Podcast Notes Playlist: Startup

Elon Musk is known for many different things – however, not many people seem to know a lot about Elon as a person, what led to him putting everything on the line to build SpaceX & Tesla, and why he continues pushing for a better future.    

In this podcast, Elon speaks his story – raw & (almost) uncut, with Kimbal and Maye Musk.

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• Keith credits his success to the basics: Early-morning exercise, proper sleep, and reading for ~1 hour a day
• If you’re going to succeed as a startup, you need to be able to find and hire undiscovered talent
• “If you’re going to attract people with extremely high potential, the first thing you have to do is let them thrive. You have to give them the degrees of freedom to do both what they can do very well, and to some extent, allow them to make mistakes.” – Keith Rabois
  • “If you try to constrain really talented people, you’re only going to create a mirror of yourself with your same strengths and weaknesses. You HAVE to let people do stuff that you disagree with. You can’t tell how good they are if they’re just replicating what you’d have them do.”
• If you’re tenacious (relentlessly resourceful), smart, and a magnet for talent, your odds of achieving success are greatly magnified
• “To be successful in an efficient market, you need to figure out what your comparative advantage is and magnify it” – Keith Rabois

Keith Rabois is a Silicon Valley legend known for discovering and cultivating talent that has gone on to create companies such as YouTube, Lyft, Airbnb, Quora and many more.

Keith is a general partner at Founders Fund and also founded Open-door which transforms the process of buying and selling a home. Keith has a unique and unparalleled track record as an entrepreneur, executive and investor.

Keith began his career in the industry as a senior executive at PayPal and subsequently served in influential roles at LinkedIn, and as Chief Operating Officer of Square.

On this episode Keith discusses working with greats such as Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, finding undiscovered talent and the mental frameworks he uses!

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• A little about Lambda School:
  • It’s essentially a trade school for coding
  • 85% of students who start, graduate
  • Unlike other schools, Lambda School has an incentive to help students succeed – they only get paid once students get a job
• Quotes to ponder:
  • “Human capital is the most unoptimized asset class we’ve ever had” – Austen Allred
  • “Starting a company is by definition saying, ‘I think what I can do is worth more than what other people will pay me for.'” – Austen Allred
  • “The highest leverage activity any human can have is inspiring other humans to do what they’re capable of” – Austen Allred

Austen Allred is the CEO and cofounder of Lambda School.

Lambda School provides a CS education that's free until you get a job. They were in the Summer 2017 batch of YC.

You can learn more about Lambda School at lambdaschool.com.

Austen is on Twitter at @austen.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

***

Topics

00:00 - Intro

1:01 - Encouraging people to do something that they're scared to do

5:16 - Where did the insight for Lambda School come from?

6:26 - College vs developer schools

10:26 - Building a network

12:16 - Does Austen see value in a traditional liberal arts education?

14:56 - Steven Klaiber-Noble asks - As competitors begin to copy your model what front do you believe you'll be competing on?

17:56 - Why did Austen choose to raise money?

20:06 - Fundraising falling through on Austen's first startup

21:36 - Moving back to Utah and writing a book about growth

23:26 - Why Austen wrote a book

26:26 - "Starting a company is by definition saying, I think what I can do is worth more than what other people will pay me for."

27:26 - Mispriced human capital

30:21 - Other opportunities for Lambda School

32:46 - Modeling risk

35:36 - David Kofoed Wind asks - When Lambda School is incentivized to take in people that will land high paying jobs, how do you think about the diversity of candidates? One would imagine that it quickly becomes a game of pattern matching the stereotypical SV people.

37:51 - Will Lambda School ever not be remote?

41:16 - Dave Dawson asks - You appear to be on the successful path now, was there a point early in Lambda School when you wanted to stop?

43:46 - Helping everyone become an autodidact

46:46 - Rethinking where to start on an online course

48:11 - Dave Dawson asks - What keeps you up at night at this point?

49:46 - Dayo Koleowo asks - “I have made remarks I do not agree with” - from Austen's Twitter bio. What is that one remark you wish you didn’t have to disagree with?

53:26 - Choosing remote work as a core problem to solve in your company

55:56 - Analysts aren't good at measuring product quality

57:36 - Teaching taste

• A little about Lambda School:
  • It’s essentially a trade school for coding
  • 85% of students who start, graduate
  • Unlike other schools, Lambda School has an incentive to help students succeed – they only get paid once students get a job
• Quotes to ponder:
  • “Human capital is the most unoptimized asset class we’ve ever had” – Austen Allred
  • “Starting a company is by definition saying, ‘I think what I can do is worth more than what other people will pay me for.'” – Austen Allred
  • “The highest leverage activity any human can have is inspiring other humans to do what they’re capable of” – Austen Allred

Austen Allred is the CEO and cofounder of Lambda School.

Lambda School provides a CS education that's free until you get a job. They were in the Summer 2017 batch of YC.

You can learn more about Lambda School at lambdaschool.com.

Austen is on Twitter at @austen.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

***

Topics

00:00 - Intro

1:01 - Encouraging people to do something that they're scared to do

5:16 - Where did the insight for Lambda School come from?

6:26 - College vs developer schools

10:26 - Building a network

12:16 - Does Austen see value in a traditional liberal arts education?

14:56 - Steven Klaiber-Noble asks - As competitors begin to copy your model what front do you believe you'll be competing on?

17:56 - Why did Austen choose to raise money?

20:06 - Fundraising falling through on Austen's first startup

21:36 - Moving back to Utah and writing a book about growth

23:26 - Why Austen wrote a book

26:26 - "Starting a company is by definition saying, I think what I can do is worth more than what other people will pay me for."

27:26 - Mispriced human capital

30:21 - Other opportunities for Lambda School

32:46 - Modeling risk

35:36 - David Kofoed Wind asks - When Lambda School is incentivized to take in people that will land high paying jobs, how do you think about the diversity of candidates? One would imagine that it quickly becomes a game of pattern matching the stereotypical SV people.

37:51 - Will Lambda School ever not be remote?

41:16 - Dave Dawson asks - You appear to be on the successful path now, was there a point early in Lambda School when you wanted to stop?

43:46 - Helping everyone become an autodidact

46:46 - Rethinking where to start on an online course

48:11 - Dave Dawson asks - What keeps you up at night at this point?

49:46 - Dayo Koleowo asks - “I have made remarks I do not agree with” - from Austen's Twitter bio. What is that one remark you wish you didn’t have to disagree with?

53:26 - Choosing remote work as a core problem to solve in your company

55:56 - Analysts aren't good at measuring product quality

57:36 - Teaching taste