Office Hours at Startup School 2013 with Paul Graham and Sam Altman

Fantastic work. I really hope pg has accepted your application to ycombinator. You clearly have a talent for hard work, perseverance and knowing how to market your product well. Even if pg doesn't like the idea, he should realise the team is very capable. I have a question though Karen, did you know you were going to do this project before you created this video [link] ? (I originally saw it on r/GetMotivated when it went viral originally) or did you decide to build it due to the popularity that the video got and the requests from people wanting to achieve similar? (Just curious from a marketing point of view whether you planned for the dance video to go viral to boost your idea or whether you saw an untapped market due to the popularity of the video and decided to fill it) ---- [EDIT] - Just got my question answered by watching this : [this video] - I'm glad that it was an idea that came out of the viral consequence of the original video, rather than the original plan all along. Also just realised that the woman learning to walk video I saw today on r/GetMotivated was submitted by you / part of the same project. I can see pg's mind turning over in the office hours video, trying to understand the concept and how big it can grow - I think he's right in the fact that you should see how people use it and allow yourselves to pivot if another idea emerges out of where you're at so far. I guess the issue is that one of the reasons for the successful popularity of your original dancing v

As someone who went through YC and met PG while he was still actively running it, I can tell you that at least in our batch he was 100% spot on about who was going to do well. He had a tendency to spend his free time with the same individuals who ended up doing phenomenally well. It would be easy to be dismissive about this and say something about doubling down on his best investments, etc. But during our batch many of those companies had not yet become the clear cut winners that they are today, and instead only turned into them a year or so down the road. One of the best companies from our batch is Flexport, and PG had been super impressed by Ryan Petersen even before he was officially accepted into YC [1]. It's pretty clear in hindsight that taking note of who PG was hanging out with was a very investable strategy. In fact, one of my batchmates had some money to put into other companies in our batch, and when he asked me for my opinion of who to invest in, that's exactly what I told him. I just did some quick math and would estimate that his ROI today is somewhere in the 1,000x range. I am not the only who figured this out - while this wasn't quite as much of a factor during my batch, nowadays there is an entire cottage industry of YC-only funds who invest only during YC demo days. As you can imagine, the way they differentiate from each other is by how much insider knowledge they are able to accumulate leading up to demo day (I am not implying that the partners ever leak a