Diary of Longevity CEO: Key takeaways & reflections from first 3 days in YCombinator

Imagine watching hours of Y Combinator videos on and reading the earliest Paul Graham essays on startups since the post-dot-com days and now meeting the network of some of the brightest and most ambitious folks in the world congregating in the Bay Area.

Just wrapped up an immense 3 days of learning with some of the group partners - Dalton, Michael, Tom, Harj, Garry, and Brad, chatting, playing pickleball and just awesome vibes.

Here are my top insights from both structured and unstructured chats:

1. If you want to build world-changing companies, surround yourself with the top who will push you to work even harder and smarter

2. YC is literally that definition, at the very inception which is why only 1% gets accepted every batch. Both high IQ and high EQ and good-hearted people at the core (from 18 year old ivy league dropouts to 50 year old ex Palantir, SpaceX rocket engineers)

3. We’re going to live longer, and more people will want to go to the moon or Mars as a bucket list goal (the definition of work and retirement will change forever)

4. AGI (artificial general intelligence) will come around, and the more we are willing to talk about it the better (if you reference points 1 and 3) some of these companies WILL end up changing the way we interact with tech and life.

Just reflecting, after applying 6 times in the past 10 years, there this previously a chorus of people who kept on saying YC was overrated. But I honestly don’t know where else you can find this concentration of highly motivated individuals who would want to change the world with software, hardware and technology in general.

So believe and share directly only what you experience if not you might become yet another “unreliable narrator” which was a new term I learnt in these few days.
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120 & beyond,
Kenneth
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