Gustaf Alströmer: preference

Transcript context

…Gustaf Alströmer Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So you mentioned YC and this kind of is a good segue to where I want to focus most of our time. You mentioned that you've worked with over 600 companies at this point, which is absurd. It feels like it's you get some statistical significance on takeaways at this point of what works and doesn't work. So I have just a bunch of questions about your experience working at YC and with all these companies. The first is I think about this quote that Elad Gill tweeted once and he wrote, I think, a post about it. Elad Gill is a legendary angel investor. He said that starting a company is an act of desperation. You're either desperate to change the trajectory of your career or you're desperate to make a bunch of money, you're desperate to achieve some kind of mission or build a specific product that you're just like, "I need this to exist." I'm curious if you agree with that sentiment and then I have a follow-up question around that. Gustaf Alströmer Yeah, actually I haven't heard it before, but you know me, I'm an optimistic person. I think it probably reflects on my view of this question, but I would say desperation sounds like a negative place that you're starting at. I actually think that most people to start companies start from a positive place. But the motivations, I agree with what he said, can be very diverse for successful founders, right? So we actually asked this in one of the early Group Office Hours sessions. We asked them, "Why are you doing this?" And we don't want to hear an answer like, "I found this niche of the market.' That's not the why. The why is like, "Why will you come in and work late after four years when you have no money left and everything's going to shit?" ", right? Then the niche market is not the answer. There's something deeper than that. We've learned that it varies a lot for people's motivations to start companies. Some of them just want to solve some technical problem that they feel are passionate about solving. Some of them want to prove themselves in front of others or prove themselves towards themselves. Some have grand really important motivations to change the world and they will say things like, "I want to give everyone water or I want to solve climate change or I want to democratize publishing." You can imagine any number of large ideas. Some people just want to start a big company and just want to be successful. It doesn't matter, in my experience, what your motivation is. I don't think either of these motivations. It sounds like some of them will be better than others. In my experience, it's not the case. The motivation will change over time to just running this thing, right? Like once something becomes big, it's hard to think every day about exactly why you got started because the motivation is just like it can be fun and work on boring things because it's fun to build something big. Everything doesn't have to be shiny and big and grandiose because there are many ideas that are "boring," but just the idea of running the company becomes the motivation eventually. That is really interesting that one of the main things you look for, it sounds like when you're interviewing, is how strong and durable is that drive to build this company. Is that what you're saying?…

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