Qasar Younis: belief

Transcript context

…Amazing. Okay. So there's a few threads I want to follow there. One is you were, as you said, COO at YCombinator, you saw a lot of startups up close. This is your third startup on your own. Something that I hear you talk about is that successful companies almost always show traction very early. A lot of founders here are like, "No, just keep trying fighting and maybe we'll be the next Figma and Notion four years in. We'll figure it out." What's your experience there and what's your advice to founders who aren't seeing traction early? Nuances. If I was starting another company, I'd call it Nuance. So I think what you're saying is correct. I continue to believe that. I think good companies tend to have traction fairly early and then just sustain it for a decade plus. To the founders that's toiling, let's say if you're listening and you're about two years into your company and you're maybe having a tough time getting money and building that first product that consumers or businesses really love either through retention or dollars, two years is the difficult time. The heuristic that I would use is if the information I'm getting from the market is not informing me on a more and more specific path, I would consider resetting. And what I mean by reset is oftentimes, and this is wearing my YC hat, seeing hundreds and thousands of companies, is oftentimes it's like the co-founding, literally the foundation upon which the house is built is not correct. And it's like, imagine you built this house and every time you put a cup of water and it slides off the table and it falls on the ground and you keep adjusting the table, it's like maybe the foundation is actually wrong. The whole house is off kilter. And the foundation might not only be your co-founders, it could be the market that you're in. It could be the phase of life that you're in and the amount of effort that you're willing to put into that thing in order to make it successful. There's a bunch of reasons that a company can fail and you have to be able to somehow say, "I don't know what is the reason. I'm just going to have to have a hard reset here." One thing I would tell founders, and I tell Applied is creating a founder class in itself, people who've worked at Applied Intuition are now starting their own companies. We have a thousand plus engineers and over time they're starting their own firms. And I say to all of them is, just imagine the first time you're going to do a startup for the first three year, it's a zero. Just rid yourself of the expectation that it's going to be successful and that you're a craftsperson. If this was a woodworking podcast and you said the first table that you built was wobbly, you wouldn't say, "Well, go work at Crate & Barrel." You'd say, "Oh, that's the first table. We're going to keep at it. " Being a founder is its own muscle and you want to exercise that muscle. But I think a lot of founders, especially early in their founding career, put such an incredible pressure on themselves to make it great out of the gate that they actually miss the thing that you're getting in that first round, which is learning and building that muscle. And the second, third time. And I think it's not random that my third company is the most successful company. I think that you see that more often than not. There are funds which are almost exclusively focused on multi-time founders for this reason. What I love about that advice is often the best ideas come from when you have low expectations, you're just playing around, you're just tinkering, you're not like, I'm going to build the next great, I don't know, Google, it's just you having fun. And that's how I found this world that I'm in right now, this path. And OpenClaw is a good example of that.…

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