AI, YC, and SF with Yang Li of Cosine

0:00Yang, how can entrepreneurs win the AI game in 2025-26? Build something that is just outside of AI's grasp. I think that we have been iterating our product for almost two years. And whenever we want to try to build something new, increase our feature set, it always felt just slightly beyond the possible. But actually, by the time we get there, the AI has improved and a whole new technique and the whole landscape has changed. And suddenly you've unlocked a huge amount of value that your customers have just begun to think about. And you're already there. so by just beyond the grasp is that kind of bleeding edge is that what you mean of like making sure you're kind of like at that forefront as much as possible i think it's not bleeding edge in terms of the actual techniques of how to train ai it's more the bleeding edge of like what is ai good at today and what is it kind of mediocre at build that feature set that supports the mediocre skills and tasks and functionality because that is the next bit that is going to improve right the rate of improvement is phenomenal like i always say to all my lots of ai founders that i know always have an eye on like what kind of sucks at the moment and build for that because it will come in faster than you know that's a great tip to even just exercise your futurist muscle right it's like looking at like where are we already just kind of mediocre and improve upon that doesn't need to be like revolutionary groundbreaking yeah like i think even within you know six months ago video generation where ai models was considered like oh it's a bit of a party trick yeah right it's not very good it's not very realistic it's very short clips no a couple of seconds yeah and now you're seeing on youtube people are doing you know short films people are doing tv series that are completely ai generated you know just the other day i saw a complete viking documentary series that was all ai generated written by a real script writer.

1:54And so it's just very compelling, right? And that six months ago was not possible. And then actually, I guaranteed that these people were dreaming to say, if only I could build something and they were preparing how to build an entire production team that is centered around this. So as a follow up question to that, how do you connect the technological innovations with market validation? Because it's one thing to kind of be an inventor and a futurist and like, really kind of push those technological boundaries. But connecting it with a market need is, of course, the difference between a hobby and a business?

2:24I don't think it has changed, right? With or without AI, how you figure out there is a market need for it hasn't changed, right? Like, I think there are definitely some places where AI is a game changer, where it wasn't possible before, or that industry wasn't invented before. For example, you know, there's plenty of people who are doing prompt optimization, right? Like, that didn't exist before AI came along, or LLMs became popular. But, you know, it's an accelerant, right? Think of it as it makes whatever that you were building before or whatever was a good idea going to go much faster, much better.

2:57The experience is going to be good and bad. Like there are challenges with AI, but I don't think validating a business idea has changed. And I don't think it will ever will change, right? You have to know the specifics of a market. You have to know the psychology of your buyer. People don't necessarily always buy the best product, right? Technically, the best product doesn't always win, right? There are people, whether it's brand loyalty or just impression or just how they feel. And overall, not always. The specs of a product is what wins in the market. Those first principles are always constant, aren't they?

3:30A hot take. Is this a bubble? Is it going to burst soon? Is this just the beginning of a whole new era? It is a bubble. But I always think that with any bubble, once it bursts, we are always at a better level than where we were. right like i think that there's a lot of enthusiasm there's a lot of capital coming up right like you know even if you look at something which i think a lot of people think of the bubble crypto a couple years ago i think everyone would say it was a huge bubble way too much capital pouring in but now you know stable coins has become such a hot topic right and and that would not have come out if the crypto bubble probably didn't exist right people were inventing and trying and seeing what works etc and i think ai is the same i think that ai feels like an even bigger bubble.

4:13But the hope is, is that if and when it bursts run, and I think it will burst, at least it will deflate at some point, we're going to quite significantly change how life looks like and make every part of industry and every part of life slightly better. Yeah, I'm with you. So let's connect this back to your business, the day job and why we're talking about AI. So you're, of course, the co-founder of Cosign. For anyone who's unaware, give us the elevator pitch of Cosign. Yeah. So, you know, where we see ourselves as fundamentally where AI dev tool, right? So there's a few ways to look at the market.

4:46There are AI dev tools that basically help either the human go a little bit faster, right? So whether it's inline autocomplete or adding AI elements into the code editor. And that's great. Like all of our engineers internally use like AI enabled IDEs or basically code editors. And it's great. But what we see is that it fundamentally is still limited. The ceiling is much lower. So a human will only really open one task at a time. I think of it as Google Docs. You don't open three documents at the same time. You don't edit three at the same time. And it's the same with code, right? You're doing one task in one code base at any given time.

5:24And all these tools are making people experience much better. It's people who learn to code are now becoming much more experienced much more quickly. The experience coders, the output is becoming faster, but they're still limited by doing one at a time. The way that we see we're building our product fundamentally is that it's asynchronous and agentic. And what that really means is, well, go to your JIRA board, your linear board, your Asana board, wherever it may be, assign every single task, right? Whether that's two or whether that's 200, it doesn't matter to us. And our AI will go away and do those tasks.

5:59It'll do things that every normal human developer will be doing. It'll be researching your own code base. It'll be accessing the internet to read documentation. organization it will run it will use code execution to basically test every line of code it's written so as it's writing it's being tested and at the end it will run something called ci which is essentially you think of it as a as a checklist of things that that should be validated inside a code before it's sent for a human review so we're fundamentally trying to say we're not trying to let people accelerate people doing one task at a time give us the task that you don't want to do or the tasks that you never get to, or just simply you just want to have AI have a first attempt.

6:38And we are particularly good, right? Which is why we have a really special relationship with OpenAI and a few other sort of hyperscalers. We spent the last two years training our model to be the best at navigating existing code. There's a lot of wonderful products in the market. If you want to start a brand new app, if you want to do a brand new project, right? Don't use us. There are better products at the moment for that. if you have existing code, if you have legacy code, you have messy code, you just have large projects, we are fundamentally way better than anything else on the market. And we can prove that by independent benchmarks, right?

7:14We are just outperforming any model, whether it's an OpenAI model or an anthropic model. Fundamentally, what we have, our proprietary model is just outperforming in existing code bases. Incredible. Well, congratulations on that. and linking this all back to the previous points around kind of the bubble and you do predict that there is going to be at least a deflation of that bubble you started co-sign a few years ago along with your co-founders which definitely to talk about as well do you believe that you that you kind of started at the right time that you're positioned well in terms of the the few years ago when you started the business and the selection of that niche to position you for the highest chance of success when that bubble deflates yeah i think you know it wasn't by designed it wasn't that one day we woke up yeah it wasn't that we woke up one day and thought you know based on the based on the analysis yeah you know based on the analysis and the reporting that we knew that that was the right time i think that for us we were always playing with some of the older models right so you know this was gpt2 right this is way before chat gpt yeah we were playing with older models like bert right non-llm models as well so we had always played as nerds really as understanding, well, we wanted to build something, but it was always not quite good enough to do any of the fun things that we wanted to do, whether it was useful things or fun things.

8:34It wasn't quite there. It was when GPT-3 came out, and this was a few months before ChatGPT came out, right? So just the model in itself, we had an aha moment where we thought, right, like it's actually pretty smart. It was still limitations, but it was a point where we thought we've got to try, right? Like we didn't know how long we'll go. the timing was right for us like we had all we were both all like stopped working for our previous startups or you know we had sold our previous startup and so for us was the right time to let's just go play with something and that it was just happenstance well on time it always say happenstance as well magic word there as well is is of course the luck factor and um i'm obsessed with this kind of notion of hacking luck and actually um you know the more the more shots you take the more chances you've got of succeeding and the fact that you guys were already kind of being playful and exploratory and then kind of as these shifts these tides turned you just so happened to be positioned in that right place to take advantage of that opportunity yeah i know like you know i can't say that we were founders that had uh you know the stubbornness that we said no back when we started like day one that vision is completely different to what we're building today and in fact you know our earliest investor essentially said we'll give you the investment but you have to change your idea because we hate it so what was the original idea the original idea is actually well building new projects right so we were very early i don't know if we're the first right i don't think we'll ever know if they're first but we were very early in terms of giving a set of a prompt right or a set of instructions at the beginning and building a mobile app right so you could build you know uber for dogs you could be facebook for cats right like you could do these things and it would at that time the context window of gpt3 was so small we were daisy chaining the instructions so we were doing what we could with a limited model then passing the output into a brand new session and then so on and so forth it was very janky a lot of time was broken but it was the idea was essentially so well anyone who wanted to build it would build the the front end the back end it would also work out the business logic right so the understanding you go from catalog to details to checkout or understood the logic as well Right.

10:47That was the original idea. But at the time, we were challenged to say, you know, how often do people start brand new projects? Right. And I still think that to me, that is a question mark. Right. Maybe I'm drinking my own Kool-Aid these days, but I think that I still think that for most developers, at least for work, they very rarely start a code base from scratch. They very rarely might prototype someone, but ultimately when they are trying to put it into production, into the main product that they're building, existing code exists, right? And they can't work in a vacuum. And that is often where I think a lot of AI tools start headbutting against the wall.

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13:19It is. And I think it's like where you see a lot of AI tools are at least promoting marketing themselves for doing a certain skill to people that are adjacent to that profession, right? Co-pilot thing. Yeah, I think it's like, you know, you look at, again, just as my industry, you look at these app generators or AI dev tools that help you build brand new projects. It's often targeted to designers or product managers or project managers or marketers, right? So people who are like, I have this idea, I want to test it, but engineering resources are always limited. Engineering resources never has enough capacity to basically build my experiments.

13:57I want to do A-B testing and all these other ideas. Exactly. And so now these tools are like, well, you've got a Figma design or you've got this idea that you can articulate in text. Well, why don't we take this from zero to one or maybe even 0.5 so that then you have a stronger case to if it's functional? Great. Then you can do experiments. even if it's not fully functional you can then bring that visualize that idea and show it to your your developers and say hey like this is what i meant do you agree and you can have that internal stakeholder management and get more support for you doing and i think that's where you see a lot of the marketing material targeted as you can now code yeah even if you don't know the whole vibe coding thing right we've seen like lovable is in like all the headlines at the moment so you mentioned about your early investor kind of encouraging you to pivot was this pre or post YC because we need to talk about Y Combinator as well.

14:46Yeah, this was at YC. I thought so. Yeah, so it was Tom Blomfeld and Michael Seibel. Oh, just okay. Heads up, guys. There's going to be quite a bit of name dropping in this interview. Just casually mention Tom Blomfield. Well, I don't think we did anything. I think we were just, it was just half a sale. There were so many partners at YC, right? The funny story is just when I met Tom finally in person in San Francisco, I told him that all the way back when I was graduating from uni, I interviewed with him at GoCardless for a job and he rejected me and it was for it was a graduate sales job and it's just like he obviously doesn't remember me I hold no grudge that he doesn't remember was he in the interview he was in the interview he was so you had to it was actually the second time you met him in person then yeah I met him a few times other events but like nothing nothing that he would remember me but like I just I did tell him the story over a beer and he was just like yeah I don't I don't I don't I don't remember it I was like fair enough what an amazing full circle moment there that's hilarious all right so talk to us about getting accepted onto yc what was that experience like and what are your views on it now because it's not what it once was but we'd love to hear your take on it i i'm a fan boy i i am like i'm just going to caveat to all your listeners that i am through and through i think that you can you can criticize anything and anyone in any organization there's always flaws and faults i still think they're on top of their game like there was just simply there's no other alternative what makes them so good then i i think it's three things right if it was practical maybe maybe the last one no i see probably don't really want me to talk about but i think it's a basically open secret but the first two i think number one is the is the mentality they do put a lot of pressure on you to be like don't overthink it talk to your customers and it's cliche but i think that if you if you were If you operate independently without that cohorts that they do and they take pressure, they check in every day, every week, and they make you set goals and they hold you accountable.

16:47It's almost like, you know, when you are in a sports team and everyone is competitive, you just generally work harder. Yeah, nice. I think, do I think you could do it without YC and without YC? Absolutely. Right. It is conceptually possible. Yeah. Right. You could be successful. You could raise funds. You can absolutely push yourself hard. you can have that discipline but i know for myself right like i definitely have times where my my own weakness it gets me distracted or you know i feel a bit more anxious and i get to live in my own head a little bit more and actually having someone just to shake you out of it and then for a short period of time which is essentially three months to just tell you just do this and you know and it is a juxtaposition because you know when we were out i see one of the one of the partners basically told me such a contradictory piece of advice but i kind of love it now which is they're saying you have to do what we say because we want you to be successful and look at how many yc founders are successful if you want to be successful just follow what we're telling you at the same time almost in the same breath they say the best yc founders don't listen to any advice that we give them right this is like entrepreneurship at its core isn't it yeah like it's everywhere it is contradictions everywhere but it's like and i thought about that for so long um so how do you reconcile that then i think that what they are like at least this is my interpretation they kind of know the cookie cutter format to at least put you in the right direction but the truly great founders or the successful founders eventually have to carve their own renegades yeah like you're doing i'm going to do something that's non-scalable i'm going to do something that everyone says is impossible or i'm going to do something i carve out a new product where the market doesn't exist.

18:33Yeah. Right. And I think that's probably what they meant to say the best founders don't listen to our advice or don't listen to any advice. That makes sense. There is obviously, I'm going to caveat that to say, I'm always thinking about survivorship bias. And I think every one of your listeners is going to think about, well, how much is that? Is that the successful people then retrospectively say, you know, if you did this, then you will be successful, right? Like we joke in our company all the time where we say, you know, maybe we're like, oh, you know, the reason we are successful down the line, right?

19:02When hopefully one day we IPO or we have a big exit is we all drank so much Diet Coke, right? In the future, we're just going to mess with people and just tell them that the secret sauce of why success came was because we all love Diet Coke so much, right? You all woke up at 6.42am. Yeah, we had an ice bath, right? Like, it's just like, I think it's just like, you know, it was, I think there's, again, like - I totally get it. Yeah, I think it's like, you know, not to say to criticize people who do ice baths and wake up at 5am and do all these things. I think that that discipline overall, having a system is probably what gives you the best chance to capture something when you have a spark, right?

19:40It's not that it is going to get you to the finish line. But it's just like if you find something that is like a spark or you find something that is actually going to be successful, then you have the best chance already to be like, OK, I'm going to take advantage of that. Yeah, you got to set yourself up for success. And then beyond that point, it's up to you. I totally get it. And like, I understand it from my perspective, mentoring MBA students in entrepreneurship and the ed tech scale up where I mentor as well. It kind of it leans on a lot of those principles. And it's very, you know, it's an 18 month program.

20:10It's very and every it's a monthly intake of cohorts. And it's like classes and modules and frameworks. And we have to do the same homework. And it is extremely formulaic. So you've got that side to it. But then beyond that, you're still an entrepreneur. like there isn't a step-by-step manual to every single thing but so back to YC totally makes sense as well being in that environment the competitiveness the momentum breeding momentum as well so you love it 10 out of 10 experience I do yeah uh there's some of these often downs but yeah I love overall I would do it over again and you see a lot of YC founders if they aren't successful even if they are successful you know you see a lot of people having an exit and then going back again I totally amazing what was the what worked for you with the application getting on in case any listeners are interested in applying to YC themselves?

20:59I don't know. I think this is like, you know, I think there's a YC are already pretty prescriptive in terms and telling you exactly what they want to see. Right. And, you know, how you should present it. I don't think I can give you any more sage advice. I guess, you know, you have to be clear, right, in the sense that, you know, I would say, like, my advice to people is that you have to remember what the goal is here, like goal is to get an interview the goal is not to convince them that you are going to be a decacorn and you're going to make them lots of money and then you're going to be the next great founder yeah obviously they take that into consideration but really your goal is to optimize for how do i convey in the short period of time in that video that you're making that you deserve uh a chance of an interview okay and you know i think that probably i and i can't speak for everyone like i my impression is that yc lets in ideas that they don't like like in every cohort there is definitely a subset of ideas where they think we don't really believe in it or we don't really get it or no we don't think this is going to be super successful but what they're looking for and optimizing for is does this founder have the grit to prove us wrong everyone knows in early stage you'll probably pivot loads yeah and if they are going to pivot do you think that this person has the fortitude has the intelligence has the grit to keep on pivoting until they hit something yeah that there's is going to work they're backing the jockey not the horse right exactly it feels like bad boy appeal as well like i can fix him mentality we don't we want these ideas that we know that we can like and i think that makes sense as well in terms of like their brand reputation because it's also looking at like how can we prove that we can add value so they're also looking at it from that perspective yeah i don't think things things though and it's like no we were just let's wrap up we were saying there's three things i think that yeah exactly helps with the founder i think the first one is obviously i said the community that the discipline that's forced upon you it's like going to camp right the second one i think it's a community right so the secret i think for a lot of super early stage products right including when we first launched and the vast majority of YC is that you sell to other YC companies, right?

23:18They always tell you you're never going to be super successful only selling to YC companies. Sure. But YC companies are more willing to try YC products. Right. And you have a community where you can promote to, you know, people are much more friendly in terms of making warm intros to other YC founders. So your early customers, you know, and whatever you charge, right, you're basically charging almost nothing. that validation to say um is this a real pain point is my solution actually fixing for something you you already have a head start right you genuinely know i can go to the yc community like hey we want to try this new feature that's experimental i guarantee you that i'll get a few people that are willing to try within a day right and that's not necessarily guaranteed unless you have that community right unless you're in the know already yeah that massively gives you a leg up doesn't it um they've got their own self-interest in this a little bit as well right like how is this also kind of helping the wider community so beyond YC itself what was the experience like in San Fran the whole kind of you know this is the belly of the beast of tech entrepreneurship what was that experience like I think the difference is in positivity right again I don't think this isn't this is unique right but I really felt it and as a British person I it's a bit of bastards yeah as a British person I often when I was in California felt and we still spend about half the year in California at the moment because all our investors and most of our customers are US based but I still find with the Britishness in me I find it quite saccharine and I find it quite over the top and I'm quite sarcastic and like judgmental when I hear someone and ask me how my day was and all that politics to me if I want to have a nice day exactly yeah leave me alone But I think that it's like, it's an intangible thing that kind of causes drag in your life, in your business, in your company trajectory.

25:18It's like, it's often in the US, you will find people find reason, regardless of whether you think it's genuine or not. Right. I think it's almost like, oh, God, what is it? It's like self-affirmation or like visualizing success. right it's even if you don't believe that they really mean it just because people say that you will be a success that and that you will hit your next milestone and you will make it will give you just that a little bit more energy and a little bit more sort of strength to just carry on and really you don't really know what's around the corner and that little bit more positivity to find reason why you should do something to find reason why you should help someone or they should help you i think generally gives you a you know it's an imperceptible thing positivity or advantage to ads day by day right and this everyone knows in entrepreneurship it's it's not a it's not a sprint it's a marathon right and i think just so you know imagine if you just had you're running an actual marathon right your shoes just don't fit so well every mile you run it just rubs against a little bit more by the time you get to the end you might not finish it right and i think that's the main difference i'm feeling over here over here you know and and this isn't my first business right like in previous times and it was a dull previous one was a uk only business right and it was often told why you shouldn't do something yeah you you shouldn't start yeah an fca regulated fintech right you you shouldn't try and look at work in an industry that you have no experience with because you're always going to get crushed right what do you know you know the fca will never talk to you right like all that stuff it's like oh okay well it just takes a little bit as you were saying like luck is almost a probability thing where if you roll the dice a hundred times you're going to roll a six right if you only roll it once then you know you might not get it right and so i think you've really got to have that energy to do so and that positivity regardless of how genuine it is yeah yeah yeah so helpful is it yeah and it's just like definitely that really helps with overall yeah and connecting it back to tom bloomfield name dropping there's going to be more name dropping to come as well so do bear with us um he posted this article that went or blog post that went viral a while ago as well right the difference between uk us and um would you mind kind of filling in the gaps on that one yeah no i think i think it's like um you know i've only briefly talked to him about it as well where i was san francisco and these alumni events i think it's fairly similar where he was just saying like anywhere is possible to build a great business there is capital london or uk in general has probably more capital than the vast majority of other cities that are in a similar size the uk also produces fantastic talent fantastic customers all that stuff is possible but if you are going to do something that is very hard and probably nigh on impossible the odds are against you why would you not do everything to optimize the odds in your favor right like if you if you if i said to you you know you know you could be successful only if you did this small thing right if you or you shift your mindset or your environment or your diet or these things and all these things you probably would say consider it and probably would attempt it and i think that's probably and again i'm putting words in his mouth here now it's just like why wouldn't you go somewhere why wouldn't you set yourself up for the best chance of success so with that in mind and the american dream and the positivity and all the rest of it why are you building this in london so i think we only launched our product product publicly about eight weeks ago seven eight weeks ago right so thank you yes a few months when this comes out um i think for us there was a couple of things that we felt that gave us an advantage in the uk number one so we raised a lot of money right at least for for pre-seed companies it was relatively a lot of money but we weren't sure whether our product was right yet we kind of had an inkling that we were doing something right but we're kind of still experimenting and we weren't for sure so we wanted to basically play and to be very frank the salary arbitrage right we could hire developers here in the uk that is as talented as what we could find in the us but you know really for a fraction of a salary we're definitely not underpaying our developers we're paying market and if not a slightly better than market over here.

29:32But it's just like for the same level of talent, it's just significantly cheaper here in the UK. And that would extend our runway. So whilst we were experimenting, it would be working to our advantage. I also think that overall, we are all British, all our founders are British people. We did business, previous businesses, previous careers that we have were British careers. We know how to navigate things like tax, payroll. And again, it's optimizing for friction. like me trying to figure out how do I comply with labor laws? How do I do health insurance for American employees? It's just, again, an extra level of friction or distraction that I don't need at this stage of my company.

30:13You tell me what my employer's contribution for pension is. I know it. I know what pension providers to use. Someone asked me for a cycle to work scheme. I know exactly how to implement it over here. I don't need to think about it. I don't need to go way and do these things. And those are the two things that I think really made our decision to say we wanted to build here, at least in the early stage of our company. I say to our investors, and the vast majority are American investors, right? You know, other than a lake star here in the UK, or technically, you know, here in Switzerland, but I have a big office here in London.

30:45We will probably have to move if we become super successful. And I think it's not really the reason that most people will think about it's not that it's access to the customers you know where we're a software business people buy software anywhere in the world yeah where we we think actually in my perspective it's the sheer volume of talent you asked me to hire 20 30 40 engineers that are that i think are at the top of the game or have a specific niche or experience that i want I can find it in London and you want me to go find 400 engineers at that level of like sort of expertise and fitting the culture that I want or just the type of experience that I want I think that's I think that's much harder and I just like you know by the time that you know obviously this is a rich man's problem to have to say I need to hire 400 but I think at that point and there's definitely other decision making points where it's like you're forced to move perhaps to the US or some other country, but US is probably the default answer, is that there was just a physical limitation.

31:50And I think like, whilst I believe that, you know, I often get told, oh, you know, the population size across Europe is the same as the US. I do still think there is friction, you know, there is a more homogenous culture, more homogenous, you know, work ethic or skill set or style for hiring just US based employees, even if they're distributed across multiple states than there is trying to hire across multiple European countries and I think again it's optimizing for like every small bit of friction right and again I like to reiterate this is a rich man's problem like if you're hiring 400 engineers yes there's probably some cost saving to be still be had in terms of like hiring in Europe compared to hiring in the US but by then I think I'll be optimizing in terms of like the culture right and and hiring like can I line everyone to work in the same way right how easy is it to basically hire basically talent from like states that just have more concentrated talent instead of trying to go across multiple countries across Europe that friction is then what I'm optimizing for I'd like at that point hopefully if I'm hiring 400 engineers yeah like the cash flow is no longer a problem exactly you're at a different stage of different priorities lots of practicalities on that and I think also just with that um just sort of wrapping the the geography topic for a sec there is all like it's of tech products as you say you can hop on a flight if you need to be in san fran in person one of the great advantages of being where we're sat now in the world as well is like time zone like we're bang in the middle of east and west as well right so calls and all the rest of it so very doable makes a lot of sense on the scaling you're saying about kind of 400 engineers at some point in the future you've already scaled massively in the past how many months right so you've gone from what is it six to 30 people which isn't huge but when you go like low single digit to double digit in a rapid amount of time what have been some key lessons in that process for you i think key lessons are and again i like i always hesitate to give advice maybe this is to me again drinking the yc kool-aid i feel like as always like giving advice is always non-applicable right it's very specific and yeah again i always feel bad because maybe it's retrospectively me applying logic to something that we just made a like snap decision at a time right what's worked for you or what's been a mistake that you've learned from that you want other people to avoid i don't think doubling headcount doubles productivity again i've heard this from other places it's not unique but i think i've lived through it multiple times including this time around as well i think you kind of have to triple right at the very least you have to triple if you go from six to twelve you don't double your productivity you want to double your productivity you have to triple right and so we really felt the difference when we hit 18 20 people um it's kind of meta as well that you're operating like in the ai industry which is all about that like like productivity and optimizations but you're not feeling that with the headcount i think we we are i think there's we are at a 20 30 person company we are probably feeling like we're operating like a 100 person company yeah wow um so i think i think it's like it definitely helps what is i suppose my have the main hires been engineers for you yeah yeah they're almost and exclusively engineers, ML guys.

35:00Have you gone through headhunters, recruiters for them, direct? Have you sourced this talent? Yeah, I think basically we do two things, right? In the early stages, when we were beginning to scale, it was through our network. In fact, the joke was that for a while, it looked like that we would only hire friends or friends of friends. We didn't hire anyone else. I think at some point, we started seeing that there was an opportunity cost for waiting for having onboarding talent, right? So we started using recruiters. We started paying for platforms, whether it's Cord or something else. We're paying for advertising.

35:36There is a certain amount of effort. Definitely, I think every founder who has been through a hiring sprint, there's so much distraction. And I'd rather just get someone right in quicker and pay the fee because the opportunity cost is so much higher. Like, I think, again, we are now going to a stage where we are large enough and, you know, we don't want to pay so much fees anymore that we're beginning to look at, you know, building our internal team. You know, we were reducing our spend on with recruiters. But I think for, again, sort of tactical hires, like we, let's say we need to backfill like sort of a role that's just very critical or we see like a cohort or a type of customer that's just is growing rapidly and we need more engineering resource or we need marketing resource to really double down on that.

36:25We just got to go fast. Is that, again, it's about all about capturing that spark. Like, you know, like lighting a fire, if you let the spark die, the opportunity is gone. And how do you balance that with the whole, you know, you've got the cliche of like hire slow, fire fast and like spending that time to get that fit right when you're hiring. But obviously you still want to move fast, you've got an opportunity. So how do you try and hit both the quality and the speed? I think I somewhat disagree with hire slow, fire fast for all roles. I think positions of leadership, sure. Yeah, you should get that right.

37:00They set the culture. Whether they are a leader or they're a boss, really changes how your culture is there. But I think for a lot of roles, maybe this is a controversy, you hire fast and fire fast. You have to be very honest. You have to be upfront with all candidates to say, we could spend weeks and months trying to assess something and you're never going to be under pressure. And you're always that. So we like you. you know we you obviously like us because you're still engaged in this process we're going to make an offer it's going to be it's going to be generous all right and you know we're going to be very clear of how we are assessing you you know what are the milestones that we want you to reach and i think that you you have to have people who are willing to take that risk right we you know maybe this is unfair uh or maybe this is making us lose a lot of good candidates we don't like candidates that are not actively looking i think a lot of recruiters or a lot of people who are hiring is like oh the best talent are people who are not actively looking because they're content for their job or you know they're obviously very good in the mode of action yeah i don't i don't quite believe that like i think it's like sure you might not be putting up a lot of effort but you're looking right you're looking you are actively looking uh just because you're not spending hours sending out applications and you know you're just struggling to make next month's rent so you really need a job it doesn't mean you're you're not actively looking there needs to be that willingness we have a again maybe an unusual policy and i know i know a few other startups that do this and i think linear right so so basically the productivity tools like a jira or asana competitor that's very popular with all the developers and women they do a very similar and i believe we probably stole it from them at least originally inspired by them is that we make all candidates spend a week with us we'll we'll pay you like a real engineer nice we expect you to take a week off of holiday time.

38:55We totally understand not everyone can do that. We try and be flexible so you don't have to do five days if you really can't do it. We try and do three days. No, we will come in on a weekend and pair code with you to work on a project. Nice. And when they come in, we give them a real project. We give them a real ticket. You set it up. We see how quickly can you set yourself up, how quickly can you do that. And again, sure, we probably lose a lot of candidates to say, of course, I'm not coming in and giving a week of my holiday to you. but to me you're saving time up front aren't you because you're actually getting to put it to the test i mean exactly we all try and like you know do interview tasks or set projects and you know you just you never really know on either side of the table how it's actually going to work on both sides until you're there in the room working alongside people so i love that just on the speed what's the shortest time frame you've ever hired someone sure well i think that for the majority of our engineers we ask them to come for a week they usually come on a monday and by Wednesday we've made our decision and we've given them an offer and then we say to them it's up to you whether you want to continue to work we like you enough and so I'd say like most of them quite fast I don't think there's many people that is any faster um cool yeah I think for non-tech roles maybe we've hired a little bit faster for tech roles like within three days of coming to the office and doing a task and when you see how they interact with existing colleagues that we have is wonderful like you know they could be the best developer in the world on paper or on a take-home task but they don't gel with the culture you know bad apple yeah they're not communicative or the communication style it's not it's not bad but it's just not the style that your current team has it's not a fit right like i don't i don't care right we we like i'm not going to hire someone that basically don't disrupt the existing team yeah yeah and so it's like and you know it's quite telling like i suppose it's like maybe as we are now scaling even faster you know we're we're intending to essentially double the size of our team again in the next three four months incredible exciting we hunters recruiters heard it here first well yeah so we're reassessing how we're doing everything right so maybe this will all change which is again bad advice that no one should already regret what you just said yes exactly um i think for us it's like you know maybe we have to change because as we are increasing the volume of candidates that we want people that we want to hire that this is sustainable and maybe that that this is in the future we will behave like everyone else does but at least for us in the early stages really worked for us like every single person that we have hired has always felt like i would be friends with you like it's great like i don't agree with you at work and some of the things that you where you think but i'd buy you a beer right i go and play tennis with you and all of these things and like and and and we have had people who have left right so voluntarily they've left you on to start their own company uh or you know for family reasons they wanted to move to a different location we miss every single person that has every left like we i genuinely think for everyone's that we wish that we they were still around like there's no one where we think oh thank god they're not here anymore or we don't notice it here and like just this really quite left field way of recruiting has really worked out for us i think this really speaks kudos to you guys on your clarity of values, vision, culture, even if it's not exactly codified, or you know, you don't have the wall art in your office, well, but you know that that clarity of you know what you want, you know what who would be a good fit.

42:14And if it works for you, then fantastic. And if you have to iterate further down the line, that's exactly the entrepreneurial journey. Rewinding back a little bit, you said that those early hires were predominantly made through network. And I did want to talk to you about this as well, because Yang, I don't think I know someone with a better a network than you. You are so incredibly well positioned. We need to get back on the name dropping as well, but I feel like you know anyone and everyone. So talk to me about that superpower. Is that something that you just does that come naturally to you?

42:44Is that conscious effort? Are there any sort of tips tricks that you can share with us? It's not conscious, right? I definitely don't think I was sat at home trying to memorise names and doing the things. I think if I had to and I've thought about this a few times in my life like I do think in general my personal secret superpower is that I'm a very good I guess active listener yeah I have a good memory for personal or like small details right like I like you and I have known each other for a few years like I know how you met your boyfriend I know some of the inside jokes that you make fun of your boyfriend about right like it's not conscious I'm not I guess I'm not there memorizing things but I think that it's a natural strength it's a natural strength so I remember like I can you know when I met my friend my my wife right like she was surprised that I remembered what her favorite wine was or you know what her favorite family holiday was within a few days of meeting her right like it's a long way I think that just generally helps when when when I'm talking to people or you know I'm not close to the vast majority of my network and like they they probably Probably they don't ever remember me, but I remember.

44:00Yeah, don't worry. I don't. I really don't think. I think, you know, but for me, it's like when I need someone or I need help somewhere or I need to make an introduction, I remember enough of a detail to feel like there is a warm connection, even if we haven't spoken in years, right? Or we met at a conference. That doesn't surprise me at all that it comes so naturally to you. And I think someone introduced me to this concept of go-giver, as in, you know, of a go-getter. And you absolutely come to mind with that phrase as well. You've been so incredibly helpful to me over the years. And I can tell that it's genuine and authentic to you.

44:34And you most likely do that with anyone that you come across. How much of that, I guess, where does that come from? And, you know, I know that it is a very common trait in the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial circles because we're all kind of in the trenches together and need to help build up that credit, even if it's not that transactional. But again, is that kind of a natural strength of yours or is that kind of a strategy? I guess I just have a rule. Is it is the effort above or below five minutes? all right like it's for me it's if it's below five minutes and it's not going to harm me or anyone else i'll just go do it right like i think i would say everything more than five minutes i think it it takes a lot more convincing again i don't think it's a conscious decision that i'm a giver i think it's just simply you know someone has taken the effort to ask me and they've managed to get to me right they did they either have my number or my email or they've asked they put the effort in yeah if it takes me less than five minutes fine let's connect this to the whole fundraising investing we need to get onto this topic as well i know so so much ground i want to cover here how has your how have your superpowers that we're covering here in terms of like remembering details having this good memory like um like offering value and helping people how much has that played into your investment strategy and even just kind of rubbing shoulders with the likes of tom bloomfield sam altman we need to talk about as well like that next level of of network that people want to get into as in like my own personal angel investing or like raising investment raising investment yeah so i think that again to give yc their credit right like just for this time round we were a yc company we didn't have to do much like outbound or outreach amazing the investors came to us right you you're well trained by yc by the time you are on demo day uh you articulate it well your elevator pitch is super slick and you can present a solution very quickly they come to you right and so i have to admit like this time for at least our first round of funding we didn't have to do much outreach at all so which is why i totally still recommend yc for we need to get those guys sponsoring this podcast honestly it's just like one big ad for yc i love it well gary tan if you're listening uh you know i fully recommend that you're you're sponsoring fantastic bring it bring it on i love it um but i think you're doing yourself a bit of a disservice here right because i feel like you have had these incredible connections in the past i mean i know some of like your previous bosses or other other connections that you've made through your previous workplaces yeah like i have really late stage funding right and i think it matches a lot more when it's late stage where you know it's simply a bigger check size i think it's a a lot of time it's no longer just you know betting on the founder anymore it's betting on the business and traction all that i think that that again is the network helps in getting your foot in the door and i don't don't want to discount that right and i think the people who don't have the network really really struggle yeah and i think that's that's almost the biggest hump to to cross i think that you know my like feeling is just that it's it's understanding what the other side's incentives are right like my biggest piece of advice about fundraising particularly later stage right you know series a and beyond is you have to understand the economics and mechanics of how a fund works right they are friendly to you but they're not your friends and and you know they're they are friendly to you because they want to extract value out of you they have people who have given their money right they have lps and they have people they need they need to show a return to and if it means that they they have to basically stab you in the back down the line in order to basically for the greater good of their investment or you know they have to apply pressure or they do something that you don't agree with that's just them looking for out for themselves right you look after yourself they look around themselves but you're friendly when the incentives align but to understand the incentives and the structure of a fund is i think it's probably the best advice i can give for founders who are trying to raise for the first time repeat founders understand this because they've gone through this right yeah yeah and so they know what the incentives right it's not again it's not personal it's just that they unless you're evergreen fund right and some funds now are converting to evergreen fund they have a 10-year lifespan you know they only deploy capital within the first two to three years.