Jessica Livingston: preference

Transcript context

…I see. It's interesting that you talk about these behaviors, co-founders interrupting each other, or being kind of aggressive here and there. Some people believe that's okay for founders to be like this. A lot of successful founders, Elon, for example, Steve Jobs, who are kind of assholes a lot of times, I imagine, and I've read part of the reason you thought about just the type of person is you're trying to build a specific culture in the early days of YC and you're going to be around these people. So maybe can you talk a bit about just why those elements were important to you and why'd you look for those? I've definitely heard that Steve Jobs could be an. I've heard stories. But I think I would've funded him because he's so incredible and he was so smart and so interested in the product and knew... I'm very persuaded by people who know what they're talking about and love their product and are domain experts. But I did consciously, especially early on, less so later on, early on, I did sometimes tend to say, "I really think this person's an asshole, I do not want to fund them." And we often wouldn't. And very early on when we were just funding 10, 20, 30 startups a batch, sometimes I have been known to say, "I don't know if I can have dinner with them every week." It was that point. And I don't think we've ever regretted any of those. It didn't happen all the time, that was rare. But life's too short, and I wanted to be able to work with these founders. And as it turns out, it was sort of important early on in weeding out explicit assholes because that was the basis of our Y Combinator community, which is now thousands of founders. Now, of course, all the founders aren't all running their company anymore, but I would say most all of the founders bring something useful and valuable to the table. So if you ask a question on Bookface, on our forum for founders, someone is going to be there to help you. And it's amazing. And that all started very early on, there was this culture of older batch mates helping newer ones, and this pay-it-forward mentality where everyone helped one another and rooted for one another and made introductions for each other. And I think it's a big part of our Y Combinator community now. So I wrote down a few of the things that you mentioned you look for, and you looked for in the early days. So let me just share a few of them and let's spend a little more time here. So you looked for, did the founders get along? Are they committed to the idea? Are they ready to quit their job? Are there any red flags? So is there anything else that you remember you spent a lot of time thinking about or looking for then or even now?…

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