Video wird geladen...

Video konnte nicht geladen werden

Beim Laden dieses Videos ist ein Problem aufgetreten. Dies könnte an einem vorübergehenden Netzwerkproblem liegen oder das Video ist möglicherweise nicht verfügbar.

In 2009, Patrick Collison and John Collison went to Startup School in Berkeley, got sushi in Potrero Hill afterward, and decided on the walk home to start Stripe. The reasoning, as Patrick remembers it, was that “we might as well because it probably won’t be that hard.” It took... them two years to launch. Seventeen years later, at Startup School 2026, he talks with YC's Harj Taggar about dropping out of MIT twice, why founders should ask what happens if they succeed, and what Stripe’s own data says about the best time to start a company. 00:07 — What Should You Still Learn in the Age of AI? 02:01 — Knowledge Still Matters 05:12 — Should You Drop Out of College? 09:58 — Why Stripe Worked 12:10 — Building Stripe Before Launching 17:20 — Is the Lean Startup Still the Right Playbook? 19:07 — The Hidden Reward of Building Stripe 22:36 — Will AI Kill Your Startup? 25:17 — Why It's Never Been a Better Time to Start a Company 29:23 — What Stripe's Data Says About the AI Economy 30:45 — Build Something People Truly Needshow more

Y Combinator

1,637,953 subscribers

57,906 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat •via X (Twitter)

Wissenschaft & Technologie Bildung Finanzen

Anya Rossi• Live Now

Private livecam show

0 Kommentare

Keine Kommentare verfügbar

Kommentare vom Original-Post werden hier angezeigt

Ähnliche Videos

20 years ago, every founder feared one tech company: Google. Even when Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) was building a startup back then, he got the same question in every meeting: "What if Google does this ?" But the truth is, Google still didn't build most of what people expected. Because no company can chase 100 priorities at once. Cause the teams get in each other's way, and everything slows down. Today the same question is aimed at the AI labs. Patrick is honest that better models will wipe out some products. That part is real. But the fear is far bigger than the record deserves. — Patrick Collison (.Patrick Collison), founder of Stripe, at Y Combinator's startup school

20 years ago, every founder feared one tech company: Google. Even when Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) was building a startup back then, he got the same question in every meeting: "What if Google does this ?" But the truth is, Google still didn't build most of what people expected. Because no company can chase 100 priorities at once. Cause the teams get in each other's way, and everything slows down. Today the same question is aimed at the AI labs. Patrick is honest that better models will wipe out some products. That part is real. But the fear is far bigger than the record deserves. — Patrick Collison (.Patrick Collison), founder of Stripe, at Y Combinator's startup school

GeniusThinking

113,494 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

The biggest startup advice (The Lean Startup Method) you've been following is broken. 1) Launch something small and cheap 2) Win one narrow group of users 3) Grow outward slowly Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) says it was only relevant 20 years ago, for two reasons he names: A) Raising money back then was genuinely hard B) And nothing let you spin up a company able to do many things at once But today, AI removed both limits. Which is why he thinks you can now start something far more ambitious on day one. Look at who actually won the last decade. The AI labs. Anduril, the defence company. So many of them did the opposite of lean. If your plan feels too small, check whose advice you're following. — Patrick Collison (.Patrick Collison), founder of Stripe, at Y Combinator's startup school

The biggest startup advice (The Lean Startup Method) you've been following is broken. 1) Launch something small and cheap 2) Win one narrow group of users 3) Grow outward slowly Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) says it was only relevant 20 years ago, for two reasons he names: A) Raising money back then was genuinely hard B) And nothing let you spin up a company able to do many things at once But today, AI removed both limits. Which is why he thinks you can now start something far more ambitious on day one. Look at who actually won the last decade. The AI labs. Anduril, the defence company. So many of them did the opposite of lean. If your plan feels too small, check whose advice you're following. — Patrick Collison (.Patrick Collison), founder of Stripe, at Y Combinator's startup school

GeniusThinking

27,669 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Dust ( helps companies build AI teammates that work across their organization. Founded by former OpenAI researcher Stanislas Polu (Stanislas Polu) and his team, the company has spent the last three years building AI for work while the capabilities of frontier models have advanced at breakneck speed. At Startup School Paris, YC's Mathilde Collin sat down with Stanislas to talk about what it takes to build alongside frontier AI labs, why staying model agnostic is a competitive advantage, how AI is changing the way we work, and why the best startups are built around a problem founders can't stop thinking about. 01:09 — From Stripe to OpenAI to Founder 01:40 — Why Stan Left OpenAI 02:49 — What Dust Actually Does 03:46 — What Work Looks Like in 3 Years 04:53 — Where the Thesis Was Right (and Wrong) 07:05 — Building Alongside Frontier Labs 09:15 — Model Agnostic as a Moat 10:49 — How Frontier Labs Changed Fundraising 12:19 — Raising Small on Purpose 14:39 — What Mistral Got Right 15:11 — Building in France 16:37 — What Happens When Frontier Labs Enter Your Market? 18:27 — The Margin Problem

Dust ( helps companies build AI teammates that work across their organization. Founded by former OpenAI researcher Stanislas Polu (Stanislas Polu) and his team, the company has spent the last three years building AI for work while the capabilities of frontier models have advanced at breakneck speed. At Startup School Paris, YC's Mathilde Collin sat down with Stanislas to talk about what it takes to build alongside frontier AI labs, why staying model agnostic is a competitive advantage, how AI is changing the way we work, and why the best startups are built around a problem founders can't stop thinking about. 01:09 — From Stripe to OpenAI to Founder 01:40 — Why Stan Left OpenAI 02:49 — What Dust Actually Does 03:46 — What Work Looks Like in 3 Years 04:53 — Where the Thesis Was Right (and Wrong) 07:05 — Building Alongside Frontier Labs 09:15 — Model Agnostic as a Moat 10:49 — How Frontier Labs Changed Fundraising 12:19 — Raising Small on Purpose 14:39 — What Mistral Got Right 15:11 — Building in France 16:37 — What Happens When Frontier Labs Enter Your Market? 18:27 — The Margin Problem

Y Combinator

54,342 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

In 2005, Sam Altman was a Stanford sophomore in YC’s first batch, building a startup in a little Cambridge office while Paul Graham cooked the founders dinner. Twenty years later, as co-founder & CEO of OpenAI, Sam closed Startup School 2026 in conversation with Garry Tan — on agents, ambition, and why the ceiling for what a startup can take on has never been higher. 00:07 — From YC’s First Batch to Today 03:04 — What PG Taught Sam 04:17 — Why Startups Matter More Than Ever 06:57 — The Coming Golden Age of Ambitious Startups 09:30 — Why Startups Win During Technology Shifts 11:46 — Building OpenAI When Nobody Believed in AGI 14:45 — Finding People Who Share Your Conviction 18:05 — Help People Before You Know Why 19:43 — Earnestness, Ambition, and Ignoring the Haters 24:04 — The AI Safety Incident That Changed the Stakes 26:58 — Preventing AI From Concentrating Power 30:41 — How Fast AI Models Will Improve 36:06 — The Best Version of an AI Future 37:47 — “It’s All Going to Work Out”

In 2005, Sam Altman was a Stanford sophomore in YC’s first batch, building a startup in a little Cambridge office while Paul Graham cooked the founders dinner. Twenty years later, as co-founder & CEO of OpenAI, Sam closed Startup School 2026 in conversation with Garry Tan — on agents, ambition, and why the ceiling for what a startup can take on has never been higher. 00:07 — From YC’s First Batch to Today 03:04 — What PG Taught Sam 04:17 — Why Startups Matter More Than Ever 06:57 — The Coming Golden Age of Ambitious Startups 09:30 — Why Startups Win During Technology Shifts 11:46 — Building OpenAI When Nobody Believed in AGI 14:45 — Finding People Who Share Your Conviction 18:05 — Help People Before You Know Why 19:43 — Earnestness, Ambition, and Ignoring the Haters 24:04 — The AI Safety Incident That Changed the Stakes 26:58 — Preventing AI From Concentrating Power 30:41 — How Fast AI Models Will Improve 36:06 — The Best Version of an AI Future 37:47 — “It’s All Going to Work Out”

Y Combinator

69,478 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

The founders of Stripe and Pinterest on how to convince people to join your startup Stripe CEO Patrick Collison argues that part of the reason startups resonate so much is because the outcome is not guaranteed: "If it were guaranteed, it would be boring... Whether or not you're the best person in the world at what you do, you're probably not going to alter Google's trajectory. But if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make--which is a really compelling prospect for a lot of the best people--a startup is a much better place to test that." Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann emphasized this as well: "No smart person that you're hiring is under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into the future and that joining is a guaranteed thing. In fact, if you're telling them that and they select in, you shouldn't hire them because they didn't pass a basic intelligence test. I think it's important to tell them what's exciting and where you think the company can go. But also tell them where it will be hard and chart your best plan. And then tell them why their role can be instrumental--because it will be... What I would discourage doing is whitewashing all of that. If people are joining your company because they want all of the certainty and safety of working at Google but also the perks of working at a small startup with lots of responsibility and transparency, that's a really negative sign." Apparently in the early days of PayPal, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin would tell people after they interviewed all the reasons that the company would fail: "Visa and MasterCard want to kill us. We also might be doing something that's illegal. But if we succeed, we'll redefine payments." Don't whitewash the risks. Instead tell them how your startup will change the world if you succeed and how their role will be instrumental in affecting that change. Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

The founders of Stripe and Pinterest on how to convince people to join your startup Stripe CEO Patrick Collison argues that part of the reason startups resonate so much is because the outcome is not guaranteed: "If it were guaranteed, it would be boring... Whether or not you're the best person in the world at what you do, you're probably not going to alter Google's trajectory. But if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make--which is a really compelling prospect for a lot of the best people--a startup is a much better place to test that." Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann emphasized this as well: "No smart person that you're hiring is under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into the future and that joining is a guaranteed thing. In fact, if you're telling them that and they select in, you shouldn't hire them because they didn't pass a basic intelligence test. I think it's important to tell them what's exciting and where you think the company can go. But also tell them where it will be hard and chart your best plan. And then tell them why their role can be instrumental--because it will be... What I would discourage doing is whitewashing all of that. If people are joining your company because they want all of the certainty and safety of working at Google but also the perks of working at a small startup with lots of responsibility and transparency, that's a really negative sign." Apparently in the early days of PayPal, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin would tell people after they interviewed all the reasons that the company would fail: "Visa and MasterCard want to kill us. We also might be doing something that's illegal. But if we succeed, we'll redefine payments." Don't whitewash the risks. Instead tell them how your startup will change the world if you succeed and how their role will be instrumental in affecting that change. Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

Startup Archive

11,811 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

Here is my episode with Patrick Collison We discuss: - what it takes to process $1 trillion/year - how to build multi-decade APIs, companies, and relationships - what's next for Stripe (increasing the GDP of the internet is an open ended task, and the Collison brothers are just getting started). Plus the amazing stuff they're doing at Arc Institute, the financial infrastructure for AI agents, playing devil's advocate on progress studies, and much more. Links to other platforms below. Enjoy! Timestamps: 00:00:46 - Advice for 20-30 year olds 00:12:58 - Progress studies 00:23:07 - Arc Institute 00:35:13 - AI & Fast Grants 00:44:32 - Stripe history 00:56:30 - Stripe Climate 01:02:25 - Beauty & APIs 01:12:37 - Financial innards 01:29:02 - Stripe culture & future 01:42:42 - Virtues of big businesses 01:52:27 - John

Here is my episode with Patrick Collison We discuss: - what it takes to process $1 trillion/year - how to build multi-decade APIs, companies, and relationships - what's next for Stripe (increasing the GDP of the internet is an open ended task, and the Collison brothers are just getting started). Plus the amazing stuff they're doing at Arc Institute, the financial infrastructure for AI agents, playing devil's advocate on progress studies, and much more. Links to other platforms below. Enjoy! Timestamps: 00:00:46 - Advice for 20-30 year olds 00:12:58 - Progress studies 00:23:07 - Arc Institute 00:35:13 - AI & Fast Grants 00:44:32 - Stripe history 00:56:30 - Stripe Climate 01:02:25 - Beauty & APIs 01:12:37 - Financial innards 01:29:02 - Stripe culture & future 01:42:42 - Virtues of big businesses 01:52:27 - John

Dwarkesh Patel

350,541 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Jack Dent story time - his path from high school in the UK to founding Chai is pretty amazing: - Cold-emailed Stripe as a teenager - Daniela Amodei was running Stripe’s careers inbox and forwarded his email to Patrick Collison - Interned on Stripe’s payments API and eventually became the only engineer working on it - Greg Brockman walked around the office with no shoes - Met Joshua Meier while at Harvard. Years later, Sam Altman Facebook-messaged him about Josh when he was leaving OAI - asked if he could be convinced to stay or start a company ... All of it became part of the path to co-founding Chai Discovery a few years later. Early Stripe was a talent epicenter Daniela Amodei Patrick Collison Greg Brockman Sam Altman

Jack Dent story time - his path from high school in the UK to founding Chai is pretty amazing: - Cold-emailed Stripe as a teenager - Daniela Amodei was running Stripe’s careers inbox and forwarded his email to Patrick Collison - Interned on Stripe’s payments API and eventually became the only engineer working on it - Greg Brockman walked around the office with no shoes - Met Joshua Meier while at Harvard. Years later, Sam Altman Facebook-messaged him about Josh when he was leaving OAI - asked if he could be convinced to stay or start a company ... All of it became part of the path to co-founding Chai Discovery a few years later. Early Stripe was a talent epicenter Daniela Amodei Patrick Collison Greg Brockman Sam Altman

Sabrina Halper

33,476 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe “We started working on Stripe in the Fall of 2009, and we launched Stripe in September 2011,” John Collison reflects. “I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it I said to Patrick [Collison], ‘Yeah let’s do it. How hard can it be?’ Which gives you a sense of our mindset. And the answer was: two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that.” John remembers feeling dejected when Stripe only had 50 users two years later: “When you spend two years getting 50 users, it doesn’t feel like a whole lot of progress. It feels like things are going pretty slow.” But this is one of the challenges of startups, he argues: “If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too.” Yet slow growth has a silver lining: “I think the thing that allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was the fact that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users; since we were hyper-focused on building a great product; and since we weren’t dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to build the product that we wanted. Part of the culture that set in really early on was taking abnormally good care of those early users.” The Stripe founders would get an email or phone call anytime a user ran into a bug. When they sent the customer an email moments later alerting them that the bug was now fixed, people’s minds were blown. They set up a Campfire room that any customer could join and use to message John and Patrick at any hour of the day or night. And if a user was based in the Bay Area, the founders would invite them to come by the office and help integrate Stripe for them. In the Stripe dashboard they would prompt their customers for feedback and feature requests. Then the Stripe founders would reply to that feedback within 10 minutes. “What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days,” John explains, “it actually had a pretty surprising viral effect where people had a good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word-of-mouth even to this day.” Video source: Stanford eCorner (2015)

John Collison: We only had 50 users two years after founding Stripe “We started working on Stripe in the Fall of 2009, and we launched Stripe in September 2011,” John Collison reflects. “I remember right at the beginning when we were starting it I said to Patrick [Collison], ‘Yeah let’s do it. How hard can it be?’ Which gives you a sense of our mindset. And the answer was: two years of difficulty. We had not predicted that.” John remembers feeling dejected when Stripe only had 50 users two years later: “When you spend two years getting 50 users, it doesn’t feel like a whole lot of progress. It feels like things are going pretty slow.” But this is one of the challenges of startups, he argues: “If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too.” Yet slow growth has a silver lining: “I think the thing that allowed us to take off in the subsequent years was the fact that since we were spending so much time on each one of those users; since we were hyper-focused on building a great product; and since we weren’t dealing with problems of scale yet, that allowed us to build the product that we wanted. Part of the culture that set in really early on was taking abnormally good care of those early users.” The Stripe founders would get an email or phone call anytime a user ran into a bug. When they sent the customer an email moments later alerting them that the bug was now fixed, people’s minds were blown. They set up a Campfire room that any customer could join and use to message John and Patrick at any hour of the day or night. And if a user was based in the Bay Area, the founders would invite them to come by the office and help integrate Stripe for them. In the Stripe dashboard they would prompt their customers for feedback and feature requests. Then the Stripe founders would reply to that feedback within 10 minutes. “What this meant was that even though the user growth was happening quite slowly in the early days,” John explains, “it actually had a pretty surprising viral effect where people had a good experience, they told their friends about it, and we were able to spread entirely through word-of-mouth even to this day.” Video source: Stanford eCorner (2015)

Startup Archive

191,059 Aufrufe • vor 11 Monaten

Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to 19 year olds that want to have an impact Even though Zuckerberg was 19 when he started Facebook, he advises not turning your idea into a company until it’s working: “I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it, but don’t actually commit to turning it into a company until it’s working. If you look at the data of the very best companies, I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into a local maxima a lot of the time.” Sam Altman agrees. Facebook didn’t become a formal company until 6 months in when Peter Thiel invested. In fact, Mark and Dustin Moskovitz even told Peter that they were still planning on going back to school for their Fall semester. Paul Graham gives similar advice in his essay “Want to start a startup?”: “So if you want to start a startup one day, what should you do in college? There are only two things you need initially: an idea and cofounders… [and] the way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas… if you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, the ideas you come up with will not merely be bad, but bad and plausible-sounding, meaning you'll waste a lot of time on them before realizing they're bad. The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without any conscious effort. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas. This is not only possible, it's how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all got started. None of these companies were even meant to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. The best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to 19 year olds that want to have an impact Even though Zuckerberg was 19 when he started Facebook, he advises not turning your idea into a company until it’s working: “I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it, but don’t actually commit to turning it into a company until it’s working. If you look at the data of the very best companies, I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into a local maxima a lot of the time.” Sam Altman agrees. Facebook didn’t become a formal company until 6 months in when Peter Thiel invested. In fact, Mark and Dustin Moskovitz even told Peter that they were still planning on going back to school for their Fall semester. Paul Graham gives similar advice in his essay “Want to start a startup?”: “So if you want to start a startup one day, what should you do in college? There are only two things you need initially: an idea and cofounders… [and] the way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas… if you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, the ideas you come up with will not merely be bad, but bad and plausible-sounding, meaning you'll waste a lot of time on them before realizing they're bad. The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without any conscious effort. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas. This is not only possible, it's how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all got started. None of these companies were even meant to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. The best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.”

Startup Archive

147,627 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

NVIDIA started with the wrong technology, learned the right one from three textbooks bought at Fry’s, and went on to invent most of the major breakthroughs in modern computing. At Startup School 2026, YC's Garry Tan sits down with NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang to talk about confronting reality, learning your way into new domains, and why resilience — getting through one day at a time — matters more than anything else. 01:07 — NVIDIA's wrong algorithm 03:14 — Buying textbooks to save the company 05:29 — The real big idea 07:06 — The Sega story 09:37 — The $300M IPO 10:33 — Seeing AlexNet differently 12:44 — Reinventing the full stack 13:30 — How to build a first-principles org 17:01 — Build the car to fit your driving style 19:12 — Frontier algorithms 20:50 — Systems thinking is the new coding 23:26 — Should you own your own AI? 25:43 — How NVIDIA sses agents internally 30:51 — AI and job creation 34:21 — The ChatGPT moment for robots 37:24 — Where physical AI shows up first 39:18 — Why Jensen just joined X 41:01 — What to learn that still matters 44:32 — The mindset you should have - "How hard can it be?"

NVIDIA started with the wrong technology, learned the right one from three textbooks bought at Fry’s, and went on to invent most of the major breakthroughs in modern computing. At Startup School 2026, YC's Garry Tan sits down with NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang to talk about confronting reality, learning your way into new domains, and why resilience — getting through one day at a time — matters more than anything else. 01:07 — NVIDIA's wrong algorithm 03:14 — Buying textbooks to save the company 05:29 — The real big idea 07:06 — The Sega story 09:37 — The $300M IPO 10:33 — Seeing AlexNet differently 12:44 — Reinventing the full stack 13:30 — How to build a first-principles org 17:01 — Build the car to fit your driving style 19:12 — Frontier algorithms 20:50 — Systems thinking is the new coding 23:26 — Should you own your own AI? 25:43 — How NVIDIA sses agents internally 30:51 — AI and job creation 34:21 — The ChatGPT moment for robots 37:24 — Where physical AI shows up first 39:18 — Why Jensen just joined X 41:01 — What to learn that still matters 44:32 — The mindset you should have - "How hard can it be?"

Y Combinator

107,704 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Collison Brothers Explain Why Stripe is Better Off Staying Private John's (John Collison) take: " People generally make the argument that public companies run in a more disciplined fashion. I think that's hogwash." "If you need a 25-year old Fidelity analyst asking you to double click on your CapEx, blah, blah, blah, to run the company with discipline, something is horribly wrong at the company and you need new management." "It used to be the case that to do any return of capital to shareholders, or if you needed any kind of large sums of money, you needed the public markets." "That's obviously not true today, where stable private markets exist." " This is our life's work. We're not going anywhere. We'll be very happily running Stripe in 10 years time, in 20 years time." Patrick's (Patrick Collison) take: "We're a company at the intersection of financial services and technology. Being private for a long time is the norm." "What matters is less kind of the returns in a given year, and more duration. And so the question is, what enables the best compounding on a 10 year time horizon?" "And what's best for shareholders as you really take the longer-term perspective? And then what's best for customers?" " At this juncture, with the business growing at this rate, we want to spend the marginal hour with some customer."

Collison Brothers Explain Why Stripe is Better Off Staying Private John's (John Collison) take: " People generally make the argument that public companies run in a more disciplined fashion. I think that's hogwash." "If you need a 25-year old Fidelity analyst asking you to double click on your CapEx, blah, blah, blah, to run the company with discipline, something is horribly wrong at the company and you need new management." "It used to be the case that to do any return of capital to shareholders, or if you needed any kind of large sums of money, you needed the public markets." "That's obviously not true today, where stable private markets exist." " This is our life's work. We're not going anywhere. We'll be very happily running Stripe in 10 years time, in 20 years time." Patrick's (Patrick Collison) take: "We're a company at the intersection of financial services and technology. Being private for a long time is the norm." "What matters is less kind of the returns in a given year, and more duration. And so the question is, what enables the best compounding on a 10 year time horizon?" "And what's best for shareholders as you really take the longer-term perspective? And then what's best for customers?" " At this juncture, with the business growing at this rate, we want to spend the marginal hour with some customer."

The All-In Podcast

407,511 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

.Alexandr Wang's advice to his 18-year-old self: develop your own internal compass for how the future will unfold, and hold conviction in it against the noise. At Startup School 2026, the Scale AI (YC S16) founder — now leading Meta’s Superintelligence Labs — talks with Garry Tan about rebuilding a frontier lab from scratch, why talent density compounds, and how to spot the exponential worth betting your twenties on. 00:07 — How Alexandr Wang Started Scale AI 03:25 — Pivoting to the Right Idea 06:23 — Conviction Before Consensus 09:06 — Why This Is the Best Time to Start a Company 11:27 — What Personal Superintelligence Looks Like 13:10 — Building a Frontier AI Lab 16:36 — Why AI Models Need to Be Cheap 20:01 — Vision Will Matter More Than Intelligence 24:06 — Systems Thinking in the AI Era 26:51 — The Biggest Opportunity in AI Today 29:25 — Advice to My 18-Year-Old Self

.Alexandr Wang's advice to his 18-year-old self: develop your own internal compass for how the future will unfold, and hold conviction in it against the noise. At Startup School 2026, the Scale AI (YC S16) founder — now leading Meta’s Superintelligence Labs — talks with Garry Tan about rebuilding a frontier lab from scratch, why talent density compounds, and how to spot the exponential worth betting your twenties on. 00:07 — How Alexandr Wang Started Scale AI 03:25 — Pivoting to the Right Idea 06:23 — Conviction Before Consensus 09:06 — Why This Is the Best Time to Start a Company 11:27 — What Personal Superintelligence Looks Like 13:10 — Building a Frontier AI Lab 16:36 — Why AI Models Need to Be Cheap 20:01 — Vision Will Matter More Than Intelligence 24:06 — Systems Thinking in the AI Era 26:51 — The Biggest Opportunity in AI Today 29:25 — Advice to My 18-Year-Old Self

Y Combinator

70,839 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Q: I’m 19 today and want to have a big impact on the world. Should I start a company? Even though Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he started Facebook, he advises not turning your idea into a company until it’s working: “I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it, but don’t actually commit to turning it into a company until it’s working. If you look at the data of the very best companies, I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into a local maxima a lot of the time.” Sam Altman agrees. Facebook didn’t become a formal company until 6 months in when Peter Thiel invested. In fact, Mark and Dustin Moskovitz even told Peter that they were still planning on going back to school for their Fall semester. Paul Graham gives similar advice in his essay “Want to start a startup?”: “So if you want to start a startup one day, what should you do in college? There are only two things you need initially: an idea and cofounders… [and] the way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas… if you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, the ideas you come up with will not merely be bad, but bad and plausible-sounding, meaning you'll waste a lot of time on them before realizing they're bad. The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without any conscious effort. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas. This is not only possible, it's how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all got started. None of these companies were even meant to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. The best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.”

Q: I’m 19 today and want to have a big impact on the world. Should I start a company? Even though Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he started Facebook, he advises not turning your idea into a company until it’s working: “I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it, but don’t actually commit to turning it into a company until it’s working. If you look at the data of the very best companies, I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into a local maxima a lot of the time.” Sam Altman agrees. Facebook didn’t become a formal company until 6 months in when Peter Thiel invested. In fact, Mark and Dustin Moskovitz even told Peter that they were still planning on going back to school for their Fall semester. Paul Graham gives similar advice in his essay “Want to start a startup?”: “So if you want to start a startup one day, what should you do in college? There are only two things you need initially: an idea and cofounders… [and] the way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas… if you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, the ideas you come up with will not merely be bad, but bad and plausible-sounding, meaning you'll waste a lot of time on them before realizing they're bad. The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without any conscious effort. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas. This is not only possible, it's how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all got started. None of these companies were even meant to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. The best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.”

Michael McGuiness

494,591 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Stripe’s strategy is to “win all the startups and then win them again.” I had a great time talking with Will Gaybrick. Will has held a broad seat at Stripe for more than a decade, joining as CFO in 2015, and today leading Technology and Business. This makes him the right person to explain how Stripe went from a simple payments API to a platform with ~25-30 banner products and 288 launches at its most recent Sessions event. Here’s what their strategy looks like: -Companies like DoorDash and Instacart started on Stripe when they were tiny and pulled the company upmarket as they expanded. -The fastest startups act as canaries for new product opportunities. Cursor surfaced a burgeoning problem of AI free-trial and token abuse; so Stripe built a token detection pipeline with the team in a weekend, and the resulting network now helps companies on Stripe’s platform block thousands of fraudulent trials daily. -Stripe keeps expanding the number of needs it serves inside each company, from Billing, Radar, and Tax to Managed Payments, Treasury, and stablecoin infrastructure. There is a large and timely lesson from Stripe which I strongly agree with: using AI solely to reduce cost is essentially going short your own company. Instead, companies should be using AI (and the tailwinds it creates) to ship more, serve users better, and create their next product line. And as Stripe continues to invest in agentic commerce, the company can move from processing a transaction to orchestrating the entire economic loop around it. The line between tokens and dollars is already blurring, and Stripe’s next mandate is to make moving between them as seamless and safe as moving between dollars and euros. A fun conversation about what it takes to build the next Stripe inside Stripe. a16z

Stripe’s strategy is to “win all the startups and then win them again.” I had a great time talking with Will Gaybrick. Will has held a broad seat at Stripe for more than a decade, joining as CFO in 2015, and today leading Technology and Business. This makes him the right person to explain how Stripe went from a simple payments API to a platform with ~25-30 banner products and 288 launches at its most recent Sessions event. Here’s what their strategy looks like: -Companies like DoorDash and Instacart started on Stripe when they were tiny and pulled the company upmarket as they expanded. -The fastest startups act as canaries for new product opportunities. Cursor surfaced a burgeoning problem of AI free-trial and token abuse; so Stripe built a token detection pipeline with the team in a weekend, and the resulting network now helps companies on Stripe’s platform block thousands of fraudulent trials daily. -Stripe keeps expanding the number of needs it serves inside each company, from Billing, Radar, and Tax to Managed Payments, Treasury, and stablecoin infrastructure. There is a large and timely lesson from Stripe which I strongly agree with: using AI solely to reduce cost is essentially going short your own company. Instead, companies should be using AI (and the tailwinds it creates) to ship more, serve users better, and create their next product line. And as Stripe continues to invest in agentic commerce, the company can move from processing a transaction to orchestrating the entire economic loop around it. The line between tokens and dollars is already blurring, and Stripe’s next mandate is to make moving between them as seamless and safe as moving between dollars and euros. A fun conversation about what it takes to build the next Stripe inside Stripe. a16z

David George

68,998 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Even the most successful websites eventually need a redesign. Take Stripe for example. After six years with the same homepage, Stripe recently unveiled a brand new site that reflects how the company has evolved over the past few years. So when is the time right for a new landing page? And what should you prioritize in the redesign? In this episode of Design Review, YC’s Aaron Epstein sat down Stripe’s Head of Design Katie Dill (Katie Dill) to pull the curtain back on their high profile redesign and to discuss how their team is evolving in a world dominated by new AI design tools. 00:30 - The Old Site 05:30 - “What is the point of a website?” 06:00 - Breaking down the new homepage 07:10 - The GDP counter (and how Stripe builds trust) 08:45 - The Bento Box that fixed the homepage 11:37 - Why great design feels effortless 15:40 - Craft, iteration, and getting it right 19:11 - Inside Stripe’s design process 27:10 - How AI is changing design 35:00 - The fight against mediocrity 40:00 - Walking the Store: Stripe’s Secret to Better Product Design

Y Combinator

86,552 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

Patrick Collison on the importance of waiting a really long time to hire people Everybody tells you “work really hard to hire the best people.” But as Patrick explains, that’s not helpful because everyone knows they should do that. As he puts it: “The question is to what length should you go and what does that actually mean in practice? And in practice, it means being okay waiting a really long time to hire people.” It took Stripe six months to hire their first two people, and six more months to hire another 3-4 people. He can think of five people at Stripe who took 3+ years to hire. “If you think about the smartest people you know, if you want to get them to work on your thing, chances are they already have pretty good paths ahead of them… You have to be way more persistent and be okay with it taking way longer than any sane or reasonable person would think it should take.” There’s an important compounding effect here — hiring just one great person will make it marginally easier to get the next great person. Patrick argues you should also view every person you hire as bringing along another 50 people just like them if your company is successful: “Even if they don’t literally hire 50 people, they will be so influential in determining the selection of those 50 people.” Source: Greylock Partners (Nov 2015)

Patrick Collison on the importance of waiting a really long time to hire people Everybody tells you “work really hard to hire the best people.” But as Patrick explains, that’s not helpful because everyone knows they should do that. As he puts it: “The question is to what length should you go and what does that actually mean in practice? And in practice, it means being okay waiting a really long time to hire people.” It took Stripe six months to hire their first two people, and six more months to hire another 3-4 people. He can think of five people at Stripe who took 3+ years to hire. “If you think about the smartest people you know, if you want to get them to work on your thing, chances are they already have pretty good paths ahead of them… You have to be way more persistent and be okay with it taking way longer than any sane or reasonable person would think it should take.” There’s an important compounding effect here — hiring just one great person will make it marginally easier to get the next great person. Patrick argues you should also view every person you hire as bringing along another 50 people just like them if your company is successful: “Even if they don’t literally hire 50 people, they will be so influential in determining the selection of those 50 people.” Source: Greylock Partners (Nov 2015)

Startup Archive

74,355 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

The next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before. At Startup School 2026, YC's Garry Tan explains why we're we're entering the era of personal AGI: AI agents that run on your own infrastructure, compound your knowledge over time, and dramatically increase your ability to build. He shares the tools and workflows he uses every day, why every founder should own their intelligence instead of renting it, and what it means to build under your own power. 00:07 — What Founders Can Learn From Spinoza 04:46 — Personal AGI Is Already Here 07:57 — Why AI Makes One Person More Powerful Than Ever 12:29 — Your Life Is a Library 15:15 — Inside My Personal AI System 17:06 — Markdown Is Code 18:20 — Latent Space vs. Deterministic Code 21:13 — Building a Company of One 24:16 — How to Build Your Own Personal AGI 27:58 — Why Most People Will Quit Too Soon 29:09 — Own Your Skills Before Someone Else Does 32:24 — Personal AGI Means Owning Your Intelligence 35:21 — Why I Open Sourced Everything 38:30 — A Personal AGI for One Small Boy 40:18 — It's All Made Up. You Get to Make It Up.

The next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before. At Startup School 2026, YC's Garry Tan explains why we're we're entering the era of personal AGI: AI agents that run on your own infrastructure, compound your knowledge over time, and dramatically increase your ability to build. He shares the tools and workflows he uses every day, why every founder should own their intelligence instead of renting it, and what it means to build under your own power. 00:07 — What Founders Can Learn From Spinoza 04:46 — Personal AGI Is Already Here 07:57 — Why AI Makes One Person More Powerful Than Ever 12:29 — Your Life Is a Library 15:15 — Inside My Personal AI System 17:06 — Markdown Is Code 18:20 — Latent Space vs. Deterministic Code 21:13 — Building a Company of One 24:16 — How to Build Your Own Personal AGI 27:58 — Why Most People Will Quit Too Soon 29:09 — Own Your Skills Before Someone Else Does 32:24 — Personal AGI Means Owning Your Intelligence 35:21 — Why I Open Sourced Everything 38:30 — A Personal AGI for One Small Boy 40:18 — It's All Made Up. You Get to Make It Up.

Y Combinator

218,308 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: - A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe - For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird - All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead." Source: Y Combinator (Oct 2018)

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: - A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe - For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird - All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead." Source: Y Combinator (Oct 2018)

Startup Archive

32,192 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: • A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe • For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird • All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead. Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: • A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe • For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird • All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead. Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

45,833 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten