- The video discusses advice for high school students interested in the startup and tech world.
- The importance of learning how to code is emphasized, even for those who don't want to be coders.
- Upskilling and grinding in various areas, such as design and launching products, is encouraged.
- The importance of building social skills and making connections is highlighted.
- Being empathetic and learning how to help others is seen as crucial for startup founders.

- The speaker reflects on the importance of helping others and the appreciation it brings.
- They discuss the importance of understanding and navigating the credential system, rather than rejecting it completely.
- Fads are discussed, with the speaker emphasizing the need to distinguish between what adds value and what is temporary.
- The speaker encourages young people to maintain excitement about technology and focus on the positive impacts it can have.
- Honesty is highlighted as a crucial skill, both in personal relationships and in the startup world.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of being honest with stakeholders and oneself in regards to the quality of a product or care for users.
- They discuss the concept of playing the "long game" and how many startups take 7 to 10 years to succeed.
- The speaker shares a personal example of someone who pursued their passion for poetry and eventually became the New York Times poetry critic.
- They highlight the importance of maintaining ambition and patience over many years to achieve greatness.
- The speaker reflects on their own experience as a startup founder and how the grind and hard work will ultimately benefit them in the long run.
- They encourage high schoolers interested in startups to pursue their dreams and not let anyone discourage them.

The video provides advice for high school students interested in the startup and tech world. It emphasizes the importance of learning how to code and upskilling in various areas. Building social skills, being empathetic, and making connections are highlighted. Understanding the credential system and distinguishing between valuable trends and fads is discussed. Maintaining excitement about technology and focusing on positive impacts is encouraged. Honesty, ambition, and patience are seen as crucial skills for success. The speaker shares personal examples and encourages students to pursue their dreams.

If you're a high school or college student with big dreams of starting your own company, this video is for you. Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel, two startup founders who started in the early 20s and are now top investors, sit down to share the hard-won advice they wish they had known back in high school.
Whether you're already running your own startup or just have an idea you can't stop thinking about, Caldwell and Seibel will discuss the skills you need to learn now and how to set yourself up for success after graduating school. Their stories will give you a glimpse of what's truly possible at the intersection of ambition and opportunity in in today's world. This is a masterclass in entrepreneurship for the next generation.

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) - 
00:00 - Intro
01:12 - Delayed Gratification
02:23 - Learn to Code
04:17 - Learn Design
04:52 - Launch Products
06:49 - Make Friends
08:04 - School Sandbox
09:13 - Learn To Care
11:20 - Credential Game
13:35 - Fads That Stick
15:42 - Be Excited
17:50 - Be Honest
20:08 - Love The Long Games
23:46 - Live Your Dream

Your job is to believe amazing things about what can you do with your life and what can you do in the world when you're young.

This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell.

And today we're going to talk about our advice for high schoolers.

So maybe the place to start, because I think that oftentimes young people are in a rush, Maybe we need to start by saying, the startup game isn't going away.

And look, I think to set this up, we know a lot of young people watch these videos.

We know they may even anonymously be involved in startups on Discord.

Like it's crazy for the folks that apply to YC, a lot of them are literally in high school.

And so we understand who you are if you're watching this, or if you know someone like this, you can forward them the video.

But we want to speak directly to you high school students who are yes who are trying to figure out who are ambitious and want to be a part of what's happening in the tech world in the you know startup world and aren't really sure where to begin.

Maybe the first analogy I'll give you and this will immediately age me so I apologize.

The basic thing I learned in Final Fantasy VII was that you can fight the boss at a certain level and get your ass kicked.

Or you can grind for like, you know, 10 more hours and fight the boss and actually like kick their ass.

And I think that this analogy applies to a lot of things in the real world and specifically in the startup world where like investing and leveling yourself up can produce a lot of benefits later on.

Like deferring a little bit of that satisfaction of getting started right now so you can upskill makes you 10 times more powerful later.

But let's be clear, you have to be upskilling during that time.

If I just stood there and didn't grind, my character got no better.

And it was cool, in a video game you see grinding.

Yeah, You can see the character leveling up.

in the real world, let's talk a little bit about grinding.

What's the kind of upskilling that you would advise high schoolers to do?

most obvious and straightforward 1 is learn how to code, obvious.

Even if you think, hey, I'm not going to be a lot of people say to me, the younger folks, oh, I don't want to be a coder my whole life.

Well, you should still learn how to code.

Like there's, It's really hard to make an argument, if you're a young person, why you shouldn't have that skill in your skill tree.

I was the business guy who didn't know how to code.

And literally, I would say there were many moments in the early stage of a company where I felt borderline useless.

And certainly I didn't have the power to impact the product anywhere near as much as my other 3 co-founders who were software engineers.

This is a great thing, AP Computer Science.

Like there's all these YC companies that help

So even if you have some complicated relationship with maybe I don't want to be a programmer, that's fine, learn the skill.

This is like, it's like learning how to cast spells or something.

Like get this complicated view of, I don't want to be a coder out of your head.

Like the coders are the most powerful people inside of software companies.

The people who code are the most powerful.

They often have the easiest path to implementing their ideas by far.

Sometimes people on this coding thing, they're like, well, I didn't grow up coding or I wasn't like a 13 year old whiz kid like people I know in high school.

I'm just trying to argue you don't need to be that.

If you have the right ambition and grind mentality to be willing to learn, of course you can do it.

Even if you're 19 or 20, it's never too late to learn this stuff.

Number 2, we talked about this a little bit, design.

Learning how to use basic design software.

This is 1 that kind of blows my mind because when I think back to my startups, I had to power up Photoshop.

We used this thing called ramp back in the day.

Like basically, if a button needed to be made and we didn't have a designer, yeah, make the button, you know?

Like, it didn't even have to look that good.

And so, this is a skill that anyone can grasp for.

And like, there's examples of good design and bad design yeah all over the internet right so you can easily copy I think the third 1 is launching products like man if you could get a product out it doesn't have to be used by any people doesn't have to just like actually going through the full motion of coming up with an idea for a little side project and releasing it and handing it to someone.

Like 1 of the things I noticed at YC is a lot of the folks that later on become great founders, they worked on projects in high school that may not be commercially like venture funded companies, but they were like pretty cool.

And so 1 of the examples I always think of was back in the 90s, there was a computer program called Winamp.

And that's how you would listen to the MP3s you downloaded from Napster.

And some high school kids, Mark Zuckerberg and Adam D'Angelo, I believe, built a music recommendation plugin for Winamp.

I think it was called like The Brain or something like that.

it was just like a free plugin and it was quite popular and they made it when they were in high school.

And I don't think it had anything to do with what they did later on in life, but they knew how to write code.

They knew how to make something they themselves wanted, which was music recommendation for Winamp.

And they released it, and I think it got like millions of downloads.

They went through all the motions a startup founder has to, but in this kind of like no stakes.

Yeah, they weren't trying to, it wasn't a business, at least to my understanding, maybe they thought it was, but it was more of making something cool.

And this sort of story comes up a lot in some of the founders that we fund is that they do stuff like this.

And you'll ask them, well, why were you doing that?

And they almost don't understand the question.

It's their nature to build things and release them.

So again, the advice part is find low stakes things you can work on, give them to the world.

And again, I think there's a lot of the advice if you want to be in the music industry, if you want to be a writer, a lot of the advice if you listen to the greats, to young people, is do it.

And even if you write the poem and don't show it to anyone, or even if you are in a bunch of bands that don't make it and break up, you got the reps in when

The next 1 that comes up a lot, if you're gonna be a startup founder 1 day, you gotta learn how to talk to people, gotta learn how to make friends.

And needless to say, I think that this is a skill that people kind of assume you can't learn.

Like assume like, oh, some people are just really social and other people are just shy.

But I know you and I have seen this with YC founders, like massively change.

And anyone who says otherwise is really doing you a disservice.

I think what's so interesting about this 1 is just like the previous examples, the way you get better at it is you suck at it first.

And you have to be willing to be uncomfortable.

Again, I think my high school mentality, I don't know if you felt the same way, is you believe too much that your identity then, like that's a nerd, that's a jock, that's a this.

Like it was like, you would put people and sort people into buckets, like they were like permanent.

if they choose to yes, and so you can make a choice if you're like, well, I'm not really you know A people person or like I'm not the kind of person that would go and talk to everyone at a party or whatever Like yeah, you could do that totally do

Well, it is so weird to me because looking back to high school, it was such a like, it was such a sandbox.

Like, it was such an environment where my interactions with people didn't matter really, right?

Like, I'm not, how many high school people are you still really close with, right?

So like, 1, that reputation's not gonna follow you in the real world, and 2, you can experiment.

Yeah, If you make a fool of yourself, you go to college, you're not going to see those people ever again.

And I think that the other thing that I learned about this is that everyone else feels shy, too.

Even the people who you think don't feel shy.

Even the people who you think, oh, they make a bunch of friends, da da da da.

Everyone has that thing inside of them being a little bit like, oh.

And I think when you're older, you get that.

You don't get that the popular kids are like have their own thing they're working on.

The person that you're afraid to go talk to is the same person who would probably like someone to come talk to them.

I think another 1 here is like how to help people.

I think that what's tricky about being a startup founder is you have to be empathetic.

Like you actually have to care about your customers, you have to care about your users.

And I think this is something you can start practicing early and I remember doing this and it was this really weird story.

I remember tutoring some kid in high school and I'll tell you, I'll be honest, right?

I was doing it the check the box on the like national merit scholarship, whatever the, the contest of the thing.

And I remember, you know, I was maybe 11th grade and I was shooting this ninth grader.

And I remember the parents on the second or third time I came just looking at me and smiling and being like, and I realized, oh my God, like they really, really, really want their kid to learn.

And they are so happy that I'm taking time and they're paying me.

And they're still so happy that I'm taking time out of my schedule to help this kid.

And I was like, oh my God, like that's when like it kind of clicked a little bit where I was like, if you help someone, they'll really appreciate, like if you actually help them, right?

And it was funny, because I remember there was 1 time where I screwed up and I couldn't make it.

And I was like, oh my God, they're gonna fire me.

They were like, just come back next week.

And I think you might find that with your customers.

Even if you screw up, like if you really care and you're really helping them, they're not gonna fire you.

It is so rare to find products or people who actually care.

Again, people are really impressed when young people care.

It's like teachers notice, like people notice.

This one's tricky because I'd like to say we live in a world where credentials don't matter, but we don't live in that world, right?

So how would you tell a high schooler to think about this game?

There's the people that love the system and embrace the system, like the teacher's pets.

And then there's the people that see the system for what it is, and they want to rage against the machine and destroy the system.

know, I was a little bit more on that side.

God, yes, the Stanford kid, yeah, exactly.

No, but the key thing is, I'm talking high school pre-Stanford.

I'm just trying to say, like, when you see this

When you see how the world works, you're like, man, this is like not ideal.

And to the extent you can learn to work, to understand the rules of the game and play the game with credentials and realize that leveling up on the credential game will help you with your long-term goals,

I think that's much better than like, rejecting the system out of hand.

It's basically like, either extreme is bad.

Rejecting the, like, fundamentally you understand the system is somewhat arbitrary, right?

If you're smart enough, you understand that, right?

So with that understanding, you can reject the system and then like, because you don't have the right credentials, it'll hold you back.

You can somehow not understand the initial point, think the system is the filter for merit completely, and then get very disappointed later in life when you realize that all these credentials don't mean you're the smartest person in the room.

Or you can try to get the system to work for you.

It's a centrist philosophy, which is you acknowledge some of the shit.

But also if you opt out of it completely, you're kind of just hosing yourself.

And I think that like this mentality is really important because I think that a lot of people feel like the system's operating on them.

But I think what they should feel is the system is a tool they can use.

If you understand it, you can use it, and you can use it to accomplish whatever goal you want to.

And so this idea that it's operating on you, I think we're trying to break.

Yeah, well I think it's easy, especially when you're young, to just get caught up in stuff, whatever the thing is.

When that was a new thing, I was really, really, really into it, and obviously that stuck around.

Certainly there's a lot of young people that got super into crypto, there's young people that got really into stock trading recently with Wall Street Bets and Reddit.

Like, you'll see people get really into stuff.

In the Zuckerberg case, building Winamp plugins, that was part of the Napster thing.

Yeah, I think that the tricky bit about fads is this kind of like what we said before about understanding the credential system.

The fads are just like another system, right?

And I think you kind of have to understand that some things stick because they create a lot of value and other things are just kind of passing with the time and I think what's really important for young people to start to understand is like how to distinguish between the 2 right like fads stick when they really add value and fads pass when they don't And if you can have a nose for when something is adding value, when it's actually helping people, if you can train yourself on that, then that's a really important skill.

On the flip side, We see the opposite of this in the startup world all the time.

We're like, COVID happens, everyone wants to have a Zoom startup.

And it's like, the Zoom guys thought people who needed videography would say, way before COVID, right?

Oh, now Wall Street bets, bam, I need to make a Robinhood better.

It's like, even the Robin guys were before Wall Street bets.

It's like, the fad is often hiding what's really going on.

And like, if you can kind of pierce through that, you can figure out real value, fake value, temporary value, long-term value.

And you can probably as a young person, look at what's going on in your life right now and try to figure out what's a fad and what's gonna stick, you know?

Next 1, how to be excited about technology.

We came up in this weird era, I guess, I didn't think it was weird, but looking back, I guess it was weird, where everyone thought technology was cool and making the world a better place.

A lot of the way we understand the world is framed via journalism.

And 1 thing, again, for young people, they don't have context on this, but it used to be journalists were all emphatically excited with no downsides.

The debate was like, yeah, yeah, we know it's great.

And so it was hard to see any problems with it.

And let's be clear, both extremes are incorrect.

But sometimes when I talk to young folks, they internalize too much of the current thing.

And I think, I don't see how that helps you when you're young.

Your job is to believe amazing things about what can you do with your life and what you do in the world when you're young.

Yeah, so I think on this 1, the real trick is even when you're absorbing this bad news, remember, look around.

See how technology is making the world a better place.

Look at your phone and see the things you could do that you couldn't do before.

Go online see the things see the things you can learn that you couldn't learn before.

See the ways you can work that you couldn't work before.

Like keep the core message in your head that technology is progress, even if the news isn't covering it that way.

This is a big 1 that I think people, in fact, you know, we talk about a lot of people who maybe didn't learn this lesson, that honesty is important, and for a while, they do okay with it, but inevitably, they get caught.

So how do you think about learning to be honest if you're a high schooler?

The best skill is to learn to be honest to yourself.

Like if you if your own relationship with yourself you can't be honest about things.

And then at your core, if you're not honest with yourself your relationship with your parents, your relationship with your friends, with institutions, it's gonna be tricky.

We run across folks that seem like they've deferred a lot of this honesty.

I think that the thing you should understand about the startup world is that a lot of it works because of honesty.

A lot of the reasons why early adopting customers will use you is because they think you're going to be honest.

A lot of reasons why investors might give you money, why your co-founder might work with you, an employee might work with you.

A lot of reasons why people make things happen in the startup world is because we're in a high trust environment.

Yeah, and this is 1 of those like negative things that people say about nerds is, oh, this person has no manners.

Something a nerd would do is be like, hey, my, our, that product sucks.

Like, like, why are we shipping this product that no 1 wants?

Like, that's like what a, that's what a nerd would do.

You know, you're bad for telling the truth about something because it's impolite and you're hurting people's feelings.

And so there is part of the nerd culture in this that I think is good, which is essential.

The person who would stand up and raise their hand and point out, you know, that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

And so I love that, because it's both the be honest to the stakeholders around you, but it's also that honesty to yourself, right?

Like if you know your product sucks, if you know you don't care about your user, you gotta acknowledge that.

And then I think the last 1 is, learn to love long games.

And this is kind of the theme that I brought up in the beginning.

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