Diana Hu on Augmented Reality and Building a Startup in a New Market

by Y Combinator8/28/2019

Diana Hu cofounded Escher Reality, which went through the Summer 2017 batch of YC. They were acquired by Niantic and she is now the head of their AR platform.

She’s on Twitter @sdianahu.


Topics

00:00 – Intro

00:15 – Getting into AR

2:30 – Her first exposure to AR

4:15 – AR’s future role in media

7:20 – Deciding where to go with the product

9:30 – Innovations that enabled AR

14:00 – Building a product in a new market

17:00 – Raising money for a new market

21:15 – Advice for founders after an acquisition

26:15 – Immigrating to the US

30:45 – Advice for Immigrant founders

33:24 – Advice for founders in/after YC



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Transcript

Craig Cannon [00:00] – Hey, how’s it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you’re listening to Y Combinator’s podcast. Today’s episode is about augmented reality and it’s with Diana Hu. Diana co-founded Escher Reality, which went through the YC Summer 2017 batch. They were acquired by Niantic, so she’s now head of their AR platform. Diana’s on Twitter @sdianahu. All right, here we go. All right, Diana Hu, welcome to the podcast.

Diana Hu [00:27] – Thank you for having me here, Craig.

Craig Cannon [00:30] – Maybe we should start from now and then go backwards in time. You’re working on AR at Niantic after your company Escher Reality has been acquired. How did you serendipitously stumble into AR?

Diana Hu [00:45] – Into AR? Well, AR’s a funny field. It’s not like a single discipline, AR is a culmination of so many fields. to really build a great experience for augmented reality, you need, of course, part the computer vision aspect, to be able to take sensor image data to understand the world, graphics to render it, then there’s actually a lot of engineering to make all this run in real time. Systems, distributed systems to make the experience just gel together. Plus, to it working at some point in devices, you have like hardware, optics, and there’s so many of those pieces into it. Personally, I’ve come from a very diverse technical background. I’ve done before, I worked a lot in cloud television before, in recommender systems and doing analysis. on television streams with computer vision techniques. I was one space, I was in the space of semiconductors at Intel, so I understood a few things about hardware. Coming into AR was interesting part because it’s such a, I really do think it’s the next technology evolution. We went from desktop, mobile, and next one in terms of representing information in a very rich way, it’s going to be the space of mixed reality with AR, VR and beyond. That will take many, many disciplines to join in to do something interesting. The reason coming into AR was that part. Plus, just I think, always been interested in some sense of the possibilities of what AR could do. It’s a lot of curious, very, very curious about that, what it could take us to be able to see information. Blend in in the real is this concept of, like, pixels, photons,

Diana Hu [02:49] – where’s the line to now between pixels and photons?

Craig Cannon [02:53] – Do you recall the kind of like first exposure you had to it, where it clicked?

Diana Hu [02:59] – Where it clicked? First exposure. Part of it is the thing that I really enjoyed about AR is about being engaged in reality instead of escaping it, where imagination to show or tell a story is really use to engage even more so, more deeply with more layers of information represented, rather than really skipping it, where the magic in AR, it’s not just whimsical, the reason why magic is so magical is that in AR is that you see a lot of the digital representation believable there. The first time I, couple of projects that I’d done, there’s some in the past I did helped some startups build some some projects way, way back. One of them was building a 3D light field display. Basically, you could see, 3D without glasses this is like, “Oh, that’s really close, like holograms and Star Wars.” That was one part. Then you start peeling the onion, of what are all pieces needed from the technology and AR as fundamental piece to build this new kind of infrastructure to just change the way we do computation for information.

Craig Cannon [04:28] – Obviously, Niantic, you’re working on games. At what point do you think AR becomes this kind of like first class citizen in media? Alongside video, photo, audio?

Diana Hu [04:44] – It will take time, because we’re at the early stages, I think the progress of technology has, like, different cycles. I mean, if you read some of the work by, like, Carlota Perez, was a economist talking about innovation cycles, just like big two stages. “Stage number one is when technology gets installed”, quote unquote. Installation types of technologies are when the applications are not ready to be built, because you really need the tooling to be able to express those applications and examples of types of installation types of technologies are just like, network infrastructure, operating systems, programming languages, all these levels of abstractions that are needed, because you’re not going to, let’s say an example, today, it would be crazy to program a website based on assembly, right? You really need those abstractions to build to be able to have a richer way of creating experiences that are more advanced, because you want to kind of build on top of the abstractions always. AR is kind of in that phase of really building the installation phase of solving all the hard problems so that you get to a very expressive world in the future that I imagine where AR programing, AR could be just as simple as spinning up a website, because right now does require a lot of very specialized understanding to create AR experiences. There’s things with 3D environment development that are very good makes for games. This is why games are also very good for AR in the early stages, that’s kind of the part one. Just to give you, just to close this,

Diana Hu [06:26] – the second stage for this technology cycle is the deployment phase. That is when really you see the explosion, because you have this kind of solid infrastructure built and deployment is when you have all these applications built into different industries and at that point, let’s say, just to give you another example, like the installation phase for mobiles is just getting the hardware devices and the operating system with iOS and Android. Then the deployment was all this proliferation of apps. It just explodes, when the tooling and level instructions is right enough. For AR, just to close that we’re not there yet, at all, there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be done. There’s some early showcases, because you do need examples with applications to be able to inform and build the right kind of awareness infrastructure to accelerate that. And in particular, for Niantic is a exciting place to be because we do build a lot of real world games, that are in the bread and butter and functions, that very good information, internally, the company to really take that knowledge to really build this platform that we call it the real world platform, the Niantic Real World Platform.

Craig Cannon [07:40] – Going further than that, as you talk about the expanding past games into other markets. What are the signals you’re looking for, that you’re even building the right thing? Thinking about in the context of product market fit… How do you even know you’re going in the right direction? Because you can make analogies about the software stack in the web, but it could be the wrong direction, right?

Diana Hu [08:04] – It could totally be the wrong direction. It’s just making educated guess sometimes. The thing about AR is actually is not a completely new concept. The concept of augmented reality actually, has been since came out, way, way back even in the ’70s or with the first, actually the first VR headset might have been even the ’60s, don’t recall the exact date. But it was by this kind of monster thing called The Sword of Damocles? It was like–

Craig Cannon [08:33] – Really?

Diana Hu [08:34] – This giant thing. It’s like early in days where people were just exploring things to what would it mean to display things directly to people’s retinas, but, of course, the computation power wasn’t there, the optics weren’t there, there’s a lot of challenges not quite there yet. But things with AR more concretely got a headstart in the 90s. With flight simulators. But that was like, super high end stuff that’s only available to the government, right? And it takes couple cycles to really get the technology at a price point, ready for consumers, still kind of in the process of it. I think the timing and knowing AR has been, it’s not necessarily new, but it is kind of the timing is getting there. There’s a couple things that are exciting, why we decided to tackle AR and one of the things actually about starting companies, you can have a great idea, you can have a great team and also great investors, but sometimes the timing is just something you don’t control,

Diana Hu [09:37] – and you could have all those other things be amazing, but the timing is so hard. And that’s what gives you sometime that multiplier effect. The fact of it is just so many things, coming back to first question, things outside your control and in the environment. For AR it came to the two couple of trends in technology that really make sense. Couple of them… One, it is AR is tagging along a lot of the infrastructure that the mobile world built. It is very easy now to build like a phone, if you want it, there’s like the supply chain for all the components, sensors and cameras and even processors, SOCs, super cheap. And that is easy. And that is getting reused, in fact, where a lot of the now versions of VR headsets to hit the consumer price point. Riding that wave was like building on top of that infrastructure built by mobile, repurposing and swapping some things and still the optics needs to be figured out. But a lot of those can be reused from the mobile space. The second, technology trend that really hitting for AR to be something real, is Moore’s Law, everyone is familiar with computing getting faster, every 18 months, twice, kind of…

Craig Cannon [10:54] – Sometimes.

Diana Hu [10:56] – Kind of, sometimes, I mean, now it’s more about mini cores. You could do more complex computation for algorithms in tiny devices, right? The other thing is, I don’t hear many people talk about, but there’s many versions of Moore’s law but for other things, like Koomey’s Law. It’s very similar, every 18 months, with exact same computation is going to be half the power efficiency. What that means, which is if you really look at the numbers, which the last time I looked at it, the iPhone 7 beats an all benchmark for CPU and power, and sorry, for CPU loads or GPU loads, when you compute something, as much as any MacBook Air that has been launched at a fraction of the power. Isn’t that crazy, right?

Craig Cannon [11:48] – That’s insane.

Diana Hu [11:50] – It tells you how powerful mobile devices and computation’s gotten, that the exact same, like, you think of a MacBook Air, is like pretty beefy, chunky computer, that can do a lot of things.

Craig Cannon [12:00] – Pretty powerful.

Diana Hu [12:02] – And your iPhone 7 beats it, at a fraction of the power. You can apply that to, if you really track it, is really getting to the point where you’re having compute that’s becoming a lot more power efficient. And to get to headsets in AR, we would at some point hit that magical total power cost, which they want to be in the single digit watt range.

Craig Cannon [12:27] – Okay, so you feel certain constraints on the actual hardware side.

Diana Hu [12:33] – Getting there, so shrinking, so that’s another one. Power efficiency. The third one. Another law, third law is Edholms Law. He was the CTO for Nortel, that predicted way, way back talking about the technology with speed bandwidth over wire line. Basically, if you have wired connection for internet, wireless was the other one. The other one, he called it nomadic. But what nomadic really means in our language is like, 3G, cell tower, LTE, 5G type of connections. They all kind of also moving exponentially, as well, tracking behind the other ones. At some point, the concept is that right now, our LTE connection is just as good or better than dial up in the ’90s.

Craig Cannon [13:30] – Relative to AR.

Diana Hu [13:30] – For networking. That applications built in AR and VR, they will be very data hungry because there’s a lot of, you’re pushing pixels, a lot of content. It’s not just with mobile app is a lot of kinds more text information. Pixels are very expensive. The thing that’s exciting right now is just to give you some numbers too, is like 4G or LTE, right now your cell connection, is about one megabit, with what 5G infrastructure is supposed to get you, is going to get you to 10 gigabits, it’s like 10 times more.

Craig Cannon [14:13] – I guess–

Diana Hu [14:13] – A hundred times more. 10s of megabits to a gigabit, which is as much as you would get in your wireless at home.

Craig Cannon [14:22] – Expanding that out. If you’re thinking about starting a company, in a relatively I mean, like, as you described, like, AR, VR has kind of been around for 50 years, whatever, but relatively nascent area. What is your advice for like a founder thinking about starting something? Because you went through the whole thing, right? Like you did YC? You, like, raised money, you got acquired, like, all that, kind of like more traditional startup stuff? Yeah, how would you tell a founder to strategize around, like, even choosing a product to build?

Diana Hu [14:58] – It depends for the industry. The challenge with spaces with AR and VR is that there’s a lot of unknowns, right? It’s hard to be the space right now, when there’s so many things that are moving is super difficult. I know, kind of in a sense, AR is following on the footsteps, what’s happening in VR in the maturity cycle a bit. Where for VR, it was at some point. The hype when Oculus got acquired, it’s like, hyped up the whole space.

Diana Hu [15:30] – But after that, it’s been difficult for sometimes to raise money for that space for content creators can be difficult sometimes. Not impossible, but sometimes difficult. For AR has some, a bit of that is just people are still right now testing the waters, what is like the killer app for AR? That’s still early to be determined. I mean, the one that we see right now is the Pokemon Go– One of the few, maybe only AR games that is significantly profitable. It’s hard. As a founder, starting right now? Well, my bet on it would have been talking about this technology trend on economic cycle, it is, personally thinking, betting more on the installation phase kind of style of companies, which have to do more with more with our core technology that gets built out. Because a lot of those, there’s tons to do, there’s so many problems to solve. Before any of that, before going into the application, right?.

Craig Cannon [16:42] – Right.

Diana Hu [16:43] – Those I think have better chance right now, if you ask me about now, later could swing and change. But those are some of the companies I see in AR. A bit better chances right now.

Craig Cannon [16:55] – Right, so you can kind of like have conversations with investors around tooling, around developers. Those are the kinds of paths you found. Yeah, more interesting.

Diana Hu [17:04] – Yeah, but it’s also a bit challenging, because as a tooling and infrastructure company, the investor are going to ask you, “Okay, do your customers who are developers make money?”

Craig Cannon [17:13] – Right, yeah, are they just like, kids goofing around in their basement?

Diana Hu [17:18] – You kind have to sometimes find the believers in that. Creating technologies and kind of this emerging tech, sometimes it’s difficult, because of this, finding–

Craig Cannon [17:30] – What was that process like? How did you find the right, folks?

Diana Hu [17:30] – In one sense we had the good timing that ARKit just got launched at that time. I mean, that’s another funny story when it got launched. There was a lot of positive enthusiasm for the space around that, that was one. The other one, we were lucky to really get connected with investors that really believe in this future and with us, that it would take a long time. We got backed up. Our lead investor for seed round was Jeff Clavier, from Uncork Capital, who really was with us in really believing where all these pieces were coming out and really taking a bet on us. And besides I was also Founders Fund. also seeing that vision with us that, yes, this makes sense. Just kind of finding those those kind of people.

Craig Cannon [18:26] – Were those folks through Demo Day, through intros, How did they find you? Because I think where invariably, people are asking to say, how do I find the right investor to support my vision?

Diana Hu [18:26] – Part of is through the YC brand carries a lot of gravitas, in a sense.

Craig Cannon [18:44] – Hopefully.

Diana Hu [18:45] – Part of it is, before Demo Day, we had show one of the first AR multiplayer cross-platform at that time, point in time, like two years ago that worked. That created a lot of that kind of, a lot of that buzz that we got contacted. And that was one of the big things, is like really driving the technology to have provable points. With emerging tech, you kind of have to show that is doable and where is going to give a sense. Instead of, so it actually building in a, like a minimum–

Craig Cannon [19:23] – Showing functional products.

Diana Hu [19:25] – A demo. Which is a bit different that I know other founders friend with, sometimes that first thing is really having more actual paying customers early, when when the technology is more straightforward. It’s more about like nailing down the market. For us was kind of nailing down the tech early on.

Craig Cannon [19:45] – Okay, and then once you show people they were like, either, “I don’t think so.” “Not right now.” What were the responses like?

Diana Hu [19:54] – I think they saw it, the demo we showed was Pong in AR, we took like a classic one, classic game, and showed it how it would, you have a ball of fire bouncing on the ground or the wall and it would scorch the ground. And that just really connected with people. It’s just that kind of thing that people’s like, “Oh, wow.” It took some time to figure out that exact, that was a weird more technologist to come up with that. So, I was working with a lot–

Craig Cannon [20:27] – I guess what I’m kind of asking is, the people who didn’t say yes, who maybe gave you a no, or, “Maybe if this develops further,” which is basically a no, how did they have those conversations play out? Because I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of someone else who’s trying to raise money in one of these newer markets?

Diana Hu [20:53] – The thing about those is that at times it is kind of scary to bet in this space– When there’s very unknown. It is finding really those investors, that are independent thinkers. Because sometimes it’s funny, is when someone invests that all the other people follow. That’s kind of it. But you keep trying, sometimes just connecting those and I think I rather really take someone really on board with the visiion to be with you to weather the future to do it, that’s way better. But yeah, I mean, when everything is, I mean, for us is a bit of an anomaly, how it happened, but we then get some nos, but it’s okay. We kind of go and keep trying, right?

Craig Cannon [21:35] – Worked out.

Diana Hu [21:36] – I worked out.

Craig Cannon [21:37] – Related to working out, you’re now at Niantic. Because you guys weren’t around that long before the acquisition happened.

Diana Hu [21:47] – Yeah. That’s another unusual thing too. That was super, I mean, it had to be one of the fastest in YC.

Craig Cannon [21:47] – That was super, I mean, it had to be one of the fastest in YC.

Diana Hu [21:52] – Yeah, we were just joking, I was like, I don’t know if that’s a good record to set.

Craig Cannon [21:57] – Yeah, for better or worse, for sure. But, regardless, it happened. There are some founders who have been on the podcast before who are now at larger companies that have acquired them. What’s your advice to a founder, who’s now at a big company, who’s managing people leading teamwork and stuff. How do you make the most of it, because you just put your heart and soul into something that you started and there’s a degree of passion in your thing. That’s really hard to feel for someone else’s thing. How do you make it work and get satisfaction out of it?

Diana Hu [22:41] – It’s a very good question. Part of it for us why Niantic was a good fit is that the vision of what Escher Reality started us, we are still building it. That’s a huge motivator to continue do that, to do that, that’s huge to be able to at least do that. I know it’s not a luxury for every aquisition, but to be able to do that and still have some of the freedom and the trust from the founders at Niantic is great. The other thing is, I guess the way I like to tell, Niantic’s still also startup, it is a much larger scale, the way way sometimes is thinking about it is kind of taking Escher, which was a Seed stage, skipping it and going to Series B. It’s like skip fast forward, it’s what it felt like. The other thing is to take this opportunity and reframe it a bit is still a very valuable space to learn other kinds of skills. Now is kind of more taking in that hyper growth company. When we join the company, I mean from last year to this year, it’s like at least 5X. It’s crazy.

Craig Cannon [23:52] – 5X employees?

Diana Hu [23:55] – So that kind of growth and be part of that, that was so exciting and learning other kinds of skills. And reframing those, because it is kind of leading in a bigger, bigger scope. That’s part of it that kind of worked out, and I know it’s like a lot of it comes down to relationship with peoples, having a good report with the leadership, executing, getting all those things aligned. And I know sometimes can be difficult because there’s different cultures, right? It’s kind of like immigration, right, immigration. There’s some mutual respect for things that we can learn from each other and work together as eventually, there’s a path to feel as a single company to feel like now, I feel as a Niantic employee, right. It’s not, and that is when it starts kind of more working out to really feel that that bought into where Niantic is going. And that I am excited with where we’re going. And at this point it is and it’s exciting to see all the things that we’ve done. A lot of the demos that we showcase last year, created the splash with AR were a load of work in my team.

Diana Hu [25:08] – Which is great. Other things this year announced in Niantic that are also great. We announced the developer contest, where we allow, invited, we did a contest, invited a 10 selected doesn’t work, selected 10 developers to work on our platform to see what else they could build outside of the Niantic world. That started with a conversation with one of the leaders at Niantic, with Ed, who is one of the platform, he leads the platform, the other parts of the platform for Niantic. There’s a conversation last year and then became a thing this year. And It’s been great to be welcomed by by people, like Ed and to work on something bigger together.

Craig Cannon [25:56] – Right.

Diana Hu [25:57] – I think if we executed this as Escher, it would have been at a smaller scale than what Niantic were able to do at Niantic.

Craig Cannon [26:06] – Or a longer time frame.

Diana Hu [26:06] – Or a longer time frame.

Craig Cannon [26:07] – Or both.

Diana Hu [26:07] – Or both. We got the luxury of the rest of the Niantic machine to get this out.

Craig Cannon [26:15] – Did you find that there were tricky elements culturally and, like, transitioning the team together?

Diana Hu [26:22] – There’s always those when you join it, I mean, right when you–

Craig Cannon [26:24] – Sure, yeah.

Diana Hu [26:25] – Those kind of happen and part of is having, taking time, patience to work through those things, and having faith in the long term.

Craig Cannon [26:36] – And just kind making it happen. And so, this is funny, you mentioned it already, but like it’s all tied back to also you being an immigrant to the US. And that whole experience. You should explain it because it’s actually really super interesting story. But to set it up, you immigrated from Chile, to the US during high school. But maybe you can provide the backstory.

Diana Hu [27:04] – Perhaps I think as you integrate with different things in your life it is a series of immigrations into different thing perhaps. Think of it that way. A bit of a summary of life story. I grew up in Chile, I’m still a Chilean citizen. The way ended up in the US or Chile maybe start with that, my parents were trying to find a better life outside of China, because of all the situations there was happening back in the ’70s. They applied for a visa and went wherever it took them first. The first place that they follow was Chile because another family member had been there, so they went there. So then I was born, normal life, things happen, right? I didn’t know anything about the US. I knew I had an aunt in there. But apparently, my parents also applied for family visa lottery to the US before I was born. And happenstance, which is really bizarre that went through when I was around 16, 17. And then my parents is like, it was very difficult to emigrate because you leave all your roots, learn a new language, unknown environments, start from scratch, your life from scratch, from zero, you’re dropped in the middle and do that it’s like, we done that once already,

Diana Hu [28:34] – we can do it again but it’s really hard. But think of it, take this opportunity to do something I know, there was seen that I’ve been always curious and been good at tinkering with things and math, is like, take this opportunity to do something, it’s like, you might end up doing something interesting. I was like, I never had to take that chance because otherwise I would regret it forever. And then moved with my aunt for a bit, for… And then the last two years of high school and there and that was boot camp for me,

Craig Cannon [29:10] – because I had to catch up with everything. Because the education in Chile is not great. Just for comparison, you learn kind of algebra, like in your senior year. I did a crunch for a lot of things in a year, and because in a year and caught up to calculus in a year, up to calculus, like the pre-calc, geometry and all that, algebra, crunch it in one year. Plus also physics and all these things, except English, English I’d been in ESL, I was still in ESL in college. I had to take ESL, when I went to college. English was hard.

Diana Hu [29:49] – It’s still hard. That was, kind of, the resilient part of really understanding what what I could do. It was really challenging, I mean, coming to this new space, and being by myself in school. It was the hardest thing I had to do back then. And also all of that, and because I had to really do something good out of it and it was hard for my parents, too, because they were earning in pesos and then I was living in dollars. I really wanted to figure out how to cut college short, too. Then I managed to also take AP classes in the last year and finish college early. And then got a job and take loans and pay all that back, and that’s kind of the story of immigrating through those lots of lessons through that it feels almost like a different person. But, yeah, I was very focused on that goal. To really graduate, do something interesting and ended up doing engineering computer science, because that seemed to be what I was kind of good at.

Craig Cannon [31:02] – As someone who then works in a big company, and then started a company, what advice would you share for other immigrants to the US around starting a company and even maybe perhaps bigger than that, like, just like motivating yourself to leave a big company, and go out and do your own thing.

Diana Hu [31:23] – With the one about immigrants I think the thing that’s exciting about US versus, let’s say Chile, and I imagine other countries as well, as a lot of this positive determinism mentality. Really entrepreneurial, where people really want to go at it, and because things are in a state of abundance, in a sense in the US with stability, mostly, I mean, yes, there’s a lot of–

Craig Cannon [31:53] – Not for everyone, but yes.

Diana Hu [31:55] – Mostly yes, here at least, yeah, more so than let’s say in other countries in a still very challenging other parts of the US, poverty lines, but bearing that, the level abundance when you do get into those environments is something that frees you up psychologically, to really explore. It’s exciting coming as an immigrant because you get more like-minded people, I think in the US were far more people that kind of thought like me, more so than when I was in Chile. To really explore and try things out. And there will be challenges, of course, coming from, depending as an immigrant, what type of company you start. There are some that need more understanding of the cultural norms or laws, that you kind of sometimes need to be more, have more years in the US to do, but there’s certain things that they don’t have any barrier on those and those are those are great to start. In fact, actually, this is actually a very quoted a lot. A lot of the big tech companies have been started by immigrants, right? Is just, there’s something about that. About having gone through now it’s a version of the human installation and deployment. Right?

Craig Cannon [33:13] – Absolutely. I think that just immigrant mentality is wonderful. Right now, it’s July, we’re in the middle of the YC batch. In spite of being acquired and working for a larger company right now, what would be your advice to people in the in the batch right now, to make the most of it? And to be honest to make the most afterwards because I think that’s something that often stresses people out.

Diana Hu [33:44] – There’s a lot of angst about what to do your life, like, is YC the pinnacle or things like that? But is a process in your life to keep always recommitting to what you’re doing, But the advice is YC is a great time to really get your, the thing that YC is amazing is really taking that really brittle stage of companies and seed to make them past that, because that’s kind of the incubation stage where a lot of companies have a lot of difficulty, I mean we did too. And once it gets a lot of focus and direction, because that’s part of the things, like, as a startup, you’re limited resources, limited time. And you’re competing sometimes with larger companies, or maybe going after the same space with a lot more resources, but what are the things that you can do different, unlike the bigger companies, and is things with doing activities of high leverage. That was advice from YC, that “Big companies wouldn’t do because they don’t scale.” And as part of that is sometimes just doing things by hand, right? Big companies wouldn’t just do a very brittle hacked up demo.

Diana Hu [35:02] – Things like that, so really taking advantage of that And YC’s great for fundraising your Seed. And getting to know also your batch mates. I think you never know, sometimes a lot of these things are, it might be the current company they’re working with, but this is like, in the future we’re in the space it’s not meant to be kind of zero sum or finite. You will live many lives, might be this current company, hopefully this one that you’re building.

Craig Cannon [35:33] – That’d be great.

Diana Hu [35:35] – That’d be great, but sometimes it doesn’t. But there’s a lot of awesome people that you can get to know, as well.

Craig Cannon [35:43] – Yeah, that’s something I need to do more often, actually. All right, thank you so much for your time. Thank your for coming in.

Diana Hu [35:49] – Thank you. All right, thanks for listening. As always, you can find the transcript and video at blog.ycombinator.com. If you have a second it would be awesome to give us a rating and review wherever you find your podcast. See you next time.

Author

  • Y Combinator

    Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200). The startups move to Silicon