Dalton Caldwell: observation

Transcript context

…I know that you'd give a talk that's exactly called that, How Not To Die. Just to pull on this thread a little bit more, what is the general advice you share there for people that also don't want to die? The way to summarize that is if you look at all the startup stories that we have at YC and all the companies we funded over all the years, the underlying theme is that rationally the founder should have given up at some point. And so again, let's talk about Airbnb, obviously something you know a lot about. They probably should have shut down three or four times before they got into YC. It objectively wasn't working. They were basically ruining their lives, they were disappointing their parents, everything was wrong and it was a purely irrational act for the founders of Airbnb to keep working on their goofy startup. And again, that's just one story. If you look across the portfolio of YC and non-YC companies, there has to be this irrational intention to keep going even when the world tells you it's not working and you feel completely defeated. And you likely have to go through this many times and have these near-death experiences. And then you get lucky and then you look like an overnight success. Right? And so that is the theme that is a summary and I provide lots of data and lots of stories there, but this is one of those things that the longer I have this job, the more I really, really believe this is true. What's your advice on the flip side of that where there's a lot of startups, especially these days that are just super struggling, have been added for a while, there are mental health challenges, they'd be very sad if they had to shut this thing down, but often it's probably the right move? What's your advice to folks on deciding, okay, actually does make sense to give up in this case?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.