#113 - Caterina Fake and Kat Manalac

**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 Caterina Fake and Kat Manalac. Caterina hosts the podcast, Should This Exist? which is a show about how technology is impacting our humanity. It launches today on iTunes, and I've linked it up in the description.
She also co-founded Flickr, Hunch, and Findery, and is an investor at Yes VC.
Kat, who you've heard on the podcast before, is a partner at YC. You can find Caterina on Twitter, at Katarina, and Kat at Kat Manalac. All right, here we go. So, Katarina, you are starting a podcast. What's it called?

**Caterina Fake** (0:35)
Indeed, I am. It is called Should This Exist?
It's been in development for several months now, and we've been working on it. It will be 10 episodes starting on the 21st, which I think was when this will go live. And basically, it's about so much of what we do as entrepreneurs and Y Combinator knows better than pretty much anybody is basically making the business case for your product service startup. And I think that we found in recent years, especially that the conversation has turned to not, can this exist?
Or how can we enable this to exist? But should this exist, right? And I think that a lot of the things that we've seen kind of come out in the world in the past several decades, sometimes they may not have been not necessarily what the founders intended, right? It may not have been what society wanted or needed or even individuals wanted or needed. And if there were a slight course correction, or if the founders had just been kind of asking themselves that question, should this exist?
It's a very important question to ask, right? Just flat out, should this exist? Should this feature exist? Should we plan this company a little bit differently to address underrepresented groups? This has potential for kind of increasing bias or inequality or like a thousand things that we can look at that are kind of these outcomes of our paths. And if you, as we all know, when you're doing a startup, you've already been in existence for five years, it's much more difficult to change your course than it is at the very outset. So those are the questions that we are hoping to introduce into the conversation, should this exist?

**Kat Manalac** (2:30)
So is there a process that you go through when you're trying to take apart an idea and figure out whether or not it should exist?

**Caterina Fake** (2:37)
Well, most of it comes out in conversation. And I think that a lot of it comes out in the conversational process that you engage in, not only with your team, right, as a founder and as a creator, inventor. Actually, a lot of the people that we have on the show are inventors and scientists and people who are kind of just taking maybe some research or some new technology and bringing it out into the world and prioritizing it. And a lot of the time, I mean, there's a lot of questions out there, you know, there's a ton of, for example, like groups that are like kind of asking ourselves, you know, what are AI ethics? What do we do with, how do we manage the, you know, the potential very great downsides of say CRISPR?
I mean, there's a lot going on right now. Crypto, I mean, it's like a very, we're kind of going into realms in which we just don't have a good ethical framework to discuss them even.
And so just making the kind of question, the part of the conversation very important.

**Kat Manalac** (3:51)
I think about this a lot because I read thousands of YC applications and some of them are for really, you know, really incredible technology that I'm like, wow, this could have a huge impact. So who should be part of that conversation when you're trying to decide whether something should exist? Is it founders, investors, or like how? I honestly think that it's a matrix, right?

**Caterina Fake** (4:12)
It's like there's a lot of people that should be involved in that conversation. And I do think that one of the benefits of this show, and one of the things that we're hoping to do with this show is to bring people in that are not necessarily normally part of the conversation, right? You want to bring in sociologists, you want to bring in historians, you want to bring in psychologists, people who actually study a lot of the different processes, and not all of us, computer scientists, user experience designers. I mean, you know, like, I mean, I think everybody starts off with the best of intentions. Nobody thinks that they're going to do something destructive when they start off.