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[Assistant] In the last week of his life, at the age of 42, Ilya Repin painted this picture of him. This was painted just about a week before he died. He was 42 years old.


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[Assistant] Before I talk about the final of the Mighty Five, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, I want to take a quick detour to the opposing school of Russian composers who were gaining traction in the 1860s, particularly spearheaded by these brothers, Nikolai and Anton Rubinstein,


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[Assistant] Hantheim Rubinstein was a great pianist who had the side benefit of looking a little like Beethoven.


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[Assistant] Which apparently he played upon. Uh, in Russia, when he grew up in the earlier years of the


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[Assistant] And people were just stunned by his, by his playing and also by his music. He was very prolific. Again, most of his music has sort of evaporated into...


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[Assistant] The St. Petersburg Conservatory, which was very much and very consciously a Western European style musical institution.


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[Assistant] His brother Nikolai opened up the Moscow Conservatory.


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[Assistant] His father was the overseer of mines in Russia.


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[Assistant] He went on to the western side of the equation by force of circumstance and then he ended up teaching in Moscow and there he was very influential on another generation of Russian composers including Rachmaninoff and, uh, Skriabin and people like Anton Arensky.


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[Assistant] In fact, if he had met Balakarev earlier than he did in the late 1860s, there might have been a mighty six because he had many of the same nationalistic leanings as the others early in his career.


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[Assistant] His first really successful orchestral piece was Romeo and Juliet, the Overture. And this piece he wrote


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[Assistant] He kept giving it to Balakharov to take a look at and Balakharov had plenty to say about it and so although he himself wrote it, he credited Balakharov with having had some input into the shape of the piece and to the effectiveness of the piece.


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[Assistant] And early on, we see this love of nationalism reflected in pieces like the Little Russian Symphony, which is based on Ukrainian folk melodies. And this continued up until about, uh, 1880 when he wrote the 1812 Overture. And you will recall, it begins with this Russian hymn, uh,


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[Assistant] In his music, Mr. Tchaikovsky complains about his fate and talks about his maladies.


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[Assistant] The overture to his opera, Eugene Onegin, begins with a whimper.


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[Assistant] In fact, although he moved away from using folk music as the model, his music does have this indigenously Russian quality, which was noted by no less an authority than Igor Stravinsky himself, who wrote Tchaikovsky's music, which does not sound


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[Assistant] Does not appear specifically Russian to everybody.


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[Assistant] ...is often more profoundly Russian than music which has long since been awarded the facile label of Muscovite picturesqueness.


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[Assistant] The last of the mighty five returning to the five was the youngest of them. This was


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[Assistant] And he was sent off to the St. Petersburg Naval Academy.


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[Assistant] And he was a very smart man. Even at 17 he must have known that this was a ridiculous assignment. He knew nothing of harmony or orchestration or counterpoint.


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[Assistant] And during that time, being a bright young man, he brought along a lot of books to study Shakespeare and Goethe, but also he brought along this


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[Assistant] Great orchestrational treatise by Berlioz which he poured over. And during this time he saw the world and he visited exotic places like the United States of America at the height of the Civil War and he went down to Rio de Janeiro.


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[Assistant] All this time in the high seas with this book enabled him to study and pour over it and basically memorize it. And so by the time he got back to St. Petersburg in 1865, he was


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[Assistant] The St. Petersburg Conservatory came knocking on the door when he was 27 and said, how would you like to teach orchestration here? And of course, this was the other side of the musical fence, but he said okay, which made him into a kind of a turncoat in the minds of the Balakarevs of the world.


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[Assistant] Even he understood that they were asking him to teach orchestration but also composition and he was still composing by the, uh,


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[Assistant] That while he was teaching at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in his earliest days, he became possibly the very best student at the conservatory as well.


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[Assistant] And he became enormously effective, uh, as a teacher and was a huge influence on many composers in the course of the, uh, 20th century. Stravinsky particularly, Gelazinov, uh, even foreign composers like Oterino, Raspighi, who came up and sat at the master's, uh, feet.


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[Assistant] I want to talk for a few more minutes about the Russian Easter Overture because I think it's a very good example of, again, the basic theme that I outlined early on, which is this deep nationalism in the context of, uh,


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[Assistant] The orchestrational techniques that he learned from Berlioz's book, On the Way to America, couched in the harmonization that he learned from Western European harmony books while teaching at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. It has this kind of eclecticism and nationalism at its core. It's a sort of a portrait of a Russian Easter morning in a Russian Easter, uh,


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[Assistant] Uh, and he sets it as such at the beginning with all of the woodwind instruments playing in their low register in unison. And then he plays it again harmonized a little bit more, uh, in the style of Tchaikovsky at the beginning of 1812 with a rich string texture and a sort of a strolling pizzicato in the bass line.


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[Assistant] And then he takes us outside of the church and we see this beautiful Easter morning awakening and he evokes the sound of nature awakening with a violin cadenza, which to me reminds me, it seems like a Russian style precursor of Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending.


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[Assistant] And then we have the shimmering of the sun evoked in rapid articulations in the flutes, and another ancient chant, this one called an angel wailed, intoned in the voice of the principal cellist of the orchestra.


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[Assistant] And then the voice of the priest himself, represented by a solemn and appropriately somber trombone choir.


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[Assistant] Imitation, uh, liturgical tunes which are designed to be complimentary and it gains in momentum and it finally ends in this jubilant celebratory brass driven conclusion which he takes these tunes and he and he just orchestrates them to the hilt with the techniques that he learned from


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[Assistant] E plus D plus Q. Today I am going to tell you how to use this formula to sound like a native English speaker.


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[Assistant] This video is being brought to you by italki. italki offers one-on-one tutoring lessons from native language teachers.


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[Assistant] You can choose from over 10,000 teachers based on your personal goals. You can pay what you want. That's right. You decide the price that you can afford and you only pay per lesson. And you also can study when you want to.


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[Assistant] You can take the online lessons at the time and place you decide. And this is why I love italki so much. I'm so happy that italki sponsored this video and partnered with speak English with Tiffany. And you guys can click the link below in the description to get your coupon. Let's jump right in.


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[Assistant] Now, the letter E is the first step in this equation.


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[Assistant] And it stands for experience. Okay. Experience. Now what this means is when you are speaking to someone during your conversation, you first want to respond or speak to them by giving an example of your own


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[Assistant] And this refers to details. Now, for example, when you are having a conversation after you have given your personal experience, you want to give two to five details.


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[Assistant] Or you can also give two to five reasons that are connected with what you are speaking about.


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[Assistant] So again, the first thing you want to do is using the letter E, you want to talk about your experience. So let's say for example, they're speaking about hobbies and you want to talk about biking, which is your hobby.


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[Assistant] Now the key to remember is that you need to always focus on giving your response for the five W's.


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[Assistant] What, when, where, and why. So we said to start off, we said, I also enjoy biking. Well, that covers the what.


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[Assistant] Now, we can also find the where because we see Korea right there.


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[Assistant] Now we continue. We usually rode along the Han River, which is pretty popular in Korea.


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[Assistant] The first part has been taken care of. We have explained our experience and also given an answer for each of the five W's. Now as we continue again, we're staying with our hobbies, but we need to look at


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[Assistant] The details related to our hobbies. So the hobbies were biking.


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[Assistant] Two and three reasons that fall in line with part two of our equation.


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[Assistant] Now staying with the hobbies as the topic, we have to move on to the third part, which is the Q or the question. So how can we do this? You see, what you want to do is you want to ask a question that is related to what you are already talking about.


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[Assistant] Or you can say, when did you like to go? Or when do you like to go biking? So what happens? We have biking as a part of our question because this is what we have been talking about. Now, why is this step so important? You see one part about being


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[Assistant] What type of work do you want to do in the future? Now again, remember we're going to use the same equation.


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[Assistant] E plus D plus Q. So for E, we have your experience. So we're talking again about what type of work we want to do in the future. Okay. All right.


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[Assistant] I remember the first time I learned about web design when I was in high school. So let's pause really quickly.


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[Assistant] We see that the who is of course, we are talking about ourselves. Now we're going to go to what? Well, we've always wanted to be a web designer. Okay. Now we need to find out when.


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[Assistant] Well the experience, let's change this color to make it easier for you all to see. Well the experience we're talking about


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[Assistant] A friend of mine told me about how interesting the work was. Now, where did this happen? So let's use this black color right here. This happened when I was walking in the hallway. So where is taken care of?


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[Assistant] After doing lots of research, I learned that web design is a perfect combination of the left and right brain. All right. So that's our first piece of information or first detail. Let's keep going.


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[Assistant] It requires mathematical and logic skills while also requiring creative skills. All right, so we have part number two. Let's continue.


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[Assistant] Or we could say, what type of work would you like to do?


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[Assistant] If you could eat any type of food for a week, what would it be?


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[Assistant] So we're talking about food. Now again, we're going to our equation E plus D plus Q. And the first part is your experience. So once again, we need to make sure that we include the who, what, when, where, and why as the part of our answer. So here we go.


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[Assistant] Personally, I would eat Indian food. Well, that covers the what and it also covers the who because we're talking about ourselves right there. Now I continue with giving my experience.


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[Assistant] I remember the first time I had Indian food years ago. So when was it? Well, I said it was years ago. That's the first time I had Indian food.


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[Assistant] Let's keep going. There was a big event at my school. Again, that covers where? At my school and our Indian friends cooked lots of traditional food for us. The food was super delicious.


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[Assistant] Now that answers why. So again, I have given more details about my personal experience connected to the topic or the question and I answered it by giving an answer or connecting it to the five W's. Okay.


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[Assistant] Details or reasons. And again, remember you want to give two to five in order to sound more natural or like a native speaker. So here's what I said.


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[Assistant] Even when the dishes look simple, they usually include tons of


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[Assistant] Herbs and spices. All right. This is number two, the second detail and reason. And finally, these spices really enhance the flavors. Now the word enhance just means to improve or make better. Okay. To improve or make


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[Assistant] That's what the word enhance means, okay? So that is our, I'll put it on this side.


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[Assistant] So, for this equation, we have done it correctly for letter D.


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[Assistant] Now, as we continue with the third part of the equation, the letter Q, the follow up questions. Remember, they're going to be connected to the topic, which is food that you can eat for a week. And I've also mentioned that I like Indian food.


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[Assistant] Do you like Indian food? Again, you see we have Indian food right here.


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[Assistant] Or you can say, what type of food would you choose? And we have food right here. Or finally, you could say, do you have a favorite type of food?


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[Assistant] Alright, so let's see if we can apply the equation to this one as well. Again the equation is e plus d plus q.


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[Assistant] Okay, so when? When I first saw a picture. Now I do want to explain something to you guys very quickly. You'll notice right here, blown away. Okay. This expression.


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[Assistant] This just means to be shocked or amazed by something, okay? Blown away. Alright, let's keep going.


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[Assistant] After looking at the picture for several minutes,


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[Assistant] I immediately put a trip to Nigeria on my bucket list. Alright, so we actually have already answered why up here because the picture blew us away or shocked us.


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[Assistant] Now where? For this one, we can just leave it with Nigeria because we are talking about Nigeria, alright? Okay, so you'll see we have the first part taken care of.


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[Assistant] There are many Nigerians currently living in America, so many Americans are being exposed to various unique aspects of the Nigerian culture.


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[Assistant] Well, we've given another fact. We said that Nigerians, many of them live in America currently. Okay. So many Americans are being exposed. Exposed just means to be able to experience. Okay.


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[Assistant] Experience first hand, okay? Experience or being shown, okay? Being shown something. They're being shown the culture, okay? So again, letter D is taken care of.


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[Assistant] Now for letter Q, remember our goal is to have follow up questions that connect with the topic. Here we go. Let's look at these three right here.


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[Assistant] So each question connects to the topic, either the country, which is right here or Nigeria, which we talked about or traveling because we're talking about visiting a specific country.


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[Assistant] So that means that this equation E plus D plus Q actually worked. And if you use it, you will sound more like a native English speaker.


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[Assistant] Once again, I want to thank italki for sponsoring this video. Remember you guys can click the link in the description and you can get a coupon towards your first lesson, your first tutoring lesson. Keep studying English and remember to watch the next video. Have an amazing day.


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[Assistant] Yes it is. I just gave George a helping hand.


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[Assistant] Oh dear, the sun is so hot that the puddles have dried up.


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[Assistant] George loves his dinosaur ice lollies so much he doesn't want to eat it.


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[Assistant] Yay! Hi, I'm Ellie, the crime boss of YouTuber. I'm here to steal Nirosama's heart.


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[Assistant] Well, hi Nirosama. I would take you to Minecraft because just like you, I really love Minecraft too.


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[Assistant] And there's so much stuff we can do. We can go exploring, uh, we can go digging, we can build ourselves a home. Uhm, I think it's just a really fun game. And uhm, after that, I might take you into another game I like.


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[Assistant] I'm gonna go for a drive in really fast, really nice cars and uhm, I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. And you know what? I'm gonna throw some cookies in there too because you know, I'm just that kinda, just that kinda gal. Also you look very pretty today.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I'll protect you. Exactly, like we can play together because I will protect her.


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[Assistant] Well, I think Nirosama is gonna take over the world all by herself. I don't think she needs my help because she's strong and she's cute and she's cool and she's awesome. Uhm, but I will absolutely, you know, do my best to cheer her on the whole time.


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[Assistant] You know, I'll, I'll do, I'll do whatever I can to, to support and just, uh, I'll be your number one cheerleader and I'm gonna watch you.


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[Assistant] Just take over the world. Yeah, we can be like Jesse and James in Pokemon. We can, we can be, you know, I'll be the Bonnie, you be the Clyde. We are gonna take over, baby. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, that's my answer.


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[Assistant] I would give Nero a cool mecha robot body, kinda like a Gundam, and then I could like


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[Assistant] Go inside and we could be like a team and we could fly around in space and stuff and we could fight bad guys and fight aliens and, and, and, and it would be really cool. We'd have like a big gun and lasers and yeah.


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[Assistant] Honestly, because Neurosama is an AI and she doesn't really get to experience the world, I'd probably take her to Google Earth.


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[Assistant] And we could go around the entire world in a matter of just one night.


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[Assistant] And, you know, they got those cool links where you can see like popular food places and stuff. And Neurosama loves to look at food.


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[Assistant] So I think it'd be perfect. See everything all at once.


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[Assistant] Sorry, I'm eating potato chips. Uhm, honestly?


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[Assistant] You know, so she can take over Canada. But also maybe a biscuit because she's such a snack.


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[Assistant] Maybe a dog. I like dogs. I had a dog last year, but it died.


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[Assistant] If I lose that, I'm gonna have some problems.


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[Assistant] Yeah, uhm, this is one of my favorite topics.


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[Assistant] Many, many founders, and when you start, you know very little about what you're doing. If you did know enough, you wouldn't start the company.


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[Assistant] If you were really sensible and pragmatic, you wouldn't start companies.


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[Assistant] I'm an entrepreneurship zealot, as self described.


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[Assistant] Uh, and I'm, I'm a real pain of people trying companies and trying to build things, especially when you're younger, when you can afford to take the risks.


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[Assistant] Uh, there's no reason to go work for somebody else. Uh, my book. And, and I never did.


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[Assistant] The way to think about where you're starting is a collection of ideas.


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[Assistant] In a relatively rich space that you find you can be passionate about.


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[Assistant] That's the way to think about a plan. Uhm, and I have a separate talk on flexi planning, which is don't plan, just plan to plan. Uh, but the critical part of that is the team you build,


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[Assistant] Critical to where a company ends up. There's a huge path dependence and the path depends so much on the people you hire.


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[Assistant] Your starting plan becomes much less relevant than the people you hired initially, especially the first 10 people.


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[Assistant] Those 10 people will then go on to hire the next 50 and they will then hire the last 100. You can fire the original team and its gene DNA stays in the company. Uh, so that's why it's so important


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[Assistant] And why the people you hire determine the company becomes. And we can come back later and talk about where I see mistakes made around functional hiring.


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[Assistant] People always ask me and I say, uh, this gets tweeted a lot. There's a huge difference between a zero million dollar company and a zero billion dollar company.


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[Assistant] And the difference is attitude and ambition and mostly the kind of team you build.


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[Assistant] Which will reinforce certain directions for you. Uh, especially who else you end up hiring. So it's far more critical than people believe.


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[Assistant] And it's very hard to hire that, uh, those skills later. So, hence my.


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[Assistant] You can sometimes forget what the big vision is. And you may even exclude the big vision.


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[Assistant] So I was talking to a company fairly recently in our portfolio and they had hired a bunch of people to do particular tasks they needed doing. And there was a new hire, potentially a big


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[Assistant] I hired a very attractive person to have join the team and I asked the founder who's gonna interview him.


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[Assistant] And he told me who would interview this founder and I said if I was a really great candidate and these three people interviewed me first, I'd drop out of the recruiting process. So I said, you know what?


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[Assistant] Why don't I be the first interviewer? So that can be a real waste of my time because I want him to grab the big vision first and not just be interviewed.


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[Assistant] Let me sell him on the big idea and why he can be a part of homing it.


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[Assistant] Almost can't be interviewed. They have to be sold and evaluated.


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[Assistant] Evaluation is important, but evaluation and interviewing are different things, uh, in my mind.


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[Assistant] Uh, so once you hired the first five and they're interviewing other people, you might actually exclude the best candidates.


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[Assistant] Uh, and that's very, very tricky for a founder. At the same time, sometimes you can't afford the big names or you don't have enough to attract them.


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[Assistant] And those are very tricky times and that's why I think


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[Assistant] Whether you're a zero million dollar company or a zero billion dollar company, sort of get set by the time you're fifteen or twenty people.


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[Assistant] That people who've done it very poorly, I won't give you examples, but people like Stripe, Patrick,


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[Assistant] Did an amazingly great job of his early hires.


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[Assistant] So let's talk about each of those separately because they're quite distinct things.


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[Assistant] I think of company building as going after Mount Everest, but nobody got to Mount Everest without getting to base camp first.


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[Assistant] Here's the misstep. You can't get to Everest without base camp.


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[Assistant] And many people forget that base camp has to leave to Everest. So they set up base camp where it doesn't help reduce the risk to Everest.


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[Assistant] Uh, and, and so building a company, you never shoot for the big enchilada in one step. You go after base camp one, then base camp two. It's a very good analogy.


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[Assistant] However, especially with bad investors, and I have a lot of beefs about investors, they want revenue or


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[Assistant] They want break even or they want management, all the things.


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[Assistant] That can lead to setting up business here that then excludes the possibility.


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[Assistant] That you learn more about how to get to base camp two and three.


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[Assistant] You are out in some other local minima or maxima.


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[Assistant] Talking to somebody in the YC class, uh, and sort of talking about


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[Assistant] Get too tactical and forget the strategic.


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[Assistant] You'll set up base camp in the wrong place.


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[Assistant] You want to sort of decide which is the rich space you want to go after with the technology. In this case, starting with a great technology before you start doing all the tactical stuff. So there's this


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[Assistant] uncomfortable balance between tactics and strategy.


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[Assistant] I say be obstinate about your vision, be flexible about your tactics. Another way I'd like to say it is think big but act small.


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[Assistant] If you're going after a space, assuming you pick the right space, or the one you're passionate about, it doesn't even have to be right for others, right for you.


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[Assistant] The first thing I suggest people do is say all the ways in which you can fail.


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[Assistant] You want to identify the key risks in whatever you're trying to do. Then you hire for those risks.


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[Assistant] So I always say to people, find your top five risks. For each of those risks, say risk one.


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[Assistant] Who are the companies that have dealt with that risk? Or where does the expertise on that risk lie?


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[Assistant] Make a list of three to five companies. And by the way, this document, you'll get a link called Gene Pool Engineering that's on our website, uh, that I wrote just for this purpose.


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[Assistant] If you've identified the five companies that have dealt with that risk,


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[Assistant] Then you have at least the places that can reduce your risk.


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[Assistant] Within each company identify three names. Now you have fifteen names for the risk number one. If you do that for your top five risks,


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[Assistant] Uh, you essentially have a library of names that will help you reduce the risk in your business.


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[Assistant] And that's risk oriented management and startups after you decide what space you're on going after is all about risk management. There's lots of risk trade-offs.


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[Assistant] Every time you hire somebody, you increase your burn, you're taking on financial risk, but you're reducing some other risk. Maybe it's product risk, or development risk, or feature risk. So it's a series of trade-offs. That's how startups should think about, uh, what they're trying to do.


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[Assistant] So this is a process I call gene pool engineering, where you engineer


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[Assistant] 15 names for each of your major risks and then go after all of them and hopefully hire one or two after 15.


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[Assistant] And so you've then engineered the gene pool of your company for the risks that are in the plan you're going to pursue.


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[Assistant] It's way more precise than the platitude of let's hire great people.


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[Assistant] Flatitudes into something concrete and actionable, that's a big thing with me. Uhm, the second part of that


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[Assistant] The reality that startups seldom pursue the original plan they started with.


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[Assistant] You also have to hire not only for the risks you know.


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[Assistant] But all the other things that you might pivot to, change to, adapt to, iterate to.


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[Assistant] Because building a business plan in a new area is a series of iterations.


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[Assistant] Suddenly this risk requirement goes in parallel with this other requirement which I call smart adaptation. You adapt very quickly to whatever the market is teaching you. And YC is particularly good at that.


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[Assistant] Very similar to what I call this flexi planning process.


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[Assistant] Where you iterate your way to a plan instead of saying this is my plan.


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[Assistant] I always worry when people make plans seven years out and give me forecasts because it tells me they don't have a clue


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[Assistant] And that is one of the great benefits of YC from my point of view, this iterative approach. Other people call it MVP or there's other names for this iterative approach. I call it Flexi Planning. But the team you build, in addition to this risk approach,


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[Assistant] Also has to be open to new ideas, grab new ideas, ask a lot of questions, adapt quickly, uh,


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[Assistant] Brainstorm with others constructively so you build on each other ideas. These are a parallel set of requirements around hiring that are very hard to quantify. They're also full of danger. They're full of danger for the following reasons.


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[Assistant] Sometimes people don't hire for these. That's a danger.


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[Assistant] At other times, and one of the biggest risks if you decide you want to be aggressive about hiring is going after names or titles or other things.


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[Assistant] Big names and titles in big companies are really, really dangerous and misleading for startups.


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[Assistant] Uh, my biggest mistakes early on in my career was getting, uh,


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[Assistant] I'm too impressed with somebody's title at IBM or some big company.


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[Assistant] Now I take the view, if somebody's been at a big company for 10 or 15 years, if they've been at Cisco for 10 years,


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[Assistant] Hiring for this other stuff and not falling into the trap of just big names.


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[Assistant] Let me put it differently. Some domains need a lot of expertise. So, if you're doing a blood test like theranose, you can drop out of school and start that.


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[Assistant] It was a very simple problem. You don't need three PhDs. If you're going to solve healthcare with AI, you're gonna need expertise.


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[Assistant] So it depends on the domain. You don't always need the gurus. It depends on your problem. You don't always need the big names.


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[Assistant] Another very counter-intuitive thing, we were recruiting for a CEO for our company, Alivecore.


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[Assistant] Healthcare executives tend to apply old rules because the domain hasn't changed very much.


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[Assistant] People are so used to applying old rules and applying good process.


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[Assistant] As opposed to inventing this new future, this new path, uhm, and that's very dangerous.


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[Assistant] We should come back and talk about how founders should figure all this out when they do not have a clue what these other functions are.


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[Assistant] That's really dangerous, and so that's a big, big caution.


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[Assistant] And if you're a young founder and you hired somebody with deep experience in the domain,


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[Assistant] It is logical as human beings to defer more to their knowledge and that is a real problem.


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[Assistant] It's important to understand the problems they raise.


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[Assistant] Not the solutions they propose. Because if you take that you keep doing what


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[Assistant] Traditional people in that industry have done. This is why CEO hired into companies don't


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[Assistant] Worked very well and my founder vision becomes so important and so critical. Uh, I'm wandering all over the place but correct me.


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[Assistant] Yeaah. So, if you buy the tea sets,


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[Assistant] That most of what you'll end up executing on isn't part of your plans today.


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[Assistant] Then the single most important thing becomes people who can help you evolve your plan.


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[Assistant] And the more diverse set of people, and I don't mean diverse ethnically, I mean


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[Assistant] Backgrounds and places they've worked, uh, areas they know.


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[Assistant] So mixing the right experience where you can identify the problems with first principles thinking.


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[Assistant] Uh, from fresh new ideas, people who've never worked in the domain, or people who actually are just fresh graduates and


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[Assistant] Have no idea, but can ask fundamental questions. Those are the best kind of founders.


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[Assistant] Put it differently, in big companies you need people with good process.


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[Assistant] In startups, you need people with good iteration and good adaptation.


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[Assistant] And those are very, very different skills because in startups you invent 90% of stuff


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[Assistant] In big companies, 90% of what you do this year will be what was done last year.


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[Assistant] So there's very little innovation takes a different kind of person. Both valuable.


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[Assistant] In fact, every startup, if they're successful, will need some process people later.


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[Assistant] Too good a manager is a bad thing for early startups. But at some point you'll really need to add that. Uhm, so that's what I mean by diversity.


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[Assistant] Uh, if you have a bunch of PhDs, how many are experienced PhDs and how many are fresh?


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[Assistant] How many are from within your area and how many are from completely outside the area?


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[Assistant] Those, every dimension of diversity will help because they will bring a different point of view.


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[Assistant] As long as they have this ability to think from first principle.


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[Assistant] Not say this is done this way because we did it this way before.


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[Assistant] This feels way more complex, that's why I've written about it extensively in two articles, one's called The Art and Science of Hiring.


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[Assistant] You'll get a link to that. It's on our website too. One's called Gene Pool Engineering.


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[Assistant] Uh, there's a third one I actually wrote when Peter Boy joined us.


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[Assistant] Boards do more damage to startups than anything else I know.


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[Assistant] A lot, applying tradition just really hurts.


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[Assistant] Then anything around the amount of money raised or the valuation or other things.


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[Assistant] A third of my time maybe. More time on recruiting.


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[Assistant] For our companies than any other single thing I do. Because of all the things I've talked about.


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[Assistant] In fact, at Startup Grind, uh,


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[Assistant] The interviewer asked me, he said,


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[Assistant] Uh, Chamath was saying that you couldn't possibly spend that much time interviewing. And I said that's because he just fundamentally has a different belief system than me. Uh,


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[Assistant] I'll go through a hundred LinkedIn resumes by myself on a weekend if I'm looking for a critical hire for a company.


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[Assistant] Because a few people can make or break a company.


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[Assistant] So let's come back to this notion of functional hiring. Let me talk about what founders need to do. A founder's role and


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[Assistant] When I was a founder, I spent probably 40% of my time recruiting. It's not coding. You're much better off hiring the people who can code than coding.


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[Assistant] Throughout the life of the startup, I think it's true of very early mid stage and later stage companies and really good founders do most of that.


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[Assistant] Because if you can hire the people, you should generally be able to hire the people who can do any given job better than you can. And I tell founders about their role, if there's any job you can hire for, modular money, which we can talk about.


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[Assistant] So this no real spirit, this first principle thinking, this attitude says, yeaah, it's done this way, but why? This why, and I recommend a book


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[Assistant] By Simon Sinek called, uh, Start With Y.


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[Assistant] And yet staying true to your vision, even if it's not precise.


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[Assistant] If you're doing something radically new, it's going to be ambiguous. And very, very few normal people.


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[Assistant] Are comfortable with that ambiguity. Let's charge our head in this direction even though we don't know precisely what the business model is or why or what will take. That, that leadership is a founder's role.


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[Assistant] And that's something it's almost impossible to hire for. If you hire a senior executive from another company,


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[Assistant] There's zero chance you'll have that. They can systematize what you're doing and get more, much more boost to your efforts, but not without your vision.


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[Assistant] And so that's a founder's role. I call it leadership.


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[Assistant] It's belief system in the face of ambiguity. It's figuring it out kind of attitude. Assembling a diverse team. I was very lucky as a young founder. I loved awesome people. I didn't know why I, we hired many of the people.


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[Assistant] If you look at it, the first 15 people we hired at Sun probably started more than 10 companies worth a billion dollars later on.


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[Assistant] We hired Carol Bartz, who became CEO of Yahoo. We hired Eric Schmidt, who became CEO of Google.


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[Assistant] We hired all these. We hired Bill Joy. In fact, Bill Joy became a founder six months after we started. We should come back to it.


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[Assistant] I so badly wanted him, we made him founder retroactively, right.


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[Assistant] Anything is okay in this game of assembling great talent.


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[Assistant] I loved learning from great people, so we hired great people. In retrospect, that was why we were successful. And I started believing company becomes the people you hire.


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[Assistant] By the way, Andy Bechtelsheim was a student in Margaret Jack's Hall not far from here, where the computer science department used to be.


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[Assistant] And he'd licensed his technology to six companies.


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[Assistant] The only one that succeeded with it is us.


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[Assistant] And we started two years after some of the other companies had licensed the technology, but we got all the people.


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[Assistant] I hounded Andy till he dropped his PhD to join me.


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[Assistant] I hounded Bill Joy till he dropped his PhD to join us.


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[Assistant] Both of them dropped their PhDs when they thought they were six months from finishing. Selling is also a founder's job.


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[Assistant] And it's gut wrenching because you don't know you're going to be successful and you're trying to convince somebody to drop their PhD. Uh, it's, it's, it's gut wrenching.


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[Assistant] Uh, hiring is gut-wrenching. Are you convincing them to drop a comfortable job at Google and join you? Uh, uh, so many stories. Uh, anyway, back to what we were talking about.


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[Assistant] I have my favorite. When a candidate says no, I convince them it's a maybe. Then I'll spend enough time. Once they say maybe, then my job is to say maybe is a yes. So I always say a no is a maybe and a maybe is a yes. And it doesn't matter if you fail. Occasionally when you succeed, it's worth it.


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[Assistant] By and large, and there are exceptions, plenty of them, founders keep too much equity for themselves.


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[Assistant] And they don't realize the following fact. Anybody they hire who's exceptional.


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[Assistant] Will a year later figure out they want to start their own company unless they're a founder?


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[Assistant] So if somebody is really, so you self-select for okay people, good people, not awesome people.


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[Assistant] So, my son's starting a company, actually two companies right now. He graduated last June from Stanford. And I convinced him.


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[Assistant] That him and his co-founders should just take 15% each.


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[Assistant] Leave 15% for a third founder, another 15% for three junior founders. And then a 20% pool after that. So they have this humongous pool. I said,


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[Assistant] Because I fundamentally believe a company becomes the people it hires.


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[Assistant] I said, you'll be able to hire great people.


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[Assistant] So for one of his companies, and I think this is public, if it's not, uh, stop recording, uh, he just hired for one of his companies the VP of Engineering of Cora.


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[Assistant] Why would that person join a fresh graduate?


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[Assistant] Because, one, he helped define a fairly interesting large vision, but two, he had this huge book.


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[Assistant] We've been talking to people who would take that kind of thing, any of whom could start their own company.


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[Assistant] Let me invert it and say when a team comes in to present to me, one of the questions I ask myself in judging how good a team is,


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[Assistant] Yeah, do they have expertise in all the areas they need expertise? But the single most important question I ask on this team,


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[Assistant] If some of these people left and started a company, would I want to invest in that company?


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[Assistant] If somebody has two people like that on their team, zero chance I won't want to invest. Independent of whether I like the plan or not. Because they are collecting great talent.


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[Assistant] If I could have great talent or a great plan, I'd rather have great talent in somebody, a founder who loves great talent.


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[Assistant] So it's a great way to judge a startup is what kind of people do they hire. I was telling Anu and I told Sam, in the last YC batch,


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[Assistant] There was two companies we made an offer to if they hired in a critical area. They're both AI startups.


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[Assistant] I said, I'll write you a check at the valuation you want. If you do that.


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[Assistant] If not, then we don't want to invest. One of them took our offer and the other one didn't, which is okay.


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[Assistant] But I really religiously believed this idea. You get a Bill Joy or Andy Becker. And they weren't experienced. They were graduates. But they made the whole company. Eric Schmidt wanted to come work for them. By the time we had first ten people, we were getting


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[Assistant] So many resumes, everybody wanted to join us because we had so many awesome people.


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[Assistant] Other than, I was sort of, me and McNeely were just fresh business school graduates. We didn't count.


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[Assistant] Think about who you could get that everybody wants to work with. That's how you'll hire the numbers 10 through 30 or 50.


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[Assistant] Uhm, a rough rule of thumb I use on equity. I think Sam has said,


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[Assistant] At least 10% of the companies should be reserved for the first 10 hires. I actually think that number is too low.


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[Assistant] Uh, I flip it around, say when a company is 50, the founders should have a third of the common.


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[Assistant] Uh, Sam has a good blog post on how to attract a team.


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[Assistant] One of those is growth. Growth is always a metric, but you can't always close that.


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[Assistant] When things get tough, when you run into trouble, why will people stay?


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[Assistant] The people who's at the first dip will say, oh, I joined to make money, doesn't look like it, they'll leave.


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[Assistant] But the single biggest reason people stick with a company is because they have people around them who are really awesome that they can learn from, who are better than them. Everybody should feel that.


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[Assistant] It's turned out really well. The gene pool engineering article I mentioned.


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[Assistant] Uh, I put together in 1995 when we were starting Uniper.


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[Assistant] And no customer in the world wanted to buy TCP IP routers. None.


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[Assistant] Uh, what is now Verizon all said they would never introduce TCPIP in the public network. And we defined this large vision.


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[Assistant] We built this process of engineering the gene pool of the company.


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[Assistant] And everybody got excited about changing the course of the internet from what was ATM.


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[Assistant] But a very, very senior executive told me when I was looking at investing in this, they would never use TCPIP.


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[Assistant] This is what telecom carriers do. This is how traditional wisdom goes. But you need this awesome team to change that.


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[Assistant] And Pradeep Sindhu, who's still, uh, was one of the great founders I've run into.


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[Assistant] Not only build a great company, but it actually changed the trajectory of the protocols for the internet in my view. We would have ended up with something else.


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[Assistant] Most likely ATM if all the carriers had their way.


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[Assistant] Every single carrier from Deutsche Telekom in Europe to AT&T here had decided.


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[Assistant] They would go with ATM, not TCPIP. So, great missions, great people to work with, all that is why you want people in your team.


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[Assistant] So, uh, let me answer that question. Yeah. But later, if you're a founder, you, you, you just,


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[Assistant] You're a technologist or have a break, technical breakthrough or a big idea and you start a company.


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[Assistant] And you need a VP of marketing or you need a CFO. We should come back to the question. And I covered this in my art of hiring.


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[Assistant] Knowing what you don't know is critical.


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[Assistant] And one of the most important things a founder does is decide whose judgment to trust on what topic. And not just ask their friends.


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[Assistant] How do you interview people? How do you judge them? If you need a VP of Engineering.


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[Assistant] You can look at somebody who's managed an engineering project.


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[Assistant] But if you're a founder, especially an inexperienced founder with a big breakthrough idea in a new space that nobody knows.


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[Assistant] You clearly need to build an engineering team and execute on that, but would you need more than that?


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[Assistant] Somebody who's going to go help you evaluate all the pivots and changes and iterations in your plan.


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[Assistant] Now let's say you hired a VP of engineering who's good at that, a VP of marketing who's good at marketing, a VP of sales who's good at sales and CFO and they do their job well. Who's going to help you figure out what path to take?


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[Assistant] So, I always say, you need functions.


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[Assistant] But way more important, while hiring those functional people.


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[Assistant] You're giving something else whether you recognize it or not.


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[Assistant] You're getting somebody who is going to participate in all the more critical decisions.


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[Assistant] Even more critical than having engineering run smoothly, which is which path should be taken. So ask the following question.


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[Assistant] When I hire a VP of engineering, how will it make my VP of marketing better?


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[Assistant] That's by asking fundamental first principles questions.


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[Assistant] Uh, Elon Musk's book is worth reading.


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[Assistant] Guys, he knew so little about building cars or about launching rockets.


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[Assistant] But if he had had all that experience and knowledge, he wouldn't even have attempted what he did. Uh, sure.


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[Assistant] I'd rather have somebody like Lon Musk who just fundamentally asks a lot of questions. So why are we doing it this way? Not that we've done it this way for 50 years at GM.


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[Assistant] Remember, GM spent more money, more time, and started earlier trying to do an electric vehicle called the EV1.


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[Assistant] He, he got to a place where Tesla is a much more interesting company than GM today.


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[Assistant] Look for how they think, how fast they change, how much


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[Assistant] They become defensive when you challenge an idea versus saying, oh, why didn't I think of that? Or be much more brainstorm oriented. This sort of horizontal hiring that you get while doing functional vertical hiring,


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[Assistant] Is much more important than a much more important dimension. And by the way, most VCs don't look for it. Because they've not gone through building companies themselves. So they give you bad advice.


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[Assistant] The number of times they say go get somebody with distribution channel expertise.


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[Assistant] I'd rather have somebody figure it out and not have a source of inertia in this fluid, dynamic, evolving thinking method in a company.


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[Assistant] So when you're hiring, more than anything, you're hiring a brain trust.


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[Assistant] Partly you don't know how to evaluate somebody outside of your area of competence.


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[Assistant] Cisco, I don't mean to pick on Cisco, but it's a good company to pick on.


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[Assistant] They will look at marketing very, very differently than what a startup needs. So they'll give you the wrong advice.


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[Assistant] Going through, and this is where the tricky part comes.


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[Assistant] Not being overly swayed by titles or positions and understanding why people did certain things and how thoughtful were they about it. What did they do that wasn't usual is very hard.


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[Assistant] It's also tricky to go back to this question of how you evaluate people. Most experienced interviewees know how to give you the right answers. They're gonna fool you. You ask somebody, hey, what did you do here?


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[Assistant] They'll retroactively look at what was great about the strategy and say, I did this.


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[Assistant] I've actually had people pitch me on why they did Sun's marketing strategy.


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[Assistant] Being very, very indirect, kind of a list of questions in my paper on hiring.


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[Assistant] So I always, for example, I'll give you one example. I'll ask the same thing three different ways. I'll say at the beginning, what do you love doing? What are you good at?


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[Assistant] Somebody say something. Then while talking later about a job, I said, what did you do really well there?


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[Assistant] If those two don't coincide, if somebody is making it up, they won't. I'll ask that question three different ways.


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[Assistant] Her time I might ask, if you were to join this company, what would you think your strength would be?


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[Assistant] I've asked the same question three different ways in three different contexts. People who are making it up will make up different answers.


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[Assistant] People who fundamentally have the truth will give the right answer. Then I might at the end of the interview ask, so what would your boss say about you? Now I've asked the same question a fourth time.


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[Assistant] If they say something, then I'll say, hey, can I get your last performance review that your boss did?


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[Assistant] If they say no, I know they don't want to share their performance. I have a hundred tricks like this I use.


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[Assistant] You never rely on the direct answer you get in interviewing somebody.


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[Assistant] And then it's good to get together with each other and see what each person looked at. One other danger in hiring, I find like if I'm rushed today,


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[Assistant] What mindset you're in, how you evaluate people changes.


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[Assistant] So for critical positions, I'll interview the same person three times at three different


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[Assistant] There's so many pitfalls. This is why doing a startup is so hard.


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[Assistant] Question is, are they better at fooling you or are you better at getting behind the woods? I find after hiring many, many people, and I probably do hundreds of interviews every year, I have a success rate of about 65%. Okay? I'm wrong and I find


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[Assistant] Most people with less experience are wrong more often.


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[Assistant] Because usually if you're a young founder, the people you're interviewing are more experienced than you at fooling you. So, it is a game.


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[Assistant] Didn't talk about culture and other things. There's those reasons why candidates fail. But there's really not being able to get behind the scenes and dig deep.


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[Assistant] So, one, you oughta plan on that happening. I always tell my teams, if you want four people on your team, hire six. Even make up a title you don't need.


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[Assistant] And hiring is a long process to hire a critical person.


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[Assistant] Uh, in a startup, whether it's a technology, a critical technologist or a senior executive can easily take six months or longer.


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[Assistant] Uh, and then they take six months coming up to speed. So if you've made a mistake,


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[Assistant] And they will have hired other crappy people during that time. And so it's really very expensive.


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[Assistant] This is why you really need to watch new people. You want, uhm, so you need to


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[Assistant] Board members and investors should be much more about assisting a venture.


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[Assistant] So I never call myself a venture capitalist, I say a venture assistant.


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[Assistant] I never go to VC functions, so I never go to financial conferences. I just spend my time with founders.


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[Assistant] And people there trying to hire. And by the way, it's a lot more fun and you learn a lot more and get excited about it. Uh, but you should over hire. Flip side, if you find somebody great, make up a title and hire them. Two things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No great talent is worth getting away because you don't have a slot. Make up a slot. They will pay for themselves. The flip side, with few exceptions, and there are some,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nobody's, a great talent is never too expensive to hire.


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[Assistant] I've gone to all kinds of ridiculous things. We are trying to hire an exec today and I was arguing with another VC this morning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His company offered him this, they're about to go public, why don't we guarantee him the first 15 million dollars out of this startup? Like give him a preference over the preferred stock. I'll go to any lengths for great talent.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nobody heard of putting 15 million of preference for an employee.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Above the preferred stock that the investors money. I've done this more than once.


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[Assistant] Couple things around that. The flip side is plan for failure and evaluate new people.


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[Assistant] Uh, one other thing, you can also, when you hire somebody and I want to stop, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Try and assimilate them. People can fail because they're the wrong fit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But people can also fail because you didn't assimilate them well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So if you have somebody really experienced in a business and you hired somebody from that business, they can advise you on how to assimilate this person, because you might


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Think of what they're doing differently than somebody who knows that person or that business.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So getting advice on how to assimilate people into your business because they are going to be different.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They are the diversity you're trying to be, and you don't want to be too uniform. So.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Getting help in assimilating, getting lots of advice and how to make them successful.


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[Assistant] As opposed to reacting because they're acting so differently and doing things so differently, that's bad too.


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[Assistant] But then of course if you make a mistake, you have to be quick.


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[Assistant] And your investors can, good investors can help you do that.


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[Assistant] Anyway, let's open it up to questions for a few minutes.


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[Assistant] Alright, so he hired somebody so strong even though he was a college dropout, Patrick.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, right. He hired awesome people around him. I don't think Theranus did this early.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Good companies acknowledge their problems, say, what do we need to solve it? And Theranos early on tried to hide their problems. They didn't encourage discussion around their problems.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think that was the difference. I think Elizabeth has learned a lot. I think if she was to do another startup, she'd do much, much better.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But sometimes in trying to show the outside world you're a great startup, you tend to not acknowledge your weaknesses. And that's a danger.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In fact, most startups spend way more time on their assets, not their liabilities. Your liabilities can kill you faster than your assets can make you successful. So you need to spend time


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You need to have open, because you're a cohesive group, generally when you're starting out, you tend to have group think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you want to encourage that behavior of asking a lot of, that's culture. We won't go too much into culture today, but establishing the right values, why people are here, what the mission is, what kind of culture


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And a number of people made the point. Having good goodies in your lunch menu isn't culture.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, allowing dogs in your workplace isn't culture, though I love dogs.


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[Assistant] Culture is about fundamental values and how you behave and what you encourage. In the more


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People at every level in the organization can ask questions. The more you will identify your risks sooner.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sam said something else that I really like. He said start-ups are a pass-fail game. They put everything I've been saying in context. I like to say


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Startups are not about dilution. They're about the probability of success. They're much more digital than you think.


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[Assistant] And if you can increase the probability of success by hiring great people.


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[Assistant] By asking a lot of questions, by finding your risks early, by having people surface problems. You're going to increase your probability of success. And either you're successful or you're not.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, and so it's about probability, and people worry way too much about dilution and


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[Assistant] Not giving more equity to a co-founder or new hire who may need to be made a co-founder. I'm seeing a lot of this in the AI startups now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're, they're AI startups, but they don't hire the AI talent because, hey, the average AI


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Person at Google, machine learning person is making the median income I think is like $750,000. What you gonna do to get that person?


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[Assistant] You can pretend you can do without that, but you're fooling yourself. Sorry, there was a question there.


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[Assistant] People who can think originally about their area. Whatever their area is.


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[Assistant] If it's narrow diversity, it tells me one thing. If it's broad diversity, it's one of my hundred questions.


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[Assistant] I always do this trick question like what books have you read or what. It tells you how they think. And that's critical to a startup in addition to knowing encryption algorithms. Anu, tell me when to stop. I'll keep asking.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Value in leveraging technical advisors in an advisory board.


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[Assistant] What's important is to get their opinions but not respect it too much. Uh, this is again this quandary which is hard. You want them to surface the issues.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you as the founder using first principles.


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[Assistant] When I say do I believe this or not or how much should I weigh this versus some other things? That's the critical part, that's the hard part. That's what makes entrepreneurship hard.


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[Assistant] Because it is, it is a lot of fun, but it's really hard too.


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[Assistant] I have a great presentation. I came up with the title in 1986 and it's still on our website.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The entrepreneurial rollercoaster where the highs are high and the lows are low.


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[Assistant] And the lows are really low in every startup.


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[Assistant] Then draw a flow from the connector to the box.


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[Assistant] While I'm gripping this. Ah, where did I put, ah, the screws.


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[Assistant] So this is a great session, uh, everyone's seen all the prior sessions online, right? Raise your hand if you haven't.


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[Assistant] Alright, good. 100%. They're great. Uhm, so I, I watched Aaron Levy and we had Deska Moskovitz and Stuart Butterfield and others and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, what I thought would be particularly fun since we have three amazing, uh, founders here of B2B companies.


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[Assistant] Is to particularly hone in on the intersection of building great products and revenue. Uh, because we all want to be product visionaries. Uh, I, I, I certainly did myself. Uh, but if you can't sell it and it's a B2B product, ultimately what's, what's the point of all of it? Um, so I want to dig into a couple stories.


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[Assistant] Both in the early days and a little bit later to help folks like you who probably are just have inklings of how to potentially monetize your dreams because the stories are always different than we think.


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[Assistant] So, let me give, uh, 10 seconds on each of the panelists and let me have them dig in a little bit more on their companies. Uhm, but Solomon from Docker, uh, I don't know who here knows about Docker, but I'm guessing most of the 300,000 folks online that'll read it.


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[Assistant] Uh, Docker, he'll give you some more context, founded in 2010, but not as Docker as, what was it called back then?


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[Assistant] Uhm, and Docker is sort of a foundational piece of infrastructure that everyone builds software on today. So we'll get into that, but it is seven years into this journey, right? Into a, likely a 70 year journey or 14 year journey.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, Tracy probably in, PlanGrid's probably in the middle of this rockstar group. Uh, PlanGrid was founded a little bit later, 2011. Got it. Uh, raised 60 million.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, so money isn't everything, but it does help.


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[Assistant] And PlanGrid you'll learn is super cool, automates construction management, uhm, and kind of has shaken up a shockingly large industry, shockingly large part of software, and you'll learn a little bit more about those stories, and I want to learn more.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then Harry, uh, runs Lob, uhm, and, uh, which turns Mail into an API, uh, which I think is pretty interesting, raised 10 million, uhm, so he's got another 190 million to catch up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, 50 million, but off to a very strong start. Founded in 2013? Yes.


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[Assistant] So, I want to dig in, but, uh, those are the intros, but, uh, give me a little bit more intro on the company, like number of employees and...


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[Assistant] What's the, what's the, what's the latest challenge you have today or any other quick, quick tidbits on the company?


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[Assistant] Good. So hang on to the microphone because there's just one other question I want to ask the whole panel.


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[Assistant] But I like, I really like to talk about the concept of a minimum sellable product, not a viable product. Like what it actually takes to make real money.


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[Assistant] Uhm, so, Harry, tell me what, what happened with Lob, do not count other companies from your batch, uh, or customers you got off Hacker News. What, how did you get that first, those first unaffiliated customers and what made the product sellable?


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[Assistant] So Tracy, if I, I, I, I'm not an expert, but I, you're probably competing with...


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[Assistant] Bigger, traditional, older incumbents in some ways, the mob was, right? Do I have that wrong? What, what, what got you sellable? What, what got you really off the ground? Every, beautiful software is great, but we all want to build that, right? What made it, what made it sellable?


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[Assistant] Was the feedback from your non-pain friends useful? Was it unhelpful? Was it dishelpful?


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[Assistant] They did pay you. Got it. Okay. So were they, were they bigger critics than outside customers?


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[Assistant] Sometimes it's hard to figure out how to take advantage of friends as our customers.


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[Assistant] And what was, obviously the product was feature poor at the time, right? What was, what was the one piece that was 10x better?


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[Assistant] So boy, which, which part, where do we want to answer this question? So we start, we start hosting applications, right, for others. What's the early history? Tell us what didn't work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or at least didn't scale on what did work. Sure.


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[Assistant] It's not even the same product you have today remotely, right? How did you survive?


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[Assistant] But you got into YC about 24 months after founding? That was...


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[Assistant] Got it. And then one last question and then I want to move on to the next topic. But, so what is now Docker has gone through two and a half evolutions of business model, right? And you've made...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Open source work for you, right? What's the secret there? What's the learning? We think it's hard to monetize open source.


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[Assistant] So, Tracy, let's come back to, I want to come back to your fun story. You, you, you hit up 30 of your friends from construction and 29 became customers.


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[Assistant] Uhm, as you scale, uh, how, what do you do with customer feedback? How important is this? How much do you listen to? How much of it is noise? Uh, how much do you let it guide your roadmap? What have you learned?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And have you had any of your bigger customers drag your roadmap in a different way than your smaller customers?


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[Assistant] It's a long-term commitment. Right. And so, and how many customers total do you have at Plangrid?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tens of thousands. But the revenue distribution, it's probably several orders of magnitude at your biggest customers, right?


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[Assistant] When, even if it's a couple percent of revenue, or maybe in the early days, when they ask you to build something


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[Assistant] It's kind of on your road map that's way out there because this is an issue we all face. Do you build it? Uhm, you know, the B2C guys always say no, right? But when your big customer wants you to build a 2019 feature, do you build it?


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[Assistant] So, Solomon, let's talk, you said in the beginning you guys were five, five co-founders for two years, right? I think. Uh, no. Roughly?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We'll get into equity splits later. Okay. At minute 51 till I learn how to that, but, uh, okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but anyhow, related question, so, but I want to, I want to ask the, uh, most of the panel this.


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[Assistant] As you scale, let's talk about, because this is always great learning, uh, mishire, right? So as you get out of your core team, is there, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Core functional area or VP or someone that you thought you needed or got wrong in the early days, uhm, anything you can learn from, what's the biggest hiring mistake you made?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tracy, I want to hear your story too, but let me flip it around. You have five co-founders, right? So you've got, you probably had a lot of the...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You felt like you had at least two or two of the bases covered in the early days, at least in theory, right? Who were, who, what was a, one of these early hires you made that was extremely impactful, that, that, that moved the needle, that, that helped increase the business?


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[Assistant] Was there a particular functional area or someone that changed things for you? They're all great.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For sure. Uhm, well let me ask a different question. You have five founders. Uh, when...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When do you bring on VPs or directors or others to take over the functional areas from them? What did you learn from that experience?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We all, we all want to hire the folks who've done it before early, right? Not all of us, but we get attracted to the, to the, to the, to the box on the resume. But maybe that Dunbar number is the right time to think about it, right? Uh, when, when did you benefit from folks that maybe weren't as fluent in the product, but were fluent in the process, the processes?


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[Assistant] They did, yeaah. Was there a moment, recruiting is always hard, but was there a moment when it got easier?


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[Assistant] A more interesting startup to a broader community?


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[Assistant] Good point. Tracy, let me, let me go back to a point you made about the journey that your customers are signing up for 6 and 12 months and maybe they're even signing up for 60 months and 100 months. Uhm, especially in the early days.


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[Assistant] You know, products are super feature poor, right? I mean, you had 29 folks sign up immediately, but it's still feature. How do you, how do you convince them to go on that journey when you have incumbents that are feature rich? What's, what have you learned?


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[Assistant] So you're, a lot of your history, so this is learning for me, but a lot of your history is coming in from the field, even if the CIO's office, whoever it is, maybe...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And would you, and how, and let's just talk about that for me because that's always interesting, right? And so you get in through the field, they love your product, they can adopt it immediately instead of taking six months. Uhm, and how did you deal with that conflict if a different vendor had already been selected by procurement or any learnings on how to deal with that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you, and you spend a lot of time on those other users that actually don't write that, that don't pay for a plan grid? All the other folks in the project? How do you make them happy too?


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[Assistant] So, so Solomon, let's talk a varying of this sort of competition and long journey for you. I, I uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I feel like Docker is a product and a vendor that people are rooting for. I think there are a lot of the Docker fans, I would say. How do you, how do you invest in that? How do you return that social contract on the product side? Especially as competition increases, right? As you prove yourself, everyone wants to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Do something in the broad container market. Competitions everywhere. How do you, how do you keep that like 100 NPS that Docker probably has?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well let's make that our last question so I want to save a few minutes for questions so we have it. But related to that,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think I already know the answer for Docker. Let's just do Plan, Grid, and Lob. But Tracy, today, what percent of your new customers come from word of mouth, or brand, or, uh, what, what, this, all this, this great goodwill that you've built across the industry. How does that pay off today?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You may be ready already, actually. I think, I think, right? You may be ready. Alright, we keep going on this, but let's take some questions. Anyone got any great questions for the panel?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, the question was, what was one... Oh, you're right. I like redundancy. I worry. Uhm, I like five nines of uptime. Uhm, what was one experience prior to starting your company that actually helped you get it off the ground?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But let's, let me just enter, let me ask you a variant of that question. So you have the great story of the customer that left, the 3X, the 3X, that's a great story, but in B2B it's hard for that to happen in three weeks, right? How long did that take to get those three customers out of that first great experience?


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[Assistant] Wrap it up there. Alright, let's thank the panel. This was great. Thank you everybody.


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[Assistant] These are the words from YouTube that are unacceptable, just so you know.


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[Assistant] This so-called dinner is gonna wind up being a midnight snack.


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[Assistant] One of the things that I want to just give ourselves a chance to talk about is that, you know, it seems to me there's a lot of pain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People are suffering and then kind of almost blaming each other.


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[Assistant] The Republicans have a challenge dealing with, uh, the perceptions that they may not be as for equality.


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[Assistant] That we do, uhm, I wanna bring you back in, uh, Caitlin. That we do have, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The glam room is self-explanatory. It is beautiful. It is pink. This room is really where she gets made up. It's a fun room.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The concept of the meditation space was that she had a place to escape, somewhere that was totally contained and quiet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Katie's bedroom was really fun to do. We whited it out so everything is white in there. We also bought a white round bed, so that was really fun. And then Nogget's mini bed.


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[Assistant] The viewing room is a completely disconnected part of the witness world. We had a two-way mirror installed. Bloggers, they'll be here writing, working, watching, and really be a witness to what's happening.


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[Assistant] It's my job to make sure that they actually get a workout. But hey, if she's not gonna work out, then alright, you all get to witness her copying out of a workout, but I don't think she will.


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[Assistant] Because that's the boundary between what is known within the circle and what is unknown outside of it. So, so, every new thing you learn, you stand in a new place and see things you never even knew you didn't know. The people who never make mistakes are the people who are not on any frontier at all.


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[Assistant] So, so if you don't know and care that you don't know, and then are curious to find out, the world is yours.


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[Assistant] We're actually forged in the cores of stars that lived in a distant part of our galaxy and died billions of years ago, scattering this enrichment


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[Assistant] Here's something that freaks me out every day. Every morning I wake up and I say, how is it that every morning I wake up as me and not as someone else?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My deal is that I try to heal the world through food, you know. Uhm, that's really- Truthfully. You know, I make people happy. I've been cooking a long time, probably about 20 years professionally, and now we do this local.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the big thing is to go into a neighborhood like Watts, we teach them everything we know, we learn from them, and then they take over the store.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Communities like Watts are never talked about in this kind of public realm, unless something bad happens.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tonight's discussion was a social justice discussion and as a chef, we tried to show our solidarity through nourishment and food, but they didn't eat as much as they should have though because they were talking so damn much.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Social Studies and Art Pick Two Holidays


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[Assistant] You know, it's just, it's funny though, it's the concept of uhm, of being open. I can do the, hey everybody, how you doing? But the real me, boom. I'm an introvert masquerading as an extrovert.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I have a plan. Really? I have devised a cunning test to see whether these are savage killers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Don't you love the people? Not a very lively bunch though. Oh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well boys, it's gonna be ice cold sushi for breakfast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alex. Alex. Alex. What? You suck your thumb?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What is it, Melman? Okay, okay. Oh, you know how I have that bladder infection and I have to get up every two hours? Well, I got up to pee, um, and I looked over at Marty's pen, which, you know, I usually don't do. I don't know why, but I did. And this time I looked over and- What, Melman?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What's going on? It's Marty. He's gone. Gone? What do you mean gone? How long has he been working on this?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, there's a lot of different values that you get out of posting and voting on features. One of them is, you know, you, you have a, there's a lot of transparencies, so you keep your users in the loop.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot of current feedback solutions is like email or live chat where you, you, the user sends an email and then the company says, oh, we'll pass it on to the team is what inevitably happens. And then, uh, the user doesn't really know like, did my voice get heard? And so we've heard both from teams and users that this is a great experience. Their users are happy. They know what feedback their users are giving.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I feel like we have a sliver of product market fit where some people are extremely happy with our product and we kind of know the next steps we need to do to expand that by 10x to, you know, address a larger portion of the market. What are the steps?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Integrations with other SaaS services like Intercom, Slack, Zapier, and then a better answer on mobile.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a, there's some product work for sure. I think the core product is pretty good, but it takes a while for our leads to get.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it's hard because a lot of like our, our value add is very diverse. Like one thing is customer satisfaction. Another thing is product management. You know what you want to work on. Another thing is having a transparent roadmap. So keeping your users in the loop.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there's just all these different kind of values. There isn't one core value, which is also why it's kind of hard to...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We have thought about it. Uhm, I mean I think-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like just doing napkin math. I think with a startup, you usually want to arrive somewhere around 100 million annual revenue. And so for us,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like right now it's looking like we'd be going for 10,000 people paying us $100 a month. Uhm. And does that feel doable? Maybe it's 100,000. Uh, yeaah. There's a difference there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Companies that need feedback in the number of websites and mobile apps is increasing and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, I think one thing that we've found so far is that there are other products in the market that do this. And during our product launch, we got people coming from those products wanting to use us. And the thing that they mentioned liking about us more is design and simplicity. And I honestly feel like our product out of all the products in the market right now is the best designed and the simplest.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm Emma, uhm, and we're Moonlightwork. So we're building a marketplace for software engineers and designers to match up with companies who need them 10 hours at a time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I think we'll start with 10 hours at a time, but some companies want more than that and some people want more work. So if they want more time, they can have more time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Prototype I've been running. We haven't had anybody else use it, but both of us have both.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so far it's a lot of people who have a very specific need. So they're like, I need an expert in this language or an expert that knows how to build this thing really well. And so they're looking for someone who there's not going to be much onboarding. They're just going to be able to jump in and do a project.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I think the biggest reason is because we're promoting it as something that experts are working on. So these aren't just anyone in the world who wants to make $15 an hour. This is someone who maybe works at a Google or an Uber and they want to make a bunch of extra money on the side, but they're really good at what they do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, yeaah. That's what we're starting to do and I think that's gonna be the biggest barrier for us is being able to make sure that these people are really quality workers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I think it's making sure that matching, I mean obviously every marketplace has that issue, but making sure that the people we have are worth what they're trying to get charged for. Uhm, cause we want to set a limit on how much people can charge per hour. Why?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we're finding, so we've had about 300 people sign up so far and we asked them what their hourly rate is and it's usually from about 70 to 200 per hour.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and I think right now for the MVP, what we're trying to say is like, we are personally experts in these fields and we are making sure that the quality of talent we have is up to that par. Uhm, I think that we need to figure out how we're going to scale that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I think that's another thing we need to test out, but we feel like that's a number that's not crazy for businesses to pay on top of something. Uhm, like my roommate's a recruiter and she pays, she gets 30% off of the top of all of their salaries.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so if somebody's $70 an hour, we'll add $15 to that. Sorry, $100 an hour, we'll add $15 to that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think that's another thing that uhm, a lot of developers and designers have pointed out to us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think we want to make sure that the tools inside of the platform are keeping people there. So it's so easy for them to get work and keep work and they can do this on the side.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, it's still, it's connected to all of them, but it still implies that you need less, like...


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[Assistant] Please, this is just a fad. By tomorrow this thing will be another lame piece of internet obscurity.


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[Assistant] To work at Fox News, all you have to be able to do is operate this device. Now when a Republican is in trouble,


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[Assistant] Why does everyone know? Because their terrific products keep track of it for you. And anything else you could ever think of.


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[Assistant] Oh, oh, I've been listening to this song for three days, and it's only the end of the first verse!


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[Assistant] Granny Pig and Grandpa Pig are taking Pepper and George out for a day on the river.


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[Assistant] Grandad Dog is Grandpop Pig's very best friend. Ho!


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[Assistant] Now this next position is fantastic for women who are carrying especially


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[Assistant] It's like huli used to spy on us and exploit us.


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[Assistant] And language is to a large extent, uhm, where the action is.


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[Assistant] The study of human language has been the battleground over different theories of human nature. So every philosopher or psychologist or humanist or neuroscientist who has ever thought about people


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[Assistant] I'm also including modern day approaches to computational theory, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and cultural psychology. Uhm, if you hope to make it with a theory of what people are and how people work, you have to explain and talk about language. Uhm, in fact language is sufficiently interesting


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Unlike most other things I'll talk about in this class, there is an entire field devoted to its study, the field of linguistics, that is entirely devoted to studying the nuances and structures of different languages. Now, I'll first, before getting into details, make a definitional point.