I'm Jack, Sam's brother, and we are here in our backyard where we also live with our other brother.
And Sam wanted to give some advice about how to have an impact on the world,
and since he couldn't interview himself, here I am. So Sam, thank you.
Thank you for taking the time.
Yeah, my pleasure.
So to get started, I think one of the things that people talk a lot about is how to get things done when you're working on.
But I know you spend a lot of time thinking about what to work on.
So could you talk a little bit about how to pick what's important to work on?
Yeah, I think you want to look for the intersection of what you're good at, what you enjoy,
and where you can create value for the world.
And in my experience, if you don't find some of the intersection of those three, it's
hard to really have an impact.
I think most people kind of just fall into what they work on, they don't give it much
thought, and there is benefit to that.
Sometimes you actually have to just try stuff to figure out what you like.
I really do think it is worth upfront thought about what you're going to spend most of your
waking time doing.
I think it's really good when people think about what they're good at, what they like,
and how they can create value for the world.
>> In addition to what people are working on, I know at Y Combinare, you talk a lot about
who people are working on things with.
How do you advise people to select sort of who they're working on things with?
>> This is really hard.
your tribe finding the sort of people that you end up working with on and off for the
rest of your career is really hard.
I think I'll tell you some things I've learned and I will admit that I don't have a perfect
answer to this yet.
But I think one thing is you should be willing to move for whatever you're doing, there tend
to be pockets of it around the world where there are similar people that are doing great
work and whatever feel you care about.
It's really worth trying to go be near them.
And so we get criticized sometimes at YC for having people
move to the Bay Area.
But bringing people together that are interested in this
similar thing of startups, I think, has been really
valuable for a lot of people.
I think another thing that I have learned is that whenever
I've helped people for no immediate benefit,
and with no intention of ever getting to benefit at all,
time and again in my career, it has really later benefited me a lot.
So I think you at some point often get to a point in your career where you're limited
by how many good people you know, and how many of those you can work with or get to do
things that together.
And so just helping a lot of people and spending a lot of time with a lot of people has benefited
me.
Years after I really help someone for no reason I get to invest in their startup and it goes
want to be as huge success, or were able to work on opening
eye together, any number of things.
I think just trying to help a lot of people and out of that
scene who is really impressive and who gets things done
is helpful.
And in terms of how to actually get things done,
so you've selected what to work on, who to work on it with,
you think maybe you found your tribe, and then now what?
What are sort of the best ways to actually accomplish big
things?
Well, there's a Charlie Rose quote on this that I've always
love than I've since added a one more element to it. But the quote is that the way things
get done in the world are through a combination of focus and personal connection. And the
additional point I would make after having thought about it for a while is that the third
factor is self-belief. It's you really have to have a deep-seated personal conviction
that this thing you're going to do that a lot of people say is really stupid, is going
to work and going to be important. But I think those three things focus personal connections
and self-belief in my experience
are how things get down in the world.
So since you were, you know, as long as, you know,
you've grown up and certainly through your 20s
and now you've worked incredibly hard.
And I know that a lot of the people around you
have worked very hard.
What's sort of the advice or the way
that you think about your work life balance in your 20s?
And what do you recommend to people who want to do these things
and also want to, you know, experience their 20s?
Well, I don't think I work as hard as a lot of people.
I think I do work pretty hard, but I'd say it's really,
I think it's, Compon Interest is a good metaphor here.
If you work really hard at the beginning of your career
and you get a little bit better at what you do
every day, every week, every year,
and you learn more and you meet more people,
and you just get more done,
there's a Compon defect,
and it's far better to put that time in
at the beginning of your career than at the end,
because if you do it at the beginning,
you get to benefit from it,
the rest of the time you work.
So one thing I always try to do is meet every person I had time for, go to everything I
could, and just spend a little bit more time trying to learn and get better at what I
did.
And I think that is really valuable.
The beginning of your career, I think in terms of setting the trajectory of the rest of
your career follows, is the most valuable time.
So obviously you don't want to work all the time because you're 20 or 20.
I do think you want to work harder than most people think you should.
I think that if you do that, you tend to benefit from it later.
Life is super unfair.
Sometimes you also just get unlucky.
All you can do is maximize chances there.
I do think that working hard early in your career to get the leverage in the compounding
effects is underrated and one of the most valuable pieces of advice that I never got.
going into that idea of these early years being particularly valuable and working very
hard on things.
How do you decide when you've worked on something long enough and it's time to call it quits
or when you've worked on it for four years and you're just about to have that breakthrough?
How do you make that distinction?
Yeah, this is really hard.
Knowing when to quit and knowing when to give up on something is there's no perfect answer
that, but it's really challenging to even get that approximately correct.
I think most people give up on things way too early.
So the mistake that most people make is they try something.
It does not immediately work.
You see this particularly in young entrepreneurs.
It does not immediately work.
After seven weeks they say, you know what, I tried this thing.
It's just not meant to be.
And I have too many other projects.
So they immediately give up.
And you kind of, you know, this satirical version of this is people that are 23 and have
started 14 startups because they give up on everyone before he had ever possibly
successful. These things are really hard. They take a very long time. There are a
lot of critics. There are a lot of people who say this thing sucks. It's gonna fail.
It's really stupid. And then also there's like what at YC we call the trough of
sorrow where no one even bothers to say it sucks because no one cares at all.
And that is at least just emotivating. Most of the founders that I have spent a
a lot of time that have gone on to be super successful,
spent a very long time on their idea
when a lot of other people would have given up.
And either people said it sucks,
or people said nothing at all.
And a framework that I have for when to give up
and when to keep working is it should be
an internal and an external decision.
If people aren't using it, or if people are saying it's bad,
that alone is not a reason to give up.
You wanna pay some attention to that, they might be right.
But I think the best entrepreneurs I know,
they make an internal decision about when to give up
or when to keep working on something.
It's basically, when you have run out of ideas
and something is not working, then it's a good time to stop.
And so into this idea that you need a long time
to do anything important, what's the source of motivation
for people?
Like what should people be looking to find,
to be inspired, or to keep going on these ideas
for a long period of time?
Yeah, I think if you don't actually believe what you're doing is really important.
If you don't derive satisfaction from what you're doing, then you will not be able to
sustain all of the bad things that happen in the incredibly long period of time that
the bad things happen over.
And so the only motivation that I have seen work for people over a long period of time
is enjoyment and what they're doing
and an intense belief that it matters.
And ideally liking the people that they go to work with every day.
But I think the reasons that a lot of people,
and by the way, it's totally cool when people start off saying,
well, I want to make money or I want to be famous.
I think a lot of people start that way
and they don't like to admit it.
But pretty quickly, or at least in the first few years,
I think a lot of people find a deeper mission
for why they do what they do.
And that drives them then for the rest of the time they work.
Have you noticed a change in what motivates you
over the last, say, 10 or 12 years?
Yeah, I mean, I think I, at this point,
I am sort of only interested in things
that I find sort of interesting and important.
And early on, like a lot of other people,
I think I was like, well, I want to make money.
I want to be in the press or whatever else.
And I wouldn't say that doesn't motivate me at all,
but it's honestly not a big factor at this point.
I just sort of, like, there's a set of things
that I think are important and I want to work on this.
I think another point about motivation
that people don't talk about enough is related to burnout.
So I was told, and I thought for a long time,
that you get burned out from working to hard.
And at least in my own experience,
what I found is that burnout actually comes from failing
and things not working.
Momentum is really energizing.
The lack of momentum is super draining.
And I find that I have infinite energy to work on things that I find interesting and that are working and almost none to work on things that I either don't find interesting or aren't working.
And so I think you see a lot of founders try something and fail and assume that they just can't work hard enough for no amount of energy or passion or whatever.
And that's actually not true. It's just that that thing didn't work. And what you should do is shut that company down, go on vacation and try again.
And many people then find that, oh, actually, when I'm doing this thing that I like and that is working,
I have a huge amount of energy and I can get a lot of stuff done.
And so when you look at really successful people and say, how do they get all these things done?
It's they have the benefit of momentum and momentum is energizing.
And the lack of momentum is really not energizing.
Working on a lot of these problems that kind of inspire this type of motivation are sort of inherently riskier.
And I know this is something that we've talked about a lot about sort of the concept of taking risk in a career being a repeated game
But how do you how do you think about the idea of taking risks in your career and how should people think about it
Maybe differently than they currently do
well
Yeah, I think people have terrible risk calculus in general
Even people who try to be really good about this are bad at it. The answer I think is almost always
A, you're wrong about what is risky and what is not risky.
And B, most people don't take enough risk.
Especially early in your career, being young and unknown and poor,
that is actually a great gift in terms of the amount of risk you can take.
And I think people don't capitalize on that enough.
I think what risk actually looks like is not doing something that you will then spend
the rest of your life regretting.
And there's a quote, people regret way more
the things they didn't do than things that they did do.
So if you really believe in something,
there's an idea that you're super passionate about.
And you take a calculated risk to start a company realizing
you may forgo a couple of years of steady income
at another job and whatever else.
And maybe people call you a failure or whatever.
That's a great risk to take.
And if you don't take that risk, I think,
you have a very high chance that you end up
regretting that. I think the wrong kind of risk to take is where people don't actually
do things or don't commit to something because they don't want to fail and they overrate
the risk of failure and the reputation damage or embarrassment or whatever. I think one really
important thing to strive for in your career is to be a do or not a talker. And the reason
that people don't do stuff, one is it's hard
and two is it's risky.
And so you have these people that want to dabble
on a bunch of different projects,
but never be all in on one.
And I think it's this combination of work and risk.
And it's, I think that's really bad.
I think history belongs to the doers.
And I think you should take a risk, actually do something.
Don't just sit around and talk and organize
and bring together groups and go to thought leadership
conferences and whatever it is these people spend their time
on other than actually building something.
And just take the risk of committing
to what you have conviction on.
Yeah, and I think people also seem to have sort
of the fear of being told know a lot and not asking for what
they want.
I'm sure that's something that you've encountered with people.
Yeah.
This was one of the other things I learned
that I wish I had gotten advice on early in my career
is ask for what you want.
You will get told know a lot, but sometimes it will work.
And I think you see a lot of entrepreneurs
shoot themselves in the foot because they don't ask
that person to quit their job and come join them.
They don't ask this big company to deal with them.
And they're just not aggressive enough.
And I think you being willing to ask what you want
and be somewhat aggressive are really important
characteristics of being an entrepreneur.
People don't wanna fail.
They don't want to be told no.
they don't want to end up in some crisis.
Another thing that I learned--
and I won't even say I wish someone told me this one,
because I don't think it's a lesson anyone can teach you.
You have to just live through it--
is that each crisis gets less scary than the one before it.
You're running a company now.
I hope you've noticed this by now.
There are a lot of things that really go wrong,
and they feel like company killing events,
and they feel like there's no way you're going to survive.
because the crises are really bad.
And the thing you learn is that you generally do survive these.
And that the world doesn't usually end.
And even if in the moment something happens,
you have no idea how you're going to get around it,
you eventually figure out a way.
And because of that, on the 19th major crisis,
you're like, well, I survived the first 18.
I'll probably get through this one.
And you kind of just do.
Definitely that ranks true.
So switching into a bit topic of sort of money
and sort of the long-term view of it
and how people can think about it most clearly,
I'm actually gonna start with a quick story
that I think illustrates a bit of sort of your views.
This is from when we were very young
and our grandma gave us each some stock.
- Oh, this is a good story.
- In a company.
- All right, you can tell this one.
- Okay.
- So she gave us each some stock
and a company that she thought we would like.
And so as you like to point out,
I was heavy as a child and one of the things I liked
Applebees and you were hacking on computers and one of the things that I
chose Apple and so we each got an equal amount of Apple and Applebees.
This is like 20 years ago.
It's like 20 years ago.
And I think neither of us has sold it.
In fact, you nicely brought me my Applebees stock back from St. Louis recently.
You're stock certificates.
It's just so long ago.
It's still papers are difficult.
Yes.
And I think inflation adjusted.
I've probably lost half my value there.
Whereas I think your Apple has gone up something like, I don't even want to think about it.
Hundreds, hundreds of things.
Yeah, it's been a lot.
How do you think about the long-term willingness to hold on to things?
What are the advantages somebody has early in their career?
How should people think about money when they're young?
>> Yeah, I still have those Apple shares marked in my brokerage account.
It's grandma's birthday Apple shares.
>> I have no choice.
>> No, I'm good.
I'm going to keep them my ship bench marked them against Apple days.
So I think that one of the few arbitrage opportunities left in the market is time.
I think we have gotten really good at high-frequency trading.
We have gotten really good at the price of things.
And we have gotten worse at the long-term value.
And I don't think you can go beat the market in a lot of ways.
But the one way I do is by making a long-term commitment to something.
I think that my new belief on how long I should hold stock and the best coming design
invest in is forever.
And I think in a world where people are increasingly
focused on the tick and the quarterly learning cycle,
you should try and go in the other direction.
And this is a great way to generate value and wealth.
And so I think that when you're thinking about a startup,
it's really worthwhile to think about something
you're willing to make a very long-term commitment to,
because that is where the current void in the market is.
I think you get paid as a founder for the wealth you create
for other people.
So there's this view of the world that business is all
about trying to steal money.
And sometimes that's true.
But the best companies just create mass amounts of value
for the world.
And then they capture some of that for themselves.
But they capture far less than they create.
And they do it over a very long period of time.
So if you're going to be one of those companies,
I think you want to make a super long-term community
yourself and others that are going to work on it with you that this is going to take a
long time.
But it is worth waiting because you will make far more money over the long horizon by
doing this company really well than a bunch of short-term things along the way.
So how much do you think people should have strong opinions about things versus putting
something into the world iterating and sort of finding out whatever works and going with
that?
I think you want a combination of those two things.
You want to have a strong opinion and then be flexible about the details.
So the thing I don't think works that often are the startups on their 11-pivot that are
totally unrelated.
But I put a big difference between refinement and pivoting.
So when you start with a strong belief, we should have a social graph in an online directory.
That is Facebook has stayed pretty similar to that, although the product itself has changed
a lot along the way.
And I think that's really good.
That is a strong idea with flexibility in the implementation.
And I think that's much better than the, we're just going to keep trying our anime ideas
because we want to have a start up.
I think strong opinions about the future are really important.
And I think one of the things that I have noticed among the most interesting and the most
successful people that I spend time with is that they have strong opinions strongly held
about the future.
They are willing to be convinced with new data that they are wrong, but the bar for that
is fairly high.
And this idea that the future is fundamentally unknowable.
I've never liked.
Actually, I remember pretty clearly this time where I was sort of like spouting advice someone
else had given me in high school or college about how you, you know, you need to diversify
and invest in because the world is unknowable.
And so all you can do is have the most balanced possible portfolio.
And I remember that I was saying that I allowed someone else instead of to me probably grandma.
And I realized that I really didn't agree with that at all because I had strong opinions.
And then I knew that there were some companies who stocked out rather own than others.
And I knew that I would rather like own stock than own bonds because I thought technology
was going to be worth a lot more.
I have different ideas today about the next 10 or 20 years.
But I think it's good.
It's not only okay, it's good to have strong ideas about the future.
And it is okay to not be super diversified in your investment portfolio or your career
or your life.
And then the final question is if you could leave young people who want to have a big
impact with one or two pieces of advice, what would you tell them?
Well, I don't want to give people a specific field to go work on because I think the whole
idea is that people need to figure out themselves what they believe in and what they think and
they believe is high impact to work on for the future.
So what I will say instead is it is really important to actually think hard about where you
think you can make the biggest contribution that your good at and the world needs and
that you enjoy and then go meet people to work with.
Go learn as much about that field as you can and then have the courage of your convictions
to actually take a risk and focus on it and go do something there and that it's okay
if you fail.
If you do fail, you'll not be in a much different place
than you are today, and you can go try the next thing.
But I think really important to be willing to go take a risk
and make some amount of sacrifice
to be able to try to impact the world in some way
that you really care about.
And I think the sooner you get to work on that,
the better you'll be.
Awesome.
All right, we'll say thanks very much.