- Well I'm back here at Stanford University.
Place is awesome.
Today, I wanted to talk to you about mentors,
because a lot of people are asking me to be their mentor.
You shouldn't go and try and find a mentor,
you should go find people who you want to help
and help them,
and then good things happen from there.
And that's how I got into Y Combinator, and it changed my life.
Let's get started.
Well, like many of you, I started off not knowing anything
and knowing nobody and actually Stanford gave me a lot.
So it's really cool to be actually just back on campus
talking about this with you.
I had a spare afternoon
so I thought I'd swing back by campus and just reminisce.
A lot of people ask me, especially now,
can you be my mentor or how did you get your mentors?
And the reality here is I never got any of my mentors
by asking them to be my mentor,
that wasn't a thing for me.
And it's not something that I can recommend for you either,
but I do have a better way.
So picture this, it was 2008 and I had just left Palantir,
actually I took an interaction design job
and could actually sort of moonlight on the side.
I had a lot of time to think about design
and product and engineering
and I had just decided to start a company,
and Y Combinator was where we wanted to go.
And start up school was happening
before applications were due,
so of course we had to show up.
Aside from starting a company, I was thinking
maybe I actually want to be an editorial photographer.
In fact, I had already started doing some editorial shoots
for a local hip hop magazine in East Palo Alto.
I was excited just because maybe I could help.
So I got here early to Stanford campus,
I brought all my camera equipment and I sat in the front row
and I made sure to take really great photos
of every single speaker, Jeff Bezos, Michael Arrington,
Paul and Jessica, Marc Andreessen.
It was really a star-studded event.
Even DHH, the creator of Rails was there.
That night, I took all the photos and edited them
and I posted them on our blog platform
and I posted it on hacker news and it got voted up.
And basically that's where Paul and Jessica saw it,
and that's what opened up Y Combinator for me.
Here's me in 2009 telling the story
at the next startup school.
- [Interviewer] Last year, 2008 was a lot different for you,
this year you yourself are a founder,
tell me about that.
- Right after startup school last year we applied,
we got in, got in the summer of 2008 batch,
launched, raised an angel round,
now we do about a million and a half uniques
in the United States on Posterous.com
and I can't say that it would have happened without it.
- [Interviewer] So now you're here
taking a lot of pictures and everything,
but you've got quite a bit more experienced now?
- I actually came to the front row,
got here early and took photos of all the speakers.
Paul and Jessica actually told me later on that
that was one of the reasons why they picked us out of
something like us we're several thousand
who knows how many applications?
I thought that would be a great reason
for me to come back and take photos this time again.
Well, aside from me being crazy embarrassed
for being on camera,
back in 2009 I didn't know what was next.
And I certainly didn't have a sense
that we would end up building a top 200 website,
and I had no idea that later I would end up
working at Y Combinator as a partner.
So it all started with me not looking for a mentor,
I was just looking for people who I believed in
and I wanted to go out and help them.
After reading Paul Graham's essays throughout my life
and just being really excited about this awesome event
to teach us how to start startups,
I wanted to give back,
and that spirit of giving back brought me
all the mentorship and more,
it was something that changed my life.
So much of our lives are basically taken care of
by other people,
this is a mindset shift that I had to learn
sometime during my adult life.
Give first and if you give first
you will be surprised what you get back in return.
Go out and find people doing things
that you really believe in and find your unique skills
whatever you're really great at and offer it to them.
And you don't even have to ask,
if you know that they could use it, just do it.
Yes, I have had great mentors,
but I have never formally asked them.
That's just not something that's done.
What you put out in the world
will come back to you 10,000 times,
that's my experience.
(soulful music)
Yeah, it's funny.
A lot of people come to me saying they want to be a leader,
they want to be a founder,
they want to start things.
And what I realize now in my career, at least my experience,
was that early on when I was building things up,
it was more important to be a great joiner,
to be able to find things that you think are interesting
and then go and offer your skills.
A, it's a great way to build your skills,
and then B, it sets you up for success
when you're ready to be a leader.
When you are ready to be the founder,
when you're ready to go out on your own.
The thing that prepares you most to be a great leader
is to early in your career, be a great joiner.
Those are really sort of the three steps
that I've seen work in my career.
First, have something that you are great at.
For me maybe early on it was designing and building product
but also my weird hobbies were helpful too,
I had no idea that being into event photography
would put me on this course in my life.
The more things you are actually good at,
the more you can have to offer for other people.
Second, follow people who you believe in,
and if you believe then other people can believe
and these things can become self fulfilling prophecies.
By 2008, it was clear to me that Y Combinator
was going to be the premier place
for all startups to come from.
Software engineers, designers, and product people
were paying attention
and VCs hadn't started paying attention yet,
it wasn't for another three or four years
before it became the toast of Silicon Valley.
And that's easy to forget,
today, Y Combinator is synonymous with startups
but back in 2008, it was still on the come up,
and it was absolutely something that
I felt like I wanted to help, I just believed in it.
Finally, you'll find that if you're a great joiner,
you're going to end up with some of the smartest people
around you and that's going to pay dividends over the longterm.
So much of life is about finding people
who are incredibly smart
and then working with them throughout your whole career,
the magnet effect is totally real
and it's really, really powerful.
And it set me up for my career,
working at Y Combinator changed my life
and it all started with a very simple idea,
how do I help them?
After spending five years as a partner at Y Combinator
and building up my skills and network,
I was ready to set out on my own
to become a venture capitalist for myself,
I hope we're just getting started.
I feel so grateful for all of the people who came before me
who gave me so many opportunities,
and my genuine hope is that
I can just keep paying it forward.
A lot of people helped me get to where I am in my career,
and I hope to do the same with you.
So appreciate you watching here,
happy to share just like the good and the bad.
That's it for me,
if you like this video please click like and subscribe,
click the bell icon so you get notified next time I post,
I hope that my lessons help you get to the next stage.
I'll see you next time.
(soft music)
(water pouring)