- The video discusses the phenomenon of influential people giving advice that contradicts their own path to success.
- Examples of this are given, including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel.
- It is noted that while their advice may be valuable, it is important to consider their actual journeys and not blindly follow their recommendations.
- The video emphasizes the need for individuals to start with step 1 and not skip to step 2, even if step 2 seems more appealing.
- The importance of understanding one's own limitations and circumstances is highlighted, as not everyone can replicate the exact paths of these successful individuals.

- The speaker believes that startups need to experience pain in order to learn and grow.
- They suggest that some startup advice is given based on personal experiences and regrets.
- The speaker mentions that at YC, they share their own stories and mistakes with startups to provide a fuller perspective.
- Personalizing advice and considering the individual's background is important.
- The speaker emphasizes that YC provides personalized advice during office hours based on each company's specific situation.
- They acknowledge the impact of individuals like Sam, Elon, and Peter, but encourage learning about their histories for a better understanding.

Do famous founders give advice they didn't follow themselves? How seriously should you consider the advice of people like Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel? It’s hard not to give advice when you’re successful, but context matters. In this episode, Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell dig into why some advice givers might be tempted to say “Do as I say, not as I did” and how we try to avoid doing that within YC. 

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply
Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 
00:00 - Intro
00:14 - Advice Paradox
01:28 - 3 Examples
02:09 - Sam Altman
03:01 - Elon Musk
03:30 - Peter Thiel
03:47 - Sam's Success
06:34 - Elon's Success
09:22 - Peter's Success
12:12 - How We Avoid This?
15:16 - Personalization
16:57 - Outro

Most mere mortals out in the world need to do step 1

can't skip to step 2, even though step 2 sounds cooler.

Including literally Elon himself was a mere mortal.

And today we're gonna talk about why it's so hard to copy your heroes.

Yeah, there's a common dynamic that we see

industry 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 classics, do as I say, not as I do, or in this case, past tense, do as I say, not as I did.

And 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.

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.

Yeah, I think there's 3 examples that we could think of that are folks that we, some of them we know decently well.

So Sam Altman is 1, our colleague of many years.

And so those are the examples that we're gonna

And I think that, you know, as a note here, I'm not trying to say that everything that they say is not true.

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 might be some

yeah and tricks and so I guess to start with the example that folks have been asking us about a lot Is is with Sam?

Yeah And so again, we you know for everyone's context Sam was our colleague for like 7 years.

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.

of money, hire a team, build a lab that takes years, you know, super cool.

And so a lot of people are asking about it.

And, you know, I think he makes fair points, but the backstory is important, which we'll get to in a minute.

So maybe the next 1 is Elon, you know, some version of, oh, it's way more exciting to work in the world of, of atoms or YRP.

People aren't doing ambitious enough startups.

Founders need to be fixing the world, saving the world, going to space.

Which by the way, I don't disagree with that message.

But that's not, once again, that might not have been his history on the news.

His teal, he's given a lot of advice about a lot of things, which is great.

The 1 that we are flagging here is the whole don't go to college, college is bullshit type of thing.

Which again, all right, there's some fair points to make there.

So, let's actually go through the histories here.

So if we start with Sam, Sam's first startup wasn't OpenAI.

And then he was able to raise money for Looped and Looped was like a mobile social product to see where your friends were in the city, released before the iPhone.

And, you know, raised a relatively small amount of money, had a relatively small team, iterated, and honestly used the YC network and then the network he built on top of the YC network to build a successful career.

Yeah, interestingly enough, that worked really well for him.

I don't even know, probably people seeing this video, you know, Google it.

But this was a really important part of how someone like this was created, how they got enough of a network to make change in the world, was doing what was a pretty garden variety path, similar to you and I's path and many of our colleagues' path, but 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 I see start a startup?

That is what led to yeah, really open AI, you know,

right And so we're just flagging this so people remember if you- That's what happened.

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 or whatever.

I think that's 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 inherited advantages.

And the advice they give them is very different.

You know, and so, you know, if you can do this, maybe you

can't, why are we debating whether it's the right move or not?

Yeah, a lot of the people that were most influenced by his advice of like, maybe I should be raising a hundred million Are people that are not gonna raise a hundred million?

It's kind of like a disservice to these people.

And so if you're 1 of the people out there that can raise a hundred million dollars Or they won't

do a startup because they're like if I can't raise a hundred million, it's not

Yeah, so 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, 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.

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 could tell he uses that line a lot.

I think you said this in other interviews, but that's the line he told me.

And he was like, look, when I came to the US, 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?

Again, this is very honest, the way he told this to me.

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.

It wasn't hard tech, it wasn't deep tech, it was...

It was, I mean, he did raise a lot of money for x.com, but basically it was pretty standard startup stuff.

And then he leveraged his success at these companies and the network that he got, and the money that he made to start SpaceX, which is super cool, way to go, 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.

And if he were not an extremely wealthy person, there's no way Tesla could have existed.

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, but they're trying to live their life as per Elon's words, when it's like, man, Elon didn't live his life

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.

Like start 2 businesses, sell 2 businesses, be rich enough to like start self-driving car company, rock and roll.

Like, hell, if you've got the balls to do that.

But again, the key thing is to realize you have to do step 1.

Most mere mortals out in the world need to do step 1 and can't skip to step 2, even though step 2 sounds cooler.

And probably 1 of the things that most young people know about him the most is his critique on college.

totally fair critique, totally valid critique, but

And not only like, did he go to college, he went to college, he went to law school.

He worked at a famous law firm and a famous bank and like 1 might argue he's basically telling you to avoid all that stuff.

But I think 1 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.

And like maybe experiencing that pain is what broke them into this.

Again, maybe you probably hate that we're saying this, but like if we had an EB test and he was exactly the person he was now by just omitting college completely, then fair enough, he wins the argument.

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 psychoanalysing, you should know that he didn't walk that path.

Why do people give startups advice that they didn't take?

I think you should always assume positive intent in people.

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 become can forget their backstory

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.

Like, I think Sam is 1 of the best fundraisers ever.

I wonder if he had tried to raise more money sooner his career to do a bigger thing, if there was a moment where he could have gotten that done before OpenAI, probably.

Yeah, remember he was working on nuclear energy stuff for a

He probably could have left YC earlier, right?

And by the way, I find myself doing this.

I find myself giving advice sometimes where I'm like, oh, well, I definitely went through that and I wanna help people avoid what we did.

But I think that what's tricky is that if you're not digging for the facts, you don't know what really happened.

Because you know, we all do startups, we have our own scars.

Someone can make a video about us about the same topic.

And so 1 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 our whole back story, what we did before we started our companies, everything was screwed up.

Justin says, I'm going to strap a camera to my head and broadcast my life 24 hours on the internet.

And Paul Rand says, I will give you $50,000 just to see the box.

So we do whatever it is the Austin does, and we email MIT.

We're really honest, and I actually think it helps people get to know us, to contextualize us as humans, to know our whole story.

And I, yeah, I think it really helps a lot.

And to know how many mistakes you can make and still do something interesting.

And so I think it's good to actually hear, before you cherry pick bits and pieces of people's advice, it's good to kind of

like a fuller perspective on their whole thing.

And even us, like I think if people knew more about us, if they were watching these videos, it probably would add some nuance to what we say in these videos.


Speaker 0: Most mere mortals out in the world need to do step 1

Speaker 1: and

Speaker 0: can't skip to step 2, even though step 2 sounds cooler.

Speaker 2: Yes, mere mortals, including Elon. Including literally Elon himself was a mere mortal. All right, this is Dalton plus Michael. And today we're gonna talk about why it's so hard to copy your heroes. Shut this up for us, Dalton.

Speaker 0: Yeah, there's a common dynamic that we see

Speaker 2: in our

Speaker 0: industry 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 classics, do as I say, not as I do, or in this case, past tense, do as I say, not as I did. And it always gets a little bit tricky for us when we witness this.

Speaker 2: Well, it's super weird because we're just getting old enough where for a lot of these people, we saw what they did.

Speaker 0: Yeah, we know their story.

Speaker 2: Yeah, we know their story. And so we're just like, that's weird. You didn't do that.

Speaker 0: Yeah, that wasn't at all your path. And so you're telling everyone to do something that wasn't the thing you did.

Speaker 2: 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 them? Why not take them at face value? Yep.

So what are we talking about here?

Speaker 0: Yeah, I think there's 3 examples that we could think of that are folks that we, some of them we know decently well. So Sam Altman is 1, our colleague of many years. Another 1 is Elon Musk. I think people have heard of him.

Speaker 2: Pretty famous guy.

Speaker 0: And then of course, Peter Thiel. And so those are the examples that we're gonna

Speaker 2: kind of talk about today. And I think that, you know, as a note here, I'm not trying to say that everything that they say is not true. Like,

Speaker 0: a lot of it's

Speaker 2: 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 might be some

Speaker 0: yeah and tricks and so I guess to start with the example that folks have been asking us about a lot Is is with Sam? Yeah And so again, we you know for everyone's context Sam was our colleague for like 7 years.

Speaker 2: Long time.

Speaker 0: We worked with him every day. So we know Sam very well. I think

Speaker 2: I first met him 15 years ago.

Speaker 0: Yeah, you're right. I met him, oh, 07:08. Anyway, we've known him a long time. 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.

Speaker 2: And you

Speaker 0: know, fair enough. So a lot

Speaker 1: of folks

Speaker 0: have- Raising

Speaker 2: a lot of money, hiring

Speaker 1: a huge team. Raised a lot

Speaker 0: of money, hire a team, build a lab that takes years, you know, super cool. I think it's worked well for him. And so a lot of people are asking about it. And, you know, I think he makes fair points, but the backstory is important, which we'll get to in a minute.

Speaker 2: Yes. So maybe the next 1 is Elon, you know, some version of, oh, it's way more exciting to work in the world of, of atoms or YRP.

Speaker 0: Yeah. People aren't doing ambitious enough startups. Founders need to be fixing the world, saving the world, going to space.

Speaker 2: Which by the way, I don't disagree with that message. 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 1, of course.

Speaker 0: His teal, he's given a lot of advice about a lot of things, which is great. The 1 that we are flagging here is the whole don't go to college, college is bullshit type of thing. Which again, all right, there's some fair points to make there. Yes. But not his path.

Speaker 2: Yes. So, let's actually go through the histories here. So if we start with Sam, Sam's first startup wasn't OpenAI. It was a company named Loopt. He did it when he left Stanford.

Speaker 0: Yeah, he was a college dropout. He went to Stanford

Speaker 2: and then he went to YC. And then he was able to raise money for Looped and Looped was like a mobile social product to see where your friends were in the city, released before the iPhone. And, you know, raised a relatively small amount of money, had a relatively small team, iterated, and honestly used the YC network and then the network he built on top of the YC network to build a successful career. Yeah, interestingly enough, that worked really well for him.

Speaker 0: Yeah. And people don't think about Loopt. We don't talk about Loopt. I don't even know, probably people seeing this video, you know, Google it. 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, how they got enough of a network to make change in the world, was doing what was a pretty garden variety path, similar to you and I's path and many of our colleagues' path, but just doing a pretty normal startup at a pretty normal age with a pretty normal Outcome like pretty standard.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's weird right like go to a good school do I see start a startup? That is what led to yeah, really open AI, you know,

Speaker 0: right And so we're just flagging this so people remember if you- That's what happened. 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 or whatever. Yeah. Because that's not at all what

Speaker 2: he did. And by the way, nor could you. I think that's 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 inherited advantages.

And the advice they give them is very different. You know, and so, you know, if you can do this, maybe you

Speaker 0: should consider it. But if you

Speaker 2: can't, why are we debating whether it's the right move or not? It just seems kind

Speaker 0: of under-tuned. Yeah, a lot of the people that were most influenced by his advice of like, maybe I should be raising a hundred million Are people that are not gonna raise a hundred million? No,

Speaker 2: so why?

Speaker 0: It's kind of like a disservice to these people.

Speaker 2: Yeah, right

Speaker 0: And so if you're 1 of the people out there that can raise a hundred million dollars Or they won't

Speaker 2: do a startup because they're like if I can't raise a hundred million, it's not

Speaker 0: worth it.

Speaker 2: Why even bother?

Speaker 0: Yeah. It's just like, that's

Speaker 2: not real. All right, so the next 1 is Elon. You're familiar with this story.

Speaker 0: Yeah, so 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, 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. 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 could tell he uses that line a lot. It's a laugh line.

I think you said this in other interviews, but that's the line he told me. And he was like, look, when I came to the US, 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 this to me. 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...

Speaker 2: It wasn't I need $100 million to start.

Speaker 0: It was, I mean, he did raise a lot of money for x.com, but basically it was pretty standard startup stuff. And then he leveraged his success at these companies and the network that he got, and the money that he made to start SpaceX, which is super cool, way to go, 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. And if he were not an extremely wealthy person, there's no way Tesla could have existed. 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, but they're trying to live their life as per Elon's words, when it's like, man, Elon didn't live his life

Speaker 2: 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. Right? I might even argue that what Elon did was more impressive. I agree.

Right? Like start 2 businesses, sell 2 businesses, be rich enough to like start self-driving car company, rock and roll. Like, hell, if you've got the balls to do that. Yeah, that's a great plan.

Speaker 0: But again, the key thing is to realize you have to do step 1. Most mere mortals out in the world need to do step 1 and can't skip to step 2, even though step 2 sounds cooler.

Speaker 2: Yes, mere mortals, including Elon. Including literally Elon himself was a mere mortal. Was a mere mortal. By this definition. So number 3 is Peter Thiel.

And probably 1 of the things that most young people know about him the most is his critique on college. And like, do we need to go to college? And I think that

Speaker 0: totally fair critique, totally valid critique, but

Speaker 2: 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. He worked at a famous law firm.

Speaker 0: And he got a law degree from Stanford.

Speaker 2: Yeah. He worked at a famous law firm and a famous bank and like 1 might argue he's basically telling you to avoid all that stuff. That stuff brought him pain. But I think 1 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. And like maybe experiencing that pain is what broke them into this.

Yeah, and

Speaker 0: we don't have an A-B test. Again, maybe you probably hate that we're saying this, but like if we had an EB test and he was exactly the person he was now by just omitting college completely, then fair enough, he wins the argument.

Speaker 2: 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 psychoanalysing, you should know that he didn't walk that path.

Speaker 0: That's true.

Speaker 2: And then use those facts as you will. So, why? Why do people give startups advice that they didn't take?

Speaker 0: I think you should always assume positive intent in people. That's something I really try to do.

Speaker 2: And especially these 3 people.

Speaker 0: Yeah, these are great. They're trying

Speaker 2: to make a lot

Speaker 0: of money. They're trying to help people. 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 become can forget their backstory

Speaker 2: yes

Speaker 0: and what they're really focusing on is what they would do now based on the information they have now

Speaker 2: 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 1 of the best fundraisers ever.

I wonder if he had tried to raise more money sooner his career to do a bigger thing, if there was a moment where he could have gotten that done before OpenAI, probably. Probably, right?

Speaker 0: Ditto with Elon. Yeah, remember he was working on nuclear energy stuff for a

Speaker 2: while, in like 2013. And He was at YC for a while. He probably could have left YC earlier, right? Ditto for Peter Thiel. And by the way, I find myself doing this.

I find myself giving advice sometimes where I'm like, oh, well, I definitely went through that and I wanna 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 at YC? Because you know, we all do startups, we have our own scars.

Speaker 0: Exactly. We are self-aware. And we actually try.

Speaker 2: Someone can make a video about us about the same topic. Right.

Speaker 0: And so 1 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 our whole back story, what we did before we started our companies, everything was screwed up. Everything was screwed up. I think the government

Speaker 1: had to ban it because

Speaker 0: we were ruining their internet.

Speaker 1: Justin says, I'm going to strap a camera to my head and broadcast my life 24 hours on the internet. And Paul Rand says, I will give you $50,000 just to see the box. So we do whatever it is the Austin does, and we email MIT.

Speaker 0: We're really honest, and I actually think it helps people get to know us, to contextualize us as humans, to know our whole story. And I, yeah, I think it really helps a lot.

Speaker 2: And to know how many mistakes you can make and still do something interesting.

Speaker 0: Yeah. And so I think it's good to actually hear, before you cherry pick bits and pieces of people's advice, it's good to kind of

Speaker 2: like a fuller perspective on their whole thing.

Speaker 0: I think it's helpful. And even us, like I think if people knew more about us, if they were watching these videos, it probably would add some nuance to what we say in these videos.

Speaker 2: 100%, 100%. I think the second thing is, and you made this point, I think we think a lot about what would we tell people we are 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, it's like, I'm thinking about telling all my kids to go to college. And 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 Yale did for me, worth it.

Speaker 0: It changed your life.

Speaker 2: Yeah, the only thing it did for me was changing my life. Yeah. Well, you know.

Speaker 0: What have you done for me lately? But yeah, imagine we had an AB test where you didn't go to college. Hey man, I don't think you'd be here.

Speaker 2: No, I would not be here. Absolutely not. Yeah. So I'm probably gonna tell them to go to college.

Speaker 0: 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 in 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

Speaker 2: what it's funny cuz 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,

Speaker 0: yeah, because you got to keep all the facts straight.

Speaker 2: 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 1, and this is 1 that is maybe hard for people to understand, is that when you're watching videos or reading our content, we can't personalize it for

Speaker 0: you, right?

Speaker 2: Like we're making this for a business concept.

Speaker 0: Yeah, we're just talking to the void. We don't know who's actually watching this.

Speaker 2: But when we do office hours with companies, Everything is personalized.

Speaker 0: 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.

Speaker 2: 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. I'd say like on average, we're probably telling them 80% of the same stuff.

Speaker 0: And so an example, if someone was a multi-time founder, like say Sam, and someone was known to be a good investor and we had the opinion that they were a good investor. Maybe following the playbook that he's following at OpenAI is exactly right. And I completely think it's smart. He should do that.

Speaker 2: Well, and let's be clear, we've had those people do YC and we've given them different advice. And we have said, hey, it may make sense to raise more money and like, da-da.

Speaker 0: And yeah, if you can put millions of your own money into your own company, you should totally do that. That doesn't apply to most people. Yes.

Speaker 2: And so I think this is what's important. I think 1 of the ways that we try to kind of control ourselves is figure out what the personal advantages are of every funder 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, 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.

Speaker 0: They're really good at fundraising.

Speaker 2: But if you want to be the next 1 of them, take some time to learn about them and their histories, and I think it'd be really helpful. All right, great bunch. Thank you.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Why You Shouldn't Copy Your Tech Idols