- The speaker introduces Justin Kahn, founder of 3 YC companies, who will talk about his experiences and whether or not to work for a startup.
- Reasons not to join a startup include bad management, lack of mentorship, and unlikely financial success.
- Silicon Valley has changed, with more people seeking stability and a career path, which startups may not provide.
- Reasons to join a startup include access to jobs you may not be qualified for, a gateway to starting your own startup, and maximizing your speed of learning.
- Examples are given of individuals who benefited from joining startups and gaining valuable experience.

- The co-founder of Twitch, Justin Kan, shares a story about the challenges of running the live video site and the importance of learning from failures and successes in startups.
- Kan's brother, Daniel, who was an intern at Justin TV (now Twitch), also went on to become a co-founder of Cruise, a self-driving car company that was eventually sold to GM for over a billion dollars.
- Kan emphasizes the importance of taking on roles you feel unqualified for in order to maximize personal growth and learning.
- He also discusses how to evaluate startups as an investor, focusing on the importance of a small number of users who love the product and the presence of momentum and exponential growth.

- Startups that are growing exponentially and not artificially inflated tend to continue growing.
- The size of the market today is not as important as the growth rate and future potential of the market.
- Investors often make the mistake of focusing on the current market size instead of the startup's growth rate.
- Technological platform shifts often lead to the creation of successful startups.
- Differentiating between real trends and fake trends is difficult but can be done by identifying new platforms that people use extensively.
- The ability to attract talented individuals to a startup is crucial, and having an exciting mission helps with this.
- The quality of the founders and early employees greatly impacts a startup's success.
- Ideas that sound bad but are actually good can be successful for startups.
- Pay attention to what recent college graduates are excited about, as they often identify trends before investors do.
- Seek advice from peers who are open-minded, intellectually rigorous, and share similar values.
- Startups should be more generous with employee equity, as early employees often create significant value.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of being generous with equity for early employees in startups, as they contribute significant value.
- The first company, Armory, is focused on building a deployment platform to help software teams ship better software faster. They have experienced significant growth in revenue.
- Astronis is building small, low-cost telecommunication satellites to provide internet access to the 4 billion people who are currently offline. They have a well-funded team and emphasize their hands-on, blameless culture.
- Atrium is a tech-enabled law firm for startups, aiming to fix the broken legal industry through a digitized platform powered by AI and real lawyers. They have a large market opportunity and are hiring software engineers.
- Carrot Fertility offers customized fertility benefits for companies, aiming to make fertility care as standard in the workplace as medical, dental, and vision coverage. They are the leading provider of fertility benefits in the US and are expanding globally.

- The first speaker discusses the product and the involvement of engineers in its development and success.
- The second speaker talks about the market opportunity and the company's success in various industries.
- The third speaker introduces a data tool called Chardio and highlights its features and success in the market.
- The fourth speaker discusses Checkr, a background check company, and the challenges they face in their engineering processes.
- The fifth speaker presents CoinTracker, a cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager, and their growth in the industry.
- The sixth speaker introduces Crowd.ai, a company building an API for change detection in aerial and satellite data.
- The final speakers represent DoorDash, a technology company specializing in food delivery and expanding into other verticals like groceries.

- Embers, a company that issues corporate cards, has raised $535 million and is expanding rapidly.
- Enzyme is a software company that helps regulated life science companies automate the FDA approval process, allowing them to get products to market faster.
- Focal Systems deploys hardware and software in retail environments to improve inventory management and the checkout process.
- Her is a mobile app for the LGBTQ community, with over 3 million users and 100 events organized annually.
- Honeylove, a direct-to-consumer fashion brand, has raised over $300,000 and is profitable, selling clothing with built-in compression. They are hiring a founding CTO.

- Iris Automation has developed collision avoidance systems for industrial drones, which are now mandated by aviation authorities worldwide.
- The company uses computer vision and AI software to allow drones to see the world like a pilot does.
- They have collected over 50 terabytes of data on real collisions and have a 25-person team.
- Level 5 creates HD maps for self-driving cars using cameras and computer vision, and they are looking for iOS engineers to optimize their system.
- MakeSchool is a new model of college focused on training students for high-growth tech companies, with a focus on computer science.
- MEDO builds cannabis software, including retail point of sale systems, inventory management, and compliance reports. They process over $10 million of weed per month.
- mystery.org creates video explanations for kids' questions.

- Justin Kahn, founder of 3 YC companies, discusses the pros and cons of working for a startup.
- Reasons not to join a startup include bad management, lack of mentorship, and unlikely financial success.
- Reasons to join a startup include access to jobs you may not be qualified for and maximizing your speed of learning.
- Examples are given of individuals who benefited from joining startups and gaining valuable experience.
- Evaluating startups as an investor involves looking for small number of users who love the product and exponential growth.
- The quality of founders and early employees greatly impacts a startup's success.
- Startups should be more generous with employee equity.
- Various startups are introduced, including Armory, Astronis, Atrium, Carrot Fertility, and more.
- Each startup is briefly described, along with their market opportunity and success.
- The final part of the text introduces several companies in different industries, such as DoorDash, Enzyme, Focal Systems, and more.

- The first company mentioned creates video explanations for kids' questions and is looking for engineers to help scale their platform
- The second company mentioned is a credit bureau for the rental industry, providing credit scores for tenants and helping them access fair credit
- The third company mentioned is building the world's first international credit history platform to solve the problem of immigrants not being able to get credit in foreign markets
- The fourth company mentioned is Pathrise, which helps mentor students and young professionals in their job search and career development
- The fifth company mentioned is PlanGrid, which builds software for the construction industry and has helped build over 1 million construction projects

- PlanGrid is hiring across various positions in software development, offering good benefits and pay
- Poppy is a platform connecting parents with caregivers for childcare, looking for smart people to join their team in Seattle
- Precious uses AI to organize photos of kids and has a small team with revenue and profit, offering work-life balance
- Promise helps people get out and stay out of jail using software and data analysis, with an incredible team committed to social change
- QuadZ is an operating system for scientific labs, providing software for free and making money through supplying lab materials

- QuadC has 9 Nobel Prize winners and is a platform for biology research
- Quartzie has 4,000 customers and $30 million in sales, offering remote positions
- Reach Labs provides long-range wireless electricity for industrial applications
- Repl.it is an online IDE for programming with code intelligence and live deployment
- Retool offers a faster way to build custom internal tools for companies
- Scale accelerates AI application development by providing ground truth data labeling

- Science Exchange is a marketplace for scientific collaboration, similar to Uber for experiments
- They have a mission to improve the quality and efficiency of scientific research
- They have a small team and offer opportunities for career growth and development
- They value diversity and have a 50-50 gender split in their team
- They are located in downtown Palo Alto and are moving to a larger space to accommodate growth
- Scope AI is an NLP-powered analytics platform for customer conversations
- They automate the process of tagging customer feedback and provide valuable data insights
- They are looking for individuals interested in NLP, ML, and data analysis
- Shone is bringing autonomous technology to cargo ships to increase efficiency and reduce crew size
- They have a pilot program with a major shipping line and are looking for talented individuals to join their team
- Starsky Robotics is developing driverless trucks and is looking for machine learning and control engineers
- Universe is a mobile app that allows users to create websites easily and creatively
- They have had success and recently closed a Series A funding round

- A company is looking for an iOS engineer to help improve their app
- Another company builds and operates drones for delivering critical supplies
- A company creates voice-controlled games for Alexa and Google Home
- Instacart, a same-day grocery delivery service, is hiring engineers to support their growth and achieve their goals

- A company creates video explanations for kids' questions and is hiring engineers to scale their platform
- A credit bureau for the rental industry provides credit scores for tenants and helps them access fair credit
- A company is building the world's first international credit history platform for immigrants
- Pathrise mentors students and young professionals in their job search and career development
- PlanGrid builds software for the construction industry and is hiring across various positions
- Poppy is a platform connecting parents with caregivers for childcare and is hiring in Seattle
- Precious uses AI to organize photos of kids and offers work-life balance
- Promise helps people stay out of jail using software and data analysis
- QuadZ is an operating system for scientific labs and provides free software and supplies
- QuadC is a platform for biology research with 9 Nobel Prize winners
- Quartzie has 4,000 customers and offers remote positions
- Reach Labs provides long-range wireless electricity for industrial applications
- Repl.it is an online IDE for programming with code intelligence and live deployment
- Retool offers a faster way to build custom internal tools for companies
- Scale accelerates AI application development with data labeling
- Science Exchange is a marketplace for scientific collaboration with a focus on diversity
- Scope AI is an NLP-powered analytics platform for customer conversations
- Shone is bringing autonomous technology to cargo ships
- Starsky Robotics is developing driverless trucks and is hiring ML and control engineers
- Universe is a mobile app for creating websites and recently closed a funding round
- Various companies are hiring engineers to support their growth and goals, including a grocery delivery service.

Learn more at https://workatastartup.com/expo

Keynote talks from Sam Altman (President of Y Combinator) and Justin Kan (founder of Twitch and Atrium).

Rapid-fire pitches from YC startups.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Work at a Startup.

This is the first time we've done this conference since 2012.

So it's a pretty special day for us, and I'm really excited to see that we had such an amazing turnout.

In a moment, I'm going to introduce our first keynote speaker, Justin Kahn.

He is now running a company called Atrium, which you're going to hear about later this afternoon.

But before that, he was the founder of Justin.TV, and he actually presented up here on this stage 8 years ago, back when he was running Justin.tv.

And he's going to tell you some really awesome stories from what happened back then, and talk about why you should or should not work for a startup.

Thank you, Jared, for giving away my talk.

I had lost track, actually, of the number of times I'd been through YC until Jared reminded me.

And some of those companies worked, some of them didn't.

And my newest company, which went through YC in the last batch in winter 2018 is called Atrium.

1 of my team members will be up to tell you about that later.

But what I want to talk about today, and it was supposed to be a surprise twist but no longer, is why you should but also why you shouldn't join a startup.

And I'm gonna start with why you shouldn't join.

And my goal here is just to give you the most unfiltered, raw feelings that I have to help you make an informed decision.

But there's lots of good reasons why you shouldn't join a startup.

Number 1, the management at startups generally really sucks.

I used to joke that there were YC companies, there were 2 kinds of YC companies.

There were the rocket ships with bad management and then there were the other companies with bad management.

And as kind of a corollary to that, It is likely that if you join a startup, especially in early stage 1, you won't necessarily get enough mentorship or direction on what you're doing unless you really actively force people to give it to you.

Second reason, you are likely to not actually get rich joining a startup.

It's statistically improbable that if you think you're gonna join a startup and then be set for life, that is unlikely to happen.

So that would not be a good reason to join.

And then the third reason, which I think is a new reason in Silicon Valley actually, is as Silicon Valley has matured in the last 10 years since Jared and I have kind of gotten here, 1 of the things that I think has changed is people, you know, originally when I got here, I think people just wanted to work on interesting shit.

And it was a much smaller number of people.

Now, I think that there's a lot of people who come to Silicon Valley because it's a great career.

And there's a great trajectory and there's stability.

And if you want, like, those things, you should not join a startup.

I've noticed more and more people, even people I've recruited more recently, coming in and saying, what's the career pathing here?

And I'm like, we don't have 5 years of money.

So if you want stability, I think you should go join Facebook.

All right, so now on to what you really came for, which is why you should join a startup.

And I when I was writing this in the parking lot 5 minutes ago, identified 3 reasons.

Number 1, you will get access to jobs that you're completely unqualified for and you might not be able to do.

So my example actually comes from that very first work for a startup.

8 years ago, I was on stage talking about Justin.TV, and we actually recruited someone from that.

And actually, he came to WorkForce Startup and got 2 offers from 2 different companies.

1 was Justin.TV, and 1 was actually Scribd, Jared's company.

And I sat down with him, I remember, in a coffee shop after work for a startup and he said, oh, I have this offer from Scribd.

He told me, I was like, I'll pay you $10,000 more right now to sign this instant.

He accepted and he joined Justin.tv and within a year he was running our entire Rails backend for a site that was like a top 100 site and I think a top 10 to 20 Rails site at the time, it was like in 2010, so the bar was a lot lower.

And that was a job he was like completely unqualified for, and he would never have gotten the opportunity to do if he didn't join a startup where we didn't really have anyone else to do it.

And he went on, actually, this is a pretty cool story, he went on, we spun out a company called social cam a couple years later he went on to be a co-founder of that company as we spun it out of Justin TV went through YC and Got an even greater scale challenge when they scaled to, like from 0 to 128 million users in like 2 months.

And so, you know, just the rate of learning for him was like pretty incredible.

And he's gone on to, now he's a co-founder at a company called Triple Byte that does recruiting for YC companies and others.

You are going to get access to jobs you are not qualified for.

Number 2 is joining a startup is a really good gateway to starting your own startup, if that's a goal of yours.

In the second workforce startup, we in 2012, I came back with another company called Exec.

And I recruited someone else, actually, someone really talented.

His name was Finn Bar, and he was an engineer at Groupon at the time.

And I think he really wanted to break into startups with the idea of eventually starting his own.

And I think 1 of the things that's really important is to just put yourself in positions where you're around people who want to do the things that you want to do, or people who are like the person that you want to become.

1 of my co-founders of Twitch, his name is Emmett, always told me that you are the average of your 5 closest friends.

And he wasn't talking about just me, he was talking about everybody in general.

So Finbar went on, he was like, you know, working at Exec, that company didn't work out super good, but he ended up meeting a co-founder there and starting a startup, which was a horrible idea.

But he ended up getting his start, right?

He was like, he became a founder, That didn't work out.

He ended up joining YC for, I think, just over a year, and then started a new startup that just went through YC and is off to the races and doing super good.

You should check it out and probably work there.

Okay, so starting your own startup, that's the second reason.

The third thing is to maximize your, I should slow down, I still have a lot of time, sorry.

The third thing is to maximize your own speed of learning.

I think this is actually the most important reason why you should join a startup.

And I've kind of 2 examples of people who did that working with me.

And they are both the 2 co-founders of Cruise.

And I think that they're cool examples because 1 is kind of maximizing learning on the way up and the other on the way down.

So The first co-founder of Cruise, his name's Kyle Vogt.

We recruited him at Justin.TV in the early days.

He was an MIT student and we had found him and he was like kind of this person that we thought we needed because he was a hardware hacker and we thought we were gonna build a hardware company.

And so we convinced him to come out from MIT for his month-long break during January.

And then we never bought him a ticket back.

And Kyle basically became our VP engineering.

And he became a co-founder actually in the VP engineering.

He always has been very amazing tinkerer, and 1 of those people with a can-do attitude is just going to, if you're like, hey, let's build this thing, he's going to go figure out how to build it.

But he didn't know jack shit about scaling systems or building scalable system architectures.

And so that was the job that was available, though as soon as we stopped, we figured out that we should not build hardware.

And so that was, that's the job we kind of assigned him and he had to figure it out really like on the fly.

And so he ended up, you know packing this live video system There was nothing kind of There was nothing there was there was there was like no precedent right?

We basically built this scalable dynamic live video system that he engineered and architected, mostly badly at first actually, and it would go down all the time.

We ended up, there was this 1 kind of funny story where we had no idea about, we had no idea how to build reliable systems.

And so every time it would go down, we would call him, which was like every 36 to 48 hours.

And so he could never go on vacation, which is not really acceptable to him.

So it was just like 1 time he was just like, I'm going, goodbye, basically.

And we're like, no, what's gonna happen if you're not around?

He ends up, he went to Tahoe or something like that.

We ended up, of course, like Clockwork, after 36 hours the site went down.

And We had no, we were calling him on the phone at like 10 times.

It's a live video site, so if it doesn't work, it doesn't have any value, right, like just right then.

So we started calling him and he didn't pick up.

We ended up having to order a pizza to go to his house to read a message to him like a pizza delivery driver read the message like answer your phone the website is down so like that was like our concept of like a pager system at the time right so really figuring everything out way 1 step at a time kind of inventing everything from scratch The end of the story is he eventually architected this live video system that by the time Twitch sold to Amazon in 2014, was the fourth largest bandwidth consumer in North America, 15 points of presence around the world, did 90 petabytes of data transfer a month.

And so, you know, I mean, his rate of learning was incredible as a software architect, and obviously kind of went on and took a lot of that to Cruise, which is also an incredible story.

The other cofounder of Cruise was my brother, Daniel, who met Kyle actually as an intern at Justin TV when he was a college student.

I'm sorry, I hope he's not watching right now.

That's fucked up, that's fucked up to say.

So no, he also had a crash course in startups over the next couple years.

He didn't work for me for very long, but when he did work for me, he recruited these guys to the site.

I remember, Justin TV, when we were doing the kind of live streaming site, he recruited this unknown band.

I mean, they were part of the reason that Kyle hated his life.

Ended up crashing the site over and over again.

But the cool thing was he joined as this intern.

He got to interact and kind of make a deal with what was basically became the number 1 teen band at the time in 2007.

And then later on you know he joined me as a co-founder when I started this other company exec in 2012.

And the cool thing you know I mentioned it you know Kyle's kind of the example of how you might learn at a startup as the startup's growing and on the way up.

I think Daniel's a perfect example of how you will also learn and maximize your learning if the startup is completely and horribly failing.

Because in 2013, by the time we had worked on exec for a couple years We realized that the home cleaning business is not a great business.

I'd recommend you don't join a home cleaning startup and He we ended up trying to sell it.

We ended up negotiating a deal with a company called Handy that's in the East Coast and against all odds has survived in this industry.

It was dragging and dragging and dragging.

And I was so burned out, I was just like, I'm going on vacation, Daniel.

It's not a very responsible thing to do, but.

And so he ended up having to be the 1 who closed this deal over the next like month while I was in Thailand.

I mean, I was like kind of doing stuff on the phone, but he was mostly like running this deal for not a lot of money, you know, just a bit of stock from handy.

And he ended up, it was a horrible experience.

He learned all about negotiating, and when you want to have leverage in a deal, when you should, all the things, all the different minutiae of negotiating a deal.

And he learned it on this very small, horrible deal which we were mostly just trying to offload because we were so burned out, we wanted to get out of the business.

2 years later, fast forward 2 years, he had become a co-founder of Cruise.

Cruise had built an amazing technology team that was executing super well.

They ended up selling to GM for a billion dollars.

And he applied, the cool thing, I think, is that Daniel applied all of those horrible lessons he learned from trying to negotiate this shitty, piddling deal for our company to his next company.

And ended up, they sold it for over a billion dollars.

Whether the company succeeds or fails, you'll probably walk away with something valuable.

The last thing I'll say is that the way I think about it is, the way I think about growing and like your speed of learning maximizing your speed of learning is from a quote that our YC partner Paul Buhite had generally said, I think he says it to every batch, which is that it's not your Y intercept, but it's your slope that's important.

And so I think you wanna, the way I've always thought about it is, how do I figure out ways that I can put myself in the position to maximize my own personal rate of growth and rate of learning and I Suggest that you do the same regardless of whether that's at a startup or not.

Justin covered a lot of what I was going to talk about, so I'm going to have time for questions.

So I want to talk about how to pick which startup to work at.

The most important considerations you all already know.

Picking a company you're excited about, people you're excited about, a role you're excited about, that's more important than the rest of the stuff I have to say, but that's also intuitive.

And so I'm gonna talk about the things that are not intuitive, or at least haven't been for me.

And I wanna just echo 1 thing that Justin said because I think it is so important.

Every job I have ever had and probably every job Justin has ever had as well, I will speak for myself, I have been wildly unqualified for.

Doing that, I think, is the number 1 secret to having a really great career.

Like that's the way you have a super fast rate of personal growth.

And I think the way careers go is you should put in the most of the effort at the beginning.

Because it's this compound interest like thing, where the work you do now, the learning you do now, the improvement you make early in your career gets to pay off for all the rest.

So you may as well work hard and take a chance on a role that you feel unqualified for early.

And if you flame out, you flame out and you go try something different.

But my experience is when someone does a role they're unqualified for, it either goes way worse or way better than expectations.

And a lot of the times it goes way better.

And if you hold yourself back from doing this because you're afraid of not working out, which is totally understandable, sometimes it doesn't, I think you miss this opportunity to have the sort of most impactful career you can.

And that is what's so cool about startups, is you can get jobs you are wildly unqualified for.

So I want to talk about how to pick a startup.

And I want to talk about this from the perspective of being an investor.

Because I think what you're doing when you go to work at a startup is making 1 big investment.

If you're really good, you are going to take way less cash comp you can than you could get at Google or Facebook.

And you are going to be compensated for that by investing your time in the startup in return for equity.

So people have different risk-reward trade-offs.

You might want a later stage startup with this lower risk or return.

You might want higher risk, high return, a very early stage startup.

But I think the right framework of this is to think about it like you're investing in a startup.

And for me at least, learning to invest in startups was deeply counterintuitive.

And I'm going to talk about 8 things that I learned about how to evaluate startups for investment.

This mostly applies to sort of the stage of startups you'll see here today.

Number 1, this is a Paul Buhite, another Paul Buhitism.

It's more important that a startup have a small number of users that really love the product, rather than a lot of users that really like the product.

Most startups either have no 1 who cares at all or a lot of people who are like, yeah, that's okay.

Very rare to find a startup where people love the product so much they spontaneously tell their friends.

But if you think about the really big companies today, Google, Facebook, you probably heard about it because someone was like, this is awesome.

And people talk about product market fit, all this other stuff.

But 1 thing you can do is either like talk to some users of the company, or ideally you are 1 yourself or know some, and like, is this product so good that people are telling other people they've got to use it?

And that I think matters much more than the vanity metrics, number of users, current growth rate, whatever that most startups throw around.

So if you only do 1 piece of diligence, this is the 1 I would do.

And as a byproduct of that, trusting momentum.

Momentum is sort of this really important concept to startups.

If things are feeling good, if it's growing, if people are loving the product, If good people are joining, that tends to keep going.

And if that falters, it's very hard to get it back.

So does the startup have a good sense of momentum?

And is there some sort of exponential growth model?

By the way, I've been investing in startups for like, I don't know, 8 or 10 years now.

I still have not managed to get good at intuiting exponential growth in my head.

So I have to do it in a spreadsheet every time.

And if it's if a startup is growing exponentially, and it's not fake, it's not like, you know, they're buying all the users or something, it tends to keep going.

And making that leap of faith, because almost no 1 understands just how powerful exponential growth is, even if they say out loud they do, making the leap of faith and trusting that is super valuable.

The size of the market today matters almost not at all.

It is the growth rate of the market and how big the market will be in 10 years.

So I think the number 1 mistake investors make when they miss out on a really great opportunity is they look at the size of the market today.

Now, they only care about how fast a startup is growing.

They don't care about the size of the revenue today and why they can't make this same leap of faith for the market, I've never understood.

But if you make a really great decision on what startup to join, it will probably be a smallish market today that's growing really quickly.

You know, I saw this morning on the way down here, this is like the 10 year anniversary of the iPhone App Store.

So 10 years ago, not very long, The size of the market for iPhone applications was $0.

And a lot of investors, somewhat rationally, but obviously wrongly, said, all right, well, we're not investing in these iPhone apps because this is a small market.

I also saw this morning the uber deck when they first raised money and they said, you know Their tam is like 2000000000 dollars or something.

And if you think about the world from a certain set of constraints, that was true But it turns out that like The market of people that want to move around cities easily grows quickly when you have a better product.

So thinking about the growth rate of the market, not just the growth rate of the startup, super important if you're going to identify something really big.

And a related concept to that is the biggest companies that we have been able to be a part of, and I think the biggest companies in the technology industry as a whole, happen when there's a technological platform shift.

So for example, stick with the iPhone example, the iPhone app store launches in 2008.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Work at a Startup Expo 2018