Everything awesome is kind of a cult — starting with a truth that flies in the face of orthodoxy

8:27basically, I did the same thing again. It was like the same thing that got me to go work on Windows Mobile instead of >> Yeah. >> um just staying on the thing that I knew and loved. >> Yeah. >> Uh it happened again. I was like, well, I don't know, you know, I was working backwards from the map instead of looking down at the territory and saying

8:46like, oh, well, these are the smartest people I know. Like Joe and Stefan were among the smartest people I'd ever met. >> Yeah. >> Um and you know, if not them, like who was I going to, you know, be a co-founder with? Like it just, you know, the universe was saying like this is the thing you need to do. But all I cared about was what was cool, what was hot,

9:06what would a really good investor say? >> Um >> And the thing is like they're like going off of uh a map. >> Yeah. >> And like you can see, you can look down, you can look around, you can like have first principles knowledge of what's going on. >> Yeah. >> Um and you know, what they were doing is like they were going to governments and three-letter agencies. And it was clear

9:28that um the things that really good computer scientists in Palo Alto could do and create >> Yes. >> uh DC did not have access to that. And you know, it's funny how much that thing that they had identified like Peter and Joe and Stefan and later Alex Karp identified. >> Yeah. >> Um that like runs through almost everything that we do in Silicon Valley. It's just like uh the

9:55future is already here. It's not evenly distributed. And then that's where like first principles knowledge or like just viewing the world as a scientist is actually very useful. >> Yes. >> Um and what a scientist does is, you know, sure there's published papers, but you go and you examine all the truths. And what you find is that once you go down into the experiment or you go down

10:20and talk to the first party people who are experiencing a thing experiencing a thing. >> Yes. >> Um then you learn secret knowledge. Then you have gnosis. And so, uh you know, from Palantir I definitely learned that everything that's awesome in my life is kind of a cult. >> Yeah. >> That starts with some sort of truth or belief that flies in the face of an orthodoxy, which is very punk actually.

10:44>> Yes. Yes. Totally dude, that's very Rick Rubin would approve. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah, well, actually what I love about you're saying is that there's a beautiful truth in the fact that you've talked through some of these maybe tragic misses, but you know, the lessons are courage, the lessons are earnestness, right? The lessons are when your instincts are pulling you to work with a set of people. So so maybe talk a

11:04little bit about, you know, we talk a lot about how Silicon Valley and the magic is it takes outsiders and turns them into insiders. And I feel like YC is the ultimate distillation of that. You know, you go from being two founders perhaps from a foreign country to two people with YC on their LinkedIn and everybody now knows what that means. >> Totally. >> So talk about how that happens. Is it a