The Cult of Conformity in Silicon Valley

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:00)
Who would want to be an early employee at iMeme and Justin TV? Non-conformists.

**Michael Seibel** (0:08)
Non-normal.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:09)
Like, they would never be caught, you know, a conformist would not be caught dead working at an early stage startup.

**Michael Seibel** (0:18)
This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. Today, we're talking about conformists versus non-conformists in the tech and startup world.
So Dalton, set this topic up for us.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:31)
Sure thing. So something I think about a lot is the history of technology, the history of Silicon Valley, the history of startups. It's just a topic that I've always thought was cool. And something that I think a lot about in my job at YC is the change between startups being something entirely done by non-conformists and the domain of non-conformists and to kind of becoming like a mainstream thing that I would consider conformist thinking is cool, like your parents thinking is cool, your authority figures thinking is cool, the kind of people that would have gone into very blue chip kind of jobs or entering tech and startups that would not be caught dead doing in the past. So anyway, that's the setup.
It's been weird to witness what was previously a very weird place to go, populated by weird people become almost the opposite of that.

**Michael Seibel** (1:30)
So let's go back to the dark ages. You and I went to school in the early and mid 2000s.
And when we were in school, what's so funny is that like, it's probably hard for us to explain to a current college kid how uncool tech was. And then like, think of however uncool tech was, startups were 10x less cool than even that. But maybe the way that I would explain it with a number, I was a Yale 5 graduate, and in my graduating year, Yale graduated 10 CS majors in a class of 1200 kids. So like, just to give you some perspective at that time, what was your experience like at Stanford during these times?

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:16)
There were startups around, but this was just after the.com boom had crashed. This was like in 2 and 3 And so you'd have to be a real idiot to intentionally get into the wreckage of the.com crash. Like, it was pretty much people that just liked computers, would be my assessment, had nothing to do with financial, seeking financial gains. Because again, if you do that, you do management consulting, you do, there was a bunch of other options.
And so it was kind of nerds is how I would describe it.

**Michael Seibel** (2:47)
Yeah.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:48)
Yeah.

**Michael Seibel** (2:48)
And, you know, at my school too, I think there was a whole set of kids, and I think this makes sense, who were like, you know, I'm going to do really good in high school and get into a really good school. Okay, I'm at that school. What's the next status seeking thing that a gunner should want to go after? Right. And then to your point, finance consulting, law, medicine, those were the easy ones. And they had a lot of the characteristics of school. There was a clear application process. There was a clear steps. These steps were kind of imposed upon you. It was a very comforting structure.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:28)
Yeah, there was a lot of recruiters. There was stuff on campus. And also you could brag to people what offers you got.
Like a lot of these places, you would interview all the management consulting places and then brag to people about who you got offers from.

**Michael Seibel** (3:42)
What your signing bonus was. What's funny is all this stuff is going to sound very familiar to anyone who's been in college recently.
It wasn't that way back then for tech. But what was also interesting is the people who did get into startups. Because I might argue that back then, just the people who were interested in tech at all back then were much more likely to be non-conformists. You made the point. We just went through the bubble bursting. And so it was interesting. I think a lot of our frameworks for who would be interested in tech just come from when we were in school. And to your point, it was like weird non-conforming nerds.
It was people who absolutely hated the idea of having a boss ever. I think there was also a bit of like, the folks in this world weren't lazy. I actually think the other kind of aspect here that was interesting was that it was a lot of people who didn't want to wait in line. Like they didn't want to be told like, oh no, no, no, like you still have 10, 15, 20 years to go to school or to work your way up through the system before you get to do stuff. They were like, I want to do stuff now.