Daniel Gross – How to Win (Startups)

0:00 the next speaker daniel gross is a former yc founder and yc partner and he is going to tell you some really important things about staying sane and healthy and whole while you're doing this incredibly hard thing that is being a startup founder so daniel thank you thank you jeff all right hello

0:30 sorry we're running a little behind today it is my fault if any of you are working on curing traffic i suggest you get to it a little bit faster so this was the original title of the talk in hindsight it's kind of a terrible title so we're going to remove it this is actually what i want to talk about today i think everyone here fundamentally is playing a game and you want to win that game whatever whatever project you're working

0:57 on i'm sure people here are excited to build kind of the next the next empire become the next rockefellers and one kind of view here that that i've noticed over years of working with different startup founders being a startup founder myself is when you're a founder the mentality you get into is kind of like you're an athlete and startups are kind of the olympics it's one of the hardest things you can do and what i'd like to do in this talk

1:24 today is is go over some of the kind of mistakes some novice athletes make while they're trying to play in the olympics because i do think they're kind of repeated and over the course of the past few weeks and i think you guys have seen great talks on mistakes people make say when marketing or hiring or growing your company but there's a lot of mistakes you make with yourself and i'd like to help you potentially avoid them

1:47 a lot of the mistakes stem from this recurring theme which is you're working really hard and not smart kind of like this guy with the rickshaw you you don't want to be in this position you know examples of things that will be in your head as you start a company especially as you start growing out a team are you know i'm i'm gonna be in the office all the time or i will make sure to be the last one

2:11 out today i will work as hard as i can and while there's a lot of value in it that stuff could kind of go wrong because ultimately input doesn't equal output this this founders seem to make this mistake kind of over and over again and what they forget is nobody wants to work for a tired idiot it's actually incredibly uninspiring and so i you know ultimately if we were to do a little quick harvard two by two matrix here

2:41 you know if if you just this is the most common startup founder mistake where you just focus on like i'm gonna pedal the bike as hard as possible and you don't really get anywhere that's kind of bad too i would not want the outcome of this talk to be the other extreme which is maybe like you could define academia you get really smart but you're not you're not pedaling as hard what you really want is to be doing both and so

3:02 we're going to be talking a little bit today on on how to do that before we dig into any details i thought it should be interesting to maybe quickly go over why this even happens as a problem so i out of curiosity could if you've ever worked for someone before that you respected a manager you respected please raise your hand okay so about half the room ultimately when you're a founder you kind of want to win the approval of your

3:31 pack be it your team or other founders and the problem is a lot of first-time founders don't really have that experience of what that that thing you want to look up to is so they don't have a mental model for what to emulate and as a result there's just like a lot of common mistakes people make because they don't know kind of what greatness looks like and so they optimize for the wrong thing all right so that should set hopefully the the

3:58 general framing for the talk what does this actually mean in practice so we're going to go over a couple of different areas common mistakes with sleep food exercise your mind and leadership this kind of a maslow's hierarchy of sorts to startup success where i think you can only tackle the stuff at the bottom after you tackle the basics what's really ironic about the advice i'm about to deliver you is i'm sure for about half the people in

4:24 this room and i'm sure many more people online you will make all these mistakes despite me saying what i'm about to say it's kind of fascinating but i'll i'll go through the exercise anyway just so i could tell you i told you so all right so sleep guys the reviews are in sleep is the ultimate nootropic it just takes a couple of hours to apply there is no way that cutting that hour of sleep was actually worth it for your company in in

4:52 unless there's a real emergency some people need five hours of sleep some people will need eight hours of sleep some people need nine just sleep as much as you need when i started my first company i was very focused on as i mentioned earlier just being in the office all the time working as hard as possible and again it's really stupid and in fact bad for your shareholders and for your entire company if you're coming in there with 20 cognition

5:15 because you're not sleeping well i would spend a bunch of weekend time you know to spend your company time on this optimizing your sleep environment i think sleep masks are the most underrated product in the world in terms of the upside that they give you in the car this is like 20 and you'll sleep i sleep significantly better there's a website for this that details it i would just go through all their products i would be incredibly frugal in general

5:38 in life and i would spend lavishly on this one again just think about it as a nootropic i know there's a lot of people that are obsessed with kind of i don't know taking l-theanine or caffeine this is a far better nootropic than all that stuff so just spend on it i would try to avoid using an alarm clock at least for half the week again your ancestors didn't have an alarm clock they survived you should

6:01 be able to as well sometimes you know one thing your ancestors obviously were not exposed to is a lot of light in the night and so occasionally we're setting your security and rhythm i think for a lot of folks especially software engineers can be helpful i think if you're a software engineer you probably have well i found at least most software engineers that i've worked with have about a 25 hour cycle that is to say they increasingly wake up later

6:23 and later and later if you take a little bit of metal melatonin you can actually reset that quite well for various fascinating regulation reasons most melatonin sold in the united states is way much more than you need it's like three five or ten milligrams your body makes point three when it wants to put you to bed so that's what you should take you literally have to buy this on amazon the reasons for which are fascinating but outside of the context of this talk

6:46 okay so we just discussed sleep a little bit that should be real basic i don't think you should tackle anything else before you're sleeping well it's again fascinating i'm sure most of you some of you will follow this advice a lot of you will continue doing what you're doing but again i told you so all right let's talk about food okay so again just think of just think of what you're doing and what you want your team to be

7:09 garbage food impairs your judgment i would i at some point realized i was letting everyone else down on my team if i was not playing at peak performance if i was not treating myself like an athlete so i would not eat crap food i i really don't want to go down the rabbit hole of like what diets to do i'm not a dietitian and i'm not here to be or tony robbins but i would just focus on

7:33 whatever you think is healthy i actually think there's probably a lot of psychological benefit to just eating whatever you think is healthy frankly if you believe sugar is really healthy if you really believe that maybe that's fine whatever fad you're into just go for it this is something worth investing in i would i would this is a contentious topic but i i think it is immoral to have junk food weaponized junk food in your office i would just get rid of all

8:00 of it and focus on healthy food that's you can find healthy foods it's just just as cheap i also think everyone is dehydrated all the time i would try to drink an uncomfortable amount of water this is probably the only weird hack i'm gonna give you in this talk most of it's gonna be frameworks but practically speaking yes you got it this man is set up for success i just i i think you'll feel much better

8:30 if you do all right so that's a little bit about food again i think it's pretty simple the message here the repeated message here is invest in yourself because startups are one of the most draining things you can do to your body to your mind let's talk about exercise okay this is probably a good idea it's again just like sleep the results are pretty conclusive on this one one thing i always well taking a step back if you don't

9:01 exercise i would at least try to spend a lot of time outdoors if you have a team you can start having one-on-ones outdoors if you're managing that team if you're somewhere terribly cold where you can't spend time outdoors that sucks but well maybe you should move to somewhere that has more sun i would always picture in my mind because i'm an overly competitive person that whoever my competitor was they were probably working out like four times a

9:26 week becoming better becoming having better ideas becoming more creative if that framing is helpful for you i would use it i think you know i i don't mean to be overly prescriptive on what you do i think anything you do you know in in the spirit of exercise is good i don't have to cite i can't i don't have time to cite all the studies that correlate with this i do think running is probably the best

9:53 in terms of time expenditure to potential reward if you can do it and i think the more interesting question with exercise is not whether you should do it because i think it's pretty clear to everyone in the planet you should do it but how to convince yourself to do it because that's that that's the harder psychological bit the largest mistake i think people make especially if you're a founder of a company is you know you have like i'm

10:19 gonna go all in mentality you tend to go all into things if you go all into something like running the first time you're gonna hate it because you're gonna sprint sprinting sucks so i would i would not overdo it and i would start really small and and build positive memories that you can grow on so celebrate success what you want to do is pretty much for everything but in this particular thing the trick is to create a positive memory such that when

10:45 your brain predicts whether you do that activity the next time it looks back and thinks yeah that was that was kind of fun so that may mean running a mile and then getting a frappuccino just because what you'll remember is getting the frappuccino but try to really trick yourself into doing this it'll definitely pay off i think the the other thing you can do in order to kind of reduce the willpower required to do anything is

11:07 make it surround yourself by other people that are doing it you can tell other people that you're running which is great because then you'll kind of feel like you have to do it because you told everyone about it you could surround yourself with other people that are running for me especially through the dark phases of my startup this this was definitely my light it helps you relax it helps you focus and you guys are gonna go through a lot

11:30 of ups and downs i suggest setting up these good habits while you're either at a plateau or at an up because it's really hard to convince yourself to do anything while you're down but if you set up the mental habit it's a little bit easier to come back to all right so if you got down the basics you're sleeping well you're eating well you're exercising then we can start to talk about kind of the more interesting

11:55 things you could you could do and you should be doing to transform yourself as a leader and to really take your company to the next level there are a bunch of kind of sub categories within to how to think about optimizing your mind the largest mistake people make i think when in terms of just thinking better is they focus a lot on feeding their body and then they don't focus on feeding their brain but ultimately your brain i think is

12:22 just constantly doing pattern recognition and this and the pattern recognition that it's doing is very much powered by the information it's consumed and so you you really want to focus on feeding your mind like you're feeding your body what does that mean in practice i would spend at least one day a week not working as hard as you can and your goal here is by as hard as you can you want i mean you want to

12:48 you want to do whatever activity will help you feel the most refreshed when you come back to work and there's all sorts of interesting studies of spending time in nature is really good for this maybe going to the beach whatever i don't intend to be prescriptive but you really need to spend a day a week not working this is really helpful because when you come back to work you will have like your your brain will just be different

13:10 and it'll be solving problems in a more novel way and let me frame it this way your competitors are probably doing this and they're coming up with better answers than you are so you should definitely take a sabbath i mean it blows my mind that people don't do this the the it it's it's like i guess a separation of the the urgent and the important that people struggle to do i would focus a lot on reading long form

13:38 i think a mistake people make here is everyone talks about reading a lot and people get very obsessed with like you know reading is a thing to do the greatest gift someone gave me is was this idea of not really caring about what you read whether you even finish the book just trying to read any book anytime all the time like every day because i and i think there's is common amongst founders you get obsessed in

14:03 this mindset of i gotta do it i gotta finish the book you get stuck in a crappy book you stop reading all together now you're on instagram sucks so just pick anything continually try to read it i i find that the value that books give you are not they're not just informational they actually set up your mind in a particular way like if you read a biography about a person you'll find yourself thinking a little bit more like

14:30 that person thought or like you read that person thought and that afterglow i think is really what you're trying to get and i don't think you can get that from short form content i would sign out of all unless unless your business is tied to it in which case good luck i would sign out of all this crap on your phone and just make it a little bit harder to use yeah it's just too good is the main

14:53 problem this is way too good all right so that's in terms of how you should feed your brain in terms of how you should think like the software that's running in your head probably the largest thing you want to do is you want to move from this mode where you're playing first person to this mode where you're playing third person and what do i mean by that i mean by that it's a little bit less i'm angry

15:16 and a little bit more i'm feeling anger the other term people use for this is mindfulness i'm trying to avoid that and repackage it in terms that seem a little bit more exciting but it's building the habit of kind of stepping out of the frame and experiencing yourself almost in the third person this is really useful because well it's actually not that useful things go really well in which case all of your emotions are awesome but when things start going south

15:43 it's going to become really important it's going to become also really important when you start doing bad things that are mostly a byproduct of your own insecurities you know so someone say who reports to you says something disagreeable to you in a meeting and it's quite helpful to be able to step back and say what's happening now is like i feel insecure as opposed to i'm dumb which is what actually happens if if you're playing in

16:08 kind of first person and you'll be able to react better you'll be able to lead people better in terms of how to do it meditation is one way to achieve this there's a lot of studies that show that it just happens as a byproduct of being in your mind for more years so just growing up but i actually think the most valuable way to to to get better at this is to just think about it and just have the concept in

16:34 your head but it is probably the largest most important mental shift i think you can do as a founder because you're putting yourself through an emotional rollercoaster so that's kind of a large software shift that i think is is really really important in terms of other cheap hacks that relate to your mind i think the simplest goal that you should constantly be thinking about is how to spend as much of your day and flow as possible

17:03 flows this concept of basically becoming unaware of how time passes there's a book written by a gentleman whose last name i can't pronounce so i'm not even going to bother mikhail something about this topic that i recommend reading you want to spend as much of your time in flow as possible and if you're really good as a manager you really want to spend your entire team's day and flow as much as possible people should be moving from one thing

17:28 to the next to the next to the next not even really noticing time flyby and that is you know it's i don't have any like instant solutions to that but you may be kind of noticing a theme across the talk here which is the key is to kind of launch and iterate i would i would be constantly asking yourself like what time of day is the best for you to do meetings what time of day is best for the team to do meetings

17:53 what music makes you productive you know is the person you're going to put on a particular project are they going to enjoy that does that match their personality maybe yes maybe no so you need to constantly be in this framework of trying different things and iterating don't be on autopilot there's a lot of information data laying on the ground that comes out of an emission from whatever you did by putting a meeting super early in the morning super late in

18:20 the day bunching meetings together keeping them separate i don't mean to be prescriptive because i actually don't know that there is a global answer but there's definitely an individualized one to you and the the the really great people are constantly iterating on whatever that is trying to improve themselves so you should do that because the competition's doing that the last thing i want to talk about is probably the most important one for you

18:51 as you build out a team which is how to become a really good really inspiring leader there's a lot of different books on leadership there's a lot of different studies on it most of them are garbage there's one particularly good one that i'd like to walk you guys through which is robert keegan's theory of adult development robert keegan's a psychologist that has done a lot of work on adult development distinct from child development which looks like psja have

19:19 covered quite well it's actually not there's there's not that much literature on how adults say circa 18 and beyond evolve in terms of their thinking thought patterns and what he's done is he's kind of split out five different phases that people tend to go through throughout life and not all people make it to the final two phases the we're really going to focus here on stage two through five since one is basically really children

19:49 i'm gonna walk you through them and then we'll talk a little bit about how you can kind of advance from one phase to the next so let's talk a little bit about an imperial mind this you can kind of think of this as like a very simple ai this is someone who is mo for the most part these are children but i think we all know some adults that fit this bill this is someone who is

20:12 incredibly selfish so they're very focused on their own goals that's their that's the number one most important thing for them they're transactional so the relationship with other people is really just a way for them to get a thing done that they want they're unable the view of the other side is untenable to them so you know oh what do you think of you know a person brings up other idea can't even get there can't even see how that

20:38 person would have that view the challenge with this mode is that it's really hard to get people to to cooperate with you over the long term as as you guys grow teams you may start seeing this flaw in actually some some managers it becomes very easy to see actually when it's not you but through someone else where people over time just aren't interested in working for them or don't find them compelling so this is kind of the the most

21:03 embryonic phase you can be in as an adult which i think is has of some obvious limitations once you advance beyond stage two you get to stage three the socialized mind or as i call it the npc the non-playable character in the game this is most adults and these are people who are kind of able to see the other side but they almost they almost see it too well and in that sense they're kind of npcs they have no

21:30 internal locus of control they really care about what other people are thinking about them all the time and the social narrative of you know oh people think i'm dumb becomes their narrative therefore i'm dumb if that makes sense so you've kind of pendulum swung a little bit too far where instead of not caring really about what other people think you now are entirely driven by it occasionally we'll see founders that i you know are kind of in this mode it's

21:59 just it's really hard to have an independent mindset when when you're when you're in this mode and any any any great company as you guys know that faces a lot of unknowns and you have to be able to kind of stare into the abyss and say there's a light at the end of the tunnel and it's really hard to do that if you're constantly gut-checking yourself about what other people think about you there's some value here like the opinion of other

22:23 people is actually important it's a great way to know if you're doing something right or wrong the problem with people in this mindset is they're just unable to have their own framework for how to live life or their own kind of truly independent ideals once you evolve beyond that you reach the kind of master player phase or the self-authoring phase and this is in keegan's view some adults you have less motivation by social affirmation and you have a kind of consistent

22:54 independent frame of mind and so you have certain values certain ideals certain things you hold yourself by and you can identify with them and and you know what those are you know i am a person who cares a lot about x and that's that's like a part of the inner monologue in your mind importantly you're able to take responsibility for your own emotions so this comes back to that that point of playing in the third person

23:18 of you know i'm feeling angry at you because you said you you kind of assaulted a value i hold dearly so you kind of know who you are at this phase this is this may actually be the best phase for a founder because you have very clear ideas that you hold on to you kind of know who you are you're aware of your emotions and in it it's slightly different from that the second phase we were talking about moments ago

23:45 you're able to kind of play an infinite game with people where you're optimizing for the collective group not just for yourself but you do have kind of a sense of where you stand there is another phase beyond it and and kind of keegan's interesting claim here is that very few adults make this phase the kind of self-transforming mind and if previously we were talking about you know a really competent game player this would be almost a game designer

24:13 this is someone who is not really held by back by any sense of who they are as a person and what values and ideals they have and is able to basically embrace and extend any of the opinions and ideas of people around him so they're constantly being recreated by the group that they're in if that makes sense you could almost an engineering metaphor would be that this person can kind of run any idea that comes to them in vm

24:40 you know and they kind of kind of kind of properly evaluate it they're genuinely curious and interested in other people they're willing to drop an entire ideology and swap it for another one you know in moments if it kind of makes sense for them and unlike you know that second phase it's not being driven by what will other people think it's truly being driven by the quality of that idea and ideology the other very interesting thing about

25:05 these people that i find fascinating is the tendency to think in systems so when someone is bringing up an idea you know being able to very quickly realize oh they're bringing up that idea because of x y and z you know because that's their position in the organization or that's their background or that's the environment they grew up in it's almost like you're seeing the entire map or you're on the 100th floor of the building and you're seeing the

25:26 entire city fold underneath unfold underneath you as opposed to being on the first floor they make the interesting case that this is i mean this is the vision this is where you want to get to it's actually not clear to me for founders that you want to be here until you have product market fit there's something very interesting about these people which is they're generally i find they're very good at managing very high quality talent who needs to be properly heard needs to

25:54 be properly understood in order to be inspired to come into work every day but the danger of making metaphors but when you think of elon or steve jobs it's not clear that you end up here it's a little bit more stage four they have an idea and there's to railroad it through but i think an in but i think it's an interesting thing to hold on to long term and i definitely think as you guys grow and as your companies you start

26:19 building out a strong executive bench this is actually what's required to get a players to to be interested in working for you you have to really be able to set up an environment where they can live their own ideology and they feel challenged by you and they feel like you're willing to adopt it and you can actually put together people with very different ideologies and kind of get them to mesh together it's like you're designing you know the game as opposed to being an

26:47 individual player so i thought so so so the question is like okay given where you know one is and there's a case to be made that we can't really ever evaluate where we stand on this kind of thing how do you move on to the next phase how do you become less maybe self-centered and more focused intrinsically in in kind of motivating others to join your cause i think knowing the concepts actually can really help because then you can

27:10 kind of label some thoughts that you have and say well that's you know stage two not five and if you guys are interested in this you should just google bob keegan and read any of his books time according to him just kind of moves a person along a continuum here there's of course this question of derivative how quickly you're moving one very practical thing that i i you know i i've learned to do over the age

27:38 of the limited amount of time i've had on this planet is when when interacting with people especially people that you hire i would only try to ask questions you're genuinely interested in hearing the answer of it's kind of interesting especially in interviews to hear people ask these road questions they don't really care about because it's a conventional question to ask and then they don't really listen to the answer and then they're not really having a good interaction with the person so i

28:00 would i would try try to nerd snipe yourself with this with this idea of what would be the most fascinating question to ask this person now even if it's someone who is saying something that you drastically disagree with so it's an interesting brainstorm of like what is something they would say that would cause me to change my opinion that will just make i think life more interesting from you and and maybe help you kind of work work through that continuum

28:26 so that's a little bit on leadership a lot of this especially if this is the first time leading a team a lot of this is stuff that you'll just figure out as you go along i do think it's helpful a little bit to have these concepts in your mind in terms of what's good and what's bad and where you to be okay so i want to give you guys some closing thoughts i think it's really important that you

28:49 the metaphor of the olympics wasn't me kidding around i remember when i did y combinator in winter 2010 james lindenbaum the ceo and founder of heroku came by and gave a talk and he said a related flavor of this which is he said that you should bill yourself at 500 an hour which at the time seemed insane to me and until i found out of course that my lawyer was billing me at 7.50 an hour but

29:17 the point is your time is really precious and especially as your team grows you will be increasingly the chokepoint for getting things done and so you really have to treat yourself as an athlete if you want to survive this game because it's all of the responsibility is on your shoulders and you cannot cave you cannot cave and and go for the urgent instead of the important it's just not acceptable if it's helpful i would just assume that

29:45 the others have figured this out and they're ahead of you and you just need to catch up to them so you just assume that they're well rested they're eating properly they're thinking properly and so when you know when you find i've certainly had nights when i was running my company or i find myself at the office three o'clock in the morning eating skittles this is not a good scene this idea of switching to kind of third-party camera mode and experiencing

30:06 yourself in the third person is really important you guys are going to have days months weeks where you get punched in the face a lot like someone wants to quit and you lose a customer and things aren't growing the only way the only way to survive that and when you're in that mode still play all the right chess moves is to experience your emotions in the third person otherwise you get caught up in it and it's just lame honestly so i've spent a

30:36 lot of time thinking about that the particulars of any hack don't really matter i don't care if you don't actually drink water the key thing here is to launch and iterate yourself kinda you have a lot of data going on about what's good what's bad what days make you feel good what days make you feel bad and just collect that information and retrain your model over and over and over i would very much try to just be

31:06 genuinely curious of other people i think if you are you'll find out other people are just the most interesting thing on the planet far more so than v you know vi or whatever engineering problem you're solving it's far more dynamic than a computer and if you get really interested in what drives other people what motivates them you'll get really good at recruiting other people you get really good at motivating other people but you have to really treat it

31:30 as a system that you're genuinely interested in always try to ask compelling questions of other people don't bore them don't bore yourself the last thing is a concept that's it's a little bit hard to convey but was one of the most helpful shifts i went through which is you want to move from playing very finite games in life to infinite games and what i mean by that is 10 000 different things but i guess at a high level

31:58 you have i i think when you you get started you tend to get very worried in various interactions that you have with people that it's zero sum that it's a win-lose situation you know maybe there's an idea you have but you're not sure if you should share it with someone because maybe if you give it to them then they'll go out and run with it and then they'll steal all the credit and you'll be the winklevoss and they'll be

32:21 mark zuckerberg or something and it's really important to let those thoughts go you very much want to make believe you're playing an infinite game that doesn't really have an end the scoreboard is really unclear and you're just trying to engender as much goodwill as you want there's a great book on this topic called finite and infinite games that helps set this kind of mental frame because it's it's very hard to explain in words but well someone's playing mario

32:53 but you've you want to i i guess move a little bit from from from kind of being focused on winning one particular interaction to winning the overall set of interactions said differently you're running a marathon not you know you're not sprinting so that's it so that's a little bit of a rant on hopefully a semi-productive rant on what you need to be doing in order to you know kind of improve yourself in order to advance to the next level

33:25 and at the very least should be a good overview of some incredibly common startup mistakes people make to the 50 of you that actually follow this advice and avoid those mistakes awesome and to the 50 that don't or probably 90 that don't i told you so thank you so much do you want to sorry q a yes yeah sure do you have any experience with people who left like a comfortable

33:57 position in a big corporation and then having to deal with up and down of inspiratory yeah so the question was for people that leave kind of comfortable corporate positions how they handle the roller coaster of a startup i think yeah so occasionally you see founders who there's basically two reactions to this you know if you leave your kind of

34:28 great job at google and you go join a startup rollercoaster one reaction is aversion effectively like i don't want to deal with that just not focus on it or i got very used to having you know taking an extra day off on the weekend and so i'm just not gonna give that up those companies sadly don't do well and i think those people aren't unhappy kind of in the process while they're doing it you know startups are

34:54 ultimately it's like you're playing on expert mode and it only makes sense if you're going to commit a lot of other people i think most founders that we've worked with you know humans are resilient and so you kind of figure it out i think i think the the real take on it is not whether the person got too comfortable it's really like are they innately interested in working on the problem they're working on that's what i think is going

35:20 on with a lot of those people is they leave like a google to start a company because they feel like they should start a company as opposed to like really being interested in in making something if that makes sense that so that's the thing i would focus on because if you're really interested in something of course you'll spend all day thinking about it sure if you're trying to minimize the amount of time you spend online but your

35:41 business forces you to go on facebook or instagram or twitter for whatever reason how do you recommend mitigating that problem or dealing with mental health effects okay so the question is if your business kind of demands of you to be online how do you handle i'm not kind of kind of falling into the simple maximizer trap one very funny thing we used to do in my company is we all had our monitors facing each other if that makes sense

36:11 and so there was a kind of a circle and there's weird accountability that gets enforced when you do that of course no one is actually watching your monitor they're busy doing their own work but in the back you have a little voice in your head that's saying maybe they are so that's a fun hack that that i think works quite well kind of team enforceability the i think the the other solution to this is is not really tackling that problem but

36:40 really focusing on something else which is growing as quickly as possible and if you do like this will just be have to be a demon you slay in the process of growing as quickly as possible because you cannot grow if you're watching youtube yeah unless you're watching you on videos yeah all right i was wondering what's your personal mantra about startup life like elon musk says that launching a company is like only had a friend that said eating

37:07 chewing glass and staring into the abyss yes and my personal one is it's an involuntary vow of poverty that requires a zen-like state of mind what's yours okay so the question is what's my mantra regarding startups i don't know that i'm smart enough to have a mantra about it i but if probably if i were to have one it would be something i can do it's kind of what i mentioned earlier it's like playing a video game on kind of

37:32 expert mode with a video game is really managing your own psychology and trying to build a product that works i do i do think we shouldn't like frame this as something that is painful i think like i think there are a phenomenal amount of ops that go with the downs and for every elon musk quote where he's chewing glass and staring into the abyss he also gets to see his roadster in space that's pretty good so yeah so i think it's just you i mean

38:00 you have to really enjoy building stuff ultimately yes thank you very much david this has been fantastic i really like how this sets up the system for self-alliance and identifies and i can relate with a lot but i've also set up some mentorship and community to support myself is there something you would talk to about how you found community or peers or something to support you as you've gone through and what's working what hasn't well this okay so the question is

38:28 you know strategies around building community and peers in order to kind of help yourself become better this is actually i think one of the main benefits of startup school and assuredly one of the main benefits of yc is that you get put in a peer group with other people and what happens is you very quickly figure out humans are fascinating they they like subconsciously almost figure out where am i in the peer group who's next to me who's kind of ahead of me in the

38:51 leaderboard who's beneath me where do i stand and how can i advance myself i think this is also one of the reasons why ivy league campuses are so good it's not really the curriculum of the ivy league it's the fact that you're suddenly surrounded by peers who are motivating you to be better so startup school is i think one very interesting way of scalably trying to give that to many people as possible on the internet because we know that with

39:11 your when you're kind of with relative peers you're always trying to figure out how to improve yourself i yeah so doing startup school is one answer to your question to me the largest value of yfc is i was suddenly challenged by the fact that yeah i thought other people in my batch were really darn good and i and i kind of realized i could compete on the same playing field so i'd encourage you guys to apply to yc

39:38 and also figure out other figure out other i don't know if there are other like online communities where you can kind of have that same sense of of competing on a leaderboard okay all the way back when you're in an environment like this it seems like everyone is really doing the exact opposite of what you just talked about but it seems to put in some pretty good results have you encountered

40:13 so the question is how do i counter the proposed reality where people are doing the opposite of this presentation and achieving greatness and i guess i would question the premise i'm not sure i agree with you i'm pretty sure that any successful unicorn founder that you meet today would kind of agree with what i said here which is even if they were doing all this crap that i defined as a mistake they wish they hadn't so

40:43 there's one interesting really interesting view which is this is a necessary pain you have to go through you wish you hadn't but it was worthwhile i'm not sure i buy that like life doesn't have to suck and you don't have to make mistakes to be successful please you're not boring of course oh it's good to know this is amazing so like not for sure i i was a founder that was working 120 140

41:14 hours a week for a social network and then i realized the solution doesn't work i still have the mission what would you recommend during what you're trying to think of the next solution next product what would you recommend hunters to do is actually still kind of like do the startup life or kind of like do something else so the question is what's kind of a good way of coming up with the next product idea

41:44 or pivot you also mentioned in your question that you were working on one thing i want to be clear to everyone here is i'm not proposing you don't work hard in order to win you have to work hard i'm proposing you don't moronically work hard and like not sleep i i because i because then you're just you're well you're gonna have to work much harder even to catch up but your question was how to come up with

42:09 startup ideas okay i think the okay so there's a lot of great content on this topic pg paul graham has probably written the best of it i'm not going to be able to one-up him but i think the a common mistake that comes to mind right now in terms of mistakes people make when they try to come up with startup ideas is they're very focused on trying to come up with an idea in a very limited amount of time

42:35 and it's not clear to me that this stuff works in a pressure cooker i think to me i've had my best ideas when i haven't had any any kind of you know immediate goal have to come up with an idea and they just start kind of coming to you and i have a google doc of maybe a thousand different ideas of which i'll build probably none but i think the point is it's much easier to think of this when you're not

43:02 necessarily in a pressure cooker and i'd really question the fact of like maybe you don't need a startup idea i think the most common one of one of a very common mistake i see in a lot of yc applicants is they're obsessed with starting a startup which is actually not what you want to do my greatest hope when i have an idea today is that someone else will build it i have no interest in going through the

43:25 whole startup thing so if you don't have any great ideas just that's not a problem that's not a bug or a flaw and how do we yes risk what's a good nice set to think about risk okay so the question is how do i get out of the pressure cooker and how do i manage risk two different questions i think if i understand the second one properly i i think the best way to get out of the

43:55 pressure cooker is i would just take a day a week saturday and just like i mentioned not work just physically like go north of if you live in san francisco go north of it and walk in the woods for a while that's great and i don't think you need that much more than that how do i think about managing risk that's like a very big question boy i think a lot of it depends on well i think the

44:26 a very common mistake maybe this will be somewhat novel or interesting a common mistake people make when managing risk is you know they they pattern match type one and type two decisions improperly that is to say this is the jeff bezos framework of you know you got your type one decisions where the cost of downside is catastrophic type two decisions where you know ultimately if you make the mistake nothing bad happens and i think a very common flaw is you think things

44:49 are type one when they're in fact type two yeah and and more often than not the the right call is to just go for it whatever the risky path is because the downside scenario you're imagining is a little bit too creative probably so i i've definitely found when i've taken the riskier approach i definitely have have been rewarded by life and i'll probably continue saying that until suddenly i'll just die because i you know decided to

45:15 jump out of an airplane that was a bad idea but so that maybe there's a survivorship bias problem but more often than not the riskier path is the right one one more question sure sorry let's say you're on board with all this but the problem is that your co-founders aren't really that interested in prioritizing this stuff can you talk about some of the co-founders sure yeah so the question is how to get your co-founders on board for doing

45:44 the stuff and again i should re-embellish doing this stuff it doesn't mean chilling it means like not dying while you're building your company so i think a lot of it is the framing and i think if you if if you're not careful with the framing it comes across as let's let's bring the perks of google into our startup life which is a recipe for disaster it's hard this is a weird piece of advice because like i mentioned three or four times a

46:15 lot of people refuse to or are just unable to accept it and they need to like fail and fall on their face before they retrain the model in general though i think this is a very interesting question what to do in situations where you disagree with your co-founders especially if there's no tiebreaker a super common problem feel like another founder product decisions what do you do when you disagree one useful hack i did for a while with my co-founder

46:44 because we were great friends best friends in fact but we used to have these bitter product disagreements is you can just cycle through different months where people have responsibility on a particular area and so you could say look for the next six months you're running product i may not agree with you you get to run product and then six months afterwards we'll check in maybe we'll swap over but just really defining time time-constrained areas where a person

47:11 gets ultimate ownership is one i think underrated solution to the like co-founder disagreement problem so hopefully that's somewhat useful all right thank you all for listening i'm sorry we started late and i'll be around here if you guys have any questions i can help answer

47:47 you