 We have two fantastic women on the stage today to talk about how to build world-conquering teams, very simple and straightforward subjects, so Alice and Kat. So what is the answer, Kat? How does YC, how do you identify the most talented founders that apply to you? What are the secret ingredients? Sure. So when we're reading applications, we look for a couple of things. We love teams because we've seen so many companies go through the program at this point that we know that it is much easier to succeed when you have someone to share the burden with you. So teams of two or three, ideally, we look at does the team have the technical ability to build the product that they want to build and scale? Does the team have the ability to sell? How did the team meet? Have they worked on things before together? Is there proof that they can execute? We also look at what their connection to the problem they're solving is. Do we believe that this team will want to stick with this idea for the next 10, 15 years? So we look at all that and we looked at does this team have domain expertise? Can they teach us something interesting or new about the space? We look at a whole lot of things, but those are the main things we're looking at when we are reading through founder profiles. Those sound like all sort of obvious attributes, but when it all kind of comes down together, is there a particular YC founder sort of image that you're looking for? So at this point, the founders at YC come from a really broad range of backgrounds. So for the last batch, summer 2017, I think it was about 23% of the teams that applied had a female founder and then about 23% of the companies we funded had a female founder. So we saw it matched up pretty well. We're seeing the average age of applicants is about 30 years old and that matches the average age of the founders in the batch. We are seeing applicants from all over the world. So our last winter batch, 40% of the companies came from outside the US. So lots from Europe, a growing number from India and Africa. We see founders coming from all sorts of backgrounds, so PhDs, people in the hard tech, hard sciences. So it's really, really broad at this point. So there isn't this one perfect profile and that's kind of exciting. I think that's been one of the most exciting things that we've seen a really broad, diverse range of people start to apply. We'll talk more about how you ultimately make those decisions based on the sort of the founders that are applying. But maybe, Alas, you know, EF is a company full disclosure. So Mosaic Ventures, we invested in EF earlier this year together with Reid Hoffman at Greylock. And they've got a slightly different approach to sort of company creation where they identify founders before they even know they want to be founders. So, Alas, tell us about sort of your secret ingredients and why this approach is being so successful. Sure. So when we think about who we want to select, we don't think about ideas, we don't look at teams, we're just looking at individuals. And I suppose one of the main insights that EF was built on was that there was no tool, there was no effective tool to find your co-founder. So unless you were lucky enough to have met them at school or through friends or whatever it may be, it was very, very hard to find the right co-founder for you. I think there's a great analogy here with online dating where, you know, 10 years ago if you had gone into a chat room and had a chat with someone and then expected that person to turn into a lifelong partner, it probably wouldn't have worked. And online dating was the tool that made that possible. And we've seen online dating go from being a reasonably weird and socially abnormal thing to do to being one of the most common ways to find your spouse. And I think in many ways EF is that tool that effectively helps you to find a pool of committed, screened, skilled, incredibly smart people who all want to find a start-up at the same time as you. And I think what we've seen now over the last couple of years is we've built 100 teams through this model. About two-thirds of them have been funded beyond at least Seed Round or beyond. And of those teams, we've only had three breakups. So it shows that it's not just a kind of efficient way, it's a really effective way to find your co-founder. And so how do you identify, first of all, the people who you think are gonna be great founders before they're even ready to make that jump? And then how do you pair them up with the right co-founder? How does that sort of magic happen? So finding the right people is really the secret source. So we have a team that reaches out to about 3,000 people every six months and then whittles those 3,000 people down to the final 100. And really what we're looking for are super smart people who have a skill, usually a technically skilled, who are committed, who are ready to give up their amazing job to quit DeepMind, quit their PhD, whatever it may be, to join us at that moment. And then most importantly, they're this sort of contrarian megalomaniacs who really have this sort of the insight and the X factor to be able to build a company. Having the right people is the most important ingredient, but then we put a methodology and a culture around them that allows them to find the right co-founder. One of the most important things we do is we get people out of bad teams. So if we start working together, it's actually really awkward for me to say that it's not working out, but it's really easy for a member of the EF team to say, hey guys, we've seen teams like this before. In our experience, it doesn't work. We recommend you break up. And so suddenly you're able to cycle through teams reasonably quickly. And people can go through up to four teams in the eight weeks that they're team building with us. Yeah, it's a very unique approach. How do they come up with the idea that they all start working on? So when people join us, we help them think about what is their edge? So what is their personal competitive advantage? And the reason we started talking about it in this way was we had a bunch of amazing people coming in who had PhDs in machine learning or roboticists or neuroscientists, and they all wanted to build the same products, which is broadly usually a dating app. So the push behind edge was to say, what is the one thing that you are potentially better at or know more about than anyone else who's currently founding a startup in that space? And so usually somebody either has a technical edge, so either they've got a PhD or a postdoc in a niche area, or they've got a domain edge. So they've been working in the industry for a long time. They may not know exactly the problem they want to solve, but they have enough expertise to be able to ideate effectively. So Cal, you talked about some of the, what you look for in founders and often the ones that make it through the application process. Can you correlate some of that to the most successful companies in the portfolio? I mean, can you look at how much female power matters? Does it matter that they worked in a branded company, a Facebook or Google, et cetera? When you look at the sort of the drop boxes of the world or the cruises, you know? Yeah, if you look at the top valuation companies that have gone through YC, they have a pretty wide range of backgrounds. If you look at Airbnb, for example, it was two designers and their friend who was in computer science. If you look at other companies like Instacart, it was an MBA or Reddit were two friends from college. It's a fairly wide range. In terms of female founders, we've seen some of the top female founding teams. You know, what I did before this was figure out, I looked at all the top valuation companies that have gone through YC, all the teams that we funded for winter 18 and all the female founded teams to see what is the most common way that all of these teams have met. And so the most common way for across those three are work and school. But as you said, I think each of those, it's about 60% met at either worker school, but there's also this like long tail of ways that people are meeting their co-founders these days. And so there isn't, I think, what we want to make sure happens is that I think some of the biggest best companies are these outliers, right? They're people that don't fit certain models or modes of thinking. And so we try not to pattern match too much because we might miss out on the next big Airbnb because we don't think about something in the same ways we have in the past. And we know the specific personality traits that you think are, I mean, you rule out. If you see those, those are just the wrong ones and founders and the ones that when you see them, you think, oh my, this is an incredible combination of traits that we must have these guys in YC. As you were saying, I think it's having that sort of obsessive quality, being so obsessed with a particular problem, solving a particular problem, like learning as much as you can about it. So learning, so at YC, for example, we see so many applications come in every year and many of them are solving the same problems. It was one cycle where we saw 15 versions of Uber for babysitters. But what we look at is can this founder teach us something new about the space, something that the 14 other applications haven't? And often what it is is those founders have built an MVP of really like simple version of the product, put it out in the world and they've talked to real users. And they've learned something through that interaction with real users that teaches us something that we would never have thought of ourselves. And so that's one of the things that we're really excited by is that you're fast moving, you're able to execute quickly, you talk to your users and you can teach us something really new and exciting about a particular space, even if it's something that we know a lot about or have seen before. And Alice, I mean, you're recruiting often very kind of deep technical, geeky people out of academic labs or post-PhD programs. What are the personality attributes? There's often this stereotype of sort of founders being sort of extrovert and charismatic, the successful ones yet. I think Susan Kane wrote this great book on the power of introvert. So interested in your thoughts on that and other kind of important personality attributes. I think one of the things that we believe very strongly at EF is the power of technical talent. And I think particularly in the UK, in London where we first started, it was very much that if you were technical, you had to find your business guy or girl because there was no way that you were gonna be CEO. But when you look at some of the most successful companies coming out of mainly America, often the CEO has a deeply technical background if you think about Bill Gates or if you think about Mark Zuckerberg. And so one of our, I suppose, deep principles is we really, really like working with technical founders and we believe technical founders should be the CEO because they have the ability to come up with a technical vision that can be world changing. And I think when they are truly obsessive and when they have a secret about something as well, then they're pretty unstoppable and it doesn't matter if you are an introvert. And I think a lot of our very best founders are particularly introverted. They know, and I think often introverts get painted as bad communicators. And I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think introverts can often be much more concise and considered communicators, which actually makes them very strong CEOs. I absolutely agree with that. Technical talent is so important and a lot of the kind of pitching and sales, that is stuff that can be taught much more quickly. Yeah, thank you. And how about just diversity of background? So there's been obviously a very strong narrative around how many of Silicon Valley's top founders are immigrants and have come from very interesting, very varied backgrounds. And obviously immigration is a very politicized subject today. And here's your chance to sort of make the pitch to whoever in the audience can influence immigration policy. What do you have to say about that? I mean, immigration for me is that it's one of the biggest things that we, as YC, don't have control over. But we see so many talented people from all over the world applying and wanting to stay and wanting to create jobs in the US. And sometimes they're not able to because of visa issues. And so, I mean, if anyone wants to help me with this problem, I would love that help. Because I think it would be a huge boon to the US to be able to keep some of that talent. That said, I also think it's an incredible opportunity for countries outside the US. We have a lot of founders come to us for three months and then go back and continue building in their own countries. And one of my dreams for the international startup community is that you get big exits here. You get big exits in whatever country you come from and then start reinvesting it in your own ecosystems. I think that's going to be, that's one of the most positive visions of the future that I think can think coming out of startups. Yeah, I mean, if you look at where entrepreneur first gets its talent from, we are based in London and Singapore. But both of our hubs are based on immigrant talent. And I think the really sad thing for the UK is being part of Brexit and Brexit currently going ahead. And for the tech ecosystem in London, the most important thing is maintaining our access to amazing talent. So if anyone can help with that, that would be fantastic. So this Brexit thing is it, we won't talk about that. Maybe just talk a little bit about teams because that's also part of the sort of topic. When you look at the best founders that you've worked with, is there any sort of secret ingredients to how they recruit amazing talent onto their teams? Any sort of tips for founders here in the audience? So I think there's a, and this sort of feeds into what you were saying about, there are so many pools of diverse talent that is currently undervalued and untapped. And we've got one of our companies in our portfolio that is producing a product for parents. And it's a company called Lingumi and they're helping teach preschool children English. Their first hire was a pregnant woman. And since then, they've just built the team around making it a place for mothers and fathers to work. And it's very authentic because it connects them back to their customer as well. And so they have flexible working policies, remote working policies and the whole company's built to support I suppose talent that often might be overlooked or would find it very hard to work in a small, fast-growing startup. And so they've grown particularly quickly and I think largely it is because they were able to access this sort of different and diverse talent pool. Yeah, I think that when you are thinking about picking a co-founder or working with a co-founder, you don't wanna work with a clone of yourself. You wanna work with someone who has complementary skills. And similarly, when you're thinking about your first hires, you should also not be trying to hire a clone of yourself. You should be thinking about where are blind spots? What are the skills we need to continue growing and ideally try to work with that? And that often means recruiting from a diverse team and not just from someone who comes from your same school or previous place of work. And so I've seen that that's an important piece of scaling teams. And another thing I thought about with co-founders is a huge part of success is that open communication. So some of the best co-founder teams I've seen have set up a couple things. So they set up regular check-ins with each other and they go through like a panel of questions that talk about issues that have arisen in the business and issues that have arisen interpersonally with each other. So they're doing that on a regular cadence. And then the other thing is basically splitting up tasks and areas of expertise. So one co-founder is the final word on maybe product or the technical product. And the other is a final word in another piece. And just knowing who is in charge of what has been really important, I think, for many of the teams I've seen work well. Strongly agree with that. Do you ever see the co-CEO teams? I'm always a little bit worried. We don't let that happen. Okay. Yeah, I'm always like, we'll see you. What we found actually was that in the very, very early stages, I think the CEO role has so much attached to it sort of from a sort of optics perspective that we now push people to think about, do you want to be a talker and spend most of your time going out and talking and selling and fundraising? Or do you want to be a doer and somebody who's building a product and building the team? And we found that by kind of depoliticizing the CTO and CEO role, it was much easier to help people think about what is the right role for them? Adam Grant wrote this great book called Originals. It was published, I think, earlier this year where he talked about, you know, hiring non-conformists into startups. And we certainly have seen that. Some of our most talented teams have incredibly diverse backgrounds where there's huge amounts of disagreements constantly among the team, which because of the backgrounds they come from, but, you know, they have the ability to allow that disagreement to sort of be heard and they're good at resolving. I think it was an amazing example. I think in Pixar, at one point in their rise where one of the co-founders pulled together all the people who are most disgruntled in the company. Karl Lestam came out with some of their best ideas and that led to the Incredibles movie and the new animation technique behind that. So there's a lot of, you know, we see a tremendous benefit to having that kind of diverse background and sort of that sort of culture of allowing for disagreement. Yeah, I love that. I think what we've seen is that all co-founding teams fight. Disagreements are going to come up constantly and it's, you know, it's not, so you shouldn't, like, try not to fight. You should try to figure out how best to deal with those, you know, types of situations and how to communicate well when you come across something that you've come, you know, you're at odds with your co-founder early team with. I mean, this is why we strongly encourage our cohort to form teams of two, where in many ways conflict resolution is much easier when there's only two of you and only one relationship that you need to protect. We have found, and partly it's because the teams are built inorganically that as soon as you bring in a third and particularly a fourth or fifth co-founder suddenly getting to an agreement, making up to make decisions really, really quickly suffers significantly. How, what tips have you seen work best in terms of conflict resolution? So we, because we're reasonably hands-on in the early days, we do mediated sessions between the founders and in many ways what that does is it sets up a norm where you've got a friendly EF person in the room who kind of removes the awkwardness but at least you get used to giving each other feedback and if you do that enough and sometimes we do it on mass with the whole cohort everyone has to give their co-founder feedback simultaneously. It just breaks down that sort of social barrier and awkwardness of saying, hey, should we do feedback? So I think it's just trying to create these kind of new social and cultural norms where things that previously felt a bit awkward suddenly a positive step in your startup. So I think we only have a short amount of time left. Maybe this is the last question, Kat. There's a lot of founders sort of question whether or not they can scale all the way to be the CEO of Airbnb as it grows through growth. And have you seen most of your successful companies sort of very much be founder-led throughout their lives? And we're very much believers in that, but sort of is that? Most of the top YC companies have been founder-led throughout the entire so far, the entire course of their lives and we've even seen some companies like Reddit, for example, where the founders have come back to continue to lead them as they've grown and that is something that we're huge believers in and even people who might not seem formidable at the beginning when they're just starting out can grow into it. And that's something that we're always excited to see. Fantastic, look, everybody please thank both Kat and Alice for a great discussion.