Harj Taggar
speaker
73 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 5 Aug
Harj Taggar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
As two young founders, how did you manage to convince a bank to trust you in the end?
So moral of the story is go get sushi in Potrero tonight.
At the time, I remember you were also unusual in that you took sort of longer to do a big public launch.
And especially within the YC world, the motto is very much sort of launch early, launch quickly, be out there and iterate.
Could you maybe talk us through a little bit about that?
Why did you do it that way?
That's a good question.
Yeah, I mean, the issue with advice in general is it's sort of so generalized.
And especially in startups, the exception proves the rule, right?
So I think those are certainly if the cost of failure is high, then it almost certainly you have to sort of take longer to build.
Maybe a slight tangent, but something I'm curious about related to this, though, is
With these coding agents, the ability to just build and produce software cheaply and quickly, I wonder, should people be taking more of this path?
Should people be more ambitious in general with what the version one of the thing that they launch is?
Or is it still fundamentally good product design to start narrow and focused and then expand out once you know what people want?
Within sort of YC and probably startup world at this point, you're famous for the, at least the Paul Graham term, schlep blindness, this stripe, at least on the surface was not like, you know, involved a lot of schleps, like things that presumably weren't like the intellectually most interesting things to work on.
And I always found that especially interesting for you because you just mentioned you had academic interest in physics and I just think clearly like, you know, a deep intellectual and have very many things that you're interested in.
As Stripe has grown into this big company, in what ways are there intellectual rewards that you've given up and which ones have you gained?
And you have a particularly unique perspective on this because you work with the big model providers, the big lab companies, and you work with all of the fast-growing AI startups on the ground.
Something that came up a lot here yesterday, honestly, it comes up within the batches too, is people are just worried about, is my idea going to get sort of trampled by the big lab providers?
And I'm just, given your perspective, I'm just curious, how should people think about that?
Showing 41–60 of 73 · page 3 of 4
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