Q a renaissance, like with the AI stuff, like this is the best time to be running like the YC business model, but can you talk a little bit about Um, specifically like, are, do you think about yourself running YC in founder mode? And can you talk about what that means and what you're doing and what's changing and how you want to take it to like the next level?
A Of course, man. I mean, you know, some of it is like, I'm trying to do founder mode, but, you know, shout out to the original goat, Paul Graham, like, and Jessica Livingston and, you know, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, you know, like I, I'm sure I, it turns out, you know, you don't have to be the founder to try to run the founder mode playbook. And, uh, Brian Chesky himself is on my board. And when I came back, uh, to YC, the first thing he said was, all right, well, if you were the founder, Uh, what's zero based accounting? Like, what are you going to do? And, uh, you know, there are shades of that in what Elon's doing with the U S government. Like, you know, I think, uh, I just stepped in it by bringing that up, but Hey, like, you know what, this is actually how, uh, you should be a leader. Like you actually have to think about things, uh, from first principles from zero based accounting. Like if knowing what we know now, Would we do that thing that we're doing? And, you know, the enemy of every bureaucracy is, uh, you know, thinking.
AI assessment note: “I'm trying to do founder mode, but... you don't have to be the founder”