- Harj Taggar, CEO and co-founder of TripleByte, discusses his background and the founding of his company
- TripleByte is a marketplace connecting software engineers with companies that are hiring
- They use a valuation process to test engineers' skills without relying on resumes or backgrounds
- The goal is to find great engineers who may not make it past resume screenings and match them with companies where they will be a good fit
- TripleByte has had about 15,000 engineers go through their screening process
- Companies are looking for product engineers who can think about problems in terms of user growth and revenue, as well as coding productivity
- Boot camps can be beneficial for those with an engineering background, but may not be necessary for experienced engineers
- The decision to pursue a CS degree or attend a boot camp depends on individual goals and the type of company one wants to work for
- Taggar decided to do YC a second time to help with the early stages of TripleByte and to benefit from the network and potential customers in the YC batch.

- Fundraising during the second time around was different due to an 8-year gap and a shift in the YC environment
- In 2007, YC was more focused on building a real company rather than raising a big round of funding
- Summer 2015 had more emphasis on building a big company and raising significant funds
- Office hours were more structured during the second time, with the addition of group office hours
- Group office hours were helpful for sharing experiences and advice with other companies in the batch
- Relationships with batchmates tend to form post-YC due to the intense focus on building during the program
- Being a partner and then participating in the batch again provided unique insights on competition and growth
- YC focuses on growth and action, with an emphasis on finding the right metric for each company's stage
- Providing a good experience for interviewees and generating word-of-mouth has been effective for sourcing engineers for Triplebyte

- The company focuses on creating a positive hiring experience for candidates, which generates word-of-mouth recommendations.
- Early stage companies should prioritize referrals and finding people they have worked with in the past.
- The company uses Google Hangouts for remote vetting, allowing candidates to use their own environment and showcasing their problem-solving skills.
- The founder believes that previous successes and networks can be both helpful and detrimental in starting a company.
- The founder advises against starting a company solely for the sake of starting one, and instead suggests building deep domain expertise before pursuing a startup.
- Finding co-founders can be done through building friendships with people who have complementary skills.
- It is important to meet as many people as possible and make a selection based on compatibility when searching for co-founders.

- The speaker discusses the idea of focusing on one project instead of multiple projects
- They mention the difficulty of transitioning from dating multiple people to being exclusive, and compare it to focusing on one project
- The speaker took a sabbatical between being a partner at YC and starting Triple Bite
- They wanted to take a gap year to travel but didn't do it before college, so they decided to do it during their sabbatical
- The speaker wanted to step away from tech and startups to avoid information overload and find something to focus on
- They mention that many startup ideas are not unique and that ignorance can be helpful in starting a company
- The speaker's travel experience did not result in any significant revelations about themselves
- Overall, the travel experience was personally fulfilling but did not have a profound impact.

- Harj Taggar, CEO and co-founder of TripleByte, discusses the founding of his company and their goal of connecting software engineers with hiring companies.
- TripleByte uses a valuation process to test engineers' skills instead of relying on resumes or backgrounds.
- They have had about 15,000 engineers go through their screening process.
- Companies are looking for product engineers who can think about user growth, revenue, and coding productivity.
- The decision to pursue a CS degree or attend a boot camp depends on individual goals and the type of company one wants to work for.
- Taggar decided to do YC a second time to benefit from the network and potential customers in the YC batch.
- Fundraising during the second time around was different due to a shift in the YC environment.
- Group office hours during YC were helpful for sharing experiences and advice with other companies in the batch.
- YC focuses on growth and action, with an emphasis on finding the right metric for each company's stage.
- TripleByte focuses on providing a positive hiring experience for candidates and generating word-of-mouth recommendations.
- The founder advises against starting a company solely for the sake of starting one and suggests building deep domain expertise first.
- Finding co-founders can be done through building friendships with people who have complementary skills.
- The speaker discusses the idea of focusing on one project instead of multiple projects.
- The speaker took a sabbatical between being a partner at YC and starting TripleByte to travel and step away from tech and startups.
- Ignorance can be helpful in starting a company, as many startup ideas are not unique.
- The speaker's travel experience was personally fulfilling but did not have a profound impact.

Harj Taggar is the CEO and cofounder of Triplebyte (YC S15), a marketplace for connecting software engineers with companies that are hiring. https://triplebyte.com/

Before Triplebyte Harj was a Partner at YC and cofounded Auctomatic (YC W07).

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00:15 - Harj's intro.

1:07 - What is Triplebyte?

2:07 - Where did the idea for Triplebyte come from?

3:40 - What type of engineer are companies looking for?

6:05 - Should people go to bootcamps?

8:20 - Why did Harj do YC twice?

9:58 - What was fundraising like the second time around?

11:14 - What was it like doing office hours for the second time?

12:58 - How should you take advantage of your time during YC?

14:08 - What learnings did Harj take from being a partner to being in the batch?

17:50 - Did Harj advise startups in the batch with him?

18:20 - What were Triplebyte's stats at the end of the batch

19:15 - What are good ways to find engineers?

21:05 - Any tips for vetting someone remotely?

21:55 - Was Harj worried that doing YC a second time would be seen as a sign of weakness to a VC?

22:55 - Did Harj's background help or hurt him in fundraising?

24:05 - How can people that have previously been successful check themselves when selecting new projects?

25:48 - How to choose a startup idea?

28:00 - How to find cofounders?

30:15 - Harj's thoughts on his sabbatical after being a YC Partner.

He is the CEO and co-founder of Triple Byte and a multiple time YC alum.

So if you could just give us some of your backstory and we can go from there.

So I first went through YC in 2007 with my first startup, Automatic, where we were building e-commerce software to make it easy for small businesses to sell online.

I then, sort of a year and a half later, we sold that company.

I spent a year at our acquiring company and came back to work at YC as a partner in 2010, back when YC was effectively just Paul and Jessica.

I left YC in summer 2013, took a bit of time out to travel and work on personal projects, and then started Triple Byte with Guillaume and Armand, who had also gone through YC with SocialCam in 2012 and their co-founder was Michael Seibel who's now the CEO of Y Combinator And the 3 of us kind of started brainstorming some ideas and decided we wanted to work on Triplebyte and went through YC in summer 2015.

Okay, and what is Triplebyte, just to clarify?

Yeah, so Triplebyte is effectively a marketplace for connecting software engineers with companies that are hiring.

And specifically what we do is, we put engineers through a valuation process that tests their skills without using their resumes or their backgrounds.

And what that lets us do is find really great engineers who might not make it past the resume screening step

lot of companies and conversely filter out engineers who do have great resumes but don't actually have a great technical ability and then we use that data to match them with the companies they'll be the best technical fit for.

So we can kind of tell an engineer with a pretty high degree of accuracy, you know, they may be a really great fit for a Facebook Dropbox and like 3 other companies that have a similar profile and what they're looking for and not such a great fit for other companies.

So we can help engineers sort of streamline their job search process and just speak to companies where they have a high chance of doing well.

So my co-founder Armon had originally had an idea around recruiting and specifically technical recruiting being broken and just felt that it was a really hard problem.

Each of us had experienced it at our previous startups like how hard it was to hire and I had seen I had seen coming out of working at YC that as soon as every company raised their seed round the number 1 thing they complained about was how difficult it was to hire and so we kind of knew it was a real problem we experienced it ourselves at our previous startups it started with this idea of well if we started a recruiting firm to solve this what would it look like And we kind of started thinking about things that we found interesting about that idea.

And the specific angle was this idea of data that if you were a recruiting company that specialized not in spamming people on LinkedIn, but specialized in figuring out who was a great engineer and on the flip side figuring out what every company was specifically looking for, you'd have this amazing data set and you could just make it efficient on both sides.

So you'd have people looking for a company spend less time in wasted interviews and you boost the productivity of companies because they'd spend a lot less time interviewing people that weren't a good fit for them.

And so how many engineers have you placed at this point?

We're not public with the numbers and the placement stuff just yet, But we've had about 15,000 go through our screening process at this point.

And I've seen you guys put out a bunch of content and stuff like what are the traits that companies are looking for?

So we started out, initially when we launched we were working with just YC startups.

And so we've expanded to outside of that, but we're still predominantly focused on, I'd say sort of internet software companies.

And what we found is that most of them are looking, a trade that's most in demand is kind of what we call like the product engineer, which means someone that's able to think about problems in terms of how will this help our users or grow our user base or boost revenue, as opposed to being attracted to just interesting technical problems.

Another trait that's pretty common, actually this is like a shift that's going on I think in the hiring process for engineers in general, is looking for signs of coding productivity as opposed to theoretical knowledge.

So Stripe potentially was a big proponent of this where interviews are shifting, technical interviews are shifting increasingly towards here's a laptop, here's a project, debug the code or show us you can build something in a couple of hours as opposed to here's a whiteboard and show me how this algorithm would work.

We're finding that actually knowing your tools well and being able to productively write code during an interview or just show examples of being productive as an engineer as opposed to having a great base of theoretical knowledge is increasingly in demand.

And so it's not even take home at this point, it's literally like spend a day, build something in the office?

The trade off with doing a take home project is you have a drop in the number of people that will go through it.

So specifically, often what happens is when someone decides they want to find a new company to work at, they'll apply to multiple companies, right?

And if you are the 1 company that has a take-home project and they have 3 other companies that they'll just do an on-site interview and get them through the process, then a lot of engineers will just choose not to spend the time doing your take-home project.

Conversely, it can actually help you find really great people because a lot of people don't perform well under a timed interview but are really great smart people and they actually can do better when you let them like work on a take-home project when no one's watching them and they can actually show you what their strengths are under that.

And so if someone were to be looking at building that skill set, what would you recommend?

Do you recommend people go to boot camps and do

Boot camps are controversial because a lot of tech companies have had bad experiences with boot camp grads and they can almost act as a negative signal.

What we found is that the top tier of boot camp grads are on par, if not better in certain dimensions than the top CS grads.

And this is getting a little anecdotal, but specifically what we tend to find is that people who have an engineering background, whether that's software engineering or maybe it was just a form of engineering, but they didn't go into programming.

They worked as an investment banker, say.

Boot camps can be really great for them because they teach you the exact tools that companies use and they teach you how to build web applications and you already have sort of the general principles of engineering as your base and so you can come out of 1 of those programs and be like a top-tier junior engineer but I wouldn't recommend a bootcamp to someone who's already been working as an engineer for a while.

Okay, and if I say I'm a high school student, do I go to college and study CS or do I go to a bootcamp?

If you're optimizing for time to get your first job, a bootcamp is a strong argument for why a bootcamp is 3 months of intense pressure.

I think the arguments for doing a CS program, Apart from just the social aspect of going to college and meeting people and just kind of developing yourself, would be not all companies are only building web applications.

There are a large number of companies that highly value computer science knowledge and it does, arguably, it does sort of help longer term, having a more fundamental underpinning.

So it's kind of, it's up to you, but it's not as clearly obvious as maybe it was before that Getting a CS degree is the only way into engineering career.

So you are 1 of increasingly more people now that have done YC multiple times.

And this is 1 of the reasons why I wanted to have you come in.

So You've done YC twice now, in addition to being a partner for several years.

Why did you decide to do YC a second time?

So for us, I think there were 2 big reasons.

We really were very early stage with TripleByte in that we had the idea and sort of enthusiasm for the idea But we didn't have a prototype or anything And this is this isn't like just over a month out before the batch was even gonna get right.

That's a what YC really helped us do was it was like a forcing function and a deadline to just like get everything together and like be really focused and like make sure that we like just did the maximum amount we could to kind of get something out there and launched.

That kind of just continued throughout the batch.

Another reason is we are, you know, our product, we're a marketplace, but like 1 side of that marketplace is technology companies.

And so even though I kind of had a strong network from YC, both being a partner and having gone through it before.

Having another hundred or so companies that are in our batch, some of whom are going to go on and be huge companies, that just helped a ton.

I think there's a really strong case where if you're like a B2B company, being part of a YC batch can just help a ton with getting your first set of customers and feedback in a sort of low risk way.

And did you have any thoughts on like how fundraising was different the second time around?

There was just, there was such a, there was like an 8 year gap between me going through YC and

Yeah so 2007 YC really looked that Demoday was just a group of people who were friends with Paul and Jessica and were mostly there to see if there might be some cool teams that they liked hanging out with and wanted to write a small amount of money to.

And as a company going through YC, you weren't expected to raise a big round.

It was kind of like, well, if someone might, if you want to work on this as a company, that was the decision after 3 months, right?

It wasn't, it wasn't like, how much money do you want to raise?

It was like, am I going to go back to grad school or do I continue working on this thing and like try and build a real company around it?

And so it was like a very, very different environment.

And in summer 15, that was completely rare.

Like no 1 at this point, it's very legit.

Well, by summer 15, like at this point now YC has like the huge successes, right?

There's like NB&B and Dropbox and people are there like with like you know some people have like moved away from their families for the 3 months.

And so it's like, it was a real way in this, like everyone's like is there to build a really big company as opposed to like figuring out if they want to start a company at all.

What was it like doing office hours for the second time?

It was, I think the biggest difference from the first time going through YC and the second 1, the first time going through YC 2007 there weren't actually formal structured office hours.

So all that happened is that you might occasionally get an email from them saying kind of how's everything going?

And if you had something you ping them and said like hey, like can we meet up and talk and so we actually did that When we went through I see in 2007 And so that actually that format that actually was pretty similar to what one-on-one office hours look like today.

Like, they are mostly just a conversation where you bring the things you want to talk about and you get sort of high-level advice about them in like 30, 35 minutes.

The big change was like the group office hours.

And so, and that was actually where most of our interaction with YC came through in the batch was the group office hours where you have like 10 or 12 other companies and sort of 2 or 3 YC partners and you kind of go around Updating on what you got done over the last couple of weeks Yeah, those are really useful for us actually because everyone was grouped we were grouped into Like the other let's say like enterprise e startups and the good thing about that was all of us were going through kind of the same issues where enterprise startups tend to not Have as easy did like it's not as easy as like 10% week on week user growth Because you're typically trying to get just like your first deal And so the metrics that you have for like work are how many like companies have I spoken to you?

How much outbound have I done and everyone's kind of in the same position doing the same thing?

So there was a really useful advice that came out of that

And how do you best take advantage of your time like between meeting your batch mates and like setting up relationships whether it's a deal or otherwise.

I think during YC you skew heavily towards the latter like you skew heavily towards just work obviously right Like you spend you don't actually I don't think you and I don't even think this is honestly the case during 2007 when they're already 11 comes in a batch the relationships I formed in 2007 and some of those people are like really close friends of mine like even today like Robbie Walker's a part-time partner at YC now and we didn't really get to know each other that well during the batch because everyone was just like working all the time, right?

It's more like in the time afterwards as like, you know, we didn't like we got thrown out of our apartment and we didn't have a place to stay so we ended up staying with Robbie in his apartment in like 2007 and like and that still happens today.

Like during the batch everyone is like heads down trying to build their thing.

The relationships tend to come post YC because then you're all going through the same sort of issues.

You're all trying to hire your first person, you're all trying to figure out how do you manage, you're all trying to figure out how do you scale and grow a company together

cool, and then what about the The the learnings you took from being a partner to then being in the batch again like that's a very unique experience.

Yeah, yeah Yeah, that was a unique experience.

I think, to some, here's what I think, I think during a YC batch as a participant, it's really really hard to not fight the temptation to feel competitive with everyone else in the batch and generally there are always some percentage of people in the batch who are like talking very loudly about like how amazing like they're just like doing tons of revenue they're just like every investor is desperate to invest in them And I just knew from being a partner for several years that the companies that talk the loudest during the batch doesn't correlate with anything.

Often, you look at an Instacart or something, Apu, the founder, was just really heads down building that company.

He wasn't really talking about what he was doing during the batch.

And so I kind of knew from a logical and high overview perspective that that stuff really didn't matter.

And none of the signals about who was doing well during a batch meant anything.

But I kind of like try to I think like maybe help other batchmates like just kind of understand that.

But yeah, it is actually just like emotionally it's very hard because like it's like, you know, doing a startup is a stressful thing.

And most people who start a company have somewhat of a competitive streak or a desire to push and drive and be ambitious.

So you kind of can't, there's a really strong impulse to feel like you need to be competing with other companies in the batch which doesn't help you in any way.

Well that's 1 of the criticisms that I've seen go around where it's like people are essentially saying that like YC focuses on growth, growth, growth during the summertime, sometimes to the detriment of the product.

Did you find that was the case at all with you?

I have come across, and actually like even some of my like friends or YC alumni have made that like same argument for not doing YC Again, and I've always just found it.

I've always found it somewhat nebulous Like I don't see I don't think that early on there is anything to optimize other than like growth Like I think you have to like pick the right metric and so I agree that maybe early on like the right metric for everyone is not necessarily like revenue right like it may be that the right metric early on is just like how many customers do you like How many potential customers did you talk to this week?

And you should be optimizing talking, like if that's a stage you're at as a company where you need to do discovery and figure out if anyone wants your product, then yeah, you should be growing the number of people you're talking to every week, right?

Because that just means you're making progress quickly.

And so I think YC focuses on action and focus and if you have action and focus, the output of that should be a growth rate of something.

And so I think for us, for example, we run like, Triple Y is a business that is enterprise in the sense of, we generate revenue when we place an engineer.

The average time for someone like entering our funnel to like place them being revenue, like for us, is more like sort of like on the 6 to 8 weeks end of the spectrum because people take a while to Like interview and decide what they want to do, right?

And so going through YC for us, I never felt pressurized in like the wrong direction Like I felt pressurized to like why can't you speed this up?

Like how many engineers are you screening per week?

That's ultimately like the metric that's going to drive this longer term.

But I didn't feel like it was like dumb advice in the sense of you should be growing your revenue, even though it takes you like 6 to 8 weeks to book revenue.

And YC is a 12 month program, a 12 week program, right?

So did you find yourself like trying to advise the startups in your group?

was something I generally try to avoid doing.

Again, YC creates the upside of having a slight competitive streak, I think, is it does just push you to do more and like be really focused and so I was like my head was like entirely consumed It's just like how do we make sure white crow as much as possible in the next few months, not like, how do I help the other companies in my batch?

Do you remember your stats at the end of the batch?

I think we were, I can't remember the exact numbers to be honest.

I think we were like probably around, I think we'd done maybe like 100k in or 150k in revenue by the end of YC.

So like the absolute revenue numbers look pretty good because again we're like enterprise in the sense of a low volume number of deals, i.e.

But each placement is quite valuable, which is how enterprise deals tend to work.

And so coming out of YC, our revenue numbers look pretty good for an idea we'd been working on like full-time for 12 weeks.

And then what about just general advice for people in your space?

Like if I'm looking to find engineers, what do you do?

I mean use Tripleglide is an obvious thing.

And then that's 1 of the questions and then like obviously use triple bite.

So yeah sourcing engineers like just getting is for like the first battle We're unusual in the in the respect that what's worked really well for Truebyte to source engineers has actually been a combination of just like writing sort of blog posts and content articles about like what we've learned from doing all these screens.

And no one's really writing good quality content about how you run a technical interview, like how you make your decisions, what correlates with what companies are looking for.

I actually, here's a kind of like 1 thing I'd say.

1 thing that's really helped us, our core product is effectively a technical hiring process, And we've paid a lot of attention to making that be a good experience for everyone that's coming through and that's generated a lot Of word-of-mouth in terms of other people say oh like this was a really great interviewing experience.

You should try it out I think companies can totally do that where if you if you take the time to give your candidates personalized feedback on how they did and suggest how they might improve.

take the time to do that, you can generate word of mouth in the engineering community as a good place to go and interview.

Other things, I think early stage companies should mostly focus on referrals and trying to find people that They've worked with in the past or they have some signal on what they'd be like to work with so you would totally early on you totally wanna if you're making a trade-off between like aptitude and skills and ability to work well with someone.

Early on, you want to lean towards the latter because if there's only a few people, it's okay.

You'd rather take the person who might be slightly less skilled, but you know you will work well together over the person who's highly skilled, but you would not look forward to coming into the office with.

Yeah, and then what about if you're vetting someone remotely?

We actually vet all of our candidates remotely through Google Hangouts.

So this actually works really well for us.

Google Hangouts lets you screen share, you can let them use, we let them use their own environment So they effectively what they do is they pick the language they pick their tools And we give them kind of the problems that you need to work on and they just share their screen And so you can get like a real insight into not just how they solve problems, but how familiar are they comfortable in their own environment.

And I think that actually works really well.

And if anything, it like helps remove the bias that you might have from meeting someone in person when you're trying to just figure out like the skills.

All right, so we have a random list of like counterpoints against doing YC a second time.

Okay, so someone asked, were you ever worried that doing YC a second time would be viewed as a sign of weakness to a VC?

Like, because I think I had seen, I think really the only thing that matters in fundraising is having traction.

And I just like continually saw that like being a YC partner, like the companies that raised on the best terms were not the companies that had necessarily the strongest fundraisers as their founders.

It was just the companies that had the product that was doing the best.

So I cared a lot more about what's gonna give me the optimal chances of building something that has traction in the next 6 months more so than what's a VC going to think about my decisions on how I run the company.

And so, yeah, that wasn't something that concerned me.

If I have a product that's growing, VCs really don't care about all the other stuff, they just care about that.

Yeah, so do you think that actually your background didn't matter all that much at all?

It helps, like the background, having previous successes, having a network, These things like help get your like foot in the door, but honestly I think they can also like that can also like put you in a bad position where when you have like access to capital and investors and investors want to base what invest in you based on like your Like you know what you've done in the past as opposed to like what signs are out that what you're working on now is great.

You can like easily, and I've seen like, there's like a bunch of examples of this.

Like you can easily raise too much money early on off the bat, and like that just like pushes you in weird directions, right?

It's just like so easy, it's so easy for you to feel like you have a real company because you raised like 10 million bucks and you have a VC on your board and you hired a bunch of people.

But like a startup is just like not really real until it has like real users and real traction and real growth.

And so that's just like the only thing that, that's the number 1 lesson I learned from being a YC part of it, which is like everything else just is fake until you have like real traction.

I felt that YC was gonna boost our chances of getting us traction.

That's a really good, do you have any advice for someone who's like a founder who maybe has done something successful in the past to just kind of like check themselves and not go nuts?

Yeah, try and, so I think so between, before starting TripleBuy, I took like quite a while to like figure out like what exactly Was I wanted to do and I had friends who had?

In similar positions where they sold a company before they had a strong network amongst a investor community and the Silicon Valley tech community and they get stuck for like years, actually sometimes, like trying to figure out what they wanna do.

And the problem is that, well, 1, you have this network of really smart people, and smart people can find like a hole in any idea, no matter how perfect it is.

So like you constantly seek feedback from really smart people and everyone pushes back on what you're working on and so it's like kind of hard to find something that you know someone doesn't have a negative view on and The other thing is you end up optimizing for things that sound really great at dinner parties and social events.

And so you end up on these blue sky vanity projects, right?

You end up like, oh, I'm going to cure cancer, which is a very great noble goal, but I have no real idea of how I'm gonna do that.

And so I think Ultimately, I think again what YC like helps with is because you have to focus on growth You the only way you get growth is by solving a real problem And so it like gives you an environment to make sure you're not working on something that's made up.

And it's really easy to do that as a second-time founder because investors really want to invest in your thing, especially early on.

So you can just kid yourself into feeling that you have a company when you just don't.

And so stepping back from that, like pre-YC the second time, how do you go about choosing something?

Because I know tons of people, like exactly like you're talking about, who just like vaguely are around at

There's so many different ways to come up with like what you want to work on.

I would like to answer this in some of a meta way.

I actually think the best way now, the best way to start a company is really not to explicitly want to start a company.

It's what we did and it's working out fine for us and I think it's a totally viable path to starting a company.

So like Drew with Dropbox, for example, he knew he wanted to start a company before he knew what the company was.

And so he was trying to, he'd set himself these frameworks for like, what are the things that are important to me and the idea that I work on?

He was like, I want something that's got a clear business model I got I want something that you know is like a hard technical product because I like working on hard technical problems And like out of that frame through those lenses He like assessed all the ideas he came up with and Dropbox was the 1 that like met all the the requirements He's like, okay, I'm gonna work on this.

And so that's kind of what we did with Triple Buy.

We wanted something that we had personal experience with the problem, had a clear business model, and we felt that we had a clear strategy on what would be unique on the distribution side to get started.

We were like, what are the criteria that are important enough for us in an idea?

Let's filter all of our ideas against those.

And when we find 1 that's a match on everything, like we should just go ahead and do it.

I think the better way, honestly, though, is to not be explicitly trying to start a company.

It's to like think about what are just like areas or problems in the world that I think are interesting and build really deep domain expertise.

So for example, let's just say you decide you do wanna cure cancer, which is like it would be a huge benefit to society.

I don't think the way you go about that is like, what startup could I start to cure cancer?

Right, I think it's like, okay, well, like do I understand biology well enough to make a first pass at this?

No, okay, well then should I go and invest a year or 2 in like going to grad school and studying biology or should I make friends with someone who's already got a PhD in biology and learn as much as I can from them and maybe they will start a company with me once I kind of understand the space well.

I think that building deep domain expertise in an area and then going into a startup is a better way to do it.

And so say you were to do that and like basically people around the valley at a certain point will know your name, right?

So you have this interesting thing that happens like people just try and like jump on the party bus or whatever.

How do you go about like finding new co-founders, building a new network at that point, inventing people?

There's no right or wrong way to do this again but I think in terms of finding co-founders you again want to lower the bar in the sense of you will just never find like someone being added to just dating and marriage potentially.

You're never gonna find the absolute perfect person across every criteria.

I don't think there's any secret to this.

Like again, ideally the best way to find a co-founder is not to really be explicitly looking for a co-founder.

It's just to have a group of friends that you would start a company with.

Okay, taking a step back, I remember at startup school a few years ago, Phil Libin, the Evernote founder, He sort of said this in a somewhat funny way, but I think it's practical advice, where he claimed he was strategic over the last decade about everyone he made friends with, he'd only make friends with someone that was a potential co-founder.

I don't think, I think he was like, I don't think that's actually practically, I don't think either you should do that or that's probably what he did but That is the best way to find co-founders is to be working at working on a problem Somewhere that you'd have close contact to people who have skills that are complementary to yours and just being like building building friendships with them over a period of time, as opposed to be trying to like explicitly find co-founders.

But if you are in that position, then I think you honestly, you run it as just like a funnel.

Like you like run it, you like Go out and meet as many people as you possibly can you like make a first you make your best guess that like how many?

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Lessons From Doing YC Twice - Harj Taggar