"Run Towards Growth" Career Advice From ex-YC COO and Applied Intuition CEO Qasar Younis

0:01Qasar Younis:Health, family, work, and social life. I can tell you in my case, I've never had a social life. I can't tell you the last time I went out. I don't need to maintain a group of friends. It's just not been important to me. Hello, and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean, and me, Tommy Stadlin. We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies. At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with giant ideas that are changing the world. This podcast brings you behind-the-scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them.

0:31We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it. Last week, we spoke to the founder of Applied Intuition, Kasa Yunus. He's built a$15 billion physical AI giant. Today, though, we're going to talk to him about the lessons he's learned in his incredible life journey. Growing up on a farm in Pakistan, moving to Detroit to the shadows of the car industry that he's now disrupted so powerfully. But crucially, also running Y Combinator, the best startup school in history that has produced so many of Silicon Valley's greatest companies.

1:05We're going to talk about the lessons from YC and the lessons in career building that I think are so relevant to many of the people in our audience. Kassel, welcome back to Giant Ideas. Yeah, welcome to you at this time. Last week, we talked a lot about Applied. Amazing company,$15 billion business you've built. But in some ways, when I was researching this, the most interesting bits for me were A, your life journey, which is kind of amazing. B, your career advice. I think you've got the most strategic career advice of any of the guests that I've interviewed. And then C, Y Combinator. So I want to talk about all those things.

1:40I think we'll start with career advice. Tell us about the lesson you learned from this Harvard professor on making good strategic decisions about which industry to be in?

1:49Qasar Younis:Top of the list is it's better to be in a high growth business industry than it is to be in a mediocre industry. You could be the best at a mediocre industry and you can be mediocre in a high growth industry. And the mediocre person in the high growth industry does financially better and has a bigger impact on all those things. So today there's a lot of anxiety around AI, especially for new grads who are like, what job should I take? and kind of almost like this instinct to run away from it and kind of look back at the past maybe. It's important when you feel that anxiety of something in your career not to just instinctively run away from it.

2:27Qasar Younis:Like maybe look at it and try to find where the growth is and try to run towards that growth. And especially early in your career, I think you'll get rewarded a lot more than anything else. And so for you, that decision was you were in the auto industry. Yeah. You'd kind of grown up in Detroit after moving from Pakistan, which we'll talk about. You were in the auto industry doing, I imagine, very well. Yeah. So what happened? Someone told you actually this is not the best industry to be in? That's really tough advice when that's all you know and you grow up with. And I made a very pragmatic and dispassionate move.

3:02Qasar Younis:And I moved to the Bay Area. I moved to Silicon Valley because Detroit is a great place for making cars. making software is really done there. And I think there's probably another takeaway there for career advice, which is it is very important that you learn from and are around really competent people. And so if there's anything that you should optimize beyond just finding an industry that's growing is to be around people who are very good at their jobs. And I mean, again, a little controversial almost at any cost. I wouldn't care really about compensation. I say this as somebody who didn't have money growing up and had to pay my own way.

3:40Qasar Younis:I wouldn't care about compensation. I wouldn't care about title. I wouldn't. Um, and again, it's all within, you know, you have to be thoughtful here. I'm not saying take the worst job offer because that's sometimes not the right answer as well, but the person, the people you're going to learn from, that is really important. More mid, mid, mid career. And, uh, I would say later, uh, in your career, it depends again on where, where you, where you're at, um, as you're technical, non-technical, et cetera. I do think in your way you're optimizing changes, the moment you have kids, the moment you have your parents are getting older and you have other responsibilities.

4:19Qasar Younis:So you have to be actually more thoughtful. You can't just say, I'm going to start a company at 45. I'm not in that camp that even starting a company is for everybody. So yeah, I think you have to be a bit more thoughtful. But with that being said, I think the mistake that you can make in mid or late careers like wow i spent 15 years at mckinsey so i gotta it's like that's fine you did like the the constraints we have in our brain the cultural constraints are actually way bigger than the actual constraints of changing jobs and learning new things yeah where is the pot going today so for for me and for you it was like get to silicon valley build technology companies software companies originally um where i mean ai obviously but What should people be thinking about?

5:05This is the future. Go build your career in this industry.

5:09Qasar Younis:What are you going to value at the end of your existence? And what are the constraints that you have today? And for me, the constraints when I was younger was I didn't have any money. And so that was a big deal. And that was the driving function. Only as an adult, it came to my realization that actually everybody isn't desperately poor. So it's like all my decisions were made very easily. It's kind of like, you know, as at General Motors, they said the Corvette is the easiest program to work on because everybody knows how the decisions are going to be made. You want to figure out what that true north is.

5:40Qasar Younis:The way that you kind of figure out or at least the recommendation I would have is, yeah, you're at the end of your life and you look back and what is the stuff that you want around you? Then you work backwards from there. And I think it's completely OK if it's not AI and working at a venture-backed company or being a founder. It's completely fine. There's a million paths to success. Success is just too, too nearly defined. Now, if you're talking about, you've already gone through that exercise and you've concluded you want to be in the technology business, how do you, what, what to work on? I think it's better time than ever to be a founder.

6:13Qasar Younis:It is easily the best time. There's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, there's more capital available than ever. There are literally more professional institutional grade capital available in almost all parts of the planet, never existed before. You can literally go to small countries now that have VCs. That wasn't even the case in London 25 years ago. You have other things as well. You have people who want to join startups. That was actually sometimes more difficult than raising capital, which is like you have to convince people that, you know, it was the default when I was coming out of Harvard was go to McKinsey, go to Bain, go to BCG, go to Goldman.

6:49Qasar Younis:There's go to BlackRock, go to Blackstone, the handful advent. There's not many companies, you know, Bain Cap, I should say. And that was it. Those are the leasing. Now it's like the default is I want to find a young company, which is great because if you're a founder, that means all these people who are very qualified actually look at the thing that you're doing as something you can join. I think probably the third reason to be a founder is I think it's a rare job. If you can deal with the stress and all the downstream impacts of it, it's a rare job that you kind of get almost everything. You get control of your destiny.

7:22Qasar Younis:You get to make impact. You get to work on places and projects and products that you want to work on. And you have a good financial outcome. And it's like, it's an amazing positive thing. You, you, you know, I, it's incredible that you can actually have a job, which is like net net can be hugely positive for your community, you, yourself, and, and you don't feel bad about it. You know, it's the, yeah. So you, so you grew up in Pakistan and a rural environment, right? Around farms. And yeah, I was in a variety. I grew up on a farm. Tell us what, what that was like. Tell us about the early years.

7:55Qasar Younis:My parents were farmers and we lived in a house without electricity or running water. And we came to the U.S. My uncle, I was in elementary school, so I was young. But we came to the U.S. because my uncle got a job at General Motors. He got a student visa to go to the U.S. And then from student visa, he got a job at General Motors and he ultimately sponsored us. And that's how I ended up moving to Warren, Michigan, which is kind of the home of General Motors. How old were you? I was seven, seven years old. So I was like second grade, third grade. So you very much remember life in Pakistan before?

8:22Qasar Younis:Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are your memories? I mean, that's a funny, very personal question. I've never been asked that question. I mean, yeah, I mean, not having stuff. I mean, you remember in the sense of like, you know, you drink well water and you, you, you know, all of your day is consumed by like these trivial things. Right. And like, you know, remember like, you know, going to school. I mean, I actually moved to another village because my parents' village didn't have a, you know, school. and um and so i had lived with my grandparents and they're there they actually had a at a school at their village so like just that experience of like it's subtly being told to you this is so important that you're gonna actually move somewhere right to get educated i think that had that had a long long-term impact you know once i got in my head as a you know young person that um starting a business is the way to non-linear wealth accumulation and that was a very explicit thought that i had how do you make money i remember so i started working mcdonald's when i was 14 and and um and that one of the the owner came in once you know he owns like whatever a dozen mcdonald's in the area we were asking store manager oh who's that i remember he had a porsche 911 which is ironic because i work with porsche 911 it's like you know it's like how the world is full full circle you grew up in in the shadows of the car industry the old orange which you're now transforming exactly yeah it's a crazy crazy so what did the manager tell you yeah and he said she said uh oh that's just the owner and he like every month will swing by and make sure operations are going by and i remember thinking like what are we what do we just what are we doing here we're the idiots like i'm getting paid a four dollars and 75 cents an hour and this guy has the nicest car and he's showing up once a month like and then like that triggered in a fairly young age that actually being an owner is the thing.

10:11Qasar Younis:So my macro recommendation, if you could in on just career and kind of what I was like, if you can somehow dissect and remove your ego from the equation you see, and I'm, I'm very much in the, in the camp of emotions are not helpful. I think they, they, they deform the problem that you're looking at. And so that's the engineer in You know, you ideally want to be fairly objective and clinical about the thing that you want and how you're going to get there and why you're not, you know, why you're not doing those things. And so let's take the being a founder. Let's say you kind of see you want to be a founder, but you've never actually started a company in your mid thirties and you still work at, let's say, whatever, big, big co, you know, and it's like, why isn't that?

10:58Qasar Younis:Why is very important. and I think if you can't have that honest conversation, some people can't, um, then you might always be in that cycle. There's a version of the honest conversation and it's like, I have a family and I, or I have a lifestyle and I like going out on the weekends and I like having, you know, the, one of the things that crossed over X, uh, recently that, that I'm sure people have seen before, but it's like the, you only get four burner, like it's like a stove and you only of four burners and only three of them can be on. And it's like, you know, your health, family, work, and social life.

11:35Qasar Younis:And I can tell you in my case, you know, if you're talking about me, I've never had a social life. I can't tell you the last time I went out, I don't, you know, maintain a group of friends. And that's important to a lot of people. They look at me like, well, that's the richness of life. And it's just not been important to me. That's fascinating. That's yeah, it's in it's I don't I used to be very insecure about this. But, you know, as I've become, I'm just me now. Like, I can't be anybody. How extreme are you on that? I mean, do you have kind of a small group of like two or three or four very close friends or you've been like family and work and that's it?

12:08That's more that. Really? Wow.

12:10Qasar Younis:Yeah, it's more that I even avoid group text chats and stuff like that. I I people ask me all the time, like, oh, how do you how do you have time for all this stuff? And as a company, especially as grown, I haven't struggled that much with with time. I think if you try, if I was trying to jam in two or three more, even honestly, one more thing, even doing a dinner a week, it just disrupts everything. And I'd like you like just, just, just like a very tactical example for the founders out there, especially the, or if your company is like under five years, you know, I, again, I'm not saying you should do this, but I'm just giving you a template.

12:46Qasar Younis:it. I work seven days a week and I always have. And from when I was at, you know, McDonald's and I had a couple of jobs when I was in high school, three jobs at one point or most of the time I should say. And then, you know, all the way to now, I'm in, you know, in my early mid forties now. And the seven days a week thing has always been very productive. And so what is the Saturday and Sunday? Saturday and Sunday is I go to a coffee shop and I'll work for four to five hours alone and I just clean up all my slack. I get through all my to-dos and let my brain think. And I think, oh, I saw this thing about, you know, about Fable and let me research that.

13:25Qasar Younis:And like just having time to just do like the memory cleanup and the like defragging that needs to happen. If there's one thing that's made me successful, it's actually that. The evenings and the weekends are also the time when you're not being distracted by endless requests of your time. But if you're running to a dinner, If you're running to friends and your friends depend on you and they're having a serious issue with their health or their family or their relationships or their career, I find it very hard not to give time to that. And again, I'm not saying this is the right thing. And it might be one of these things that when I'm in my 60s, I look back and I say, hey, that was the big mistake.

14:06Qasar Younis:I should have lived a different life. If you look at all of these posts of people who are passing away, it was always consistently say, I should have worked less. I should have spent more time with friends and family. So, you know, it's a very conflicted piece of advice. It's very notable, though, that I would say, I mean, it's just the hard reality that, you know, lots of the people like you who've had extraordinary lives and really created very, very big outcomes from giant ideas work basically all the time. And I think it is the hard reality that a lot of people don't grasp that to achieve those kind of outcomes, basically, you have to work harder, a lot harder than the average and sacrifice stuff.

14:42We had a very different world, but Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the UK and the former number two at Meta. And I asked him, how has he done it? And he basically said, you know, he seems very gregarious and kind of sociable. And, you know, him and his wife, who is a very successful lawyer and potentially politician, she said they basically never went to dinner parties. and you know they had they they worked extremely hard and they tried to be good parents and and that was kind of it and you can't add the extra stove yeah it's kind of like the analogy of this

15:10Qasar Younis:at work is uh at applied intuition we we i write internal posts and one of the first posts we ever wrote is about meetings and meeting culture and um what happens especially in big companies is people start thinking the meetings are the work and that's actually not the work in this like larger life example people start saying going to an event or going to a conference or going to a dinner that that's the work because you're learning about the ecosystem in venture there's some truth in that because that's that's kind of part of the game is getting information learning information and understanding where your peers are thinking but in the making aspect so not the funding the making aspect it's making clearly this is not for everyone obviously but what i think is interesting is that i think there are founders in europe and perhaps new york and some other geos who think that they are living the life that is going to get them to what you've got and others who've made it have got um and they're willing to make the sacrifice but they they actually don't realize that it is kind of a seven days a week highly highly uh full of sacrifice and because they just don't know they're not aware that they would like to go do that but they're not aware of this true sacrifice that's required yeah and there's a thing that we haven't talked about it sometimes analogies are helpful.

16:21Qasar Younis:Uh, like imagine if we were just talking about, this is a podcast about making a great band and everything we've talked about being a band. So you take all the analogies you talk about, you gotta, you gotta put the reps in, you gotta be a master of your instrument. There's also this kind of thing about taste and like understanding what the market wants. And I like you use Nirvana as a good example in the sense of Kurt Cobain simultaneously knew how to make catchy music, but like, uh, dislike that fact. And when it was like, like you as a, as a founder, you have to somehow understand like, where do you sit with your skillset and the thing that you're making and where the market is.

17:05Qasar Younis:And it's something that's not actually talked about enough is like the founder has to know like how their company relates to everything around them. And then that's really important. It's not only the simple version of that is competition, but it's not that or the market that's growing, but it's products, it's their ability to recruit or their lack of ability to recruit, their ability to be charismatic to venture capitalists or not to fundraise or not. And so that's what you have to, once I think good founders kind of really understand like where all of that stuff is, not only their own personal strengths, the personal strengths of a team.

17:43Qasar Younis:So now you, it's like, it's much more complex. Then you can actually kind of, kind of maybe put the company in the right position. I often see founders take somebody else's playbook and try to like, you know, it's kind of like, you can't become Nirvana by copying Kurt Cobain, right? You can't be like this depressed guy living. No, that's not how it's going to work. But you can learn that this is the way Nirvana actually became huge. And they used MTV because that was the thing. And so you as a founder have to almost learn how to play the game. I think YC is the most influential organization company in startup history.

18:31Full stop. I think that the culture that it's created, the lessons that it's imbued that are now so mainstream is kind of extraordinary. YC is like in model speak, it's like a distillation of actually Silicon Valley.

18:46Qasar Younis:Right. So there's interestingly nothing about YC which didn't exist before. No. But no one put it in that package to consume like YC did. Yeah. And when I mean consume, I mean like the scale to get to lots of people's brains and things like that. And the Silicon Valley culture in a way is a distillation of probably just Intel. It is a bunch of companies in those early days, HP and some others. But Intel really has a huge, huge influence, Andy Grove specifically. All of the learnings from YC, they're freely available, right? Paul Graham's essays are out there, but it's all for free. Anyone can consume it.

19:23And yet there is something about being part of YC, even though it's only three months. yeah the community the network you build the halo effect of the brand what what is it to you that makes yc so powerful for its graduates now now is different i mean i left almost 10 years

19:41Qasar Younis:ago so let's talk about both then and now yeah i say yeah that yeah that's probably better it 10 years ago i mean part of it is that's applied to both is like the four minute mile yeah you're around founders like this is one thing that's interesting about the valley is uh and i think it's happening in more cities like you know you see lovable and you see lagora suddenly you're like you can build a big company in stockholm so important role models so important so it's like the four minute mile once you see and like in the bay area the the first buddy that makes a big you're like oh you know uh kyle got got he's successful not a particularly smart man but he's he's he's then like you know then michael does it and you're like oh my that's that's that's interesting.

20:22Qasar Younis:And then by the fourth, you're like, okay, what am I doing on the sidelines? I can do this as well. That's a really important thing. And YC, I think at the minimum, it just shows you the playbook. That it's not a mystery. I think it's like the magician is a magician until you see all the tricks. And then you're like, oh, it's just some mechanics and I can learn those mechanics and I can be a magician. That exists at both times. I think in that era, the older, let's say let's say yc from 2005 2010 yeah like that era the first first 10 years um that is really a downstream funnel from hacker news it was in paul's essays were were everything i remember when i went to the interview i remember the majority of the reason i was in the interview was just to meet paul graham yeah paul graham founder of yc yeah i shake his hands and i remember thinking distinctly thinking oh we have an interview like like i like like i was so like lost in the fog.

21:19Qasar Younis:Yeah. You know, cause I think Paul, you know, is, is, is, you know, has some of the best ideas, you know, like really, really, really great ideas. Like, uh, um, and I'm like a connoisseur of ideas in that way. And so, so that, so it was, it was a different, it was, it was frankly, like, I felt like a, I was like a, like a devotee and that was the era of YC where it was actually the Paul Graham show. Yeah. And today it's very different. It's not even who runs YC. Now, Gary Tan. Gary was actually one of the partners when I went through as a founder in 2010, 2011. It is Gary is important to the, but it's YC and supersedes actually, you know, any individual.

22:05Qasar Younis:And so today it's much more an institution. Yeah. You run it with Sam. Sam was the president. I was the CEO. Yeah. And that was, you could say the middle ground. So there was the early years, that was the middle ground. Now it's like the new era. And all three of those eras are different. The first, Paul Graham era, I talked about a little bit of the Sam and I, that era was the institutionalization of YC, which is taking it from a family business, you know, the Hacker News server in Paul's kitchen to making it actually like modern web application, et cetera. All those little things, just getting the brand out a lot more.

22:36Qasar Younis:I mean, I remember doing London Startup School. You know, first time we ever did it was out here. and that was over 10 years ago. So that was that era. The current era is the, and this is actually about Silicon Valley as much as about YC, it's the industrialization era. It's everything at that much bigger scale. The influences, the reach that Gary has actually is, now Paul is kind of a celebrity, so it's slightly different, but let's say other partners that were with Paul in the early days compared to Gary's influencers, There's like, you know, that's a huge difference. I mean, Gary just has a huge influence now.

23:16Qasar Younis:Gary can meet heads of state. Right. Well, I see it was a little cottage thing with like, you know, four people who started in, you know, in Cambridge. So, yeah, in the U.S. Cambridge. And so I think today the just size, scale and scope is huge. The downside is it's just bigger, right? So as an individual person who's a founder who's going through, I did all my office hours with Paul Graham. And I think back, that's like extraordinary. Amazing, yeah. Amazing, right? And so I think that, you know, you don't get that now. But, you know, in YC's defense, the partners today might actually have more reps on helping companies than even the early partners did.

24:01Qasar Younis:The early partners, you know, batch when it's 10 or 20. Yeah. the whole batch is 10 or 20. Now it's like a partner might work with 50 companies in the first time around and they do three or four batches and suddenly they have a huge corpus of knowledge. So it's, I think people always want to, I think the inclination is to try to compare better or worse. Yeah. It's just different. And the key thing is everything around it's different too. I think the old YC wouldn't work today. Okay. And it would be very difficult. Okay. Yeah. But maybe not sort of which area is better or worse, but just sort of why were each era very successful?