[0:00:00] Good afternoon. Good afternoon. And thank you for coming to what is going to be a very special afternoon for you today. We are here today to see and hear Sam Altman, president of the YC Group, which is the parent of the world-renowned Y Combinator. Frankly, it wouldn't matter what Sam was going to say, I would want to listen.
[0:00:31] But today, he has promised to give us 90 minutes of startup school, a program he launched earlier this year to make startup knowledge more accessible to the masses. Sharing knowledge, that's Sam's thing. Let me tell you a little bit about Sam, although I'm sure most of you know a lot about Sam already. He's become a legend in the Silicon Valley despite his young age.
[0:00:59] But we know that age is just a number. It's what you do with your knowledge to improve human lives that really count. Sam was just 19 when he co-founded his first startup company, Looped, which was acquired in 2012 by Green Dot for over $43 million. Well, they turned around and named him the chief technology officer and later to its board of directors. Through the next five years, he co-founded Hydrazine Capital.
[0:01:29] Served as the acting CEO of Reddit and as chairman of the board of two nuclear companies. I met Sam in 2014 and I think it's about the time that he had just been named president of Y Combinator or YC. Perhaps the most prestigious startup accelerator in the world. In 2015, Sam was named the top investor under 30 by Forbes. In 2016,
[0:01:59] He co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit research company established to steer development of safe artificial intelligence for the benefit of all humanity. Today, Sam Altman is one of the most influential figures in the Silicon Valley and the North American technology sector. The Startup School series is Sam's way of bringing essential and free startup knowledge to more people.
[0:02:27] If you have an open internet connection, you can learn from the experts by watching this carefully curated program. The knowledge gained at startup school is invaluable as it is in participating in YC itself. In fact, more than a few of our Waterloo engineering students and alum have used this participation in YC as a springboard to success, including the founders of Thalmic Labs, Vidyard,
[0:02:57] Pebble, and BufferBox. Sam has had a huge impact in the Waterloo region and we deeply appreciate his support. I'm also delighted to share with you that Sam is receiving an honorary degree of engineering, a degree tomorrow at the convocation during the Faculty of Engineering afternoon ceremony where he will also give an address.
[0:03:24] The convocation is live streamed, so please watch for it. He is an intellectual leader who has inspired the world and inspired us. We are very proud to have him as an alumnus. Now please join me to welcome Mr. Sam Altman. Thank you, Dean, for that lovely introduction. It's really nice to be back here. I remember the first time I came to Waterloo. I felt like I really would have.
[0:04:01] Loved to go to school here. The thing that stuck out the most is that unlike where I went to school and I had to find a group of people who were interested in building and creating new technology and not just sort of going to class all day, everyone here was like that. And I really loved that. And that spirit has been amazing. I think, I'm pretty sure this is accurate. I can't think of anything that would even come close. I believe there are more Y Combinator alum companies within a kilometer of...
[0:04:30] So I'm happy to be doing this talk today because this is the last day of startup school. So we just finished. We advised 3,000 startups at once online, sort of a crazy experiment, and it worked really, really well.
[0:05:04] I have given talks like this many times. I have the most fun when it's mostly me answering questions. So I will talk, but please interrupt any time you'd like. I'm happy to go in any direction. Whatever's most useful. I'd much rather be interrupted if I'm boring you or telling you something that is not helpful than I would to sort of waste your time on something you don't want to hear about. Thank you very much. So, this is great. I had a late flight last night.
[0:05:34] So I wanted to talk about the question that I usually get when I'm anywhere other than Silicon Valley, although maybe a little bit less in Waterloo than most places, which is, what makes Silicon Valley special? How can we be more like Silicon Valley? What do we need to do? And first of all, I think the most important thing is to not feel like you are any less impressive than people in Silicon Valley. I think people handicap themselves.
[0:06:03] A lot by saying that, well, you know, I'm going to grade on a curve and I need a few extra strokes in the golf game because I haven't, I'm not in Silicon Valley. Completely wrong. Obviously, talent is equally distributed around the world. There may be more access to capital in Silicon Valley, but everything else is basically harder. It's harder to find office space. It's harder to recruit and retain engineers. So I think the number one piece of advice that I always give people is get out of your own head about this. But here are the things that I think are admirable about Silicon Valley.
[0:06:33] Many, many things we do wrong. Here are some of the things I think we do well and are worth trying to emulate. One is there is just a relentless belief in the future, that there's going to be a future, that things are going to change, the future is going to be better, that it's okay to say that the future is going to be better, it's okay to have strong ideas. One of the hard things, if you are trying to build a really successful company, you kind of have to live in the future.
[0:07:00] Alan Kay talks about how he tries to mentally live 30 years in the future, but that's a little bit too aggressive, so he tries to build the future that's 15 years out. 15 years is a long time. Technology trends are these exponential curves. It's really easy to be building the future, be correct, but seem kind of very crazy, very out there, very focused on the wrong things in the present.
[0:07:29] One of the challenges of this is if you're going to have this relentless belief in the future, if you're really going to truly think about the world 30 years out and try and then get to work on building the world that's 15 years out, people are going to mock you. And all humans basically have this evolutionary drive not to like being made fun of, not to like being mocked. You want to fit in with your group. And one of the things that really works about Silicon Valley
[0:07:56] And one of the things that works about Waterloo too is that there is enough critical mass of people that do believe in the future that you can find people who won't mock you. You can find people who think it's okay to be ambitious, who think it's okay to be working on the problems of tomorrow, who think it's okay to be trying these things that sound like they're not going to work today. Close to that is just you want to have some people, and I have found a group over the last decade plus of people like this for me, but I have people that I can call up.
[0:08:26] You know, at 11 o'clock on a Friday night from a bar with a really crazy idea that sounds totally wild and completely nonsensical. And they will at least humor me. They will not immediately say, that's dumb. They will say, well, let's think about how that could be good. Or, well, that sounds really bad, but maybe it's good for this reason. And most of the time, they're just bad ideas. But every once in a while, they're really, really good. And the problem is, most people just kill all of their good ideas.
[0:08:54] I don't know what the Canadian phrase for this is. Interestingly, in the US, we have no such phrase, but most countries do. I picked one from Australia called Tall Poppy Syndrome, but this idea where if you try to be too ambitious, people try to cut you down. Is there a Canadian phrase for this? What is it? You can feel it. So I think it's really interesting that there is no, there's no American phrase for this that it's at least popular, and it's good that there's not an obvious one in Canada either.
[0:09:25] But I think it's really important to find a group of people who won't try to cut you down for saying like, I'm going to go build this giant company. Again, another really good thing about Waterloo, density really matters. Density is really, really important. Trying to be around, you know, a lot of other people working on startups in close physical and mental proximity is really important. And then the other thing that I think we have for all of the cultural problems in Silicon Valley, we have a very good culture of paying it forward.
[0:09:56] So people help you. And if you're successful, you are expected to pay it forward. And that's been great to see at just among the YC companies that I know of in Waterloo, that there's a real culture of that. And I know a bunch of YC alums are running many of the startup related orgs and starting a new one. And that happens in Silicon Valley as well. And I think that's a really good sign. So another question is that we get all the time and that I have spent the last 10 years of my life trying to figure out is,
[0:10:26] What makes really great founders special? There are two phrases that kind of come to mind if I were trying to pick what our top 10 most successful founders would have said about themselves when we were interviewing them at YC. I always figure it out and I never give up. Would have been high on the list.
[0:10:51] And everyone thinks the thing that really matters is how smart they are or their domain expertise or their network or their connections. It really is this kind of a personality trait. People have different phrases for that. Determination, relentlessly resourceful is one that Paul Graham uses. But that spirit is the most important factor, I think, in successful founders. You need to have everything else.
[0:11:16] But a lot of people have everything else. This, I think, is the kind of the rare and the limiting trait. The good news about this is I think people can kind of learn it. People don't try too often, but I think this is possible, where if you apply yourself to getting better in this way and the way you do for anything else, I think people make huge strides. This is not something that if you're not born with it, there's no chance. Three things that we have observed about how successful founders get things done. Focus.
[0:11:46] Self-belief and personal connections. This actually started something Charlie Rose said, that he had observed that the way people got things done in the world was a combination of focus and personal connections. And then for startups, I think it's really important to add this, you actually have to believe in yourself, you actually have to believe you might do it. But these three things we've seen again and again. And in fact, if I were looking for a co-founder,
[0:12:15] I would look for a lot of that. Does someone have a relentless focus? Are they just gonna get this one thing done and keep their blinders on, not get distracted by shiny objects along the way? Do they actually believe that this is possible? Because momentum is this crazily self-fulfilling prophecy. And can they form the personal connections that it takes to be successful? Will they be able to recruit and retain a world-class team? Will they be able to sell their product? Will they be able to raise money? Will they be able to talk to the press?
[0:12:45] The ability to form these personal connections is super important. Another thing that I did not used to believe was this important, and now I do, is clear communication. And vision and thought is part of that, but really clear communication. Almost all of the best startups that we have ever been involved with, from the very first time we met those founders, they were able to very concisely and clearly communicate what they were doing in like 25 words. And I don't know why.
[0:13:15] This is so important. It may be that you need this to spread the message. But I can certainly say that founders who aren't good at this don't really go on to be successful. Founders that don't get good at clear, concise communication really struggle. And you can prove this to yourself quickly by just looking at the founders of really successful companies. They're all good at this. So I think this is an area to invest in and get better in. If you have those things, then one thing you can do
[0:13:44] is attract great people to work on the company with you, which is hard and important. It's really, really hard to recruit the 20th employee for a startup. One thing that I always tell people is it is easier to start a hard startup than it is to start an easy startup. And the reason is you need a startup that is going to be inspiring. You need a startup that people are going to want to help you with. And if you are another startup that kind of fades into the noise and no one really cares that much about, it may be a fine business, but it's just not exciting.
[0:14:14] Contribute their energy to it. It's really hard. Recruiting that 20th employee is really hard. You need an exciting vision and you need to be good at communication and personal relationships. And then also, founders just get a huge amount of work done themselves. So in the early days, especially, you kind of got to do everything and there's a lot to do. And so people that have this sort of like focus and maniacal productivity is really important.
[0:14:47] The thing that people always want to talk to me about, though, is none of those things. People always want to talk about the idea. The idea is important, for sure. But there are a lot of good ideas in the world. There are far fewer people that are willing to put in the effort that it takes over years or decades to build the great company than there are people who have great ideas. That said, starting a startup with a bad idea is also bad. So I'm happy to talk about this.
[0:15:17] And about how to have good ideas. But this is always what people want to talk about. A lot of people think if they could just come up with a good idea, then they can start a really successful company. We've run this experiment at YC. We funded 21 companies where the founders seemed really good but they didn't have an idea. All 21 failed in the first year. By far the worst experiment we've ever run. It turns out that good founders tend to have a lot of good ideas and also good ideas without real commitment behind them.
[0:15:47] Are just tough. So wait to have a good idea before you start a startup. If you start a startup without a good idea and you just kind of cast around for one, you'll be under pressure to make something up. It won't work that well. And startups, the very best startups are all started because someone believes so passionately in an idea and they believe that a startup is the best way to make that happen. One of the things that is really hard about good ideas is that original thought is really hard. Most people just
[0:16:17] Copy somebody else's thoughts. Most people do what somebody else is doing. And this is disastrous because if you have one idea that starts to work and you have 10,000 clones that follow it, none of you are going to be successful. And the person that started first that you all copied is very likely to win. In the year after Facebook started, there were well over 1,000 social networks that started. In the year after Instagram started, there were well over 1,000 photo sharing apps that started.
[0:16:46] We have not seen the same Snapchat cloning race. I'm not sure why. But you want to do something that is new and different. You want to think of an idea that's not the same idea everybody else is working on. The year that I joined the board of Helion, which is a nuclear fusion company, according to somebody's count, there were 10,000 photo startups of some sort or other started that year, and one nuclear fusion startup started, which seemed a little bit off to me.
[0:17:17] But I think most people just do what everybody else is doing right then. Noticing problems in your own life is certainly a good way to do this. It's not true that all successful startups are starting to solve a problem that the founders have themselves, but it's a very high percentage. If you really go back and think about the transformational companies, most of them start with someone solving their own problem. And then there's this idea of a great wave, which is that
[0:17:46] Another thing you notice if you go back and look at all the really successful companies is there was this massive wave of technology coming. You could see it in the distance and you knew it was going to just crash over the shore and through the city. And you got out there early on your surfboard. So I think it's really hard to create a technology wave as a startup. That takes too much, too many resources. You can't do that. But what you can do is notice that a wave is coming.
[0:18:16] And university students are particularly good at this. You can notice that a technological wave is coming, and while other people still think it's a toy are not going to matter, you can really get conviction behind it and surf somebody else's wave. And this, by the way, I think is the reason that there tends to be these clusters in time when a lot of great companies started. So, you know, when the internet wave happened in the mid to late 90s,
[0:18:45] You had a huge cluster of companies that are now very large, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, I guess, others. And then when the mobile wave happened after the iPhone came out, 2007, 2008, you had this other big wave of Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, in this short period of time right after this new wave started.
[0:19:11] And so a very good question to think about now. Facebook, I would say, kind of was the one that straddled both. They did really well on the internet, and then they did even better on mobile. And a really good question to ask is, what is the wave that's starting right now, and what will be, you know, where is the cluster of companies, because we're about due for another one, where is that going to be? Another question that people come up with, ask all the time, is about co-founders and how to find them. We do have a significant preference for co-founders. I think this is borne out in the data. We are very happy to fund.
[0:19:42] Single founder companies. And I would guess, you know, on the order of 10% of the companies we fund are single founder, yes. I don't answer that, and I'll tell you why. I am equally likely to be right as wrong, but because you might listen to me, I could set you down like a terrible career trajectory. And I would feel very irresponsible if that happened. So you should not start the startup I want to start. You should start the startup you want to start. And you should trust your own convictions. You look younger than I am, you're more likely to be right. That's sort of been the history of technology. But...
[0:20:17] I mean, one that I am so sure I'm right about that I'm willing to say is I do think machine learning applied to every vertical is as close to a guaranteed shot as you can have right now in startups. The problem is a lot of other people think that too, so it's brutally competitive. But there are going to be $100 billion companies that get started around now applying AI to different verticals. So that's one I feel confident enough about to say.
[0:20:48] But if you think it's Bitcoin or VR or synthetic biology, then you should bet on that. So Amazon, I think, was basically a solo single founder company, and obviously that's been fantastic. It's clearly possible. And it is certainly a lot better to be a solo founder than to have a bad co-founder. I actually was dealing with this this morning. This is about the time in a YC batch when people that kind of came together as co-founders
[0:21:19] Just so that they could get into YC and told us how they knew each other for a long time and made all that stuff up. This is where that all falls apart. So you really do want shared history with a co-founder. It is a very stressful thing. It's like a relationship. And if you don't have some goodwill built up in the bank, it's like if you start a relationship with the most stressful bad part. And you need that shared history. You need to feel like you owe each other something. And that way, at some point,
[0:21:46] The expected value of most startups kind of dips below the x-axis. And if the co-founders feel like they're friends and they owe each other something, you can kind of get through it. As I mentioned earlier, this concept of determination, hugely important. And one mistake people make all the time when they select co-founders is to pick somebody who's really good at technology, domain expert, everything else good, but not determined. And that's very bad. In general,
[0:22:16] The hiring framework that has worked for me in my life has been to go for values first, aptitude second, and specific skills third. And I think this is particularly true for co-founders. The problem is that most people for regular hiring and especially for co-founders reverse this. You know, I need an engineer with a background in Node and who has worked on iPhone apps. About the worst possible way to choose a co-founder.
[0:22:45] And then you really want people who are, you want founders who are humble and not entitled. Companies end up being reflections of their founders. The culture of the founder set is what the company's gonna look like for a long, long time. And I think a very common mistake that people make is to assume that, well,
[0:23:08] This founder I saw in this movie that is probably not even that based on reality was really arrogant, so that's how to be successful, so that's how I'm gonna come across. It turns off everybody. Poisonous to the culture. No one wants to work with you really bad. And I have seen, the reason I added to this slide, is in the last year I have seen people who are kind of more reserved, a little bit more introverted, closer to my side of the sort of ASPE scale than somebody else.
[0:23:36] Say, you know what I need is like a really outgoing, kind of arrogant co-founder because that's what success looks like. And really, that's just going to hurt you. And it has become this meme of this thing that people are trying to select for. So I mention it. Okay. So product. This is like the most important. Yes. Everything that I said before except the determination and the self-belief has to be even higher. The way it normally works when you have two founders is
[0:24:13] There'll be days where one person's kind of down and kind of wants to give up, but the other person is feeling really good and saying, we're going to do this, don't worry about it, and you pull the other person up, and then the next day it reverses. But the problem is if you're by yourself and you're going through the sine wave, when you're in the downs, you just end up giving up. There's nobody to pull you up. So we really look for people that have incredible internal conviction about what they're doing.
[0:24:46] It's hard though, it's really hard. I don't think I could do it. I wouldn't try. I don't think I could do it though. I do, yeah. Certainly for the first hires. I mean later it may get to the point like someday you will get so big and so successful that you just need this incredibly esoteric skill and then maybe you can compromise a little bit, but only a little bit. The first few hires, like even the first 10 hires, I think you want to think of those people as like almost at the co-founder bar. You really want people that are going to
[0:25:24] Believe in the mission, that share your values, and that are just super talented, super high aptitude at whatever they do. I have almost never gone wrong in my career hiring people who are inexperienced at a specific domain, but super committed and super talented at everything else they've done and trusting that maybe they'll be a little bit less productive for the first month, but they'll come up to speed quickly. The leaders that I've hired for the different parts of my organization,
[0:25:54] I've taken a bet on most of them that they haven't had experience. And it's worked out, but that's the order I go in. Yes? Well, one thing that is kind of frustrating to some people, I'm sure, about the way I hire is I don't, I think there are people who are really good at interviews, and I've gotten a lot better throughout the YC process, but I am not one of these people who can say,
[0:26:41] I want to work with you an hour every day for the next 10 years based off of two one-hour meetings. And I know there are people who do that or claim they do that and are good at it, but that's just not me. So I really spend a lot of time, like if I'm going to be hiring a direct report, I'm really going to spend a lot of time with them. Like we're going to go out for meals four or five times. We're going to spend many hours sitting together in the office. We're really going to talk about their life story and my life story, what they want to get done in their life.
[0:27:10] What I want to get done, kind of like my philosophy behind Y Combinator and what I want it to be and why it matters and what they want to accomplish. I hire really slowly. And I try to do it gradually as well. So like if you're going to be a partner at YC, we've developed this process where it's basically like a year long. You know, first you come in and you do office hours with some companies. And then if those go well with companies like you, if a number of partners that have sat in with you like you, then we're going to make you a part-time partner.
[0:27:39] For six or 12 months where you're kind of like a partner, but you do it much less of your time. And so we get, but you're kind of like in our partner meetings and you kind of hang out. And then if that goes well, we're going to sort of like, we have this sort of six month trial partner period. We don't screw up that much once we actually make you a partner, but we have a long time to get there. And we're pretty ruthless about, you know, if at some point it's just not feeling good, even if it's someone we become friendly with, which is why it's hard.
[0:28:09] We just say we love you, we want to help you find something else to do, but probably not here. So that's the thing that's worked for me. There are people who kind of make these one-hour snap decisions. We do it for YC companies. We decide very quickly, but most of them don't work out anyway, and we're not with them every day, so it's different. Yes? All the time. Yes. That's happened for sure as well, but most of the partners at Y Combinator have not been investors before.
[0:28:58] This job. And so I'll give you, here's a specific example. A couple of years ago, we decided that we were gonna start a growth fund. Although I'm an investor, I am basically financially illiterate. There are these people who can build a model and say, oh, we think the company's gonna do this much in 2023 and thus be worthwhile.
[0:29:22] And I don't know the shortcuts in Excel. And that's okay at the stage of investing I do. But it means as a growth investor, I really am well out of my league. However, what I do know how to do is sort of say like, okay, I can't build you a precise model, but I think this is a company that's going to be worth a lot in five or six years for these reasons. I don't know exactly how much, I don't know exactly what price we should pay, but let's take a hard look. But we had never raised a growth fund.
[0:29:48] We had been investing super early, and now all of a sudden we're gonna be investing 50 plus million dollars at a time at a late stage in YC companies. And we had to go off and figure out how we find professional limited partners, because we needed way more money than we'd ever deployed before. And everyone's advice was the thing you need is to hire a growth equity finance person. Everyone's advice, even my own partners, but certainly everyone outside.
[0:30:15] There's no other option. No one will give you money without this. You need a seasoned investor with a big track record. It's a different world. You need someone that's going to wear like cufflinks and suits and the whole thing. And I met some of those people. And 100% of them failed the values test. And honestly, I would say a high percentage of them failed the aptitude test as well. They did have the experience.
[0:30:43] But any of those people that I brought into the organization to lead this very important new group that we have was going to be a big compromise on values. Everyone I met thought about that, thought about that. And I was like, you know what? We're not going to do this. So the guy we ended up hiring for this had never been an investor before in his life at any stage. He had been a CFO. He was the CFO of Twitter. But he had absolutely no experience as a growth investor. And it was this thing that everyone said you just can't do. This is the one area where you've got to have an experienced person.
[0:31:13] But I didn't like any of them. I didn't think any of them were going to have good values alignment with what we're about as an organization. So we hired someone that had absolutely no experience with what we're doing. And he's worked out fantastically well. Built a great team. You know, was able to sort of get in more junior people that specific domain experience. But he understands very fundamentally what we do and why. And has built a wonderful organization in service to founders in the same way that we do it at a later stage that I don't believe any of the traditional growth investors would have done.
[0:31:52] Well, in the very early stage of my career, you know, no one experienced or talked to me at all. So at that point, I had to hire an experienced people. That was not a choice. That was the default. I think that's many people who have run startups have understood what that's like. You know, the thing that always made me feel a little bit better about that is I was also unqualified. And I was doing okay. I was also, you know, I had no experience. I had never run a company before. Didn't really know anything about business. Didn't know that much about engineering.
[0:32:24] I was doing okay. So I was always, I'm always skeptical of founders who say like, I have no experience myself, but I will only hire people with 20 years of experience. There's some mental disconnect there. So yeah, I was always willing to, you know, there have been times, again, there have been times where really specific domain expertise about something is important. You know, like I wouldn't hire a non-lawyer and say, okay, you be general counsel.
[0:32:55] But in general, I think taking a bet on people has paid off for me. Yeah, it's a great question. It's definitely hard. One of the best pieces of advice someone gave me when I asked that same question when I was starting my career is just be realistic that you're not going to hire that many people and that you're not going to get as much done as you'd like.
[0:33:44] Hold the bar super high, because you're only gonna get to hire three or four people anyway. Your network's not that big. It's really hard to get people to believe your vision. You might not have that much money. And so that kind of mentally freed me, because I had been feeling like I had to hire a bunch of people immediately to be taken seriously. And then when someone said, that's just not realistic, that's not gonna happen, so find a few people, realize it's gonna take longer, and get really good ones. And it's better to hire two or three great people than 10 warm bodies.
[0:34:15] That really freed me, and I was like, okay, you know what? I'm not gonna hit the hiring goal that the board told me to hit, because I'd have to compromise to do that. And I'm just gonna get a few people, and if they're really good people, maybe we get less done this year than we wanted, but it means we get more done next year. And still, we're always behind our hiring plan. Every year, YC is always behind our hiring plan. It's just hard, it just takes a while. It never gets that much easier.
[0:35:13] Look, a board's role is advice and consent. The CEO is supposed to run the company. And I think if the CEO is doing a bad job, that's when the board is supposed to step in. The board can fire the CEO sometimes, less and less. But theoretically, the board can fire the CEO. But beyond that, the CEO is supposed to make the decisions. And the board is supposed to be a sounding board, advice and consent. And I don't...
[0:35:42] So like do I think a board should fire a bad CEO? Yes, and I know that's like a little bit heretical in Silicon Valley. Beyond that, do I think the board needs to give the CEO a very wide latitude to run the company? Yes, and I think most boards do. If you don't have a board though that you want advice from, if you don't have a board that you intrinsically respect and want to listen to, that means you have a bad board and you should fix that. But I, and I've had good board members, I've had bad board members.
[0:36:13] I have board members now, but we've never had a board meeting. But I like them all. But I think you really want people who are there to support you, to help guide you, but will respect that it's your company and you're going to make the decisions. Equally important. I mean, you do have a CEO who is going to make a lot of the day-to-day decisions, but every good co-founder dynamic I have seen, and by...
[0:36:52] That I mean like where all the co-founders actually stay at the company. There's huge compromise. And even if one person is a CEO, which they are, like everyone is kind of aware of what everybody else feels most strongly about, and there's huge compromise. Because you know, it's like the co-founders own the company together, and they should be running it together to some degree. And the whole like, the dynamic you see sometimes where
[0:37:22] The relationship between co-founders starts really good, but then someone kind of gets power drunk on being CEO and their investors, their boards telling them it's their show. The other co-founders, and then kind of compromise goes out the window, the other co-founders almost always leave. And in all of the good long-term relationships, I think there's really good compromise. Go ahead. Sometimes it's really bad, and sometimes it's really good. I mean, there are definitely times when a co-founder should leave.
[0:38:05] There are definitely times when someone is just burned out and had enough, and we had a co-founder leave, and I think that was good for everybody. There are also times where it would have been much better if that founding team could have stuck together and gotten along for a long period of time. So I think that depends on the specifics. Nothing lasts forever forever, but if you can have a really good co-founding team together for 10 or 20 years, that's quite valuable.
[0:38:41] I will keep going. If people have more questions, though, I would rather answer those. Go ahead. You mentioned one of the things was that... Yeah. Watch Brian Chesky on YouTube. Brian is unbelievable at this. Brian is, like, every time I leave Airbnb, I was over there yesterday, every time I leave Airbnb, I end up thinking, like, wow, I want to go work here. It's, like, so inspiring. He's, like, talks so clearly about...
[0:39:27] He's like so good at making Airbnb feel important, you feel important. It's like politician level of skill about that. You know, I would just like, I think people like genuine people, and so I think if you can, if you are not naturally super charismatic, which definitely I am not, and many other people aren't either, I think you can go a really long way by just
[0:39:58] Being genuine in your beliefs, your intentions, and also your willingness to help others. I think if you just go out of your way to help people, even if there's not an immediate transactional value to you, that develops really good relationships over a long period of time. I've many times helped someone even though the kind of immediate thing I was trying to do with them didn't work out.
[0:40:24] Has been unbelievably good for me years later when I've gotten to invest at a company and a company that has now gone on to be super successful or they've joined YC as a partner or something else. So I think a long-term focus on, hey, this person seems really great and there's not an immediate thing, but I'm going to do whatever I can to help them and trust that it'll somehow lead to some value creation years down the road is good. I think genuinely being excited about what you're working on and trying to get other people excited about that.
[0:40:53] Rather than like this fake whatever sales tactic stuff people do. Works really well. I think learning to communicate clearly honestly is a huge part of it as well. Yes. You know that is the decision that founders get paid to make. It is different in every specific case. Probably yes, but it really depends on the specific thing. Alex Schultz who works at Facebook on growth. I don't.
[0:41:40] This probably isn't his original idea, but he talks about this idea of the magic moment. The one thing that people use a product and they love it so much that that's why they tell their friends about it. Airbnb talks about not how do you get to a three or a four or a five star experience, but how do you get to an 11 star experience? Like what is the most comically ridiculous thing they can imagine that they can never do? But maybe they can go back from that and get you to a six star experience. And that's so great that you tell all your friends about this incredible trip you had on Airbnb. And that's how they grow.
[0:42:10] So yes, I generally do think trying to figure out what is the one magic moment, what is the one thing that's gonna be so good about this, people will spontaneously tell their friends to buy it, is important. But there are trade-offs, and if you have this one ridiculous thing, but it makes the rest of the product suck so much, it's probably not worth it. I do believe this, though, by the way, that nothing but a great product will save you is true. The general class of mistake that startups that fail make
[0:42:41] Is they focus on everything but this. And they do so well at everything else. They do so well at sales and marketing. They do so well at hiring, raising money. But they ignore this most essential task. And then they fail and they can't figure out why they failed. And they have these sometimes fairly off-base conspiracy theories. Because they just can't understand. So you think there must be someone out there working against them. Some destroyer trying to make them fail. And they can't understand. Hey, there was just this one thing you had to do. And you didn't do it.
[0:43:11] A piece of advice that my partner Paul Bluheit gives is that it is more important to have a small number of users that love you rather than a large number of users that like you a little. And I think this is one of the most important counterintuitive ideas in startups. Most people think that they need to get a ton of users on day one and then figure out how to increase their engagement. And that actually does sound roughly right. The other thing you can do, of course, is get a tiny number of users that like you, that love you.
[0:43:39] And then figure out how to find more of those people. And the latter is the one that works almost always. And that's a counterintuitive and an important point, yes. Depends on the product. If it's an enterprise product where people are gonna be paying you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, 10 would be enough. If it's a consumer product, probably needs to be in the thousands. Go ahead. I think one of my competitive advantages as an investor has been that I have a super long time horizon.
[0:44:40] And most investors, even though they say this, don't. And I think it's kind of like a human logical fallacy because these things just take a while anyway. But it is hard to go into an investment saying, even if things work perfectly, I'm going to be holding these shares for 15 or 20 years. Most people just don't like that. And so I think I have kind of found a tribe of other investors that think the same way. And we have been able to run the tables on these kind of companies.
[0:45:09] I think the issue is most people just, no matter what they say, don't honestly have a long-term time horizon. Yes. You know, this has been a problem of mine. I have had a hard time throughout my entire career establishing people who really want to disagree with me a lot. So I don't feel qualified to answer this, but you are right to ask the question. It's definitely a problem. Let me know if you figure it out. I think it generally is useful to over-communicate on these things and generally say, you know,
[0:46:11] Person one is gonna be responsible for things X, Y, and Z. Person two is gonna be responsible for things A, B, and C. And then when we get to the big strategic disagreements of the entire business, we're gonna resolve them the following way. And we have a lot of rules like that in place at YC. So there's like a class of things that any partner can do by him or herself. There's a class of things that you can do if you can convince any three people to go along with them.
[0:46:37] There's a class of things you can do if it's your domain. So we have one partner responsible for software, one for recruiting, one for finance, one for legal, one for operations. And then there are a class of things that require the entire partnership to vote as a whole. And those don't come up very often because there's 18 of us and really painful to make a decision with 18 CEOs sitting around a table. So we don't do those often. But if we're gonna do something like raise that new growth fund that I talked about earlier,
[0:47:06] That one requires the whole partnership to get together. And so we have set these frameworks and it lets us work. I think we're probably the biggest venture investing partnership that I've ever heard of. And I think without some rules like that, it would just be ungovernable. Yeah. I think it's always really dangerous to sort of say we could do these 17 different things and we have no internal conviction about which to do. I think it is like, I subscribe to the strong ideas weekly held.
[0:48:24] There's one idea of those that I believe will be the best. If I get new data, I'm willing to change my mind. And I think the other extremes, the extremes are both wrong. And that's what I'd recommend. Yes. You know, we wonder about that. I think less than people think. So we have tried a number of different configurations. But right now, the current one,
[0:49:14] It's the hard tech companies, they go through YC just with the software companies. And they always come in saying, I can't get anything done in 90 days, and they always leave saying, I cannot believe how much I got done in 90 days. I think too often, people use hard tech as a crutch and as an excuse for why they don't have to move quickly, and that's just wrong. So we just sit down with them on the first day and say, okay, we understand you're not a pure software company, but let's figure out what you can possibly get done in 90 days.
[0:49:42] And that focuses people and it means they get something done. And they almost always will say that was the most productive 90 days of my life. So I think as a general rule, the hard tech companies should look more like software companies. And it's generally a bad excuse when they say they can't. And we have just had result after result after result in very different fields of people that thought they couldn't do anything on a three month time frame being shocked at how much they could get done.
[0:50:13] I was also on the phone recently with a company called Ginkgo Bioworks. They had existed for seven years before YC. Then they did YC, and the founder said to me that if they had just done YC initially, they could have compressed that initial seven years into one year. And so I think you have to move fast no matter what business you're in. Everyone kind of wishes they didn't have competitors. That would be nice, but if you're doing something interesting, other really talented people are going to be trying to do the same thing.
[0:50:44] And they can work smarter or faster or harder or all of those than you. And the way you beat them is to just have super talented people working on a very fast iterative cycle. I think I'm always interested in exponential curves. And I'll just mention two that I think are important. This first one is the idea of how quickly your product gets better. So let's say on every iteration cycle, your product gets 10% better on average.
[0:51:13] If your iteration cycle is a week and your competitors is three months, you're going to leave them in the dust very quickly. And the reason that I think most hard tech startups fail is their iteration cycle is three months, which is basically rounds to infinity and they lose momentum and die. And the very best ones operate on the scale of software startups. It's a little bit harder, but they figure out a way to do it. That's really important.
[0:51:42] The other kind of exponential trend that is very related to that point, and I know that this is always a little bit of a landmine to say, but I'm just going to say it anyway. I think you should work really hard in the beginning of your career. One of the things that no one told me, and I later realized to be true, is that studying and working hard, it pays off like compound interest. And if you do that in your late teens and early and mid-20s,
[0:52:12] You have many working years ahead for the benefits of that compound interest to pay off. And if you wait and do that until you're in your 50s or 60s or 70s, you just have less working years left for that to pay off. And so to the degree you're willing to say, okay, at some point in my life I'm going to work really hard and focus on this thing, I think it's good to do that at the beginning of your career. And then you get the benefits of that over a long time. Let me just make sure I don't have anything else really important in here to say. Okay, we can skip the rest of that. Go ahead.
[0:53:20] Sure. Yeah. Well look, investors aren't totally wrong about this.
[0:53:53] Momentum is really important. Momentum is self-sustaining. And one way to have momentum is to be growing really fast. Another way to have momentum is just to have continual breakthroughs in the lab. But most hard tech startups, and I have met many and been involved with some of the best ones in the last few years, most of them just honestly don't move that fast. And yes, it takes more effort to identify a fast-moving company if you can't just look at a graph of daily active users.
[0:54:23] But it is possible. And I have found the more time I spend visiting these companies and these labs, I can identify pretty quickly if it's a fast-moving company or not. I can usually go to one weekly research meeting and have a pretty good guess. And investors are not wrong. That is really important. You really do need that.
[0:54:43] The question is, how do you evaluate it if it's an area you're not familiar with? I try to sit down with every hard tech startup that comes into YC at the beginning of our program and figure out what their goal for the end of the program should be. And there's a lot of people who are willing to engage in a genuine open brainstorm with me and come up with something that they think is a little bit too aggressive, but they're willing to try. And there are some people who are just like, nope, I can't.
[0:55:10] I can't have the next milestone for the next three years. There's no intermediate milestone that makes any sense. That's just how long it takes. You don't understand science. Okay, they always fail. One particular company was Cruise. It was a self-driving car company we funded in, we funded them in January of 2014. This was before self-driving cars were cool. This is an example of the kind of class of ideas that all investors say they don't like.
[0:55:40] And then three years later, they're begging us to fund more of them because it's their new investment thesis. Happens again and again in the history of YC. Anyway, we fund this company. Investors all think we're crazy. Self-driving cars are decades away and Google's going to win. This is dumb. What are you doing? We just want more photo sharing apps. YC sucks. And, you know, sat down with this founder. Founder had no expertise in building self-driving cars or cars of any sort. It was the former co-founder of Justin.tv, but he's really smart. And, you know, really,
[0:56:10] He knew how to build a good company. And we sat down and we talked about what he could get done in three months. And he had this idea and I was like, well, I don't think that's gonna help you raise money. I don't think that's gonna build real momentum. How about this other idea? And I had this idea that he thought was impossible and may have been right about. And what he compromised on was that he would have a car by demo day that could drive itself down the highway from San Francisco to Mountain View.
[0:56:38] Most people would have said, I can't do that. He's like, all right, I'm going to go get that done. I'm like, okay, I'll ride in it if you do. And he got it done by the morning of demo day. They had a car that drove itself autonomously, just hacked up Audi A4 with computers hanging out the back. But it drove itself 90 days later. And he raised some money, made incredible progress. Still, they had unbelievable internal momentum. Every week, their car was getting better on the roads.
[0:57:08] And he went out to try to raise an A round later, and investors just said, well, we don't really think self-driving cars are going to be a thing. Now it's maybe late 2015, let's say. And no one was investing, and I kept trying to help them get investors, and no one was doing it. And I was like, this is so dumb. I understand they don't have this graph of daily active users, but if you go sit in their office, this is so clearly different from every other self-driving car company.
[0:57:38] Couldn't raise money, couldn't raise money. So finally I was like, fuck it, I'm going to write you a check. So I made my biggest investment of the year in that company. And then like seven months later, GM acquires them, giant acquisition. Every investor that passed within the next year was saying like, autonomy is our new thing. We really want YC to be funding more self-driving car companies. This is the future. But had people been willing to just do the work and look at how quickly that company was progressing,
[0:58:09] Even though it wasn't obvious externally from like a daily active users chart, they would have invested. And the problem is that most hard tech companies aren't in fact progressing quickly. All right. Should we do the pitch practice now? All right. Thank you all. Thanks very much, Sam. Now, I was watching from here and I noticed that all of you were paying attention and taking notes.
[0:58:55] It never happens in my class. So Sam, can I hire you to be faculty member of Waterloo Engineering? Thank you, it was wonderful. And for you for paying attention, there will be a quiz later. Okay, there is more to come. Sam has graciously offered to show us how he would respond to a venture capitalist, venture advisor to a real startup pitch, and then provide feedback. Now there is no script.
[0:59:25] There was no rehearsal, so it is the real thing. The chosen startup is Lucid, and its co-founder is Fernod Kazemzadeh, a Waterloo engineering alum, and he's going to tell us, or rather Sam, about his company and to pitch why Sam should invest. So without further ado, let's get Fernod up here and see what happens.
[1:00:23] Thank you. Thank you. Actually, let me sit there so I can look at the slide. Hi. Okay, so why don't you just go through this and I'll probably interrupt with a lot of questions. Sure. All right. And by the way, this is really hard to do and takes a lot of bravery, so thank you for doing this. So at Elucid Labs, we're a med tech company. We're trying to bring specialized care to underserved communities and potentially people who can't have doctors actually examine them.
[1:01:08] Basically democratizing healthcare. We're looking at dermatology. So skin cancer is one of the most diagnosed forms of cancer worldwide in North America. So more than 80% of all cancers diagnosed are skin. And one in five people in North America will be diagnosed with skin cancer. So basically the way it works out is you have a lesion on your body. It's either benign or malignant. You go see a dermatologist. They give you a diagnosis of benign or malignant. And everything's fine.
[1:01:38] If they diagnose correctly, but there's still lots of issues with all the overlapping parts. So if the lesion is actually benign and diagnosed as malignant, and then they order a biopsy, so every year there's 17 million unnecessary biopsies, which equals $17 billion cost. If the lesion is malignant and they diagnose as malignant, it's a healthcare, cost of the healthcare to treat it, and...
[1:02:02] Worst case scenario, if the lesion is malignant and the diagnosis is benign, there's 20,000 people a year who die in North America. And obviously, in the diagnosis stage, if it's late stage, then there's no return. And the problem is this. They do it with visual examination. Skin cancer, just like any other cancer, has stages of progression, and it only becomes really visible at...
[1:02:30] You know, stage two or three. Here we call it stage one, and then we term the other ones as zero and negative one. But biopsy is the clear way of diagnosis. It's the gold standard. So it's a knee-jerk reaction for physicians to just order it and remove their responsibility and put it on someone else. What we do is we use computational imaging. So we have sensing.
[1:02:56] And augmented with artificial intelligence, where we can actually not necessarily replace doctors, but we augment the doctor's capability to be able to diagnose and provide care at a very high standards. And we do that.
[1:03:13] Different things we do, but that's besides the point. So I'll just move on from here. What we're really proud of is we can radiomically sequence cancer, just like a genomic sequence, where you can look at a sequence and say, okay, this clearly is this disease. We can do the same with skin cancer through our computational imaging and our artificial intelligence. And this is actually our product, Ada, which is performing right now. It's an imager.
[1:03:40] And what it gives is that ABCD metric. This is the state of the art in dermatology. Asymmetry, border irregularity, color, diameter. So how big is it? And this is, believe it or not, again, done by eye and everything just based on the physician's recall of what they saw last time you were in. And then the most important part is E, is evolution of the ABCDs.
[1:04:05] So our product goes through, does those measurements quantitatively, and suggests different cases that have similar diagnoses. Another product that we have is a spectroderm. This is where the sequencing comes in. So this is basically where we're augmenting the dermatologist to the utmost level. And we do some depth imaging, so it's like x-ray without ionizing radiation, so we can actually see into the skin. And this is the first of its kind.
[1:04:33] We're actually staging skin cancer as opposed to just saying if it's malignant or benign. And this is the performance that we get today. So on the left is what the dermatologists are capable of. On the right is what we do. So true positive is how good are we at actually determining what is cancer as cancer. True negative is how good are we at determining what is not cancer as not cancer. And then the inverse of those.
[1:05:04] So as you can see, the numbers are good. The competitive landscape works out like this. If you plot it on the axis of artificial intelligence and diagnostic capability, we're away from a pack there. There's a lot of companies who provide telemedicine, teledermatology, and there's a lot of companies that just provide imaging and let the doctors make a decision. And it's not really clear what they're looking at and making decisions on.
[1:05:35] The North American market cap is, well, basically there are 450,000 users, potential users, dermatologists, nurse practitioners, general practitioners, family doctors. We assume five of these practitioners to a clinic, and with a hardware and software as a service model, we project a $450 million market cap in North America. This market cap worldwide is about $1.5 billion, and that's just for skin cancer.
[1:06:00] When you go to skin disease and other conditions, it's about a $50 billion. When you go to cosmetic dermatology, it's about a $100 billion market. This is the team. The three people on top are the co-founders, and we have our co-founding team. We have expertise in artificial intelligence, optics and photonics, and UI, UX expert, as well as you must have the business and operations.
[1:06:24] Currently, we're working on partnerships with Toronto Western, Women's College Hospital, and St. Michael's Hospital, all in Toronto, to run basically a trial, a paid trial with this device. And that's it. So that was great. Way more went right than wrong there, so you could just give that presentation to investors and it would be fine. But since we're here and there's a lot of people, I'll make some suggestions. It's come a long way. It's really good. I think...
[1:07:02] The most important slide in the whole thing under the, you know, if you have a great product, that's what you want to talk about, is that you have a great product. You have something that works. So you have something that is better than human dermatologists in every metric. So the two things, like this is great. And then also early on, I kind of got what you did, but not until here. So I think this would really benefit.
[1:07:31] My number one piece of advice and number one piece of advice from most pitches is that you need investors or anyone you're pitching, this comes down to the clear communication, to understand what you're doing in like the first minute. And it's always tempting because it's always tempting to say, well, we have this really big vision. You know, you eventually want to build the AI doctor for everything. And you eventually want to help low-income people have access to high-quality medical care by using computers. And you can say that.
[1:08:00] At the end of the presentation. But you really just want to tell people very clearly up front, this is what we do. And it's okay if this is what you do today and you're going to do a lot more later. Because what you do today is plenty revolutionary. It's plenty big. So I think the thing that would help us the most is to add a slide here, right after this one, that says in one simple to understand sentence, you know, something like, we use AI to diagnose skin cancer better than the best human doctors.
[1:08:32] That's it, just tell me that, and now I've got a framework for you and what you do for the rest of the presentation. And then I will, everything else I will be thinking of in that way if I hear that at the beginning. And that is missing, I would say, from 95% of presentations, and it's the thing that investors want the most. It's just that early on. So like this slide, this is the first thing we start on. My mom is a dermatologist, I happen to know that skin cancer is very common. Yeah, it'd be great.
[1:09:02] But like, you know, this is less important to me even if I didn't know it than knowing that you have built something that without a bio, just purely visually with a computer can diagnose skin cancer better than the best human doctors. That's what you should be talking about in slide two. This as well, this was a hard slide for me to follow. I love the message, which is that there's a huge error rate, but you could just tell me, like, there's a huge error rate.
[1:09:29] And it would be easier, and 20,000 people die a year, and we spend almost $20 billion on unnecessary medical procedures. And I would have gotten it, and I would be less confused. This one, again, helpful, but so early on in the presentation, I would rather be hearing about how the technology actually works, how well it works, where you are in the process of getting it deployed. I think one thing that was missing that was important is what is the roadmap.
[1:09:59] Look like from here to you saving a lot of lives and saving a lot of unnecessary procedures. That's all more important than this. I think it's as important in a pitch what you leave out as what you say. And this is valuable, but it's just not as valuable as the burning questions that an investor will have. So this, again, happen to know it, but even if I didn't, wouldn't be as interesting to me as you telling me, okay, so we have this thing. Here's the data that proves it works.
[1:10:27] And here is basically a roadmap of the next two years of what we have to do to get this in the clinic and to start making revenue and to start impacting people's lives. This is good. This is where you're actually showing the product. This makes it seem way more real to people and you're actually doing something. But I would have this before all of that. I would just say, now I'm going to show you what we built, but before we do that, we're better than human doctors today.
[1:10:59] This is not a future thing. This is not a technology bet. This is working. And then you can get into all the rest of this. These slides, I think, are always terrible. I have never seen one of these where the startup presenting is not in the upper right. No one's ever worse on the two axes they choose to show. And this one, again, it's fine, but I've never, ever seen a slide where someone says we're a small market. So I think what would be really helpful here
[1:11:29] We have created this revolutionary technology. It's going to have this huge impact. And here is how we're going to get it into the 90,000 clinics. That was for me the biggest thing missing. There's other things I changed the emphasis on the order, but the big outstanding question for me at the end of this was, okay, what do the next two years look like? What does winning look like? What are you going to go do now? What needs to happen? And I think if you reorder things to talk about what you do clearly at the beginning,
[1:11:59] That it works. Then tell me about the product. Everyone understands the need and the problem. And then spend the rest of the presentation with something that doesn't exist yet today, which is how do you go from here to a multi-billion dollar company that impacts a lot of people? And then at the end, then you can get into the kind of we're going to be the AI doctor and revolutionize healthcare. We're just starting with skin cancer. That'd be fine. That'd be great. But again, small comments.
[1:12:28] Super strong. Definitely, I understood what you did and I was excited and I wanted to help and it sounded like a really good business. So that's all great. Thank you. Okay. I always try to end early, but I'll do Q&A for a little bit longer. Thank you very much. Thank you, Sam. Look, the one thing I liked when I was in school is when talks ended early so I could go get work done. So I will try to end this a little early. But if anyone has a question we haven't gotten to yet, I'd be happy to answer it. Yes.
[1:13:40] You know, my backpack is all over there. Otherwise, I'd pull it out and show it to you. I make a list every day of the things that I want to get done every night before I go to bed for the next day. And I have like three big ones at the top and then a long list of like 50 little ones like calls to return and stuff. And I have figured out what times of day I'm productive at different kind of tasks. So like the morning is really important to me to get creative work done or to just get like high throughput work done where I really have to focus. And I have been in that. I have had the same productivity system.
[1:14:10] For 15 years. And it keeps working, so I don't change it. Well, I write a plan at the beginning of every year for the whole year as well. But I don't look at that as much. And I have this thing every day in my face of what I'm trying to get done. And I look at that all the time. I mean, I kind of know what the overarching priorities that I'm trying to get done are. But I believe you get there just like... The motto of Blue Origin is something like step by step ferociously.
[1:14:47] Which is a great motto for how you get things done in life. And so I have these big projects I'm trying to get done, but I break them into very little pieces and every day I try and knock off a few of them. There's no magic to this. There's no secret to productivity beyond. Know what you want to get done, relentlessly guard your time and get those things done and don't get distracted on other stuff. One big one is technology can make the world better, but that's not the default.
[1:15:24] So you need people who believe the technology can make the world better and are willing to work to, in fact, make the world better. Another is that economic growth is central to a functioning democracy. And startups are one way to generate that. But if you don't have that, you have this very zero-sum world. You see this in my country right now where people are kind of angry because we have no growth and it's just getting more and more unpleasant. And I think if the thing that people in the private sector can do the most
[1:15:52] To help get the country back on track is to get economic growth back. In the US, we had kind of 200 years of unrivaled economic growth. We had 100 years of territorial expansion. We had 100 years of new technology really working. And people were mostly pretty happy. And now we don't. And because people are sensitive to relative differences in quality of life, but not absolute differences, if you don't feel your own life getting better every year, you are understandably unhappy. Or if you see your neighbors, if you're on the wrong side of the wealth inequality,
[1:16:22] Split with your neighbors, you're pretty unhappy. And so I think fixing this, I really do believe that economic justice is going to be one of the most important problems of our time. And fixing that and all the different ways we can fix that, that's a very central value to me. Having the US continue to survive and be what I think is the greatest country in the world is of great importance to me.
[1:16:50] Having the world get better every year, solving the environmental problems, ending poverty. These are all things I think YC can help with and that are really important to me. That was totally unnecessary, but thank you. Okay, now, should I open it? Wow, someone knows me well. It's a hoodie. Thank you. Thank you all for coming to listen, by the way. This has been a lot of fun. Actually, there's no need. It's basically the same theme. Same talk was on my mind. Oh.
[1:18:04] There are socks which I never wear, but thank you very much. I'm going to wear these. Thank you so much.