The Winding Path of Progress | Sam Altman | Talks at Google

[Music] hi everyone welcome to our talks at Google event I'm gonna go through some logistics first this is a fireside chat style talks so we'll take about 40 minutes to talk through some questions and then in the last 20 minutes we'll open up to the audience to submit questions both in person here through mic in the back of the room and also through the dory go slash ask Sam and I'd like to thank everyone who has helped out to make this talk possible including our facilities team and everyone on the p.m. speaker series organizing team

so it's great to have Sam Altman here with us today for talks at Google Sam is the president of Y Combinator which is widely regarded as one of the top startup incubators in Silicon Valley he went to Stanford and studied computer science and was the founder and CEO of a mobile location-based startup called loped which was funded by YC as part of its first class of startups in 2005 and acquired by financial services company Green Dot in 2012 in 2014 he was named president of Y Combinator and since then he's worked on a wide range

of initiatives from YC research which is a non-profit branch of Y Combinator that focuses on doing pure research around moonshot ideas like universal basic income and he's also worked on open AI which is a non-profit AI research company looking into finding ways to create safe friendly artificial intelligence that can actually help all of humanity and it's great to have you here thanks for having me so just as I mentioned you're involved in a wide range of things from YC to open AI and most recently you released the united slate so I wanted to ask you

how you think about prioritizing the projects that you work on you know I think optimal time allocation is probably like an AI complete problem I think if you can get to spending like one percent of your time perfectly that's that's really good and so I think this idea of figuring out what to focus on and what not to focus on is both really hard and still significantly under invested in the frameworks that I have used the sort of two big frameworks that I've used to figure out how to allocate time one is impact maximization /

regret minimization so I try to look at those two curves together and I try to think about where I can have the biggest net impact on the world net positive impact on the world easy to have a big impact and and then also just regret minimization you know you get you get to live once it's really important that you do what you want to do and that you spend time with the people you'd like to work with and work on the things that you find personally fulfilling in so if I think I'm gonna really regret

doing something or regret not doing something even if I think it's not the best use of my time for pure sort of than that impact on the world I'm still willing to be like to take that really seriously and I think that makes me do better at the things I do that do help the world so you know the broad things that I've learned that I like to do one is teach people another is create economic growth I really do believe that one of the things that is most fundamentally going wrong right now in the

country is that we don't have enough economic growth and little that we do is not evenly distributed at all and so I think in a democracy you you really want everyone's lives to get better every year we're basically insensitive to the absolute quality of our lives and extremely sensitive to relative differences year over year to our neighbors and it's it's really important that everyone's life is getting better constantly and I think economic growth is important to that I think that I think the AI is gonna be the most important technological trend of our lifetime so

I'm spending a lot of my time on that and you know I try to think about things on those two strategies the other framework besides the sort of impact maximization regret minimization that I found really useful is spend a little bit of effort China a lot of things and then relentlessly prune down and focus quickly on the ones that you liken the ones that seem to be working so in some sense this is the Y Combinator model of fund a lot of startups with a little bit of money and then you know most don't work

out and some work really well and you spend more time and more money on the ones that do and this is the hey guys this is the thing that I've tried to apply to my life more generally is this idea that I can try a lot of things with a little bit of effort it's very hard to predict exactly what's gonna work and what hasn't but then the the hard part about that and the thing that most people don't do is you really want to relentlessly focus down on on the ones that do work and

the last thing I'll say about prioritization is the other hack I have learned is if you can get one really great partner with you on every project that will cover up a lot of the slack because if you try to do multiple things at once crises come at the same times and that's really hard if you have to do it all yourself and focusing more specifically on productivity like what are some life hacks that maybe you apply to make your everyday more productive um and I think there's like a lot of crap written about productivity

secrets on the internet and people sort of like get into this thing where they spend more time like trying to be productive about their productivity system they actually get anything's done I I will say I think that well it's a - I think pieces of advice that aren't obvious one is I think far more important than any particular system is just figuring out the right things to work on and so all of the time that people spend with like this new productivity app or that or whatever would be better spent like really trying to think

diligently about I have the same number of hours as anybody else what am I gonna spend them on and getting that right is more important than exactly like being perfectly productive with those hours a big part of that is not doing things that waste time I think if you can just like focus on the things that are important and not do the things that waste time you can be fairly sloppy with productivity otherwise and you'll still get far more done than most people that's it's really hard to do that the other thing that I think

people don't think about enough is figuring out your own personal like rhythms of productivity and there's huge variance I've noticed between people that figure this out and don't so like for me personally it turns out that I am most productive if I go to sleep late wake up late and then keep the first like three or four hours of the day and don't schedule any meetings like work from home like get through my list of stuff then and then like pack all my meetings when I'm kind of less productive it just grinding and stuff out

or thinking creatively in the afternoon and like it took me some number of years to figure it out because it didn't like fit well with the work schedule I was naturally in but then I was like alright if this is like the thing to that makes me most productive then and I like make my whole schedule work to support that and that was like a really important change for me so I think figuring out your own personal like optimal times to work on what kind of different things people don't really talk about that much and

at least for me it had a huge impact shifting gears a little bit but still trying to get your perspective on different things related to day to day one of the key issues that has come up recently is bias in the workplace and both conscious and unconscious bias and I wanted to get your perspective on what are some of the strategies that you implement personally whether in the way you interact with people that you encounter or in how you approach the decision-making process in using strategies to minimize your own bias look I think this is

an important conversation happening in Silicon Valley right now and there's a lot of opinions on a lot of sides but I would just like to say it the following I think no matter what you believe about biology no one that I respect does not believe that women and racial minorities and a number of other groups face an absolutely unfair playing field their entire lives I think people start getting told directly indirectly from the very young age this is the kind of thing you should do or can do or whatever and that has an effect a

compliment anyone and I think trying to counter that is really important and I think again I think there are things people can reasonable well-meaning people can disagree on and I think unfortunately we spend all of our time talking about the disagreements and we don't focus enough on the agreements and I think almost all smart reasonable people will agree that the society we grew up in has a hugely unfair playing field um and I think because of that it is not enough to talk about unconscious bias I think that is a real problem to be clear

I think we are all a product at the society we are up in and we all have biases that aren't our fault but still a responsibility to counteract but one thing I don't like about the discussion in Silicon Valley about unconscious bias and how that's the problem we need to fix is I think it is not nearly sufficient and it ignores the good thing to fix but it ignores the fact that you know decades or centuries of society have built up a very uneven playing field and that is why we do need programs to try

to proactively counter that so I think it's you know I think it's really important we not lose sight of that and an unconscious bias training alone although currently very fashionable will not fix that that said I do believe unconscious bias is a problem we try to counteract it a by talking about it and doing training which I think does help but be I think one of the things that we have done that unfortunately other investors have not done as much it's just have a very diverse partnership and we have six female GPS on our team

and I'm that's you know probably a large part of the women in top at best novels in Silicon Valley and that's that's really good we have you know the CEO of our core program is black and I think I hate to play that kind of like who's the most discriminated stack game but I think black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley haven't accept a hard time and I think by having a more diverse team it helps us have broader networks and also think about our own unconscious bodies all the time and the issue of politics or maybe

even bringing these issues up in the workplaces some sometimes seen as a taboo and yet you've been pretty vocal about your views on current political events and also other issues that are coming up in Silicon Valley so I wanted to ask you how you walk that fine line between expressing your opinions but also minimizing any repercussions that that could have on the day-to-day business of YC well now it's not even controversial you know like now all the tech CEOs are talking about politics um when I started doing it a couple of years ago kind of

at the beginning of the rise of Trump it was controversial - two things were going on one is I think no one took no seriously so most people are like oh this is a ridiculous thing that's going to go away - is that I think in normal times it does make sense for business leaders of large organizations to remain apolitical you know I think it actually does make that makes a lot of sense it's it's a huge distraction it's hugely time-consuming and it has all of these like weird negative effects like you know if you

piss off the president he can do bad bad things to you however however these are not normal times and I think the you know like when the future of the Republic is at risk the duty to the country and our values transcends the the duty to your particular company and your stock price and I think I started that a little bit earlier than other people but at this point I'm in a very good company and it doesn't seem to be that controversial anymore what are some things that you wish people knew about you that they

don't know about you uh you know at this point I we just like to have like my own little quiet private life back I don't feel like I'll say nothing at all okay fair answer moving on to talking a little bit about YC and what you look for in companies are there any qualities in founders that you think are overrated or underrated yeah I think the most underrated quality the most underrated quality of all is being really determined this is more important than being smart this is more important than having a network this is more

important than a great idea the hardest thing about starting a company is the level and the frequency of bad stuff that happens to you and most people that are good in really other ways eventually just get killed the company gets killed by stuff going wrong and you know so much about being a successful entrepreneur is just not giving up when we have funded people who have a great idea perfect background on paper and you know a great product and still failed it has usually been that they're insufficiently determined so I think this is the most

important non-obvious skill of a founder of course you need a good product in a good market and to be smart but that's really obvious the degree to which being like a you know three or four standard deviation outlier on determination is a required skill of a CEO is not something that was obvious to me when I started that's also bad because it's really hard to select it's really hard to identify that you know as we have said more publicly how important that is people applying to YC have gotten better better at telling us stories from

their past life about how they overcame these impossible odds to get through something and and unlike intelligence which is very difficult to fake in a you know one-hour meeting you can definitely fake determination you know one hour meeting so that's one thing that really matters another thing that really matters that is non-obvious is independent thought and and this I think is an even more unusual skill than determination um I think both of these you can make a conscious effort and build up but I think independent thought is one of the hardest skills to to build

up because like we are all speeding of social pressures from birth we are all pushed to think like other people and if you think in your own lives about the number of people you spend time with that you would say are true independent thinkers that consistently have new ideas you haven't heard from other people and think about the world in different ways um it's probably a very short list and yet these are the people that start all the interesting companies the consensus ideas everyone tries Google will eat your lunch at and they're also not kind

of really big trends of the future you want startup ideas if you picture a Venn diagram and here you have is a good idea and here you have sounds like a bad idea you want that tiny little overlap and and those are the kind of ideas that are the hardest to identify and the ones that even if you do manage to notice them most people will talk you out of so I'd say those are two non-obvious skills that we look for and what's one challenge that YC companies face repeatedly that you've noticed hiring engineers when

Google can just sort of like throw unlimited cash anyone they want has become very problematic for startups I think the good thing about that I always try to like I always try to find the good in any bad situation and the good thing about this is it means that if a start-up does not all of the startup all of the really good startups have really important missions eventually they figured out they I mean I have an on day one but they eventually get to this like missionary mindset and it used to be that even if

you didn't have that like you could just sort get a bunch of mercenaries to come work for you and now you can't because you can't help at Google and so one positive side effect of this thing has been that startup the importance now of a startup having a really clear and really important mission on day three has gone up a lot and I think that's leading to better startups because otherwise you just can't recruit another common problem that startups have and this doesn't sound like a great insight but most startups still don't ever build a

product that people want and it doesn't seem to matter how much we talk about this it doesn't seem to matter how much anyone talks about this people still keep trying to do anything about this and if there's like one thing that a start-up has to get right its build a product that people really want not a little if they want it a little bit that kind of you won't generate enough momentum like you got to build something that some people really love and after failing because of insufficiently determine founders this is the number two reason

that startups that seem really good otherwise fail moving on to talking about different technologies what would you say is the biggest challenge that we're facing in terms of making progress on artificial intelligence right now well I don't know if any of you saw this but opening I beat the best 1v1 but the best single player dota players in the world last Friday and I when we started that project at the beginning this year I did not think that was gonna happen this year and I wasn't even sure it was gonna happen next year and it

was very wild to watch that happen because it was almost purely self training and it was this very complex environment and the a I was just playing itself and getting better and better and better in fact the final bot that we had that beat all the humans handily one day later it lost 6040 to a one day more evolved version of itself just to give you a sense for the rate of improvement and and so I think people are kind of asleep at the wheel here there are problems but again in the same spirit of

always trying to figure out like the good not the bad we are making unbelievable progress maybe too much progress but I think I think of all the things I worry about with AI the technical barriers to progress or not the top of the list there's another camp that says that maybe we're placing too much emphasis on the threat of AI what do you think about that yeah I think we we don't talk enough about the benefits I think the AI has the potential to eliminate like nearly all human suffering in the next couple of decades

I think we can have a world of abundance we can eliminate poverty over time we can probably cure a whole lot of diseases there all these wonderful things that the technology can do I think we're already seeing that and just how much better a lot of consumer products we use every day have gotten people like disaster porn people are more interested in talking about the end of the world than they are about life getting timber is not better every year and having that compound which gets a lot better so you know you can if you're

a journalist you can write an article about how AI is going to end the world and get a lot of clicks and you know a pageview bonus or whatever you get or you can like write an article about how AI is like gradually making all these problems 10% better and probably no one reads it certainly no one shares it and so I think for whatever reason the waiver wire is to talk much more about the downside of this than the upside but the upside I think is gonna be huge re is huge and what do

you think about crypto currencies you see yeah I mean I think you know it's gonna go up and down like I bought my Bitcoin a long time ago I plan to hold them for a really long time I try not to watch the price ticks but it's so addicting that I can't help myself I think this is not investment advice I think I think the only super compelling use proven use case we have seen so far is store value and as a replacement for gold I think we are seeing real adoption there and real collective

belief that actually makes it have some value however if that's how it's gonna play out then I think Bitcoin should dominate biggest Network first biggest brands most collective belief whatever and so I have been surprised by the continual strength and all of the altcoins I think there are potential other truly valuable applications of the blockchain you know file coin is a YC thing so I know that one pretty well and I can see that being big but I think most of what's going on feels like a complete outside a Bitcoin feels like a complete speculative

bubble and I feel bad that a lot of people are going to get burned so I think probably the right thing to do if you believe in it is to you know buy Bitcoin and then I'll think about it for another five years mm-hmm is there any specific product area or technology that you think people are sleeping on sure a lot hey i as we mentioned I think people are asleep at the wheel in a really big way on nuclear fusion I think is within some single-digit number of years of working and because it's been

so bad for so long people are just kind of burned out and not really taking a new look at new materials and stronger magnets and better computer models that's gonna enable this to work synthetic biology again it's like people talk about it a lot a couple of years ago it didn't quite work as fast as people were hoping so we had like this hype cycle and then it really falls off and now when part where I think the interesting work is happening and and people aren't paying enough attention I guess yeah that's a topic hanging

on for a long time but I'll one day two three sure is there any particular problem that you think technology can't solve how to make us nice to each other technology has clearly been quite bad at solving I won't say it can't but I haven't seen it yet and I certainly don't think technology can by itself and I think I think we are kind of in this situation at least in the developed world where the world keeps getting better and we keep getting unhappier and you know there's like a decent amount of data on this

and I think I think technology is not entirely to blame but it's certainly not blameless and I think 30 minutes left I couldn't even start the conversation but I think the number of like things that technology has done to make us more isolated feeling relatively worse if a friend of mine lil old er said she never used to be unhappy because she had no idea what she was missing and now that she has to watch like I'm very bad at pop culture I'm gonna pick a random Kim Kardashian like fly around in private jets on

Instagram all day she's jealous and it like makes her very unhappy and it didn't used to happen and I've been thinking about that a lot in the last couple of weeks and I I don't have a solution to that but I understand why that's a problem so I think figuring us how to make us like happier and nicer to each other in particular I think one thing that technology does that's really bad is you know we have some probably long-standing evolutionary pressure but even if I really don't like you I'm very unlikely to come stand

next to you and say I hate you you're a jerk like you know whatever else people say on Twitter a lot of things because there's this like you know we're like these pack animals and we have to like live with each other and you know help each other survive but somehow like on Twitter that goes away and and I think like I'll save my whole rant about Twitter but I think like that is a platform in particular that rewards saying the most aggressive snarky things that's how you get likes and retweets and sort of value

out of the platform but a lot of Technology does this it we don't have whatever kind of like the human be nice to each other in person instinct is and we have these platforms that reward being bad reward being a jerk and and so I think I'm not optimistic technology is going to solve that problem I think that's gonna have to be people solving that problem in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2015 you mentioned that you were optimistic about the future and that was right before all of the elections stuff happened and the situation

that we find ourselves in so would you say that you're still optimistic yeah of course um like progress is not it's it's not a perfectly exponential curve it's not it's not even a straight line and you know we are clearly in a challenging period now but I think if you look back at the last few hundred and then few thousand years if you zoom out enough that the squiggles on the curve kind of disappear the world's getting so much better and I think that's gonna keep happening and I am you know even with everything going

on right now I'm delighted to be alive right now and not a hundred years ago and certainly not you know 200 or 2000 years ago and I think we do have technology to thank for a lot and we have better governance just like the number of people living in a democracy you know 200 years ago was very low if the percentage and as horrible as things are the fact that we get to stand up and speak our minds without fear of you know being thrown in jail for political opposition and the fact that we get

to vote again three and a half more years I think that's amazing and I think it's easy to take that for granted but yeah I think the future is gonna be a lot better I mean very optimistic what do you see as being a big challenge that we're facing as a society right now how we deal with a world where the natural forces are for wealth to concentrate into the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people as I mentioned earlier I think people are more sensitive to relative quality of life than absolute quality

of life and I think technology is naturally a force that's a giant lever that tends to create way more wealth but really concentrated so I think one of the most tone-deaf things people say in Silicon Valley is you know like poor people should be happy they get this Android phone for not much money they can access anything in the world and they wouldn't have that without us so why are they complaining and okay like there is some truth to that I do think it is cool about the world that like the richest person and someone

living in absolute poverty carrier on the same phone that that is something that would not there was no analogy to that other than maybe like if you got a really bad disease there was no like equality like that you know four hundred five hundred years ago however that point which is always what Silicon Valley falls back to I think it's like maybe not the most possible most tone-deaf possible response but up there like people want to feel like they have agency they want to feel like they have a voice in the future they want to

feel like they can participate and they want to feel like they're not just kind of like given this baseline while you know like they toil in the provinces and Silicon Valley just gets all the money and I think people who don't see that or just not thinking clearly and so I think one of the greatest threats something else I don't think technology can fix on its own is how we get to a more just world I really really fundamentally believe that economic justice is the most important thing you can do for social justice and if

you have all of the resources going to a small set of people even if everybody else has having their absolute quality of life raised very quickly that's not enough you recently announced the United slate which puts forth some policy proposals as well as an invitation for candidates what would you say success looks like like for that you know if we can run five six candidates in the 2018 cycle on that election on that platform and have two of them win their elections I think that'd be an incredible start and you know maybe it doesn't work

at all because it may be the kind of maybe those issues although I believe they're important are not yet ready for to convince the public at large but I think it'll be a good start and I think over time it would be really good if people on the progressive side built up a kind of long-term organization focusing on winning elections and shifting public perception in all levels the right has done a fabulous job with this congratulations to any of you on that side but I would like the the left do a better job at that

I don't I I don't think we're putting forward our best game there in your invitation you also mentioned that you'd be willing to work with Democrats independents and Republicans is there any issue in particular that you see anyone regardless of political ideology coming together and agreeing on more so than other issues um I think there there are a lot of issues again I think people agree on way more than they disagree on so I think you know it's we want around the state and talk to Californians Republicans Democrats San Francisco LA Fresno Shasta County wherever

you go the price of housing is like the biggest issue for most sort of regular people that are not Google employees maybe even for Google employees it's really really bad I mean it's like this is if you could fix I think one thing that would have hugely positive secondary effects it's like bring the cost of housing down by a factor of ten and be transformative for society it's a what eliminate government regulations yeah like I think many regulations have good elements I'm not I'm not kind of the libertarian anarchist all government regulations are bad but

I do think the the sort of no more building no building taller has been disastrous for the state and I think like it is the worst possible allocation of resources to have people tie up every free penny they can find into the place they live like think about anything else we could spend that on think about what it would be like if people could like live close to where they work rather than commuted now and have to get here each day and that is something that Democrats Republicans independents almost everybody agrees on or at least

there are people in all those camps that that do so I think like again easy to talk about the divisions it's really good that when you go talk to regular people they all agree on what the most important issues and they I want to fix it in the state what do you think the tech industry's role is in government politics look I think we are all citizens of this country and we all have like you know there is a there is a right to participate in the electoral process and I think there's also not there

is a duty to do that and I think when I think I think tech is going through such a boom right now it is easy to say hey I'm just gonna focus on like doing my thing you know building products making money and whatever and I'm gonna figure out someone else's let someone else take care of the rest one of the kind of like disappointing things that I have learned is I've gotten to spend more and more time with increasingly influential people and kind of how the world works is that there is no plan and

there is no group figuring out everything and it's it's kind of like up to all of us everyone hopes like the reason conspiracy theories are so appealing is that like everybody wants there to be a conspiracy like you want to think that like someone has a plan that you know there's like there's all this stuff happening someone's got a centralized plan and it's all gonna work out and like I think one of the sad realization zuv growing up is that there are no grown-ups no one has this master plan and if if we don't participate

that thing can just go off the rails what do you think are some of the most effective ways for employees at a large tech company like Google to get involved in government and politics um everyone wants an answer other than this one because it would be more convenient but I think one of the answers is to just run for office we have this process we have this like system instead of rules that we've all agreed to and everyone wants some way to hack around the edges of that rather than just participate directly and that's okay

there are good things to do but I think just taking the problem head-on is not enough people try that and there's rumors going around that Mark Zuckerberg is gonna run for office like every other week and there's also been rumors about you running for governor and we've seen tech people run for office in the past Meg Whitman ran for governor of California in 2010 but she lost by a significant margin to Jerry Brown so my question is do you think that it's actually feasible for someone in tech to run for office and win or is

there too much of this perception of the tech industry as being elitist such that people won't connect with voters I think there is I think at least people should try I think the tech industry is the most hated in the Bay Area and if you go out throughout the rest of the state or the country there's a lot of people who think it's really cool they aspire to it they wanna they want to participate in it and I think it is easy to get too negative a view of how technology people are perceived here I

don't know if a tech person can win the presidency we're gonna find out but what I am confident about is that tech not people from the technology industry could start winning local school board and city council and you know congressional seats and that'd be a great thing to start with is there any person currently living that you would want to run for president who's your ideal candidate ideal I can't answer that on the fly that's I would like it's a good question to think about when you said that I was like oh I should figure

out who that person isn't go try to fix them to run but I don't have an answer like ready to go on my head okay well with that I'm going to open up the floor for audience questions so if you have a question feel free to go to the mic in the back of the room or also submit your question to the dory hi um you mentioned the anecdote about your friend being unhappy and and Kim Kardashian and it reminded me of a quote and it's set up people aren't unhappy because they want to be

happy they're unhappy because they want to be happier than other people and you mentioned that technology may or may not be able to solve this so I'd like to hear some of your ideas or success strategies on how to solve this on a micro and macro level whether it be delete Twitter - so that's a good thing to do that's a good thing to do I yeah I deleted all the social apps from my phone and I yeah I can still like check them on my computer when I want but I don't have that like

constant urge to like push button for dopamine hit here and that's that's been really good you know I think after talking to a bunch of these people about the things that make people happy there's like the obvious stuff which is like spend time with loved ones that everyone knows even if they don't do but there's a bunch of things that are like very not or less obvious to me that seem to have huge measured effects like taking time to think about the things that went well as opposed to the things you're upset about or like

going for a walk outside every day no matter what and I think as we get sort of to abundance and unlimited resources this is going to be a more important topic what I would encourage you to do is to just like start reading there's a lot of literature on this no one seems to care about enough to spend time but I would say start reading it and hopefully I'll finish my blogpost on it soon thank you hey Sam thanks for coming I wanted to ask a question about the larger landscape of VC in general heard

a rumor that YC is looking into a growth fund think of broken TechCrunch like a month ago like potentially raising a billion dollar fund I wanted to get your thoughts on growth first venture and how you see growth evolving for the Bay Area in general you see private companies staying yeah very longer so um we already have a growth fund it's called YC continuity we raised the first one in 2015 it's about halfway invested and it it basically follows on in capital in YC companies one of the things that I wanted to do after I

joined YC was start to fund hard tech companies nuclear fusion synthetic biology quantum computing self-driving cars long list and one of the the one of the good things that I realized is that nobody else was funding those companies and so we could have our pick one of the bad things that I realized there's nobody else was funding those companies and so we could fund them all we wanted and there was no follow on capital and I think so that was the actually the genesis for our growth fund is that there was this class of companies

that I think are really important and really valuable and they weren't getting funded since then we've expanded it and we we fund lots of other companies I will certainly say that there is no shortage of growth capital for software companies in Silicon Valley like you know it may have gotten harder to raise a seed or an A round it probably has somewhat but if you have things working like when you want to go raise a B or C around and you have like this beautiful exponential growth like you will not be able to keep up

with the number of term sheets you're getting that is the stage that I think just has a huge amount of capital allocated to it as as companies are staying private longer as public market investors have a harder and harder time finding alpha they are more and more willing to do stuff like this so that part of the market is not suffering at least not yet sure let me do a question from the dory we have a question about universal basic income and how we've Google has been supporting give direct least research on ubi in Africa

and you're a proponent here in the US so what are your thoughts on how when and where the universal basic income approach might be most effective yeah um I don't think universal basic income is a solution to all problems I think in fact of the bigger problem that we were talking about earlier of what makes people happy and fulfilled and feel needed and valued and meaning in their lives it is not sufficient to solve that problem and I don't think it will replace like the entire other social safety net like the people who are like

eliminate everything else you know no healthcare no schools no minimum wage I'm basically I'm I don't believe in that either but I do think that if we do all of our jobs if we Silicon Valley do all of our jobs we will create more wealth than the world has ever seen before and less jobs and in that world I think there is a moral obligation to eliminate poverty I think poverty is a obviously very bad thing but it is worse even than people realize if you if you look at the studies on the long-term psychological

damage that living in constant poverty does to people and how it means that you never get a chance to really invest in your own future because you're always just trying to survive I think there's just a huge amount of wasted potential and so you know there are a lot of arguments about a ubi this was another thing like when we started this a couple years ago I did not predict at all that this was going to like ignite into this big national debate it was like we're just trying to hire a researcher you know like

maybe this is a good idea can we just do a project and it's just been like so I don't think I quite understand why it has become such a national issue so quickly but I do think that longer term if we have the ability to eliminate poverty we will get a lot more out of the world as a whole as you started the research or experiment in East Bay have you noticed anything that maybe you didn't expect or has it change your attitude towards it in any way you know we're like seven or eight months

into a five-year study so not yet okay hi Sam I'm thinking more in general of founders but this could be general too but what advice do you frequently give but you find most people never actually follow through on I mean no one ever listens to any advice at any sort so all of it I think I think the thing that people well the piece of advice that people later say they wish they had listened to is that it is very easy to get sucked into a path in life and you know you can do things

like say oh I want to start a startup someday or oh I want to be a you know AI researcher someday but first I'm gonna go do this other job to like you know make money and gain experience in whatever and it's so easy to like get sucked into a path where you spend your entire life doing something that is not really what you want to do that's probably the piece of advice that I have given people that they have most often come to me like five years later and said I really wish I had

listened to that thank you sure I'm curious to hear your thoughts on relative rates of progress in AI between China and everywhere else so you mentioned nobody has a plan but China has a plan for state-level centralized investment nai where as Elon Musk is calling for regulation that would slow down yeah everywhere else China does plan that's true they don't doesn't always work they don't always have global coordination you know like right now we're in this kind of world where it seems like you have like the Internet and China the Internet in the rest of

the world maybe they have a plan for their piece of it I don't honestly know how far along China is with AI and I don't think anybody else honestly really does either I think it would be bad to get into an arms race with China over AI I've got something we should try to avoid and I think there is a real opportunity although it might we may not have the leaders in place to do it right now to make this a joint kind of like worldwide project rather than another space race or nuclear arms race

thanks hi Sam I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on funding hard tech because I think there was a big problem with private capital allocation and like 70 billion dollars was put into VC last year which is a drop in the bucket in terms of worldwide investment so do you see like YC maybe raising and a hundred billion dollar fund in the future maybe like how can we solve this I think capital is allocated really badly and unfortunately there are huge efforts like if you have this really valuable thing which is you

get access to invest in great startups in the most of the world doesn't then there will obviously be a super return there and you're gonna work really hard to protect that and so I think I think expanding access to invest in startups which is happening but slowly is a really good thing to do and I think you know like crowdfunding equity crowdfunding we're still in the early days of but it's an important trend and I think that will change the capital allocation I think you're seeing I think you're seeing startups in all these different ways

go to non-traditional funders and that's been really good we first saw that with consumer hardware we're now in a lot of other places you know I think the other thing that's happening finally is there's just and there's bad to this too but there's just a huge amount more capital coming in to fund early-stage private companies mid stage private companies and I expect that in a world where interest rates stay even close to as low as they are we are in the very early in into that trend so I think capital will get you know my

general model is that the world is very complex financial system capital sloshes around looking for the best return there are periods where there's a really outperforming return but then more capital gets allocated there I think we're seeing that now but do you think that nuclear fusion company could raise a hundred million dollars in an echo or something like yeah or maybe I wouldn't suggest that they do it Aiko but I do think they can raise a hundred million dollars and I don't think they could have three years ago and I think that's a really positive

trend for the world that this stuff is now at least somewhat possible awesome thanks sure another Dory question what are the most common reasons that qualified candidates get rejected from YC well there is one particular thing that is that happens a lot with super talented people from large tech companies so since I'm here I'll mention that one which is you are a really great person really talented really smart really driven and you don't having a good idea or you know any idea so you make up a bad one and there's this like myth about startups

the idea doesn't matter at all and I think that's just there's existential proof that that's not true and I think there is there is this particular failure mode of people from the big tech companies with just like hey I'm really talented yes you are so I'm gonna like start a company and I'll figure out what to do later and I think that isn't usually what produces the great companies and so we have learned that it's much much better if you're otherwise a qualified candidate to have a have a good idea and I think that's the

that'd be the common failure case for people coming out of Google hey Sam hey what are your thoughts about you know where you're gonna go or what you're gonna do with your life after YC or the second acrossing are you gonna take a load of office seriously you know I don't even like know what I'm gonna do in three weeks I I plan to run YC for a really long time I I do plan to get continually more involved with politics but I'd like to support others not run for office myself at least not anytime

soon you know like I am a big believer in do the things that you like think about in the shower in the morning when you can think about anything you want and your kind of mind is just off and the things I keep coming back to are like how can I make YC like a hundred times bigger how could I make sure that the arrival of AI goes well and in a short term how can I help our political system from going off the rails so or any more off the rails done already has so

you know I kind of plan to keep working on those things for hopefully you know a really long time I have a question about the general way Silicon Valley walks because it seems like it's a system which in which you have like the most talented minds dealing with maybe not the most important issues like you have the sharpest mind working on social apps or mobile apps but we still don't have a cure for cancer all we still don't have another way of like having energy or like really important stuff that the world should handle and

so my question is do you agree with that what's your perspective on that and how do you think maybe this can be addressed I don't agree with that I think I used to be my job as a capital allocator and now I be my job as a talent allocator so most of my day is like spent meeting with really smart people and trying to convince them to work on important problems and you know I think in 2007 what everyone said is the best minds of our generation you to build spaceships and now they're like moving

numbers around my Wall Street and in 2017 what people say is the best minds of our generation used to build spaceships and now they get me to click on ads and you know there's always some truth though there's always someone to pick on there but like I think open AI has some of the smartest minds in our world if our generation working on having a I go well I think helium which is that fusion company I mentioned some of the smartest minds of our generation working on nuclear fusion why see I think last time I

count is founded eight company is working on a cure for cancer incredibly talented people or cures for cancer cancers I think you can always say there's all these people like working on bad stuff or stuff it doesn't matter but you know I think Google is still like a really great thing for the world yeah and I think it does matter I think it's always easy to pick on people and say you're not working on a cure for cancer you know you're wasting their time but you're making this thing better that people use every day and

their lives would be a lot worse if it went away and you're making it better every day and I think it's it's it's really easy to pick on people and say you know that person is not spending her time right and I think it always says more about the person that says that then the person they're pointing to and if you're doing something useful for the world if you're doing something you enjoy if you're sort of like even if you're only the small impact but on a product that a lot of people really use and

love I think that's really valuable and I think the people who say this generally have a lot of insecurities about how they're spending their time so you don't think like Silicon Valley's like avoiding the tough problems I invite you to like come sit in my office for a day and like listen to the people coming through and what they're working on I really don't think that No thank you I seen that you're a largely influential public figure could you speak to the privileges that might have led to that and helped you with your success and

how you may be a good or about ally and then also seeing that a lot of our consumer products are largely bias specifically to the people who create them which is largely Silicon Valley engineers like myself and others in this room how do you keep your ideas and thoughts diverse and addressing intersectional needs yeah great question um I basically had like nearly all of the possible privileges I had wonderful loving parents I grew up in a safe house I'm a white guy we had enough money that I was able to pursue the things that I

was interested in and go to a great college and it's never lost on me how if I had been born a mile in a different place to a different family difference can call a different gender I wouldn't be where I am now I view that as an obligation to try to make the world more just going forward I think anyone who is really successful and doesn't like I think anyone should try to do the best they can with whatever hand they're dealt but if you're dealt you know like four aces then and you win then

I think you have an extra obligation to try to sort of make the world a little better so I try to be really thankful of what everyone's done that has allowed me to do this I also try to figure out how to pay that forward and I think I think anyone who is really successful or almost anyone who is really successful has like privileged luck skill and hard work and I think people who try to say it's just one or just the other all tend to be wrong so I'm thankful for that and I try

to pay that forward I in terms of biases in the product I think this is one of the reasons that diverse teams are most important the moral question aside that consumer products the teams the companies that I think have done the best job addressing this head-on have had a very diverse set of voices around the table and I think that is always the strategy I recommend because that's the only one I've seen consistently work thank you sure we're on time now but if you can do these last three questions quickly we can get through them

sure thank you for coming Sam my question is on and artificial intelligence companies it seems to me that the scarce or valuable thing is data in those areas and less so the algorithm because they're mostly open-source so I was wondering how you think about that when I used to believe that I now believe that it's gonna be compute not data I think data is important but there will be a lot of it available and just my own experience with open AI to really be at the forefront here you just need massive amounts of compute and

so I used to ask companies like how they're gonna get a lot of data and I asked them how they're gonna go out of compute okay thank you sure hey Sam thanks for coming um I know you were talking about like you know people are you becoming unhappier and the world food problem all this kind of things that are kind of like quantifiable like physical needs of people have you or had companies that come to you kind of like try to solve the spiritual needs of people because we can identify the physical needs but what

about like spiritual needs or research or companies we have had a few none of them have really worked yet but you know one that like stuck out a memory was a company came to us and said like churches like you know organized religion had this really important effect that was totally separate from the religion itself which was this this tight-knit community and how do you build that in a world where most people or the client number of people believe in religion and go to church and so I think there are people thinking about things like

that which is sort of these non-obvious attacks on the problem that are interesting but none that I could yet point to as here's this thing that's really worked well so you partnered with the ACLU earlier this year which you got mixed reactions to you I'm wondering what you've learned from that whole experience what successes you've had and what partnerships you're looking forward to with other nonprofits in the future I mean I was really excited about how that went that was a we had never done anything like that before we often try new things you know

they don't work sometimes they do that's when we would do again we would do something more like that I think there are these really important organizations in the world that can use our help to build better technology teams and that was an experiment that went well that we'd love to try again one of our software engineers Kay Jen went there for I think she won for like eight weeks almost the whole program sad my office has helped them we got a you know call from them later about how well it went been able to help

them put it you know expand and supplement their team and that you know I think that's something we'd like to try again and one last question because it's gotten so shirt boats Elon must recently call the for pre-emptive AI regulation at the National Governors Association as a chair of open AI and friend of mosques what is your opinion on this issue and what specific actions can we take to minimize future risk the specific thing I would support today is just insight like I think the government should understand where the edge of capabilities are and how

its evolving because I think no one certainly not the government knows what the regulation very I should look like today but I'd be in favor of starting that education process awesome so yeah that was our last question thank you everyone for coming [Applause] you