Founder peers can raise your ambition more than school

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 7:03

   where do you think that came from that one story i think i i would happy i'd be happy if that like drifted off well now it's it's purely immortalized here here it is my memory of that is that like i needed to reschedule an interview one day or something um and pg tried to like say like i'll just do it next year or whatever and then i think i said some nicer version of i'm a sophomore and I'm coming. But yeah, you know, these things get slightly apocryphal. It's funny, I don't, and I say this with no false modesty, I don't like identify as a formidable person at all.

2. 7:42

   In fact, I think there's a lot of ways in which I'm really not. I do have a little bit of a just like, I don't see why things have to be the way they are. And so I'm just going to like do this thing that from first principles seems like fine. always felt a little bit weird about that. And then I remember one of the things I thought was so great about YC and still that I care so much about YC about is it was like a collection of the weird people who are just like, I'm just going to do my thing. The part of this that does resonate as a like accurate self-identity thing is I do think you can just do stuff or try stuff a surprising amount of the time. And I think more of that is a good thing. And then I think one of the things that both of us found at YC was a bunch of people who all believed that you could just do

3. 8:32

   stuff. For a long time, when I was trying to like figure out what made YC so special, I thought that it was like, okay, you have this like very amazing person telling you, you can do stuff I believe in you. And as a young founder, that felt so special and inspiring. And of course it is. But the thing I didn't understand until much later was it was the peer group of other people doing that. And one of the biggest pieces of advice I would give to young people now is finding that peer group as early as you can was so important to me. And I didn't realize it was something that mattered. I kind of thought, ah, like I have, you know, I'll figure it out on my own.

4. 9:16

   But man, being around like inspiring peers, so, so valuable. What's funny is both of us did spend time at Stanford. I actually did graduate, which is, I probably shouldn't have done that, but I did. Stanford's great. You pursued the path of, you know, far greater return by dropping out. But, you know, that was a community that purportedly had a lot of these characteristics, but I was still beyond surprised at how much more potent it was with a room full of founders.

5. 9:44

   It was, I was just going to say the same thing. Actually, I liked Stanford a lot. Yeah. But I did not feel surrounded by people that made me like want to be better and more ambitious and whatever else. And to the degree I did, the thing you were competing with your peers on was like who was going to get the internship at which investment bank, which I'm embarrassed to say I fell on that trap. This is like how powerful peer groups are. It's a very easy decision to not go back to school after like seeing what the like YC vibe was like.

6. 10:16

   Yeah. There's a powerful quote by Carl Jung that I really love. It's, you know, the world will come and ask you who you are. And if you don't know, it will tell you. It sounds like being very intentional about who you want to be and who you want to be around as early as possible is very important. Yeah, this was definitely one of my takeaways, at least for myself, is no one is immune to peer pressure. And so all you can do is like pick good peers.