Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston on the San Francisco comeback, founder mode, and the carpetbagger problem

guest Jessica Livingston from Y Cominator of course coming into the studio. Welcome stream Jessica. How you doing? Finally. Hi. Am I talking to you now? You're to us now. You are live on the internet. We are on X YouTube. We Twitch. We figured it out. We're on Substack. We've been on LinkedIn. Substack a YC company.

And Twitch Twitch also a YC company. Hi, how you doing? Hey, what's happening? I'm good. I'm so happy to be on the show and see. Long time no see, John. Yes, it's been it's been years. Uh we probably ran into each other.

Uh YC 2018, I went through the batch and uh uh we were we were uh at a couple o overlapped at a couple dinners. Um, are you up in the Bay right now? I am. I am at Y Combinator's office right now. Normally I live in England. Yes. And so I'm I'm here for a couple weeks this summer. Paul and I are back.

Give us the vibe check on San Francisco and YC. Uh, you've seen so many ups and downs as as trends have come and dissipated and people have talked about moving. uh what's your current uh opinion or take on just San Francisco and YC as a place to start and build a business?

Well, um so I come back to San Francisco sometimes just once a year, usually a couple times, two or three times. So I've only just seen little snippets of it. Mhm. I was very depressed a few years ago.

I came back um gosh it was like three years ago when I went and I I went to a bunch of like big YC startups like Reddit and Twitch and all these just to go say hi to some of the founders and to get a tour and it was really grim in San Francisco like I never walked around.

We were like in the car the whole time and we went into these startups and no one was there. everyone was still, you know, working remotely and I remember leaving thinking like, what is happening? Like it was so weird because it was very sudden for me because I hadn't been there during the pandemic, you know?

So, it's all of a sudden this snapshot was one that felt so foreign to me.

And now I feel like it is just vibrant and alive and there's so much crazy stuff going on in the world, but in this area, the Bay Area and San Francisco, it seems so optimistic and exciting and Y Cominator is just flourishing there because I'm on I'm on the board. So, you know, we keep tabs on it that way.

We don't come back um all the time, but we try to come back for a dinner a session. And now there are four sessions a year, four batches. So I think we're going to have to come back four times a year and you know talk at the dinners and things like that. But it's still NFL combine more positive. Yeah. Yeah.

No, we like to call it the NFL combine of technology where uh everyone who's joining the league, they're they're they're they once they leave Y Combinator Demo Day, they have a serious business and they need to be evaluated by the scouts, the and the literal venture scouts and sometimes the venture capitalists who kind of play a role of scouting the next public.

I'm hoping to come to I haven't been to demo day in a long in a couple years, you know, years. I'm hoping to come to the next demo day. Not the one in September, but the one in December. You'll you'll have to come. We live stream from demo day now. And uh be prepared. We bring a lot of confetti.

We bring a lot of very uh air horns and gongs. And uh if you're not prepared, one venture capitalist friend of ours came in and uh Jordy like launched a cannon of of confetti all over him and he was very surprised. But it was great. Um this that's so cool. You live streamed from demo day. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to watch it in England. Yeah. In September. the best people have said it's the best way to experience demo day from England. Yes. Yes. So, uh yeah, we'll send you the previous streams you can watch. We we we go backtoback with founders as they come off and have much more unstructured interviews.

It's a complete the opposite end of the spectrum from the prepped demo day pitch which has a particular uh veneer to it and is is meant to deliver information at a certain cadence. Uh our interviews are all over the place.

We'll talk about what people are wearing, what they did before, what they did, what they want to do next. We do we do go into the companies but we have a lot of fun with the founders.

How do you uh what do you think your role is in terms of uh you know being on the board of YC help you know continuing to help steward the company but having so much space from both San Francisco and even the business right I feel like when you can create that space in this case it's a physical space it can help you have a perspective uh that is unique and valuable even if you're not in the office every day like someone like Gary yeah I mean I have a lot of space.

I I we moved to England in 2016 and it was only meant to be a year and I took a sabbatical that year from YC. Paul had already retired. Sam was running it and it just kept going. The sabbatical was like endless and I never went back.

Um so I've had a lot of distance, you know, both mentally and physically and I think it I was really tired when I left. I mean, having started Y Combinator and it was growing and then I had kids at the same time, like never barely took any maternity leave, I was just really burnt out.

Um, and so I think I I love that I have this space cuz I feel like I have so much energy and love for startups, but it's not all the time.

So it feels like this special thing like when I do feels like going on vacation like going on vacation to San Francisco going on vacation to the Bay Area totally and I've you know we've been having and but it's a vacation that's very strenuous because I've been having more I'm busier here than I am at home and we've have meetings I was just I just toured the Open AI office right before I got on the show and it's it's just that's why I think I'm on such a high because it's just all so exciting And not that it feels novel, but it just feels so de different than, you know, having sheep in my yard in England.

Um, but it's it's great to come back. I'll tell you that much. Yeah. Um, on on on YC, can you help me understand the different eras of what made YC outperform other groups or investors?

I've heard this someone pitched this narrative of like the original brilliant insight of YC was that a new grad who was talented could not just walk into Sand Hill Road and get a meeting and raise money. And so there was this unique opportunity to take risk on younger and earlier stage founders.

And then the second era um not really era but second un unseen opportunity that everyone else was missing was uh helping connect international founders to American capital markets and bring companies and there's a huge amount of companies in the YC portfolio where they're they built a business somewhere else.

The founders grew up there. They're connected there. um but coming to YC got them accelerated in the American business context. Um do those two stories resonate with you or those is that is that completely apocryphal storytelling or is there something there? How would you kind of noodle on that?

Well, the first part of it 100% is true. That was our razor on Detra. I mean we started Y Cominator in the beginning of 2005 in Boston.

So there were not many angel investors and so if you wanted to raise money you had to have a business plan and you had to go in and pitch VCs who of course only wanted to invest millions of dollars in you.

There wasn't really an easy or efficient way to say hey I really just need like $50,000 to pay the rent quit my job and sort of experiment with with what I'm working on.

also remember at that time you know uh ser you know server costs were coming down you kind of just if you wanted to do a software company you just needed a computer and so you know Paul and I thought you know there we're in Boston here MIT and Harvard there's all these young super duper programmers and they could easily start a startup now if they just had a little bit of money to cover their expenses and someone gave them advice and someone helped them with the like really scary business things and legal things like incorporating the company because Paul himself was a startup founder and he could handle you know the big idea of creating a web-based application but the thought of incorporating the company paralyzed him kind of thing and so we did all that stuff um and it was also a time where traditionally VCs would install like a seasoned CEO you know they'd get the product going and say, "Well, you need someone to come in and run your business.

" Which leads me to what I want to talk about later is found the founder mode series that I've just launched like half an hour ago. Um, they bring in a seasoned CEO to run the company and we kind of thought, well, why can't the founder run the company? Yeah.

You know, back in 2005, we should just train them on the businessy stuff. Um, so that's how we started and for many years it was run with that in mind. you know, help the programmers. Our target audience was always programmers.

Um, and we just brought in people to say, "Here's how you run the business and get product market fit and all these different things. " We had all the guest speakers that would come in. Um, the second part of your question about the international people. Uh, I mean, we always did fund some international people.

The point is we always said in order to benefit from YC, you need to come to the Bay Area. You need to experience it. Even if you move back after the three-month batch is over, you need to come here because the ecosystem here is like nowhere else in the world.

Even if you lived in Chicago, we'd say come, you have to come and be present at Y Combinator. Yeah. Did you ever were were did you guys ever explore or were you motivated to try to uh like that I can't think of the the the YC of the UK, right? and you guys are there.

I'm sure you have reasons why that maybe doesn't exist or maybe it does exist. It just never broke out in a way. But, uh, was there always a commitment to San Francisco and not wanting to frag fragment kind of the magic of the Bay after you moved there or was there any Yeah, I mean, what we always got was why Yeah.

Why don't you have the YC of other cities, especially like New York? They always thought we were going to come to New York or or Boston.

Remember when we first started we Paul and I were by coastal so we'd do summer sessions in Boston in Cambridge and winter sessions in Mountain View and we did that for three years and then when we had our first child we had to choose so we chose Silicon Valley so we were always then in Mountain View.

um why don't we franchise why don't we do YC in other cities cuz we want people to come to Silicon Valley or to San Francisco cuz like I just said the ecosystem here is like no other and you know they can do a startup in London.

There's some startups that are doing very well in London but I don't think we I think we need to be in Silicon We need to be in San Francisco. I keep saying Silicon Valley because I'm so old school and I live in San Francisco, but I'm sorry, it's San Francisco now. Yeah.

Do you think things have changed with the the Mountain View to San Francisco uh switch? I remember when I first went through YC in 2012. Uh I was actually part of Imagine K12 which then kind of merged in and uh I was living with another proper YC company and we lived in Sunnyvale in a in a rundown house.

It was pitched to me. The pitch was amazing. They were like, "It's just like the house in the social network. It's got a pool. It's got a jacuzzi. It technically had a pool. It was filled with algae. It technically had a jacuzzi. It was full of leaves.

But what this gave us was the opportunity to basically just spend all day working because there was nothing else to do. So, we never were we weren't throwing pool parties. We were just grinding. And and I learned Python and I learned C and I taught myself a bunch of programming languages and built a bunch of products.

Everything flopped. It was a disaster. Uh eventually I learned to, you know, do other stuff, but um but there was something about the monastic building in uh in Sunnyvale that I really enjoyed.

And I'm wondering if there's some sort of like defenses that next generation of founders who might be in uh San Francisco where they get funded with more money up front and they can afford a a more distracting lifestyle.

Like is there any advice that you'd give for someone who can snap their fingers and be living in a nice apartment and have time to throw pool parties on the weekend? No one would ever take my advice. We've been telling for three years like just stay down in Silicon Valley.

Yes, it's boring, but you will get so much work done and you'll be so focused. And I think people who've gone through YC in the old days would agree. But what did they do after the 3 months? They got funding and got an office in San Francisco and moved to San Francisco.

You can't only, you know, we're not going to be able to stop people. San Francisco is so much more fun and everyone wants to live here and certainly all the young people want to live here.

Literally, as soon as we raised money, we actually moved to LA, but we got a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and we're throwing pool parties constantly and it was a mess. Well, you shouldn't be doing that. It was a mess. This was I'm now confused. How many startups did you do through YC? I remember Soilent.

So, Soilent went through in summer 2012. Uh, I was part of an Imagine K12 team that merged in. So, I became a co-founder of that CC Corp and added to that cap table and board, but we didn't go through YC again. Sam said like, you could go through again, but we were like, we could just raise a seed round.

So, we built that business and then I started a second YC company, winter 18, uh, and went through again properly. So now I'm like officially a YC founder, not this like retcon fake YC founder that got aqua aqua hired in and given the given the title of co-founder later on. It was a very messy status.

You're going to have to come on the social radars then because I feel like I'm sitting here talking to you guys, but I have a lot of questions about your guys' lives. Yeah, you know. Yeah, it's a Well, come on. We've only done one podcast this year with Yeah. Oddlots. That was it. Yeah, we're Yeah, we'd be happy to.

Anytime. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when when you're live three hours a day, it's really really hard.

And also, we both have young kids and so uh the schedule requires like turning down just a ton of events, which has been uh frustrating, but I'm sure you're in the same boat where people invite you to stuff and you're turn down everything. Yeah.

Would you have predicted back in 2005 that being a founder would one day be high status, something that that young people like thought would be the cool thing to do? Yep.

or was that not on your radar given at least at that time when it was hard enough to incorporate your business uh much less build something successful? I think Paul might have envisioned it. I I I don't joking aside I don't I don't think so. I mean it was such it was such a narrow thing.

Doing a startup was not the norm. Everyone either got a job in finance or went to graduate school or got like a real job. it was only sort of the weirdo sort of people who didn't fit in hardcore programmers that did startups and it just wasn't the normal option.

Um and and actually and then when we came to Silicon Valley there were more people that did it and so there was this then all of a sudden it didn't seem so weird and when we first started as you guys probably know we only had eight startups in the batch.

was tiny um and but it grew consistently over the years and as more startups got going um more people heard about them and then I remember specifically it was like when the social network movie came out I don't know what year that was it like 2011 or something yeah 2010 2011 somebody should try to do an analysis and and on how much economic how much EV that movie created probably a lot because it has to be in the I would have it could easily be in the hundreds of billions.

Even though it's sort of the wrong reason to do a startup, lots of people just did it anyway and built businesses because parents and of course Facebook itself was made made startups more popular and parents I mean we used to have parents who sort of disapproved of their kids doing YC cuz you got into Stanford grad school.

Why on earth aren't you choosing that over what's this Y cominator? And then all of a sudden, startups became seen as like this interesting thing that people actually did.

I mean, I'd like to say why Cominator had a bit of an impact on the number of startups that got started because we hopefully made it really easy to do. So, people who wouldn't have started started them did. But yes, that movie I do believe had a big effect. At least had a big bump in the YC applications.

also just the the the press machine uh some of Paul's writing around how to do PR some of the internal resources that also made it more acceptable uh one of my co-founders dropped out of a PhD program at Caltech both of his parents are professors so that was a big negotiation but fortunately like TechCrunch was there and had written about us we were profiled in the New Yorker and the the business just felt a little bit more real but in the early days even going through YC you tell someone I'm doing a startup, hey, it's actually kind of real.

Like I'm in this YC thing. People would be like, what are you talking about? Like you are crazy. Why don't you go work at a bank or consulting firm? Um people didn't get it. And so we just happily and quietly like did our thing, appealed to this small group of users that loved us and just kept growing every year. Yeah.

And now like everyone's doing it.

the the the flip side of this is I' I'd love your thoughts both as uh a founder and a mentor to entrepreneurs and also a parent potentially on this this concept of get your bag culture or this idea that uh Gen Z founders are potentially optimizing for short-term economic gain at a higher rate than previous generations.

Do you disagree with the premise? Do you think there's an antidote? What's your thinking about that concept? John, what is did what kind of culture did you say? This is how out of touch I am. So, so they uh explain it like the cool kids refer to it as get your bag culture.

A bag of course is a bag of money and getting the bag is a liquidity event typically reserved for IPOing a generational company.

Uh you well and so and and so you can compare this to like the the origins of YC which is maybe h more hacker culture people that were in it to just tinker and build build a product and satisfy the experiment or maybe build something for themselves.

Now there's a category of founders that I think people rightly categorize as people that are purely in it to make to try quick money. I call them carpet baggers. Carpet baggers. Yes. That's That's like a really old term, but it still it still uses the term bag, so I like it. I'll use it. Yes. Okay.

I I think I I don't think that it's sustainable if you're after the money. You can't start a startup sort of just to make money unless you're really good.

um you need to have some sort of genuine interest in what you're building because they're so hard that in order to get to that whatever kind of liquidity event you can get in order to get there you have to go through so much difficulty and and stress and hard times that it's it's I think it's hard to do.

I think people have done it. Um but I don't think it's not as easy as it sounds to like oh go get that funding. I and and it's a long haul. It's like I tell people you got to at least be ready to devote the next decade of your life to this.

I mean, maybe you can have a liquidity event earlier than that, but I don't I don't I don't believe in that. How have you how have you thought about uh like sort of protecting the YC brand over the years because YC has this interesting challenge where always orange, never red, never yellow.

And I don't Yeah, I don't mean I don't mean visual, but but in the sense of YC now accepts hundreds of founders in every year that get the opportunity to be a part of this program and the community and the institution that is YC and that ultimately creates people that um that love the brand that promote the brand and and all these positive things and become part of this community that that is part of the value.

But you also have to reject thousands and thousands of people every single year, right? people that don't make it in. And the dynamic that's the hardest part of YC.

By the way, the dynamic that I've witnessed is anytime almost every time I see somebody talking poorly about YC, it is somebody that won't overtly say that they were rejected, but I know deep down it's like you applied a couple times and you were rejected and this is you kind of lashing out, rejecting this this institution.

And it's never the founders that actually went through it, right? I've literally never, you know, a founder could go through it and say, "Oh, my I, you know, I went through YC, but it wasn't the re and it wasn't the reason that my company worked. " Maybe you could make that argument.

Or I went through YC and and I didn't necessarily fully connect with my group uh partner, but but I love the community, right? Like there's always they always get something out of it.

Uh but it's this hard challenge of having to ultimately reject people that are a part of the community and the industry that that you're in. Well, you're you're making a good point. We always want people to think good things about us. And certainly, if we reject you, we want you to apply again.

If you're still going, it's it's not like, oh, we don't like you and we never want you to come back. Maybe we just thought your idea seemed bad and you you wind up pivoting and reapplying. Um, I honestly think I I think we do a really good job advising everyone, even even the startups that are failing.

I mean, sometimes I used to kid Paul like he was so devoted to the startups that even the ones that were like clearly failing and needed to just call it a day on their startup. He'd be like, "No, we can make this work. Have you tried this?

" I mean, I really think our advice is exceptional and anyone who goes through the program will think even if my startup failed for whatever reason, it was still a valuable use of my time and I learned so much and I'm part of this amazing community which just gets better and better cuz more people join.

Um, we can't do anything about the people who like say bad things. They're mostly people who have never been through the program and so um or people we've rejected. You're right. Yeah. Are there particular red flags that pop up for uh people who see YC as a resume bullet point to add?

[Laughter] I'm laughing because the answer is yes.

um a lot of people and you know one of the YC partners you know now who looks at all the applications now I don't look at the applications really anymore but you can definitely tell people who are like building their resume and just want to put it on like their LinkedIn and in fact I think we had to like do something to prevent people from saying like like um YC founder on LinkedIn we had like as as in like a type of education you know it doesn't go in the educ ation section.

It's an investor. Like it goes it goes in the investor list of your company which you will continue to build forever hopefully. But I mean that's also that's also what every brand would hope is people value our money so much that they they they put it as part of their education. Yeah. It's an interesting trade-off.

Yeah. It's a it's a good problem to have, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I have a friend who uh I went to high school with and like phenomenally tracked individual, perfect SAT scores, uh Ivy League education, rejected from YC like 10 times, I think literally 11 times, got in, uh starts a company, an AI company before the Chat GBT moment and is just absolutely taking off and has been doing fantastically and has turned it into his whole life's work, which is fantastic.

Um, and I love that story to be rejected 10 times. It might have been 11 times. I I need to I'll I'll text him and confirm the exact number, but it was it was way over five. And it was this was back when YC was only doing two batches.

So, this was a five plus year process of facing rejection and continuing to build and getting through. And so, uh, yeah, to the people that think that they want to take to their anony accounts and and talk some trash, I would say just just continue to apply. Apply the 11th time. Yes. Yeah.

and then and then talk some trash. Apply the 11th time like I was rejected. Well, even even I was so so uh my last company I was I was rejected and it was even after we had raised from uh I was uh No, but I get to cover demo day now with with John. I feel guilty. No, no, no, no. It was for good reasons.

The exact reasons that Michael laid out in the rejection were the reasons that my company, my last company, like our hardest moments were all like he saw it like he had a crystal ball and he saw the struggles that we were going to run into. We eventually pivoted, but it was uh I appreciated the advice.

And then I still feel like YC is great because you just you you uh not to turn this into uh just praising uh YC the whole time. But uh all of the the core uh lessons are just all available online. Yeah. Right. And if you actually if you don't just read them, but you actually but apply them. Yeah.

But you actually apply them. I mean that the lesson that um the lesson that I think a bunch of companies right now are going to learn scaling headcount rapidly prior to true product market fit, right? You we have all these comp early stage companies, seed series A companies.

When you if you get up to 30, 40, 50 employees with like some market pull but not true product market fit. Good luck going through a a real pivot like a bet the company pivot with 50 people on your team.

Like it just it's so much harder than if you I think YC's standard advice is keep it like if if you have like you know under sevenish people if I can remember a two pizza team is can potentially pivot once you're at 50 it's going to be really really hard.

I don't know and you should always stay small before so you can serve money because if you don't have product market fit what if you have Yeah. What if you have to pivot? You can't do it as a big organization very easily. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about um finding product?

The other thing I will say that that uh from the from the 2021 era was that there was advice from investors broadly and this is like due to just like this pressure around delivering markups.

But there was this vice broadly of like if you want to raise money you need to have best-in-class growth which means that if you're a seedstage company you need to go from you need to get to a million dollars of ARR.

This was the 2021 era of like that's what get gets your series A done and you need to basically do it in less than a year and like there's this extreme pressure to do that and I think that was at odds with with YC's philosophy which was it's not about how fast you get to like the company that gets to a million dollars in ARR uh the fastest is not the one that gets to a billion the fastest right and I just time and time again I when I talk to early stage founders that aren't in YC to see.

I just say go like read read everything you possibly can that has been created from the people that have study the blade. Sorry, that's going to be long. Study the blade. That's another meme. Sorry. Study Jessica. I got to get up to speed on these memes, you guys. God. Memes for old people.

We throw them fast and we'll make YC for memes and you can come through it. Um we'll accept you on on product market fit.

talk about what product market fit looked like in the first batch and now I want to apply some of those uh takeaways from like we're in this weird era that there's a current discussion around uh AI inference reselling as a potential way to spike revenue growth that is not a true true example of product market fit because you are effectively selling a dollar for 90 cents and people will just take that all day long and that's not actually product market fit and I want to know how you tussle with that in the various companies that you saw early on uh like false signals for product market fit.

Well, we didn't have that much product market fit in the first batch. I think the only one was Reddit. Yeah. Um and even that was sort of slowgoing with maybe some fake accounts and things.

I mean I always think of it and I am probably not the best person to talk you know deeply about product market fit but what always sticks with me is something Paul Bukite used to say which is it's better to make like a small group of people love you y than a whole bunch of people just like you and I think if you can make that small group of people love you can you you usually always can expand that group of just avid users if it's if they just like you and are just coming to your site now and then or won't pay for something, those people aren't going to stick.

You can't that's not something you can build a long-term business off of. And I think, you know, YC, we're always just like, find people who love this product and we'll pay you for it. That that's the best way to determine if they love you, right? Um because a lot of people will say, "Oh, we're starting this idea.

Our friends, you know, say they'll use it. " We're like, "Really? Hey, are they just are they really going to use it or are they just saying they're going to use it cuz they're your friend? You know, like they really want to know what local events are going on in their neighborhood that night.

No, they think they do maybe, but they won't actually use it. Yeah. Talk about your new series, Founder Mode. Oh, yes. Founder mode. Okay. So, very briefly, literally just launched it like in the last hour.

Um, so Carolyn Levy, who's our legal counsel here, um, we're co-hosts of the Social Radars, which is a podcast, and we interview lots of YC founders about anything. It's very, sometimes very random. Sometimes we talk about how they got started. Sometimes we talk about what's going on now. It's very unscripted.

And you'll even interview like a nonprofit CEO, too, sometimes, right? Yes. We've had Edith from Norah Health was on it, of course. Yes. Yes. So, the only thing is we try to do YC founders, although um Tyler Schultz, the whistleblower at Theronos, was not a YC founder, but his episode is so interesting.

But anyway, so we're iterating YC founders. So, last week um Gary hosted a Y Cominator founder mode retreat up in Soma Valley. And what did you just do? We have a soundboard founder mode and one of the soundboard cues is founder mode in in a very serious uh Quake 3 or Doom video game voice. Sorry to interrupt. Sorry.

No, I I love that.

So he had the founder mode retreat and so Carolyn and I said since everyone's there and we're you know thinking about founder mode let's grab people and do very like short interviews like 15 minutes each about what does founder mode mean to you and when have you had to do things like that because it all started a year ago when Brian Chesy gave this famous talk at our other retreat from last year and I mean I left with my mind blown.

You just sat there for an hour like with your mouth open listening to him just go on and on and this happened and that happened blah blah blah blah blah talking about how he was gas lit and all this stuff and it was fascinating and every founder in that room was like gosh I sort of have been secretly worried about these same things.

So Paul then wrote an essay called founder mode. You defined what that means. You defined what that mean meant, but we need to collect examples. So that's what Carolyn and I are doing. You're making me laugh with that. We're collecting examples.

So we have like 10 different episodes coming out with a bunch of different YC founders. Today we launched Brian Chesy, Gary Tan, and Paul Graham. And then we'll we'll dribble them out over the next couple weeks.

But it was really fun hearing these stories because there's themes that are similar, but everyone has their own different stories. Well, we like to collect KPIs around here.

We have a tradition where we ask our guests to give us a number, maybe the number of years they've been in business, total amount of money they've raised, total downloads or number of episodes that you've done for the show. Any number. And then we ring the gong for numbers.

Uh is there anything you can share with us that can quantify your career? Anything? Any number that sticks out to you. It can be anything. Any number at all. Yeah. I mean, I'd have to say 20 because we founded Y Cominator in 2005. There we go. Best year yet. Best year yet. It's not all digital sound.

We also embrace the We're going to we're all going to go listen to the Founder Mode series. Uh we encourage uh the audience to as well. And all that we ask is at some point in the future, come and do the do the demo day stream with us. We would love to have you live on the demo day stream live. It's a quick interview.

If I'm here, stop by in December. That'd be fantastic. We'd love to talk to you more. Have a great rest of your day and have a great rest of your trip to San Francisco. We'll talk. Bye, guys. Bye. Let me tell you about Bezel. Get bezel. com. Your bezel concier is available to source you any watch on the planet.

Seriously, any watch. And our next guest is already ready. He's in the reream waiting room. He's coming into