Why You Shouldn't Copy Your Tech Idols
Most mere mortals out in the world need to do step one and can't skip to step two, even though step two sounds cooler. Yes, beer myrtles, including Elon, including literally Elon himself, was a mere mortal. All right, this is Dalton plus Michael, and today we're going to talk about why it's so hard to copy your heroes. Set this up for us, Dalton.
Yeah, um, there's a common dynamic that we see in our industry, yes, where a prominent person will give advice that sounds reasonable. You know, like they're just saying, they're just giving people advice, but it is not at all what they did to become successful. It's the classic "do as I say, not as I do," or in this case, past tense: "do as I say, not as I did." Yes, and um, it always gets a little bit tricky for us when we witness this.
Well, it's super weird because we're just getting old enough where for a lot of these people, we saw what they did. Yeah, we know their story. And so we're just like, that's weird; you didn't do that. Yeah, that wasn't at all your path. And so you're telling everyone to do something that wasn't the thing you did. But what's weird is that if you're a 20-something, you don't know; you only knew them as successes. And why even go do that? Why not take them at face value? Yep. So who are we talking about here?
Yeah, I think there are three examples that we could think of that are folks that we, some of them we know decently well. Um, so Sam Altman is one, our colleague of many years. Another one is Elon Musk; I think people have heard of him, pretty famous guy. Yeah, and then of course, Peter Thiel. And so those are the examples that we're going to come first to talk about today.
And I think that, you know, as a note here, what I'm trying to say is that everything that they say is not true. Like, yeah, really good advice, and they're also pretty damn good people to have as heroes, considering what they've accomplished. But if you're actually looking for the "how I get to where they got there," there might be some, yeah, some tricks.
And so I guess to start with the example that folks have been asking us about a lot is with Sam. Yes, and so again, for everyone's context, Sam was our colleague for like seven years, a long time. We worked with him every day, so we know Sam very well. I think I first met him 15 years ago. Yeah, you're right; I met him post-seven away. Anyway, we've known him a long time. Yes, and he recently made some comments about, "Hey, I don't know about some of the advice I gave when I was working at YC," like you know, "maybe there's just a better way to do startups of like going really big and being ambitious."
And yes, you know, fair enough, so a lot of folks raise a lot of money, hire a team, yeah, build a lab that takes years. You know, super cool. I think it's worked well for him. Yes, and so a lot of people are asking about us, and you know, I think he makes fair points, but we should talk—the story is important, which we'll get to in a minute.
Yes, so maybe the next one is Elon. You know, some version of, "Oh, it's been more exciting to work in the world of atoms or YRP." Yeah, people aren't doing artisanal enough startups; founders need to be fixing the world, seeing the world, going to space, which by the way, I don't disagree with that—that's cool. I would like founders to do that, but that's not, once again, that might not have been his history on the news, and we'll go into that.
And the last one, of course, is Thiel. He's giving a lot of advice, but a lot of things— which is great. The one that we are flagging here is the whole "don't go to college, college is..." yeah, um, type of thing, which again, all right, there's some fair points to make there. Yes, but not his path. Yes, so let's actually go through the kind of the histories here.
So, you know, if we start with Sam, Sam's first startup wasn't OpenAI. Um, it was a company named Loopt. Um, he did it when he left Stanford. Yeah, he was a college dropout. He went to Stanford, and then he went to YC, and then he was able to raise money for Loopt. And Loopt was like a mobile social product to see where your friends were in the city, at least before on the iPhone. And you know, raised a relatively small amount of money, had a relatively small team, iterated, and honestly, like used the YC network and then the network he built on top of the YC network to build a successful career.
Yeah, interestingly enough, like that worked really well for him. Yeah, and people don't think about Loopt. We don't talk about Loopt. I don't even know. Probably people seen this video. You know, Google this, this is a real thing; there's a lot—there's lots out there. But this was a really important part of how someone like this was created or how they got enough of a network to make change in the world was doing what was a pretty garden-variety path, similar to your nice path and many of our colleagues' path.
And just doing a pretty normal startup at a pretty normal age with a pretty normal outcome, like pretty standard. Yeah, and it's weird, right? Like go to a good school, do YC, start a startup. That is what led to eventually OpenAI, you know? Right? And so we're just flagging this so people remember it doesn't happen—is that the beginning states before OpenAI was fairly standard stuff. And so if you actually wanted to emulate Sam, you would not immediately go try to start a lab and raise 100 million dollars or whatever.
Um, because that's not at all what he did. And by the way, nor could you, I guess. Like, a really important point for like literally 99.9999% of founders: you couldn't copy Sam's play starting at OpenAI. Sam couldn't copy Sam's play starting at OpenAI. And by the way, and I think this is an important point to make: like I sometimes do meet people who can do things better or have inherent advantages, and the advice I give them is very different.
Yeah, you know, and so, you know, if you can do this, maybe you're great—consider it. Yeah, but if you can't, why are we debating whether it's the right move or not? It's just, yeah, a lot of the people that were most influenced by his advice of "like maybe I should be raising 100 million" are people that are not going to raise 100. No! So why? So it's kind of like a disservice to these people, yeah, right? And so if you're one of the people out there that can raise them to a startup because they're like, "If I can't raise 100 million dollars, why even bother?" Yes! Like that's not—that's not real.
All right, so the next one is Elon. You're familiar with yourself, yeah? So, um, I actually heard the story from Elon verbatim. I met him before, and so I'll tell you what he told me about his life story. And again, perhaps he is an unreliable narrator about his own life—certainly possible based on my interactions with him. But what he told me is the reason he started, um, what was it called? Zip2 and PayPal was he wanted to make a lot of money. He said, "What I wanted to do with my life is go to space, and I knew to go to space I needed a lot of money."
Um, the actual line he told me—I swear this is a direct quote—is he said, "My plan is to die on Mars, hopefully not on impact." And I can tell he uses that line a lot; it's a laugh line. I think he said this in those interviews, but that's the line he told me. Yes, and he was like, "Look, when I came to the U.S., I came to Silicon Valley; it was a dot-com boom, and I just knew I needed money. And so I just was like, how can I get money fast?" Yes, again, this is very honest the way he told us to me.
Um, and that's why he did tech startups. And like all the ideas that he came up with were just about trying to build the most successful company using, I don't know, the conventional stuff. Yeah, like his ideas were pretty conventional; it wasn't hard tech; it wasn't deep tech; it was—I need 100 million dollars to start. It was, yeah, I mean he did raise a lot of money for X.com but basically it was pretty standard startup stuff. Yeah, and then he leveraged his success at these companies, yes, and the network that he got and the money that he made to start SpaceX, which is super cool—way to go!
Yeah, and then became an investor in Tesla. And many times, if you know the history of Tesla, he had to personally dip into his own checking account and bail the company out. Yeah! And if he were not an extremely wealthy person, there's no way Tesla could have existed. No! And so it's very hard for us to have this knowledge and for me to have this knowledge of talking to Elon and see people trying to emulate in-state Elon.
Yeah, like they're trying to live their life uh as per Elon's words when it's like, "Man, Elon didn't live his life to Elon's words." But I'll say this: I think what's interesting is it's impressive to have this two-step plan and do it. I might even argue that what Elon did was more impressive. I agree, right? Like, start two businesses, sell two businesses; be rich enough to like start self-driving car company, Rocket League. Like, hell, if you've got the balls to do that, yeah, that's a great plan.
Yeah, but again, the key thing is to realize you have to do step one. Most mere mortals out in the world need to do step one, yes, and can't skip to step two— even though step two sounds cooler. Yes, mere mortals including Elon, including literally Elon himself, was a mere mortal. It was a mere by this definition.
Um, so number three, yeah, is Peter Thiel. And probably one of the things that most young people know about him the most is, um, his critique on college and like, do you need to go to college? And I think he said, um, totally fair critique—totally valid critique. Yes, but he went to college, and not only like did he go to college, he went to college—he went to law school. He did undergrad law firm, and he got a law degree from Stanford.
Yeah, he worked at a famous law firm and a famous bank, and like one might argue he's basically telling you to avoid all that stuff. That stuff brought him pain, but I think one of the things I've learned in advising startups is that if you don't let the startup experience any pain, it's a lot harder for them to learn. Yeah, and like maybe experiencing that pain is what broke them into this.
Yeah, and we don't have an A/B test. Again, maybe you could probably hate that we're saying this, but like if we had an A/B test and he was exactly the person he was now by just omitting college completely, then fair enough—he wins the argument. Yeah, but my sense is there was some aspect of those experiences that had a profound impact on his later success.
Well, even if we separate out cycle-analyzing, you should know that he didn't walk that path. That's true. And then use those facts as you will. So why do people give startups advice that they didn't take? I think you should always assume positive intent in people. That's—I mean, I really try to do, and especially these three people, yeah, these are great. They're trying to—they're trying to help people. Yes, and so I think this is well-meaning, and I think what's going on is they're so used to their backstory, they almost become blind to it, just like we can—any human can forget their backstory.
Yes, and what they're really focusing on is what they would do now based on the information they have now. Yes, well, I want to say that more specifically. I almost think a lot of this advice is advice that they wish they could go back in time and tell themselves. Yep, right? Like I think Sam is one of the best fundraisers ever. I wonder if he had tried to raise more money sooner in his career to do a bigger thing if there was a moment we could have gotten that done before OpenAI. Probably, probably, right?
Um, ditto—yeah, he was working on nuclear energy stuff for a while, 2013. And he was at YC for a while; he didn't, he probably could have left YC earlier, right? Ditto for Thiel. And by the way, like I find myself doing this. Like I find myself giving advice sometimes where I'm like, "Oh, well, I definitely went through that, and I want to help people avoid what we did." Exactly! And so I think it's all good intent, but I think that what's tricky is that if you're not digging for the facts, you don't know what really happened.
Yep, so how do we avoid this in YC? Because, you know, yeah, also startups, we have our own scars. Exactly. We are self-aware, and we actually try—someone can make a video about us about the same topic, right? And so one of the things that we try to do with companies in the batch at the beginning of the batch is we all tell our own stories about us, our whole backstory, what we did before we started our companies, everything we screwed up—everything we screwed up.
I think the government had to ban it because we were ruining their internet. Justin says, "I will give you fifty thousand dollars!" We're really honest, and I actually think it helps people get to know us to contextualize us as humans. Yeah, um, to know our whole story. And I think it really helps to know how many mistakes you can make and still do something interesting. Yeah, and so I think it's good to actually hear before you um cherry-pick bits and pieces of people's advice—let's go to kind of like a fuller perspective on their whole thing. Yes, I think it's helpful.
Yes, and even us—like I think if people knew more about us, they were watching these videos, yeah, they probably would add some nuance to what we say in these in these videos. 100%! Right? 100%! Um, I think the second thing is—and you made this point—I think we think a lot about what would we tell people we were really close to. What would we tell our kids? What would we tell our friends' kids?
Like when it becomes—like when you can personalize it and make it real in your life, suddenly you're a little bit more maybe conservative, or you're a little bit more real. Yeah, and you can be a little bit more experimental. You know, you don't like kids go to school, and like, I didn't really like college, and I actually wasn't terribly impressed with my school. I went to Yale; I wasn't terribly impressed.
But if you look at the facts, it's where I met my co-founders. Without them, I wouldn't be here right now. So if that's the only thing y'all did for me, it changed my life! Yeah, the only thing it did for me was changing my life. Yeah, well, you know, what have you done for me lately? But yeah, imagine we had an A/B test where you didn't go to college? Hey, man, I don't think—no, I would not be here. Absolutely not!
Yeah, so I'm probably gonna tell them to go to college—risk it! Yeah, and again, I feel the same way. I got kids too, and I actually really try to give them—I try to give founders or the people in these videos, I try to say the same stuff I would just say to my kids. Yes! Like, and not have a, "Oh, let's throw in a troll opinion here, Michael, just for the hell of it!"
Like, well, it's funny because PG always said this too, which is just like: it's just easier to tell the truth, like what you really think, than to think up the—like, because you gotta keep all the facts straight! Yeah, it's really hard, right? But like, if I tell this to my kids, probably it's good for you too! And I think the last one, and this is one that is maybe hard for people to understand, is that, you know, when you're watching videos or reading content, this is—we can't personalize it for you, right?
Like you're—we're making this from, yeah, we're just talking to the void; we don't know who's actually watching this. But we do office hours with companies. Everything is personal! We read their application; we interviewed them; we accepted them to YC. Yes, and so the advice we give is super personalized! Yes! And it's often the case that we will know something about someone's background, yes, that we can integrate into the advice that we give them.
And I'll say that, like more explicitly, we often contradict—or it looks like we're contradicting—kind of standard YC advice given someone's specific situation. Now I'd say, like on average we're probably telling them 80% of the same stuff. And so an example, if someone was a multi-time founder, yeah, like say Sam, and someone was known to be a good investor, and we had the opinion that they were a good investor, yeah maybe following the playbook that he's following it OpenAI is exactly right.
And I completely think it's smart he should do that! Well, we've had those people do YC, and we've given them different advice. And we have said, it may make sense to raise more money, and like that—and yeah, if you can put millions of your own money into your own company, oh, you should totally do that! Yeah, that doesn't apply to most people! Yes! And so I think this is what's important.
I think one of the ways that we try to kind of control ourselves is figure out what the personal advantages are of every founder we work with and try to figure out how to help them exploit their advantages. I think it's really, really hard to do that in general. Yeah, so um, shout out to, of course, Sam, and Elon, and Peter. They've made a huge impact, and you know, and are better fundraisers than us by a thousand. They're really good! Yes!
Um, but if you want to be the next one of them, take some time to learn about them and their histories, and I think it'd be really helpful. All right, great sponge! Thank you! [Music] [Music]