 I'm Sam Altman, I'm the president of Y Combinator, we're based in the States and we fund startups. We've funded more than 800 now, so quite a lot. Some of them have been Reddit and Dropbox and Airbnb and Stripe in a lot of others. And we also try to build up the most sort of helpful network for founders that we can. We hope that by doing that we can make it much easier to start companies and then help develop technology to really big companies that we all use and whatever it is. That's my two sentences. Our version of this is that you should only start a company if you're in love with that particular idea. You shouldn't start a startup for the sake of having a startup, you should have an idea. You really believe this is something that you want to do and the people you want to do it with. Starting a startup is sort of extremely hard, unimaginably hard but just barely doable. But it's so hard that if you don't believe in this and if you don't want to do it for 10 years, there are sort of better things to do and it's better to join a great company than to start a mediocre one. But all of that said, it's doable and I think we found that startups are much more doable I think than people think. It looks like now we have enough data to say this confidently. More than 1% of the startups that we fund go on to be worth more than a billion dollars and they go on to change industries that they're in and they change. And this is not just in South Africa, everywhere. And I think New Zealand is sort of one of the top up-and-coming areas that we see for startups that we're funding and startups are staying here, they're coming to the US, they're not wherever. But there's clearly environment here to support it. So if it's something you really want to do, you should do it. If it's not something you really want to do, then it is way more pain than it's worth. Well, here's just one data point from what we have. No company that we've ever funded that has been founded by one person is in our top 30 most successful companies even though we found a fair number of single founder companies. It is possible for sure and there's many great examples around the world, but these things again are so hard to do and the psychology ups and downs are so intense. That if you have a co-founder or two, hopefully like you're not all at the sort of crash at the same time and you kind of support each other. One thing that we say is that startups usually, the expected value dips below the x-axis at some point. Things go really wrong and if you're by yourself you're just going to stop. And if you have a co-founder you will sort of like out of obligation to each other keep going and you can sort of like cheat this like law of thermodynamics somehow and both do it to support the other person. On the other side, we've never had a startup with four or more founders be really successful. It's one of these things where there's like exponential or less factorial communication overhead and it just gets way, way harder. So in our experience two or three co-founders work so best, but I'm sure others. You know, I think having something like a zero get built in a city is this unbelievable thing. It's very, very hard to do the first time but having such a successful technology company creates this entire ecosystem of people that work there and then go on and do new things and invest in startups and you know, I think that's just such an incredible asset for the city to have and the startup scene that is almost guaranteed to develop out of that success is awesome. So I think that there are, in addition to the interpersonal pieces, there are two other things that we really think about that make a culture great. One is momentum. So you know, winning teams tend to keep winning and teams that sort of take our off the ball and start losing time to keep losing. And so one of the most important jobs as the entrepreneur is to make sure the company never stops winning because you know, it's very difficult to dig yourself out of that hole and if you keep that going it's this sort of, this ongoing, you know, it's just this ongoing tail end. The other thing that we see is sort of the missionary and mercenary divide. I think most cultures end up being either a mercenary culture or a missionary culture and the great companies are always the missionary cultures. If people believe in the mission, if you are sufficiently ambitious, if you present people, you know, we're going to make this big impact and we're going to reach these people and we're going to do this important thing that's going to be great for the world, that's what motivates the best people. You have a culture like that where you do have this ambitious important thing. It's easier to motivate people. In many ways it is easier to start a hard company than it is to start an easy company. More people will be excited, you'll have a better culture if you're doing something that matters, if you're doing this big thing. If you have the kind of culture where you're telling people like you need to get into your desk at nine and leave at nine because we work 12 hour days, like people might do that for a little while but that is almost never. In fact, that is not what I have ever seen produce great results. The best companies do a few things across the board. Everyone's successful in a different way, but the commonalities, one is they talk to users very early, you know, that they don't try to keep their ideas secret. They're open, they actually listen, you know, like a common finding mistake is to talk to users because someone told them they're supposed to but be so convinced they know the right answer to not actually listen to what their users are saying and you have to build something that's so good that users spontaneously talk about how much they love it. That is the test and that is eventually how you keep growing. The second thing that correlates really well is like obsessive customer service. So you know where like the founders themselves are constantly talking, this secret is part of talking to users. And then the third thing is a very short cycle time. So the way to make a great product is to make it better every day. And if you make it say 2% better every day, that compounds exponentially over time and the best companies get this very tight feedback loop. They have an idea, they test it, they change it, they test it, they change it, they keep going in. This over time produces incredible results. And then the last thing I'll say on this point is an obsession with the details of the product quality to a level where it's almost like stupid or does tend to correlate with success. So founders that spend a lot of time on their documentation pages and their jobs pages and that if there's this famous YC lore story where Drew was supposed to be speaking, Drew has been the founder of the jobs, he'll be speaking at the YC event. A new version of Windows in Sweden, service pack 2, something like that, went out the broke drop box for seven users and he just chancefully speaking the event to go fix it because it was bothering him that much that it was broken for this tiny number of users. So there's this obsession with quality of the product which is what makes users love it that turns out to be really important. Here is one really important point which is that people get more ambitious over time and when the founders of Airbnb first came to us they were delighted that they had three users and if we told them that someday they were going to be running a 50 billion dollar company whatever it's going to be with more nights than any other touch in the world they would have looked at us and said, you're crazy, we don't want to work with you because you don't know what you're talking about. So I think there's this pressure in the last couple of years to have an immediate vision about how you're going to have this 10, 100 billion dollar company and no one honestly has that in their first days. Google almost sold the company for a million dollars. They would have if the offer came through. Zuckerberg very, very nearly sold Facebook for a billion dollars. So it's okay to become more ambitious as you go. In fact, that's what should happen. So what we look for is people that have a kernel of an idea that we believe can develop into something huge but you can't focus on that right away. You have to focus on delivering something great for a small number of users first. The way we talk about this is that there's like you can either create an initial product that a lot of users really like or that a small number of users really love. Obviously you'd like to make something that a lot of users really love but those ideas get taken by big companies and you can't compete with them. So you don't have to have a take over the world plan on day one. In fact, very few of the companies that we've been involved with that have gone on to do it thought they were going to initially. The founder had something that was really passionate about they had a plan as Scott was saying about how they had some defensibility but at the same time you can be extremely ambitious from day one but maybe over time right so here's an example Space X Elon had already done a couple of companies so maybe he had the right to be really really huge vision but from day one it was we're going to Mars and that's where this company like that's the success case and I'm sure that Mars is not success. But product one, so yeah you kind of vision like that but product one was not like let's build the Mars No you don't start with that. That's a bad idea. So like in fact we just funded a rocket company in the next YC batch and they would like to go to Mars too someday but their initial project is to launch 20 kilo satellites and that's sort of what I meant you can start with something less ambitious. Generally I don't think I think it's like difficult to classify companies by a particular country. The one thing I tell anywhere outside of the U.S. is a general statement is that it's okay in the U.S. to be sort of arrogant is the wrong word but it's okay to be ambitious I would say I think it is more forgivable to stand up as a complete unknown and say I'm going to try and start the best search engine in the world I'm going to try and start a rocket company that's going to take me to Mars so I can die there I'm going to start a social network and I know you think I'm crazy because it's just our college students but someday everyone in the world is going to use it and and people aren't afraid to fail if they fail at something big like I think Silicon Valley is even a little bit too forgiving of that but it is one thing that has worked really well for U.S. based companies so we didn't take that too far but I would just sort of that's my general advice anytime I'm out of the States one thing I believe very deeply is you should never start a company in a particular area because someone on a panel tells you that like you're well-suited for that that is just a recipe for disaster so I will try to not name specific areas because I think anyone in the world can now compete in any area they want like one of the really amazing things about the level of globalization that we've had and the depth that the Internet has reached is that anything you can do in the U.S. you ought to be able to do in New Zealand that said I really want to echo the point about the advantage of being in a small country I think that it's so much easier to do something disruptive in a lot of different spaces here you know like a really ambitious start up in New Zealand could probably get a government regulation change which in the U.S. is classically impossible you know having a small but concentrated customer base that you can test with that you can iterate on that you can get to this point where you built a product that people love before you only shoot on the world is incredibly valuable so I do think that no matter what you decide to do you should use the advantages of being in a smaller contained ecosystem which are huge as much as you can it is changing for sure to raise money now online or without in-person means never before but I think the correct way to think of fundraising is like really high value sales and just like any other sort of sales the human connection really matters and doing it in person is so much better so one thing that happens at Y Combinator a lot is that companies will come to the valley for a period of time raise money because it's like literally 100 times easier to do it in person and then go back to whatever country they're from and it used to be that most investors wouldn't do that they would say like I only want to invest in companies that are going to stay within 20 miles but that has totally changed that is like long over now and but I still think it is for sure a lot harder to raise money via email in fact so hard that other than something like Angelist I don't recommend trying it and I think it's just worth it if you can't raise money from investors here which hopefully you can then I would just be willing to fly a lot we will fund nonprofits directly and we've funded a lot and some of them I think are totally awesome but I'd say generally we want to do things that have a huge positive impact and as Scott was just saying I think most of the time those are full profit entities I think in the current world when you can argue whether or not capitalism is good I don't think it is but the best way to make a change and if you look at the big improvements that have happened in the last 100 years most of these come by a company that has a mission and builds something incredible and changes the world and they get more investors as they go Google certainly did not understand the impact that making all information instantly accessible would have on the world and it's been a massive massive change if we can get energy like a nuclear energy company to work I will have a massive massive change but the converse of that is that I won't invest in a company I believe is bad for the world twice I had passed on a company because I thought I was going to make money on it for sure because it was bad for the world once it was so bad it sort of self-inflated and the other time I would have made a bunch of money but it wouldn't have been worth it I think the biggest problem that the world the macro problem the world is going to face is that there's going left unchecked that we're on a trajectory to have massive massive wealth and equality and slowing economic growth leading to mass unemployment and it turns out that economic growth I think everyone wants their life to get bigger every year and no growth world it's very zero-someter and spiting I think the only way is with massive economic growth business is what's going to deliver that and so I think just continuing to drive economic growth is probably the most important thing for ongoing prosperity and peace and everything else that we can do I have a rule of myself that I would only deal with the most current crisis at a time when things got really bad where people get really debilitated is when they think about the 30 things that are going to go wrong that are going to kill the company and that leads to paralysis and inaction and the way to get through it is to say you know what I'm pretty smart, I've gotten through a lot of bad stuff I'm going to solve those 29 problems I don't know how, I'll figure out that later but here's the thing that might kill the company today I'm only going to worry about that and if you live to fight another day then I will learn the privilege to worry about certain things and focusing yourself on this most urgent fire and giving yourself permission to ignore these other fires until tomorrow and not just sort of thrashing in context between them is really big and then the other thing is just keep perspective terrible things happen to the company in the past terrible things that happen to the company in the future this probably won't be the one that does kill the company and if the company does get killed it's just a company, it's not life it's not family, there are more important things so the worst case scenario here is terrible but not like a world ending and you can probably solve it founders are incredibly resourceful and you can almost always figure out some way through it and survive from another day I actually studied it in school so I'm happy to answer this I I think it is probably the machine learning is probably the fastest going concentration in every good CS program in the states and I expect that will just keep that growth rate and I think there is such strong belief among new CS students that this is the most important thing to be working on that that's going to just keep going I mean probably I will pass all but until then we're going to try out a lot of great students