David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Rappi. It was a late application. He applied one week after the batch. We have pretty much like the batch started. I think that's why it's such a powerful and mission-oriented organization. It's very different. Maybe that's a good place to wrap. We talk about powers on Acquired. We can speculate a lot. And I think we probably have on the show about YC's power at various points in time. You're in it. What do you think YC's power is, in the Hamilton Helmer sense, that enables YC to earn better differentiated returns versus your competitors in the venture ecosystem? The traditional VC power is brand, but it feels like it's something else with YC. I think brand also comes much later. You can either get brand because you have a lot of things you've built before and you launched, or you just launched something and it takes just the way you all started Acquired. It takes an incredible amount of time to build a brand. It's never an overnight success. At YC, I would say, if I had to pick one thing YC is really good at across both early and Continuity is we go by based on founders. I know it sounds cliche, but I think we also have an incredible advantage in assessing what makes a founder a really good founder. We have incredible amounts of data, pattern recognition, and learning that we have honed it to a point that we know how to spot them. You all have heard of the famous 10-minute YC interview and everyone asks, how do you know in 10 minutes? The fact is we probably know in the first two minutes. We actually don't need the full 10 minutes. But sometimes, one or two people will surprise us with the end of the interview. I think the three things that can articulate what it is on the founder we look for. One is the continuity stitch. Often in the growth stage, people pay attention to the founder, but they don't. If you're at a venture fund or a growth fund, you probably hang out with the founder for a week or two weeks before investment, some a total of three hours. By the time Continuity invest, I probably know them for years, or months, and I've had those interactions.…

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