Founder Mode: Paul Graham, Founder, Y Combinator

Today on the social radars, we're joined by Paul Graham, founder, my co-founder at Y Combinator. Welcome, Paul. Welcome, Paul. Thank you. We are taping this at the Y Combinator Founders Mode Retreat. No kidding. Wow, the sarcasm. Oh, it's starting now. Okay, so let's think back last year to Brian Chesky's talk. Yeah. That was incredible. And everyone in that room was affected. Do you remember that talk? Well, everyone who saw that will remember that talk. The default reaction to that talk is it's the best talk I've ever heard, you know? And we gave a talk this year too. And I said up front, that having been the best talk ever, there's no way we can possibly reproduce it. And so we just talked about the talk largely. Because it was this unique one-off, it was a unique product of the circumstances, right? Like Brian, I don't know how much he told you, he wasn't even supposed to be speaking. Yes. But Ron Conway nagged him to come, and he's like, all right, all right, I'll come, right? And then he wasn't even on the schedule, you know? And Gary just said, you know, get up and say a few words. He went on for like over an hour. And the audience was sitting there, ah, the entire time. Because he was talking, I mean, it's a unique circumstance. He was talking about something that they had all experienced and felt like it was only them. Yeah. So there were really two parts to the whole founder mode phenomenon, right? There was his talk, which by itself would have just been a founder telling their story, which are often dramatic. But then afterwards, I talked to all the founders, you know, because it's this big event with a huge number of founders. And everyone, one after another, said the same thing happened to me. I had no idea, right? And then I knew something was going on, right? That every single person had been suffering in secret from the things Brian had been suffering from, and trying to solve the same problems. And so that's how I knew, you know, there was something missing in the world. There was this thing they could be doing. It was like when they would discover planets by their gravitational effects before they could actually observe them. It sort of knew that there was a planet out there, right? Because they could detect its secondary effects. And they just had to go look for the planet. So this reaction of everyone was like the evidence there was a planet out there, and the planet is founder mode, right? And so now the task is figure out what it is. And that might sound, it might sound like we're being sort of bogus. We're talking about this thing, and we don't know what it is, but it's not bogus. Because we know, we can describe what it is. It is all the things that you can do if you're the founder of the company that you couldn't do if you were just a hired manager, right? We don't know what all those things are. Just like you can detect there's totally a planet here for sure. I'll bet my life on it. Look at the gravitational effects. We still haven't observed it, right? And so, or in math, there's all sorts of sets that are precisely described, but we definitely don't know what all the members of the sets are. There's a lot of math papers to be written about that. And so that's what we're doing now. We're like writing the papers, describing the set of things in founder mode. Tell us about your essay founder mode. Okay, so after Brian gave this talk, I thought the essay is really a call for people to figure out what this thing is, right? Like the essay was essentially saying, we know there's this planet out there. We're not sure what it is. I'm not, I deliberately tried to say as little specific about what it meant in the essay, just the general description like I gave you. And so the essay was a call for people to like, A, wake up to the existence of this thing. You don't have to do what your C level execs tell you. And also figure out what it is. Tell us, you know, tell one another, tell us, try things, see what seems to work. I'm sure even now, even if you collected everyone's experiences about stuff that they could do as founders, it still wouldn't be a complete list. Yeah, that's right. Because people have explored such a small subset of how to operate companies. Everybody just does the standard things. They're afraid to do anything weird, right? Plus the world's changing fast because of AI. So even if there's so much more to be discovered about it. In the past couple of days, we've been talking to founders about what founder mode means to them and hearing different stories. So we're finding some themes, but different examples. That's the whole point. The theme is what we figured out in the beginning. The examples we'll still be figuring out 10 years from now. One thing that really struck me in his talk was how people sort of accused him of micromanaging when he was really just trying to understand what was happening with the project. Maybe we need to de-stigmatize the word micromanaging. Maybe micromanaging is not about- Well, no, because there is such a thing, right? There is, you could probably figure out how to define what's going too far. Because for sure, there's going too far. For example, one thing we know is going too far is when you make someone do their job worse. Yes, that's true, that's true. If you measure by results, and that's certainly possible to do. If you don't know something and somebody else is an expert and you get in there and say, and you know where this is a classic case? Graphic design. There's this, I saw this graphic design firm had like their prices listed and they had like, you let us do everything and there was this comparatively low price. You get involved in the designs and there's this much higher price, right? Like you control everything. There's this infinitely higher price. Or there's a joke in, or not a joke, a rule of thumb in the world of advertising, like never let the customer be in the ads, not the client, be in the ads, right? Because they think they're an actor and they're just not, you know? So there's, you can definitely make things worse. Well, yeah, and Brian did say, he's like, when he talks to people, it's like, you're actually, I've done this before. You're actually better at it than I am, but I still want to collaborate with you, but you're actually the expert. He did say something like that, so you're right. Steve Jobs is like notoriously picky, right? And somehow he had this long relationship with Johnny Ive where they made amazing things together. There must be an, I mean, if anybody was going to be accused of micromanaging, someone would be Steve Jobs. And yet somehow Johnny Ive, who's this brilliant designer, didn't mind it. He seemed to have loved working with Steve. And so there is an example of, there's an example of the other side, right? You could see something's micromanaging if the results are worse. You can see that that, whatever it was, was not micromanaging. So you're kind of narrowing it down, right? But maybe it's possible. Maybe I should sit down and think if you could just define in a sentence, what's the difference between micromanaging and not. When Johnny Ive was speaking at the conference the other night, didn't someone say, why didn't it, did Steve not bug you? Why did you enjoy working with him? What was his answer, Carolyn? Yeah, he, someone did ask that. Micromanaging came up. Gary probably asked. And didn't he say no, because he was partner? He was collaborating. He was collaborating with me. So maybe this is the thing. If the person, if the boss, if the person who's not the boss, the person who works for the boss, if they feel like it's a collaboration, then it's not micromanaging. Yeah. Maybe. Yes, which is what Brian said in his talk last night. You have to partner with people. Yeah. You're not micromanaging, you're partnered with them. Okay, so we're figuring something out here. Yes. It's got a feel to both parties like a collaboration. We're rebranding micromanaging. It's got to be mutually consensual. Yes, there you go. Somehow it's gotten a little weird. It's just such an important topic. And I feel like it resonates with so many people. Just out of curiosity, because we haven't, we've been so busy. We haven't even huddled and talked about our time at this conference. Have you been having a fun time talking to the founders? And what are things are you learning from the people here? Well, one of the most exciting things I just learned is that vibe coding is a real thing. Cause I was sort of a little worried that vibe coding might be a fad, right? It's just the sort of thing that would be a fad. People would want it to work. It's the kind of thing people would try for a long time and they go, oh, it never works. Well, I talked to a startup that works on the backend stuff used by all the vibe coders and like old fashioned hand coders. And so they know how much money all these apps are making. And the vibe coding apps are making a lot of money. And if they're making a lot of money, that's the test of whether people. but we'll keep doing it or not, right? So newsflash, we know for sure vibe coding is real. And this is fresh news because this guy himself said, if I'd asked him six months ago, he wouldn't have been able to say for sure, but he just felt like he had enough data now to say, okay, this is really gonna stick. Will you tell our audience what vibe coding is? Vibe coding is where you tell an AI to write the code for you. Well, wait. You're not even a programmer. You just tell it in English. Speaking of naming conventions, you said hand coding. Was that what we're gonna stick with in terms of what is the opposite? I just made that up. Yeah, I was gonna say, but what is the right word for people who can actually code without using AI? You know, it'll probably later one day, maybe it'll have some name like legacy coding. Legacy coding, yeah, probably. Which would be horrible because now I'm a legacy coder, if that's true. I'm definitely not gonna be writing any programs by telling AI what to do. I like writing code. I like writing code. I enjoy it. I remember Amjad from Repl.it, who's like the big vibe coding company. I remember he gave me a very early demo when they weren't even sure that they were gonna do this. It was just this experiment. And I was looking at all this code being churned out by this thing, sort of slightly nauseated, right? Like, blah, right? It's just, and Amjad said, don't look at that. That's object code. This is the source code in English, right? And you guys, any programmer will think, holy shit. But yeah, right, I know. Source code, like what this means, source code is your, in the old world, source code is your program. Object code is what the compiler spits out, the machine language, that you never ever look at. It's considered bad form to go and look at it unless you're doing some weird optimization, right? And so he's saying, that thing that you're thinking of as the source code, as the program, it's not the program anymore. This is the compiler spewing stuff out. That thing in English over there, that's the program. I was really weirded out, but that turned out to be the first sign of a huge, you know, mountain. Wow, what else? What else have you gleaned? I'm genuinely curious. Stoke is amazing. Oh, we interviewed them yesterday. Andy, yeah. Andy, one of these favorite companies. He's so low key, Andy's so low key, but that is an amazing company. They're gonna just, they're just gonna take over the world, right? They're so good at engineering. I actually flew up to visit them a couple of years ago and he's just delivered ever since. He never misses deadlines. He's just like this execution machine. I don't think he even realizes himself what an ass kicking founder he is because he's just in the rocket business up there. You know, he's not in Silicon Valley meeting all these other founders all the time. He's off in some test range making rockets take off, right? He told us that all the things that you saw a few years ago are totally different now. Oh, yeah. I wouldn't be surprised. And we should go again. Okay. And I wanna come this time. Really? I would be, I'm always psyched to go visit places like that. What else, what else? I was surprised what a variety of things people are working on. Oh, really? I was just, this morning I was talking to a guy who like does carbon capture off of locomotives. Oh, that's Paul. That's Paul. Yeah. Oh, did you interview him too? We interviewed him yesterday. Okay, that's great. This is not planned, by the way. You're like referencing all these people that we did these short founder mode clips with. Okay. Talk about, by the way, you must have noticed what a cheerful guy Paul is. And also, believe it or not, even though he's quite far along, I had an idea for something he could do. I was like, you know what you should do? And he said, oh, wow, that's an interesting idea. No way, PG, you know what you should do? The finger wag. The finger wag. I am going so off piece, but I have to tell you a story that I just learned half an hour ago. Apparently, so for our listeners, we're at this retreat right now, offsite with the YC founders, and our sons are here with us, not participating in the conference, but they're milling around. And last night, there were some of the founders gathered at the bar, and one of the security people came up to one of the women running the conference and said, excuse me, I think we have a problem. I think Paul and Jessica's son is drinking, because our son's 16. And it was Paul Gross, because he looks so young. Oh my God, they thought he was our son. They thought that was our son, and he was drinking. He's 28. He's 28, yeah, exactly. He does look young. He does, he has a baby face. Well, because some of the founders are so young, and like old people, they talk to you like VCs and people running train networks, just don't trust anyone that young. We've heard founders talk about tricks they use to seem older. Do you remember there were those guys who said they wear wristwatches? Because no one young wears a wristwatch. So if you wear a wristwatch, we're all wearing watches. Not you, you're young, C. Levy. No, I'm not young. I just don't wear a watch. You have some sort of earphone that broadcasts the time to you every minute, right, in your ear. I have nothing like that. But I did, this is- That would be a menace. That would be dystopian tech, right? Yes, it would be. Yes, it would be. By the way, Paul Gross did tell us a trick that he did use when people were skeptical about his age. He does extremely deep dives into information and says, I'm gonna know more about what this is I'm talking to you about than you do. Yeah, like you can't be stumped. So I think, I was talking to him about this. He said people think he's too young when they first meet him, but after 10 minutes they think, well, this kid seems to know his stuff. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So any last thoughts on the founder mode retreat before we wrap up? We still have to figure out more. We're getting, we're collecting a lot of stories about what it is, but we still need to collect more. Founders seem really happy. They do seem happy. Like obviously, like it's a good, not just because it's a good retreat. I think in general, things are going well for a lot of people's companies. Yeah. You know, like this is not, like things are, like it's a happy time in the startup world right now. And having been through a few cycles, right? We've all been through some, I can appreciate happy times. Let's hope tariffs don't bring everything crashing down. I was, I asked someone about tariffs yesterday. I don't, I don't remember. Well, if there's, It was Paul. It was Paul. If there's some macroeconomic thing, like the stock market crashes and everything goes to hell globally, that always affects startups. Of course it does. Venture funding dries up. And so it's weird. Like we've simultaneously got, if you looked at California, if you looked at a bunch of startups in California, you'd think things have never been better. And if you looked at what's happening in Washington DC with like everything getting torn down left and right by this blonde Godzilla, you know, it would seem like things have never been worse. Which prevails? I honestly don't know. Should I be optimistic or depressed? That's a good question. Can we end by you sharing your, you gave a, you told me about a great metaphor the other day about as we collect data on founder mode, we're sort of discovering the edges and like plotting. Oh, it was an island. An island. Like we knew that there was an island at such and such location, right? But we don't know what the coastline looks like. We don't know how far you can get to the edge before you hit sea, right? Sea being actually micromanaging people or something like that, right? So it'll take a while. It'll take a while, but no one is in a better position to figure this out than YC because YC has this huge collection of founders. There's a huge number of founders and they're totally willing to talk candidly because they all trust one another, you know? And that combination is unbeatable. No one's in a better position to figure this out. Yeah. All right. I think that's a great place to end and hopefully we'll keep working on figuring it out. I'm interested. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Paul. Thanks for having me guys. Bye. Bye. Bye.