FIND CONTRARIAN BETS

“And they weren't wrong. I remember talking to the Lyft founders the week before they launched Lyft. And they were extremely worried that they would go to jail. And they decided to like roll the dice and launch this thing anyway. I think a big reason why other people didn't launch Lyft and Uber before was utterly that. It's like it was basically illegal to do that and they were worried that they would go to jail.”

“So the other thing that's cool about Campfire that we're seeing in a lot of enterprise startups is with CodeGen, increasingly, you can actually bring the switching cost closer to zero. Even with the idea of a forward deployed engineer, before CodeGen, it'd be like six weeks of writing custom scripts to convert one data schema to another. If the demos are very good, that six months could be two weeks. And then if you can code gen and get very, very good at a suite of tools to convert data from the schema to yours, you could have time to value in less than a month when it used to take a year.”

“I mean, nine out of 10 people might tell you you're stupid or crazy, but then one out of 10 people might be exactly the person who believes what you believe. And then you're contrary and you become right, because it's necessary to actually attract and be a magnet in the world for all the people who agree with you. The only people that matter are the people who you care about, who have certain problems and your ability to solve it and your ability to attract all the other people who want to solve those problems too.”

“I mean, speaking as a VC, like maybe the best exhortation I can give to the people listening is like, do not use that. Like, you know, it's merely an indicator. The more rules you have about investing, the more ways you can basically talk yourself out of making a lot of money in venture. It would be the stupidest thing in the world to use that as your only criteria for whether or not you should work on a company.”

“Coinbase to me feels a little bit less. I didn't feel like crypto was well understood enough for it to be clearly illegal. If you hung out with a lot of people who were really, really into Bitcoin in 2010, 2011, 2012, the majority of people you ran across were cipher punks who said, F the state, F the laws, and we're going to have this radical freedom through Bitcoin. That's what he's contrarian bet was. It was that it's worth doing all of this extra work for a time where it wasn't clear the market even wanted it.”

“I mean, I think it's deeper than merely like, is it obvious or non-obvious? Non-obvious sounds like in your body might feel like, you know, neutral. But actually non-obvious feels dangerous and scary. Like I could devote my life to this, waste 10 years on this and have no outcome.”

“DoorDash entered a very crowded space. DoorDash, I think, was a prime example of this, because when DoorDash started, there was actually another YC company, Spoon Rocket, doing food delivery, where they would actually cook the food in these kitchens that were spread around the city. But there was this period where we're seen as just building software is not ambitious enough, and the big opportunities are going to be in going full stack. And so in a way that like DoorDash is contrary in bet was actually say, we're just going to do delivery, we're just actually going to have like an app and a marketplace, and we're not going to try to be a full stack startup, which was obviously the right bet in hindsight.”

“So the story of Flock Safety, I remember I was still at Initialized. We were looking at companies at Demo Day. And then, funny enough, that morning, all the cars on my street in Noe Valley were broken into. And, you know, it was a professional crew. They came in and broke into every car on our street. And the police basically said, sorry, you know, unless you have a license plate, we can't do anything. Flock Safety today solves 10% of all reported crime in the United States.”

“And also something that people forget is that when OpenAI launched, it got mostly negative press. But by and large, most people, especially the AI researcher establishment in academia and in other companies, mostly just like were extremely negative on the idea that a bunch of like twenty somethings could create AGI. They're like, you know, we're the experts in this. We've been doing this for like 50 years. If there was a way to do it, we would have already done it. These kids don't know anything.”