#102 - Andrew Kortina

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Andrew Kortina. Andrew's the co-founder of Venmo and Finn. Finn is a high-quality, on-demand personal assistant and executive assistant service. You can get $100 credit to try Finn at finn.com/yc. I'll also link that up in the show notes. If you want to find Andrew on Twitter, he's at Kortina and he's blogging at Kortina.nyc.
All right, here we go.
All right, Andrew Kortina, welcome to the podcast.

**Andrew Kortina** (0:34)
Thanks for having me.

**Craig Cannon** (0:35)
How's it going, man?

**Andrew Kortina** (0:35)
Pretty good.

**Craig Cannon** (0:36)
Cool. So you are the co-founder of both Venmo and Finn, but you're also a blogger. And I wanted to talk to you about a couple of your essays, specifically around work, human dignity. There's one called The Beautiful Struggle, The Beautiful Game. And you end it with, as we give more and more work to software and machines, I think it's worth asking why we've historically regarded work as fundamental to human dignity, and whether or not it's still useful to do so. So I found this interesting because you wrote this after selling Venmo.
And then you went and started another company.
I assume like you could have taken some time off and not worked. Why do you go back to work?

**Andrew Kortina** (1:26)
Yeah, I think it's very difficult to change your own idea of dignity. And I don't necessarily even think it's something that you come up with yourself. Like, I've thought a lot about this. And when I was younger, I kind of thought I had an idea of like, okay, what is the good, what does it mean to be a good person? And just either that was some objective truth or it was something I had come up with myself. And I think the older I've gotten and the more fortunate I've been in life, the more I kind of recognize that a lot of things that I have are not necessarily things like I have accomplished myself, but things I've received from teachers or reading great books from the past 2,000 years of Western civilization or the culture that I grew up in, the country that I grew up in. There's all these things that you think you can take credit for, like a work ethic, right? That seems like one of the most free will determined things, like a strong work ethic, but you probably learn that from some role model.
Anyway, to get back to that question, I think I've come to think more and more about, where does my own conception of dignity come from? Why would that involve working and making things or doing things for other people?
I feel like a little bit less ownership of it. I guess where I was going with that essay was, why would a culture connect dignity with the idea of work?
I just think it's been a useful thing to do. If you live in a very uncertain world, where there's things like a hoard of locusts can take out the crops for the year, and then there's famine, right? You want to incentivize people to be productive and create a surplus, so you can endure those natural catastrophes. For me, growing up in the United States, I think there's a lot of connection between work and entrepreneurship and dignity, and doing service for others in your country kind of gets back to this like Protestant work ethic stuff. And even though I think I can recognize all these sort of cultural influences on my own conception of dignity, it's really hard to, I think, convince yourself of something otherwise, because you know it's all a ruse. On the one hand, you could say it should make it easier to just change your mind about something, but if it's been inside of you for so long, it can just feel like, I don't know, I don't want to go sit around and do heroin all day. I'm sure that would be really fun, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but it would be very tough for me to not feel bad about that, even though I don't think it's a bad thing for somebody to do. And I think it's just as dignified as working on an important problem.
But I don't know, this stuff gets ingrained pretty deeply. I think it's hard to change for somebody, especially once they're older. Maybe it can change across generations, but I think it takes time.

**Craig Cannon** (5:12)
Well, you did describe, I forget, I think it was in the essay before, these kind of flow state moments you've had outside of work.