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Welcome to the Chain Stories podcast, the podcast that celebrates disruptors who defy convention.
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Here, we dive into the bold stories of trailblazers who turned audacious ideas into billion dollar ventures.
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Welcome to the ChaninStories podcast.
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Today, I have a pioneer, someone that is working in the forefront of AI.
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Actually, something that I did not know that existed before and just came into my eyes.
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The founder of YesNoError.
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One of the first autonomous DeSci AI agents.
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Matt, it's a pleasure to have you in the show.
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And for our listeners, would you like to go and take a deep dive and intro yourself?
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Yeah, thank you so much for having me here.
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Happy to give you a quick background on myself.
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So I'm Matt Schlicht.
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I grew up in Southern California and I didn't go to college.
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Instead of going to college, I moved directly to Silicon Valley back in 2007, and I dove into the world of venture backed startups.
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I joined a company called Ustream, which was one of the first companies pioneering live video.
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And convince them that they should let me run all of product.
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Ustream ended up four years later getting acquired by IBM for over$150 million.
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And I got super lucky to get educated like in the streets instead of college.
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And when I was there, I got mentored by this amazing guy, Josh Elliman, who, he launched the Facebook API at Facebook, he grew Twitter.
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He invested in Musical.ly, which became TikTok.
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Just like an expert product person in Silicon Valley.
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I took a company through Icominator, same class that Brian Armstrong was in, the founder of Coinbase.
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He was the only person there.
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Forbes 30 under 30 twice whatever that is worth.
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And then I've taught myself to code over my journey.
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And I have been building in artificial intelligence since 2016 when open AI came out with their API, the first private version, I was one of the first, I don't know, a couple hundred people that had access to that in 2020 and have been on the forefront of building AI and autonomous agents.
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Since then, and most recently, I launched YesNoError, a AI agent that goes through all scientific research that has ever been published and uses the most advanced AI models to detect errors in these papers.
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And we've already found many errors and contacted the authors of the papers who confirmed that those errors were real and went on to go fix their papers.
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And we're on a mission to do that through all scientific research that's out there.
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That's quite a journey.
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And going back in time and a lot of our listeners might face this situation.
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Did you thought of for a second or even did your parents thought or told you like you need to go to college?
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Do you have to go and finish this out?
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You can't drop out or was this a self debate?
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What made you decide, okay, I'm going to go on my own and try.
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Yeah, so I don't have anything against college.
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I definitely wanted to go to a great college.
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The high school that I went to it was a very good high school.
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It's called Sage Hill.
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It's in Newport Beach.
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I didn't have a lot of money.
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Everybody else hadn't, around me had a lot of money.
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And what was interesting is the school I went to before that, it's called Waldorf.
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Anyone can look it up if they're interested in it.
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One of the pillars of Waldorf is that you don't use technology.
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So I didn't have a computer.
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I wasn't playing video games.
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I wasn't watching TV, but when I got to high school, I suddenly was like flooded with all this technology.
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And I was like, Oh my God, like a thousand people work at Google.
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This is like super crazy.
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And I got my first laptop.
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And so in high school, I didn't do any homework.
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All day long, all night long, all I did was build things on the internet, just super fascinated that you could go on there, nobody cared how old you were, you could just invent anything that you wanted.
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And so junior year of high school, I actually ended up getting kicked out.
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They asked me not to come back for senior year, which was obviously super upsetting.
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And so over summer, I actually got access to the school's email system, and I hacked into it, and I found like an error in their system, and I told them about it, so I didn't exploit it or anything, I said, hey, I actually found an issue in your email system I can access everybody's emails I think you should probably fix that, and because of that, they actually asked me to come back and finish out senior year, which was awesome.
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My grades weren't super good, so I didn't get into any like great colleges.
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And so the option was like, do I go to a not great college or should I just fight my way in to Silicon Valley?
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And that's what I did in two years, two or three years later, I actually went back and did the commencement speech for the high school.
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Fascinating.
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And so pretty much you taught yourself how to code during high school.
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And you had swamped with these materials in this world of digital economy, digital information, and you just took a straight dive into it.
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Was it your dream to one day go to Silicon Valley and build your startup?
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How did this start within you?
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As I grew up, I always wanted to be an inventor and I didn't know what that meant.
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I just wanted to create things.
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And what I discovered in high school, when I got access to the internet, this was like when Facebook was coming out.
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I remember being one of the first people who got like a Gmail account and you like had three email invites and you could send it to other people.
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What's fascinating about the internet is it's not a physical place.
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Anybody can grab a street corner and get access to every single person who's on the internet.
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And so if you can go build something digitally, you have the potential of the entire world, or at least anyone who's online, to interact with that thing you made.
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And so in high school, that just, if I was going to invent something, I was going to invent something that was digital, that was on the internet.
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And ever since then, yeah, my dream became, I'm going to go to Silicon Valley.
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And so the moment I graduated high school, I got a job, I worked my way in there.
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Started as an intern, moved up to business development, and then moved up to leading all of product.
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And yeah, that was the dream.
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And then ever since then, I've just been working with people inside of Silicon Valley.
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Working with investors and just staying on the forefront of technology.
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At first it was live stream video, then it was social networks, and then it was crypto for a little bit, and then for the longest time now it's been artificial intelligence, which is like the most transformative technology that probably will ever exist.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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We get ask this question a lot of times about founders from all over the world that we invest or speak with is should I move to Silicon Valley and Matt, do you see Silicon Valley as a place still today that a founder that's working on AI and tech that they really must be there is the center of action, otherwise they're going to miss out and be left behind?
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I don't think it's required that you have to go to Silicon Valley in order to be successful.
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There's definitely examples of people who don't go to Silicon Valley and who become successful, but Silicon Valley is still the heart of technology, and if you are a young person and you want to throw yourself into this world completely, then you should.
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I still would strongly recommend that you should go move to Silicon Valley for a period of time.
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Because when you go outside and you walk down the streets, the people you bump into are the builders of technology.
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When you go to a party, the people there are the builders of technology.
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When you get coffee, the people next to you are the builders of technology.
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And you're gonna meet other people who are young like you.
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Who have their whole careers ahead of them.
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And what's going to happen is, you're going to build these really strong relationships.
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And like, this is a very long game.
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You're not just playing this for the first day or the first year or the first five years.
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This is something where the relationships you build, you can be working together with people for many decades.
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And so if you meet people who are also young when you're young and you build this really tight relationship.
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Then later when maybe you're both not in Silicon Valley you can be working together still.
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And they have built their career and you've built your career.
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So if you are thinking of being a tech and you have the means to move to Silicon Valley, you a hundred percent should do it for some period of time.
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Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
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And going back to the time when you're there working as a BD for in this first job, how was the transition into Y Combinator?
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Was this was back in 2012, was something that you told yourself, okay, I need to go build my company.
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You had applied before.
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Y Combinator is basically for everyone who doesn't know, is the number one startup incubator in the entire world.
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It's based in Silicon Valley.
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And this is where some of the most incredible companies in the world have came from Airbnb, Twitch, Instacart, Coinbase, Stripe, all of these companies were actually started very young and funded by Y Combinator and they were helped in the very beginnings by the Y Combinator community.
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And if you are a startup founder, you're an aspiring startup founder one of the greatest investors that you can get is Y Combinator.
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It's basically this three month program to give you like very intensive like relationships and training and suggestions.
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And the whole goal there is build really quickly, find product market fit, go out and succeed.
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And it culminates at the end with something called demo day, where you and everybody else present to basically all the who's who of investors in the world who are looking to invest in the next big thing.
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And after I was at my first job at Ustream, I went and was lucky enough to get in after applying like three times into Y Combinator.
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And I took a company through Y Combinator in 2012.
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The company didn't end up succeeding, but we built an incredibly viral product called Trackspy, where celebrities could take advantage of social networks and viral loops to launch content at a very large scale.
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So any rapper at the time you could think of worked with us, like Lil Wayne, Drake, like all these people were the people we were working with.
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We just didn't make any money at all.
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And my Y Combinator class was actually a very unique one.
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Instacart, which is a massive company now, was in my Y Combinator class, just like a handful of people.
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Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase, was in my Y Combinator class, and he was the only person who worked at Coinbase.
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It was just Brian.
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And so Bitcoin was still very early, like Mt.
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Gox was still around.
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I think like the hack happened, around then or like right after then.
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So the very fascinating time.
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So if you have the chance and you have an idea you think is special, I would definitely recommend applying to Y Combinator.
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It's an incredible place.
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Awesome.
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And going back to that moment when you had Brian Armstrong in the same class, do you remember what were the comments or the sentiment of people towards crypto?
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And even yourself, what have you thought about crypto or what is this guy out there building a Bitcoin exchange?
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What do we even need this for?
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It was very early.
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I think I bought my first Bitcoin in 2011 and I bought it on Mt.
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Gox.
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I ended up losing all of it in the hack that happened.
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So in 2012, I forget what the price of Bitcoin was, it was very low.
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Brian gave everybody in the class one, he said if you sign up for Coinbase, I'll give you a Bitcoin.
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And the sentiment was that not everybody, most people didn't even sign up because it was just this like ridiculous thing.
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And a Bitcoin also wasn't worth very much and people were confused.
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And to give you also another comparison, when we went out to go fundraise at the end, you have Brian Armstrong saying, hi, you have Mt.
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Gox Wild West of crypto.
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I'm gonna go super legit and build like the full legit version of Mt.
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Gox is like basically what he was saying.
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And he's oh we take transaction, percentages and like business model and there's a whole movement.
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Then you have me I say hi, I'm building viral products to help rappers launch music and we make no money.
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My company in the beginning raised more money than Brian raised with Coinbase.
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And so that's just another example of like how people didn't understand.
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Like it's so hard to be an investor, they didn't understand the Gary Tan, who is now the CEO of Y Combinator and is doing a fantastic job at the time he was just a partner at YC, which meant like he would help individual startups and give you advice and you can meet with him, Sam Altman, who is the founder of open AI was also a partner at the time.
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So these people are just walking around and giving you advice.
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Gary had just started investing in YC startups himself.
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And that year that I was in there, he invested in Instacart and he invested in Coinbase.
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And he invested in me.
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And two out of three of those became multi billion dollar companies.
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I was the only one that didn't, but I liked it, there's some sort of pattern matching that I fit in with there.
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But I'm sure you got a lot of experience and being in such a environment where you are today and you have a wealth of knowledge from that time.
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Absolutely.
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Yeah.
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I think if you're starting out now and you're going to go build a startup, the biggest mistake you can make is how can I replicate the most successful people and where they are today?
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This is the biggest mistake that you can do.
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What you need to do is you need to go back to the beginnings.
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And if you're going to try to replicate someone, you need to start at where they started because there's no way that you can just, bam, make Stripe what it is today.
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Bam, make Bitcoin what it is today.
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Bam, make Coinbase what it is today.
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You have to figure out where it started and then you have to progress up.
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And then through that, you're going to have to go find your own journey.
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What's one of the biggest values of me, if going through Y Combinator is I know these very rare tidbits of what certain people like and did and thought and said well before anybody knew who they were.
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Absolutely.
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And since you're in such a closed environment where unicorns came out, is there a secret ingredient that you have noticed?
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Was it the team that Brian hired?
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Was it the VCs on the cap table?
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Was there something specifically you noticed this keeps happening over and over or it was just a combination of elements?
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Also, the fact that the market is super favorable sometimes.
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Yeah, so this is the whole science of either starting a company or investing in companies, and it's constantly evolving and changing because narratives are changing, the economy's changing, the market's changing, the world's changing, and so I think one side of it that is clear is you need to have something that can impact a large number of people, and that when you have it, even in a not perfect version there are people out there who will just truly love it.
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Even if it's not perfect, they will just truly love it.
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You don't want 10,000 people who slightly care about something.
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If you can even have a hundred people who really care about something, like your customers that's where you want to start, right?
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Because then you can grow from there.
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You need to be doing something where your potential customers or your user base are super crazy passionate about it.
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This is like the most important thing to them.
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So that's one thing.
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The other thing is if you can somehow recognize a large movement.
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That with a group of people is like the number one thing they care about.
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But if you went and talked to most normal people, they have no idea what you're talking about.
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That is like a very unique opportunity where maybe you can be the one to shepherd and formalize this thing that this group of people really care about, and you can bring it to the masses, right?
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Brian Armstrong saw something interesting is happening with crypto, the underlying concept of a trustless system that can power lots of different things, money being one of them, but lots of other use cases.
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No matter if people are making money on it or not he saw that.
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Enough people cared about this, they cared about it really passionately, and if this got big, it would not get sorta big, it would be like, the biggest thing, right?
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He also had previously worked at Airbnb, he was a developer, he could code things, so he was also very smart.
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So if you take those two things, experience and ability to execute and he knew what Airbnb looked like as it got big.
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And then he had also found an interesting pocket of passionate people where if they were right, they would be really right.
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And he merged these two things.
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And then there's a huge element of luck there, right?
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Like just because he did those two things doesn't mean that he would have done them right.
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Doesn't mean that that's actually how the world would play out.
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Probably if you ask Brian today, is Bitcoin anywhere near as big as you think it will be, he would say, no, it's super small compared to how big I think it would be.
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Ability to execute group of people who care about something.
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If that something can get really big, it's going to be really ginormous, and then a good amount of luck.
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Absolutely, I think that makes a lot of sense, especially with crypto.
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He was on the vanguard, he was the first pioneer, and there was no roads.
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But there was a lot that could be walked.
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And I also noticed that myself, being in this space for ten plus years that everyone out there thinks I was crazy when speaking about this.
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People still think you're crazy.
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Probably you go talk to most people right now about crypto and they still think you're crazy.
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So I think that's a great sign to continue in this room, as they say, you're if you're here, you're early, absolutely.
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And Matt, going back to your story.
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So you went to the Y Combinator, then going into 2016, you mentioned you were one of the first people to use open AI's, API.
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How did you came into AI?
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What was the sentiment at the time?
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Especially, this was probably one of the first versions, if not the first version of Open AI release.
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I'm sure it was not this robust and probably the system would hallucinate a lot when you're giving them a prompt and what draw you into it?
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Actually a little bit before that in 2014, I made a little experiment called ZapChain, which was I thought it'd be fun to make a social network where instead of upvoting each other you gave people tiny amounts of bitcoin and this was before ICOs happened I think if we were a little bit later we could have done an ICO and that would have been an incredible way to monetize and build that.
00:18:20.722 --> 00:18:26.067
But I got all the who's who, anyone who was anyone at the time on crypto was using ZapChain.
00:18:26.498 --> 00:18:34.387
Vitalik did an AMA on ZapChain before he launched Ethereum to promote the launch of Ethereum with the people who were on there, so it was pretty crazy.
00:18:34.798 --> 00:18:44.218
2016 I saw that you could start to build chatbots on places like Facebook Messenger and other platforms and AI was getting better and better.
00:18:44.548 --> 00:18:46.637
Nowhere near where it was today.
00:18:46.637 --> 00:18:49.278
We did not even have large language models.
00:18:49.278 --> 00:18:54.147
So all of the experiences people are used to today with ChatGPT, that didn't exist at all.
00:18:54.178 --> 00:18:55.307
It was way more basic.
00:18:55.708 --> 00:18:57.917
But it was very clear that this is where the world was going.
00:18:57.938 --> 00:19:08.798
You were going to get to a place where you could just talk to an AI and an AI would be able to do most anything and everything that a person could and maybe eventually even better.
00:19:09.248 --> 00:19:18.038
So in 2016 I started a company called Octane AI where you could create a chatbot and you could use very basic AI with that.
00:19:18.528 --> 00:19:23.087
And that company right now is profitable, makes millions of dollars a year.
00:19:23.188 --> 00:19:24.788
Has over 3,000 customers.
00:19:24.837 --> 00:19:33.077
We found a niche specifically in helping e commerce brands use AI to help their customers figure out what products they should buy.
00:19:33.307 --> 00:20:00.788
But because I've been on the forefront with this team building AI products when OpenAI I came out with their first beta for the OpenAI API, this was like late 2020, I was lucky enough to get an email from them to be invited to, I think, like the first couple 100 people who had access to this incredible GPT technology and back then when you used this is like the technology that became ChatGPT.
00:20:00.807 --> 00:20:02.288
It couldn't even do poetry.
00:20:02.337 --> 00:20:03.867
You would say hey, can you make a poem?
00:20:03.867 --> 00:20:05.077
Can you make something rhyme it?
00:20:05.087 --> 00:20:06.758
It wasn't even good enough to do that.
00:20:06.768 --> 00:20:08.917
It was very bad compared to where it is today.
00:20:09.167 --> 00:20:09.738
It was magic.
00:20:09.738 --> 00:20:11.018
You could do incredible things.
00:20:11.048 --> 00:20:16.067
And so ever since then, every single day, I've coded with LLMs.
00:20:16.067 --> 00:20:17.897
I've coded with OpenAI's API.
00:20:17.897 --> 00:20:25.617
I've coded with Google's and Anthropix and Llama and most recently DeepSeek because it's just like having magic in your hands.
00:20:25.617 --> 00:20:31.653
If crypto is like this thing that you can trust and it's a ledger and you can have all sorts of use cases for that, which is super important.
00:20:31.932 --> 00:20:41.532
What's fascinating about AI is it's intelligence as a resource that you can program and it's just exponentially getting better and better.
00:20:41.532 --> 00:20:43.833
So I started building games with it.
00:20:43.833 --> 00:20:45.502
I started building chatbots with it.
00:20:45.502 --> 00:20:59.393
I started exploring different techniques like RAG where there's this concept of giving they're called embedding vectors where you can take a chunk of text and you can basically give it an address in a like a thousand plus multi dimensional space.
00:20:59.653 --> 00:21:09.762
And then you can use that to find like correlations between different texts and you can use that to power chatbots, anyone who's interested in building an AI, look up RAG and it's a very basic once you start building with it.
00:21:09.823 --> 00:21:12.732
Yeah, I've been building with this technology since you could.
00:21:13.163 --> 00:21:39.987
And 2023 one of the interesting things that I saw was this rise of autonomous agents, and I saw people building auto GPT, which now is like top 10 most starred GitHub repo, like 170,000 stars, baby AGI, I think it has 20, 30,000 stars, and people were experimenting with what if, instead of you telling the AI what to do, what if you had the AI tell the AI what to do, and it could do that in a loop?
00:21:40.376 --> 00:21:47.027
And you could start to build AIs that were autonomous, and just kept coming up with a to do list, and they would do the to do list, and then they would keep going.
00:21:47.426 --> 00:21:50.826
And when I went and talked to a bunch of people about this, they'd never heard of it.