 So I'm going to start kicking off the questions. Cool. So let's start with, let's start with Vaughn, actually. We have a question here that says, you have obviously been able to create this great culture. So how important is culture? And how do you create and maintain it in a grown company? That's a really, really big question. I think the simplest answer is to create a culture that you want to be in and that attracts people you want to be around. So you all have fun. We've got this very fun loving culture at Vaughn, but it's balanced also by working really fucking hard as well. And so it all starts at the top. You've got to walk, talk, and set that culture and set those core values that define your culture right from day one. And write them on the wall, stick them on the wall, make sure that everybody when they join the team understand what it is that contributes to the success of the team from a cultural point of view. So for us it's like number one, everything we do is to make retailers' lives better. Number two, we do impossible things. We always pick the hard stuff, the hard problems to solve. And then number three is we look after each other because doing the other stuff is really hard. So we need to support each other. So yeah, and you'll find that once you identify what those core values are for you, it becomes really easy. And then it becomes self-replicating because as your team starts hiring more people, then they make sure that they're looking for those values and the people that they bring on board as well. Scott, can you tell us what the most successful portfolio or company you guys have worked with today? There's a handful. I mean, all these companies are at different stages, right? So the older ones are generally gonna be further along. So it's hard to pick favorites, but the ones that we've been a part of that have done incredibly well are obviously Facebook. So we were the first outside investors, institutional in Facebook, that was great. We were the first outside investors in SpaceX who were doing really well and Palantir. So we helped incubate Palantir from the earliest days and now that's a really huge company too. So I'd say those are the three that we were involved in very early that have had that full maturity. And then in addition to that, recent ones are things like Airbnb, which is just a fantastic company. And one of those that has the network effects that are global, so that it's a really plausible thing to believe that it would become winner-take-all. So following up from that, what made you invest in those big portfolios? Yeah, good question. I think a lot of people saw that Airbnb was taking off. With that one, we invested at a time right after Groupon and Zynga had bad IPOs, actually. And so a lot of the other investors in California were saying, well, obviously, late-stage consumer interest is a terrible investment. Let's not do that. So we said, well, that's probably wrong. What can we look at? And so we picked out what we thought was the best late-stage consumer internet investment, which was Airbnb. And turns out it's doing quite well since. I'd say SpaceX was the one that really nobody got. There were even other investors that wrote letters to their LPs, their investors in the fund, that said, don't worry guys, we'll never do anything that stupid. That was like the worst investment ever, obviously. But we looked into it and we saw, number one, could you cut down costs in space by a factor of 10? What would that do for you? For the industry, that would be massive, we thought. And the reason that people thought it was so bad, actually, was that there had just been three launch failures, which to the outside world just looked like, okay, three strikes and you're out, all three went bad. But if you looked under the hood, you saw the first one made it off the pad a little bit and then there was this crack in a fuel line that took it down, bad luck. And then the next two, each one made it way further than the one before it. So while they were failures, you saw that like it was almost making it. And you could basically predict the next one's actually gonna work. And by the way, SpaceX had these huge contracts in the government and those contracts would, if they could do them, would bring in actually more cash than the entire valuation at that time. So it's like, well, there's more cash coming in the door than they're even asking the value of the company at. If they can do it, we think they can do it. And then our team had worked with D-Line before and just said, well, this guy, he just gave him money. He's gonna be working on it. He's gonna be working on it. He's gonna be working on it. Iselle, I have a question here from the audience, which is, what is it that makes it most challenging being a young female, building a tech startup and how do you personally overcome these hurdles? It's a really hard one. I don't even think of myself as really being a female in this space, although I am. I've never once said like, oh, it's really amazing for a woman to be doing this. How no, we do way worse things like having a baby. That's pretty hard, okay? And I don't think, and a startup is like having a baby. Story is a toddler now. It's two years old. And I feel like it needs the same nurturing as a human does, all the right things. Love, care, and attention. And we give it a lot of that. So yeah, the obstacles I think have been the same for me as my co-founder, Chris. And we help each other overcome those obstacles. And really, it's just a wild journey to be learning and doing something that we love. So even that there are obstacles and some mornings it is hard and tough. But when you're doing something you love, it's so much easier to look at those and go, well, I'm not gonna cure anyone. I'm just gonna do my best and go for it. Awesome. Everybody smut for Paul. Paul's taken the, sorry. Paul Spain here, if you don't know him at Paul Spain. There we go. Sean. Okay, this is a pretty big one. Are you ready? Right. What can society do to reduce algorithms and to teach and to further reduce inequality? And what are you doing about it? Twitter, not me. Yes, I saw you. I think if we look at some of the biggest macro trends that are out there, I think this march towards a more unequal society is one, I think, of the overriding macro trends of the next decade. Now that'll end in two ways. It'll end up with a world that probably looks more and more like certain parts of San Francisco where you literally have to walk over homeless people to get to your free lunch, free massage, free whatever startup with laundry and everything done on top. And you walk back home over the same homeless people, right, it's a bit fucked up, honestly. Or it's gonna crash. We'll go down that path. But I don't see any of the path out of that. So both are not great options, right? So we have to really think as people kind of creating this tech is if you're gonna build stuff, people are gonna buy it, there's gonna be enough people to buy it, right? This world of Uber for X only lasts so long, right? When you think of what that really means, it means let me create an algorithmic driven system that will farm out things to the lowest possible pool of talent that's fully fungible and it'll drive me around from point A to point B in a luxury town car. And if you don't like my star ratings, you don't have a job, right? It's kind of a bit of a strange world, but that's sort of, you can think of Uber for X as kind of really playing off the massive inequality that we've got where I can effectively farm out servants to do jobs for me, right? I don't think tech is really, I think there's been a lot, there was a lot of hope I think at the start about tech, you know, that it would create a better world, a more equal world, a world that we would have access to all the information for free, right? But I don't think, if you look at the numbers that are around, that you can really make that argument and say that it's made the world more equal or the very least you've got to acknowledge that at whatever impact it has in creating a more equal world, it has been outdone by something so much more vastly significant. Now you can't really point to what that thing is and you start thinking, well maybe it's tech. So I think there's a few things, right? So we look at like Airbnb, let's sort of say it's a category defining thing and it is in many ways, but it's sort of, there's also Craigslist, right? And those that don't know Craigslist is effectively a free site that lets you, you know, trade things backwards and forwards. Craigslist has been set up and has been run for the last 15 years effectively as a socialist company, right? It's been run effectively without maximizing profit. One of the most popular sites on the internet is said, hey, technology, here you go, world use it and we're not gonna make too, too much money from this. And that's really, really different from running a company up to a $100 billion market cap. And you've got a choice, I think, you can run a company towards $100 billion or you can provide a technology and make it accessible to people. And how you go about doing that will affect the economies that we create. So I think one of the things we really have to think about is in building these companies is what part are we playing in making sure that everyone benefits from the tech versus what are we doing to make sure that I as a founder benefits from the tech? And there's a balance, right? And I think we as a society need to figure out what that balance is because ultimately if we don't have enough people to consume the product, you don't have a working economy. So carrying on from how do we... How do we let everybody share the tech? And I didn't plug this question. Vaughn, can you answer for what each of the audience members could do to help you on your mission to encourage kids into tech? And please tell us about OMG tech. Not plugged, I didn't write that. Did you ask that question? Okay, I'm gonna think about this for about five seconds. What can we do? I think the best thing that we can do is try and imagine what the world is gonna look like in 10 years time because the kids that are going through school today, that's the world that they're gonna be innovating in. And so, sure, I mean, we should all teach kids to code because that's gonna be an incredible skill for them to have, but that might be a little bit short-sighted because the world in 10 years time is gonna be sensor-driven, robotics, nanotechnology, hoverboards, thank God. And so that's the stuff that we need to get kids really passionate and excited about. And so there are some basic skills that they need, so coding, engineering, math, science, all the STEM subjects. And so that's really, we've been obsessed by the internet for the last 10 years or longer, but really the new world is gonna be more than just the internet. So we need to get kids back into those engineering subjects again. That's, I think, the most important thing we can do. I like that answer, thanks. Only because I teach engineering, so it keeps me in a job. Thank you. And so Scott, the Twitter says, I love the all-black shirt. What are the New Zealand traits that you think are most important to nurture to make this an even greater startup system? Ecosystem, sorry. Yeah, that's a great question. I'd say it's already got a lot of the pieces. There's great tech talent, there's great engineering talent. There's a lot of expertise in a bunch of different areas. People are really resourceful with what they have. And I think all the companies who've talked to so far on this trip, they've really taken what they started with and just pushed it about as far as anyone possibly could. It sounds like one of the last remaining pieces is saying, well, okay, we've got a great product. We've got product market fit. We're really scaling the company. We now need to go international. We need to raise more money. And we're talking with a lot of people. It sounds like that's the last piece to really make accessible and really easy for people. And I think that's gonna happen. I think it's just something that gets figured out over the next couple of years where more and more companies will have succeeded crossing that gap and going to that next level. I think another big thing that we're seeing the early stages of is when you really start seeing an ecosystem of all goes from maybe nothing to like one really successful breakout company or maybe two. And then the people from those breakout companies go and start their own companies with money that they've made off it or expertise and they're able to raise more money. And then those companies then put out their next set of really engineers and founders that then start their next thing. And those employees, it just keeps circling. And I think what we're seeing already is that that's beyond. And so once that cycle happens and starts it's just a matter of time and so it just keeps growing more and more and more. So yeah, I think that's a really exciting time to be in. So I want you to appreciate that. Cool. Why Combinator Sam? How many applications does why Combinator receive and how on earth do you evaluate them? We get more than 10,000 a year. And how do we evaluate them? So we make mistakes is the first thing I'll say at this sort of scale, given our limited number of partners, we're gonna get it wrong. And so we're letting companies we shouldn't and we don't let in companies we should all the time. And that's just, we're upfront about that. We do as good of a job as we are able to. But we know we can't be perfect. And in fact, if we tried to hold ourselves to be imperfect, we'd miss great companies because the companies that go on to be really successful don't always look great at the beginning. And so we're trying to fund things that could be great, which means we're gonna miss big time a lot. But the way the process works is pretty straightforward. The alumni, we've chosen a few hundred of them to help us screen applications. And they can vote either maybe or no on an app. That then screens out about the worst half of the applications. And then the remaining half, the partners read. And each application gets read by at least three partners. The ones that are near the cutoff get read by usually six partners. And we give each app a letter grade. And then there's an algorithm that decides which one's gonna interview. That's it. So then we interview, say, 500. And out of that, we fund, say, 120, something like that. And continue on for a minute. Actually speaking of algorithms, I had one other thought on Sean's question. And that was, I don't see it as purely an algorithm thing, that inequality, I think it's really a leverage thing. And so you look at that chart and you see, well, early 1920s, it really peaked. But what happened? It was the financial crash. There's so much financial leverage in the system. So it's like, this leverage that existed actually backfired or went away. And so then that corrected technology. It's like Archimedes said, give me a lever long enough to move the world. I think technology naturally increases that leverage. To the extent that you mentioned back from the Ice Age, no one's gonna be able to hunt and kill a thousand times more than anybody else. But the best program is 100 times better than the average programmer. And so technology is naturally gonna create this sort of stuff. Then the question is, well, what do we do? Do we stop the technology? Do we build specific technology? I think it's more about building specific stuff that's gonna help. But in addition to that, hopefully the technology can just create so much more wealth that even if there's a little bit more inequality, hopefully not a lot more, but even if there's a little bit more, everyone's five, 10 times better off than they would have been. So that's the way I think about it. I'm kind of a little bit pessimistic on the inequality piece. I think it's really hard to fix the technology, but I'm hopeful that it just makes everyone's life so much better. I'll actually, I'll add my comment to that too. I, oh, sorry. You know, I think that growing wealth and inequality likely will be the defining social problem of our time. I do think everyone's life is going to get better, but I think that people are more sensitive to their relative difference than the absolute difference. So yes, it is better to be poor today than to be a king a thousand years ago in terms of quality of life and life expectancy and everything else, but it just feels really unfair. And that is still going to be a huge problem. I think it is really unfair. Technology, as Scott was just saying, is the long arrow of tech is towards more inequality because there's more leverage on individual ability and more leverage on assets and everything else. And some of that's fair, but a lot of it's not. I don't think the way to do it though is to try to stop technology or to try to say you should run companies and not maximize for profit. It is true that Craigslist has run as a social enterprise, but I think it is a terrible website and it hasn't innovated in 15 years. And that's not the model that I think we should hold up. I think it's okay for these companies to run and be very competitive and try to generate a lot of profits, I think. Again, like Apple, most profitable company in the world, look how many of you are out there using iPhones right now and how many people are so dependent on this. So I don't think we should actually try to fix this problem with technology alone. I don't think that'll work. But I do think we have this exponentially compounding difference in leverage and we need social fixes to this problem. I think we are going to see the big countries around the world do some version of a basic income in the not distant future and I'm not sure if that's the perfect solution but I sure hope it works. And I think the situation right now is really untenable. But I don't think we should try to stop technological progress to fix the problem. So then with that, do you think that we are the community that should bring up these issues? I mean, we've got Derek here and Rebecca Mills. We've got the B Team concept, right? In which you can make profit but make sure that social justice issues have been evaluated. And then do you think the entrepreneurship mentality is also to make sure that we're not creating this big divide when we're striving for success in our companies? Well, I think that socially responsible companies are awesome and have a huge competitive advantage and actually in the current world it is difficult to succeed as a not socially responsible company. I think if you look at the fastest growing the largest companies that have started in the last couple of decades, they're all actually, they take social responsibility really seriously and I think the whole B Corp movement is awesome. So I think that it's a requirement to be successful at this point and that's good but again, I don't think it's going to solve the inequality problem that technology does tend to concentrate wealth if you don't have social policy to counteract that. Yeah, I would also say if there's something that's like, if there's a real problem, if there's something that's obviously messed up, that's probably an opportunity for a company. I don't know what company, but if it's like a huge problem, there's a huge opportunity somewhere in there and there's probably a way to hack it. I'm going to ask a question if that's okay because I've run out of Twitter ones and then we'll put the rogue mic around. My question is having been through all of your bios and spent my night on Google trying to figure out who you all were last night. What is your opinion on education? So I'm not going to say who or what but some of you have several collections of degrees and some of you have, and I hate the word dropped out because that's not the word, but some of you have gone to tertiary institutions to apply for a degree and have found more success by leaving that degree and setting up what you've set up now. So does anyone want to talk about whether or not we should encourage our youth to stick to their degrees and graduate in something because that's the safe bet, right? Or if you know what you're doing, should you just quit and do what you're supposed to do? Yeah, I'll call myself out here. So I was one of the people with multiple degrees. I'm not proud of it, especially the MBA, but my undergraduate was in engineering. I loved rockets, I loved aerospace, I wanted to learn about it. I took as many classes as I possibly could. I thought it would make me better at doing aerospace and I think it did. So for what I wanted to do at that time, it was useful. And then, yeah, I ended up getting a master's because I could in the four years and I really liked all the coursework and it made me better and I went to work at SpaceX. So it was relevant for that. And then I got the MBA because I was working on other stuff and it was a way to extend that runway, basically. So I'd say education, in my experience, it was helpful for what I wanted to do, but think about what do you want to do? What's the point B that you want to end up at? What's the strategy to get there? If you're doing a startup, I think more relevant than university is a really great accelerator incubator or in concert with actually starting a company. So the only way to learn startups is to join a startup or to start one of your own. I think Sam talked about that earlier. So I'd say education isn't good or bad, it depends on what you want to do. Does it fit into that strategy? Is it something that makes a lot of sense? So you just have to evaluate that for yourself. Anybody who... I don't have any degrees. I went to university for two years. I studied computer science, it was great. I really loved it, but then I dropped out to start a company. And I think the framework that I tell people that are thinking about this decision is just do whatever you think will be the highest leverage on learning. And if you think you'll learn more in school, then do that. And if you think you'll learn more working in some job, do that. Even now, if I thought I would actually learn more to go get a PhD in something that I do doing my job every day, I probably would still do it. But I don't think I will. And I also think that the world has changed so much in terms of the learning opportunities and the way to learn, that people need to really critically examine the conventional wisdom about the best way to learn and the best way to use your time. I taught a class online about startups this fall and I got many hundreds or maybe thousands of emails from people that said, you know what, I was in university. I realized I was paying 30 or $50,000 a year and I was learning less than I learned watching this. So online for free. And it made me realize that I actually would learn more working for a company or doing something related to startups than I would sitting in my freshman writing class or whatever. So no value judgment about whether that's good or bad but I think it is a trend that people are going to sort of get their education in very new ways. Yeah, so for me, I've obviously got, I think about, I did about 10 years of university. Loved every year of it. I think there's, when it was Scott's colleagues there, Peter Thiel said once, a Rhodes Scholar is someone who had a great future in their past which I took as a personal slight. But I think there's a few things we should consider around about the education side of things. So I think New Zealand has some of the best education system in the world from what I've seen and the quality of I think the top students that are coming out of the technical programs here in this country are really, really phenomenal and it's something that I think we don't fully value that everyone here pretty much has an ability to go to a very, very good school and get a very, very good education coming out of university. So that's kind of one thing. The second thing I would say is we have this kind of model of what a university is for kind of learning and it's a sort of lecture classroom thing but going out to Oxford I sort of realized kind of the history of the university and it was and still is at Oxford, a tutorial system where you spend time with people who are kind of experts and they teach you what they know. I think one of the things that we should think about as university is not so much people giving lectures and getting degrees but actually view it really as an exchange of expertise between people dedicating a period of their life to learn about how to be an expert in topic XY or Z. In that case it's more like a guild and when you think about it like that when you think about things like Y Combinator it's a place to confer expertise on how to build startups. It's kind of like a guild. So is that really that different from what university really was and should we kind of make the distinction as like are you gonna drop out of university? I'd say no, you're sort of taking a different course, right? And so we need to think the university is not lectures and people, it's exchange of expertise. And so think about it like that. The third thing I would say is there's a tremendous amount of output by people like Michelle, people like the professors and the researchers. They publish 1.56 million scientific papers every year. What a tremendous amount of research that can be done and commercialized. And it truly is, you can pretty much go and do any topic, look in the last three years, find a bunch of papers and come up with a dozen different company ideas. But the problem on that is there's no one that money goes back to the scientists that do the work. And so you kind of miss that break in the chain. If there was a way to have some sort of financial instrument that was rewarding the science that was being commercialized, I think we'd have a much better system that ran across that. So we got to think about how to do that. But I'd also say is that the people creating the science are the ones that we're building the technology on top of. So this distinction of inside and outside of university, I think it's very, very blurred. I think that, I went to university and I dropped out and after my first trimester, I was doing computer science and I also loved it. But it started a lot earlier for me. It started in high school and I knew then I wanted to do something really big. But the only next progression after high school was university and that's just like the thing that you did. And I guess it was just fit for me being in high school. It was really hard to know what other opportunities there were out there. So I think that we need to start early and actually show our kids in high school that these are the options that are out there for you and get them to be more interactive with each other in high school. Everything was do stuff by yourself. And that's just not how our world is. We're constantly engaging with people every single minute of the day and we have to really foster being social and sharing ideas and a really big thing and a really big point that came out today is not being secretive. We need to be open and explore our ideas. Which for me university didn't do. It was still really single. Like this is my paper, this is what I'm doing. I hope that it changes and also what I really hope changes is that university start realizing the way that the world is moving. Like the talent in Wellington, it's the development talent in Wellington is still really hard because the universities are still teaching really like old and basic development languages. And we're like we don't hire people that have that skill. We don't, it's not what we look for. So I think they just need to realize that and be open and started tracking the right people and foster their curiosity. Hi, my name is Chris. I'm curious about particularly to you Vaughn but also I guess to Sam and Scott. I'm a solo founder, so and it kind of sucks but you know you have to do it. I was kind of curious as to how you coped and then I guess for you guys like as funders how do you perceive and consider people like myself? It has, it's good and it's bad side to it. The bad side is it's really lonely. You're not having somebody to lean on but you can counter that by putting in place other people around you that you, those key initial hires become really, really important. You kind of treat them like co-founders and putting good governance around as well. So getting a really supportive board in place but the pros are that as a sole founder you can make really quick decisions. You don't have to have those arguments about whether you should go left or right. Doesn't necessarily, I mean, that assumes you know the right thing to do but you know you balance that again by having that a fail fast approach which is like well I'm just gonna try this and see how far I go with this and if I screw it up then I can at least back out of it and I can admit I made a mistake. But yeah, I was asked whether I'd do it again whether I'd do it as a sole founder. So I think I would probably next time around find a co-founder because I think there's something to be said by having somebody there on the same journey as you that you can talk to late at night and bit your mind to each other about things. I think just for psychological health that would be a really good thing. We certainly prefer two or three founders to one. It's not, we fund lots of companies with a sole founder but we almost always hear a version of that which is I wish I had had a co-founder and if I do it again I think I'd like to have a co-founder. I think it's just really hard and startups are always really hard. It's far worse though to have a bad co-founder than to have no co-founder. So another thing we tell people is don't force it. We'd much rather just fund you by yourself than for you to tack on some random co-founder which is usually company killing. But there are a lot of things in startups that are hard and every startup has some extra challenges and this is one of many. I think it is important though not to delude yourself that this is somehow not a negative and instead really think about what you're gonna do to mitigate the challenges because the data on it and at least from what we have is that you do underperform as a solo founder and the ones that we've had that have been successful have really gone out of their way to sort of mitigate the challenges that come with that. Yeah, I'd say that mitigation piece is really important. SpaceX to go back to that example, basically solo founder Elon really started on his own. What he did to mitigate it was for the next six months to 12 months before the company really got started and at that full time, he would bring together these experts on the subject and say, can this be done? Let's dive into this. We'll meet up next month and talk about this. And those became the first employees of the company. So they weren't really co-founders but they were almost co-founders and they were these people that could help work on working on these early concepts and so it's not like there was one person going it alone which is really hard. One more thing I'd say is that when these stories get told in the media they're always simplified to either co-founders or solo founder and in reality, almost all companies fall on a spectrum between those. Even in companies that have two equal co-founders, there's usually one person that really drove it and had the idea first. And although economically equal, if you asked anyone in the company who's the clear leader here, there's often one person. And on the other hand, on the solo founder piece, there are often very early employees like Scott was just saying that are sort of co-founder like in terms of their influence on the company and the culture. So it really is more of a spectrum I think than people say.