Garry Tan

What's funny is my YC batch, we had one of my fraternity brothers from Stanford actually was in my very YC batch.

But our startup idea was

post an email and get a blog.

Theirs was post an email and get a photo on a photo frame.

So we were competitive with them.

I knew that they were going to launch and we needed to launch first.

Parker Conrad talks about that during his batch for Zenefits.

He was doing health insurance for business and there was another company called Simply Insured.

And boy, did that light a fire under his ass to make that company 10 times faster and better than his competitor.

So mostly I want it to inspire.

But on the other hand, a little competition never hurt anyone.

And it sounds like that's like real world direct competition in those cases.

Oh, yeah.

Which you will have to encounter.

Yeah, that's super real.

So it's different than, well, he's building something really different than me, but I want to be as good as him.

Yeah, that's right.

A lot of this is, the 13 weeks is a lot about trying to get people to focus on the thing that really matters instead of how do I raise more money from VCs?

How do I impress the finance bro?

None of that matters.