Straight Answers

“later you, uh, came on to become president of YC and, um, you, you sort of brought exactly the same energy to, uh, a great many YC founders over the years. Um, did you have anything like, did anything jump out at you from that time around, you know, taking this raw energy of someone really, really smart and maybe a little undirected and then driving them more towards agency?”

answered: “I love startups. I think not everyone, they're not like for everyone”

“And so, yeah, if you, if you take away all those fun little moments, um, where do you find the motivation to go further and to push harder? It's got to come from somewhere else.”

answered: “none of these moments kind of stick as much anymore in your head”

“Um, I'm curious now that effectively everyone can write software, what separates the exceptional builders from the rest? What, what are the qualities now that everyone can ship code?”

answered: “I would give like one caveat. So coding is solved for the kind of coding”

“I guess selling data at the time, you know, large language models were not even, had not really come to the fore yet, Um, but self-driving cars were sort of coming up, and, and computer vision suddenly became, so that was sort of the first market, is that right?”

answered: “Yeah, so, the, the story here is that, like, I was, when I was at MIT”

“Yeah. When you don't come from a classically trained world, which would be interesting for next generation.”

answered: “Well, you have to, because if you don't, the startup dies, right?”

“How important are credentials? Um, you know, how would you answer that, especially people who want to do these harder tech things?”

answered: “a lot of the traditional things that were hard to get. Expertise... That's really shifted”

“Can you add new brain areas? Are there ways to understand how the brain is like, what, What is going on either to use this to build smarter machines or to think about how to treat things like depression or addiction.”

answered: “Do you ever think about what that might be down the road?”

“We couldn't move money at the speed of light, but are now possible. And how do we actually use that to create this value?”

answered: “I want to talk about stablecoins more.”