Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders

Vivian Shen (0:00)

So, we're here in Mountain View today with PG himself at the original offices doing your talk that you do for the YC batch. I looked it up, this is actually the 47th YC batch.

Paul Graham (0:10)

You know, I've been trying to calculate that number, and I wasn't sure exactly what it was. No wonder I'm not too worried about this talk.

You know, I've done it that many times.

Vivian Shen (0:20)

It changes a little bit. Yes, it's the 21st year also of YC.

Paul Graham (0:24)

You know, the weird thing is, I make the talk from scratch every time.

Vivian Shen (0:27)

Really?

Paul Graham (0:28)

I probably say the same things over and over, but I always feel like I should, like, I think, oh my god, I think a couple of hours beforehand. Oops, I better, I'm just talking to YC. I better think in advance a little bit about what to say. And so I open up a text file and start typing things. And that's how it always is.

Vivian Shen (0:43)

Any tidbits from today that are new from winter?

Paul Graham (0:47)

No, most of the things. Most of starting a startup. This is an actually interesting point. Most of starting a startup is the same. Most of starting a startup is always the same, right?

In, you know, microprocessors or AI or like in the internal combustion engine. It's always the same stuff.

Vivian Shen (1:03)

Good. Well, in that case, let's run through some questions.

Paul Graham (1:06)

Okay.

Vivian Shen (1:07)

So you recently posted that the startups YC funds now are much more serious than they were in the supposedly good old days. Yeah. What did you mean by that?

Paul Graham (1:15)

Well, what I meant by supposedly good old days, people are always saying that YC has jumped the shark, you know? And like, I remember when people started saying this, which is in about like 2008, right? YC is always this thing that was great, but now it's not what it was, right? Because they can't say it was always terrible. They have to admit it was once great. So if they want to attack it, they have to say it's fallen, right? It was good, but now it's not. It's always been, it's always not good anymore.

And so that's what I meant by the supposedly good old days, because the old days are what people claim used to be good. But like in the old days, there was a lot of things like Reddit, right? Which valuable as it is, is not exactly intercontinental ballistic cargo, right? Which I did Office Hours with recently. How about that for an idea? Like it's like an ICBM, except instead of exploding, it lands.

Vivian Shen (2:08)

It's ambitious.

Paul Graham (2:08)

And drop stuff off. Yeah, that's serious, right? You don't get much more serious than an intercontinental ballistic cargo.

Vivian Shen (2:16)

Yeah. What were some of the other serious ones?

Paul Graham (2:19)

Well, curing cancer.

There's a startup in this batch. I mean, there's all sorts of different approaches to curing cancer. And I say, fund many of them, because anyone working would be good. So one way to approach curing cancer is vaccines. That's one end, right? The opposite end is therapies, right? And so there's a startup in this batch that is basically doing on-demand research for people with cancer. You know?

And what I like about it is, they're sort of inflicting on cancer the death of a thousand cuts, which may be the way to defeat it. Because, you know, it's notoriously, it's notoriously not the sort of thing where you just like come up with a cure for cancer. I mean, maybe you do if these vaccines work. Maybe you do, right? Or maybe the way you fight it is the death of a thousand cuts.

Vivian Shen (3:12)

And they're actually really interesting because they helped another YC.

Paul Graham (3:15)

Yeah, right. It's part of the whole YC community.

They helped Sid from GitLab deal with his cancer, which he has done very successfully. I mean, he approached it like a startup, right? And these were essentially his co-founders in that de facto startup. And it's funny because I remember thinking after that, you know, I always had this process going of what would be a good startup idea, right? And I remember after that saying, you know, somebody should start a startup to do for everyone what Sid did for himself. And now, not only is this startup happening, it's the people who actually did it for Sid. So it couldn't be better. I was so delighted when I realized that one was happening.