Founder Mode: Paul Graham, Founder, Y Combinator

**Jessica Livingston** (0:00)
Today, on The Social Radars, we're joined by Paul Graham, founder, my co-founder at Y Combinator.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
Welcome, Paul.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:08)
Welcome, Paul.

**Paul Graham** (0:09)
Thank you.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:10)
We are taping this at the Y Combinator Founders Mode Retreat.

**Paul Graham** (0:16)
No kidding.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
Wow, the sarcasm.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:18)
Oh, it's starting now.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
Oh, no.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:20)
Okay, so let's think back last year to Brian Chesky's talk.

**Paul Graham** (0:25)
Yeah.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:26)
That was incredible, and everyone in that room was affected. Do you remember that talk?

**Paul Graham** (0:32)
Well, everyone who saw that will remember that talk. The default reaction to that talk is it's the best talk I've ever heard. And we gave a talk this year, too. And I said up front that having been the best talk ever, there's no way we can possibly reproduce it. And so we just talked about the talk largely.
Because it was this unique one-off. It was a unique product of the circumstances, right? Like Brian, I don't know how much he told you, he wasn't even supposed to be speaking. But Ron Conway nagged him to come, and he's like, all right, all right, I'll come. And then he wasn't even on the schedule. And Gary just said, get up and say a few words. He went on for like over an hour, and the audience was sitting there the entire time. Because he was talking, I mean, it's a unique circumstance. He was talking about something that they had all experienced and felt like it was only them. So there were really two parts to the whole founder mode phenomenon, right? There was his talk, which by itself would have just been a founder telling their story, which are often dramatic. But then afterwards, I talked to all the founders, because it's this big event, it's a huge number of founders. And everyone, one after another, said, the same thing happened to me. I had no idea, right? And then I knew something was going on, right? That every single person had been suffering in secret from the things Brian had been suffering from and trying to solve the same problems. And so that's how I knew, you know, there was something missing in the world. There was this thing they could be doing. It was like when they would discover planets by their gravitational effects before they could actually observe them. They sort of knew that there was a planet out there, right? Because they could detect its secondary effects and they just had to go look for the planet. So this reaction of everyone was like the evidence there was a planet out there and the planet is founder mode.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:34)
Yeah.

**Paul Graham** (2:34)
Right? And so now the task is figure out what it is. And that might sound like we're being sort of bogus. We're talking about this thing. We don't know what it is, but it's not bogus because we know, we can describe what it is. It is all the things that you can do if you're the founder of the company that you couldn't do if you were just a hired manager. Right? We don't know what all those things are. Just like you can detect, there's totally a planet here for sure. I'll bet my life on it. Look at the gravitational effects. We still haven't observed it. Right? And so, or in math, there's all sorts of sets that are precisely described, but we definitely don't know what all the members of the sets are. There's a lot of math papers to be written about that. And so that's what we're doing now. We're like writing the papers, describing the set of things in founder mode.

**Jessica Livingston** (3:20)
Tell us about your essay founder mode.

**Paul Graham** (3:23)
Okay, so after Brian gave this talk, I thought the essay is really a call for people to figure out what this thing is, right? Like the essay was essentially saying, we know there's this planet out there. We're not sure what it is. I deliberately tried to say as little specific about what it meant in the essay, just the general description, like I gave you.
And so the essay was a call for people to like, A, wake up to the existence of this thing. You don't have to do what your C-level execs tell you. Right? And also figure out what it is. Tell us, you know, tell one another, tell us, try things, see what seems to work. I'm sure even now, even if you collected everyone's experiences about stuff that they could do as founders, it still wouldn't be a complete list. Because people have explored such a small subset of how to operate companies. Everybody just does the standard thing because they're afraid to do anything weird, right? Plus the world's changing fast because of AI. So even if there's so much more to be discovered about it.