Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
23 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“Well, Patrick Collison probably didn’t seem to most people to be the big star, and you can prove this, because if he had, they would have invested in early Stripe rounds, and they didn’t.”
02 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. I’m now going to look. I never thought about this, but I was just looking at some Tintorettos.”
03 / belief
“I would say YC interviews could actually be seven minutes instead of ten minutes, but ten minutes is already almost insultingly short, so we kept it at ten.”
04 / uncertainty
“Maybe, maybe. I don’t know. Oh, 2,000 years is a long time, or even 1,700 years.”
05 / belief
“Maybe there’ll be some solution because it is a very rapidly evolving field, but I think you have to have a large corpus, initially, of examples written in the language.”
06 / observation
“I’m sure someone is building some good houses somewhere. The point is, you don’t really need to, and so it only happens by accident.”
07 / belief
“Ah, wow. [laughs] Boy, there is a topic I think about a lot. There’s a bunch of different reasons people can be underrated.”
08 / belief
“I think if you said, “Okay, you have five hours to sit in a quiet room and build something,” I don’t think they’d be up to it, anyway.”
09 / belief
“Not as much in my experience, not as much. You don’t have to think ahead as much in painting.”
10 / uncertainty
“People were thinking at the time, “It didn’t have to be this bad.” [laughs] I don’t know.”
11 / observation
“In the old days, you had to have a classical-looking house because that was the only way to build houses.”
12 / belief
“I think Tintoretto would have looked down on Vasari as a minor-league artist, but that was interesting.”
13 / evaluation
“All you need to do is have this hard core of crazy left-wing supporters who will absolutely support you, no matter what, and turn out to vote. Everybody else is like, “Oh, local election doesn’t matter.”
14 / evaluation
“This sounds very arrogant, but I realized this with Y Combinator. I realized that Y Combinator had become famous long after it had become famous.”
15 / evaluation
“” Needless to say, that’s one of those things that sounds too good to be true, and it is, because if you go and look in philosophy classes .”
16 / observation
“We were especially taken by surprise because the thing is, the companies we funded would grow until they had thousands of employees, but YC itself didn’t grow.”
17 / preference
“Classic YC office hours were to walk down the block and talk as you walk, which also has the side benefit that you are side-by-side, and not looking the other person in the face, which I think may be better.”
18 / evaluation
“No start-up is thinking, “Well, I better not do that because Microsoft might enter that and destroy me.”
19 / evaluation
“There was a guy on Twitter — I think his name was Rob Miles — who said that trying to make safe AI will be like trying to make a secure operating system. That is absolutely true, and therefore frightening, because the way you make a secure operating system is not by sitting down and thinking at a table with a piece of paper about the principles for making a secure operating system.”
20 / evaluation
“It sounds weird, but if you look at where the money’s spent at auction, it’s almost all fashionable contemporary crap because if you think about how prices in very high-end art are set, they’re auction prices.”
21 / uncertainty
“I don’t know what he meant by it, and I also don’t know what it’s like inside OpenAI, really.”
22 / evaluation
“Because I was studying Florentine history, all the buildings are right around you, and I found myself thinking, “Damn, Florence was New York City [laughs] in 1450.”
23 / commitment
“I’ll investigate this summer when we’re going to go back to YC and talk to some founders, and I’ll talk to the partners, and I’ll see what’s going on, because I had a mental note to check and see if this is actually true.”