FTC Chair Lina Khan at Y Combinator

Thanks everybody for coming to White Combinator today. Uh, we're so excited, uh, to host Cherina Khan of the Federal Trade Commission. Um, you know, uh, so I'm Luther LOM, the new head of public policy at White Combinator, and um, this is the first event of its kind, I think, and at least since I've been here. I'm on week five, but uh, we, uh, hope that we have a lot more events like this.

I think one of the reasons, uh, I'm feeling optimistic about kind of this bridge building that's happening between the technology industry and Washington, uh, is because of the leadership of Gary Tan. Uh, you know, Gary's got this great line about, uh, that you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you.

So, I just want to make sure folks know that you know I'm a resource, Luther at White Combinator dot com. Please don't ever hesitate to reach out. Um, we want to be the voice of Founders in Washington, and um, I'm really excited to Ruiz, uh, Len Con and Gary to come up on the stage. But let me just say a few things about Cher Khan.

So, in Washington, or in our industry, it's not uncommon to have just a massive impact when you're really young, but it's far less common in Washington. And uh, Cher Khan, before she'd even in like her 20s, wrote this seminal article on uh, Amazon that was published in the Yale University Law Journal, and it like went viral.

Law Journal articles don't typically go viral, but it really helped in reshaping of thinking around uh, large technology companies. And so, uh, the fact that she came into, and when President Biden was elected, she was not only appointed to the Federal Trade Commission, but actually he named her as the chair, is just so significant.

At the age of 32, the youngest, uh, ever to hold that position, is helping uh, shape our economy in that way. It's just very exciting. So, uh, Gary and Lena are going to have a conversation uh, about our industry, and there'll be plenty of time for Q&A. Please, uh, give them a warm welcome!

Thanks, thanks so much Luther. So I'm going to, uh, make Luther embarrass in return, which is, uh, I received some uh, messages from various people in Tech, and then they all sort of resembled like, oh bringing Luther on at YC was like signing Michael Jordan in his prime for what he does.

So I agree and welcome Luther. Um, Cher Khan, thank you so much for joining us. It's just such a pleasure to see you here in uh, in San Francisco and uh, you know pretty close to Silicon Valley, as we call it.

Um, I guess one of the funniest things about uh, you know prepping for this, you take a look at um, Cher Khan's uh, bio on the FTC homepage. And uh, you know it's, it has her bio, it's a very illustrious bio obviously, and then a few lines down, the font gets bigger and it says, uh, a few disclaimer, uh, a huge disclaimer about CLA uh, scams. The font is 3x bigger.

So it's really important. Um, I guess why is that there? What, let's see, what does it actually say? Yeah, it's uh, why, why do you have to have this big disclaimer about that right now?

Well, first of all, let me just say it's so great to be here. Thanks so much to YC for hosting this chat. We've really had, uh, been here in SF for a couple of days, had the chance to, you know, meet with the business community, hear from Founders, hear from investors, and it's just really a big part of what we're looking to do in DC is make sure that we're not just in a silo out there, and we're in fact hearing from like actual people in the business community.

Um, so I think you're referencing probably some disclaimer that says like FTC officials will never ask you for money, um, uh, it's good never demand money or U make threats, more specifically. That's right, that's right.

So, uh, you know, we see a lot of scams and frauds in the marketplace. Uh, sometimes scammers are pretending to be the government, sometimes they're pretending to be some type of legitimate business. And uh, some of our work at the FTC is, you know, not just on the antitrust space but also on consumer protection.

And so we enforce the laws that prohibit deception, that prohibit unfairness, and uh, you know, I think there's been an epidemic at various...