Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator, shares insightful experiences and lessons learned over three decades in Silicon Valley. He talks passionately about his interest in education technology and why Y Combinator invests in startups at their earliest stages.
Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator, shares insightful experiences and lessons learned over three decades in Silicon Valley. He talks passionately about his interest in education technology and why Y Combinator invests in startups at their earliest stages.
Geoff Ralston: [00:00:00] In 2009, they came in and they interviewed not very many people were interested in their idea. What YC saw was extraordinary determination and real vision in the founders. And that was enough to make the company fundable by YC.
Gopi Rangan: You are listening to the Sure shot, entrepreneur podcast, four founders with ambitious ideas, venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your goals. Welcome to the shore shot entrepreneur. In this episode, I talked to Jeff Ralston, the president of Y Combinator, one of the most leading accelerators in the Silicon Valley.
Jeff built one of the first web mail services, rocket mail, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1997. And later he was at [00:01:00] Yahoo serving as the chief product officer. He was the CEO of Lala media, which was acquired by Apple in 2009. And he started imagine K12 one of the first ad tech accelerators in 2011. He invested in many interesting companies like class dojo, remind and others at imagine K12 and YC has had many successful startups go through its programs like Stripe, Airbnb, pager duty, Gusto, Gingko, Bioworks, Dropbox, Instacart, Mixpanel, amplitude, Zapier, and many others.
Jeff welcome to the short shot entrepreneur.
Geoff Ralston: Hey Gopi. Thanks for having me.
Gopi Rangan: In this episode, Jeff and I talk about his journey into Silicon Valley, how he started as a software engineer and how he built a carrier in the Silicon Valley, starting at Hewlett Packard and later founding many important initiatives.[00:02:00]
Jeff is one of the most influential people in the Silicon Valley who have arguably shaped the way Silicon Valley helps evolve over the years over the decades. He tells us the story of why Y Combinator started, what was the Genesis and how it's operating today. And what's the vision for the organization for the future.
He gives specific examples of startups and what he saw in entrepreneurs at the very early stages before they became huge phenomenon. He also talks about his views on Silicon Valley. What is good? What is bad and what might happen in the future? Jeff, let's start with you. Tell us about yourself. Let's start with how you started your career as a software engineer.
And when did you come to Silicon Valley?
Geoff Ralston: That's such an open-ended question. And because I've been around for so long, I could probably take up the rest of this podcast. Just. Telling you that story, but I won't, I'll try to be brief, but I'm an engineer originally. I have written software for a really long time.
Sometimes it's actually kind of funny when I think [00:03:00] about how long I've been writing software. Cause I, I started running software when I was a teenager and that's actually. Pretty unusual for someone of my era, because you just didn't really have access to tools towards software for the most part back in the seventies when I was a teenager, but I've actually got lucky.
I've always since then written software. And I got a degree in computer science and I was at school on the East coast and they had a set of interviews and this company I knew of, cause everyone used. Their calculators, Hewlett Packard came out to interview and I didn't even know they built computers, but it turns out they built computers and hired a lot of software people.
They flew me out to California for an interview. I was just sort of. You know, in love from when I was, uh, I was from Buffalo, New York, in the snow and the cold and the overcast Buffalo has sort of the, is sort of the opposite of San Jose in the Bay area where we have almost, no, we have the least amount of [00:04:00] sun during the year compared to San Jose, which has just about the most amount of sun.
I fell in love with California pretty quickly. And so I took a job out in the Bay area and. Cupertino California as a programmer, working at HP. And I actually stayed with HP for quite a while. I went back to school a couple of times and ended up living in France for five years, working for HP. I was so close when I lived in France to CERN the nuclear power center where Tim Berners Lee was.
Inventing the worldwide web. I was only about an hour away from that, but I didn't know anything about that. But when I came home, it was just as the weld was getting going, and it's sort of rekindled in me, something that had been there for a long time, which was the desire to be an entrepreneur. I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur and just my path and my career took sort of a different road.
When I sort of ran headlong, as I, as I was just transitioning out of France and coming back to United States, Into the [00:05:00] worldwide web and into this global potential for a connected world, I almost immediately quit my job at HP and started founding companies. Eventually I found my way to, as you said, being part of the team that built rocket mail, then I ended up at Yahoo and I did a whole, I had an amazing nine years at Yahoo doing a number of things.
You said the rest, I. When I left Yahoo, I was very excited to make a difference in education and kind of failed my first try and retrenched worked with someone who had always wanted to start a company with bill when, and we did LA LA together. And then I came back to education in 2011.
I've already spoken for too long in your copy, but I just will say there was listeners to what you said about how I've been at YC since 2011. And. And you also mentioned that I found it imagine K12 with Tim Brady in 2011. That sounds a little weird and it is, it was a very strange. Time where I was trying to figure out what to do in education.
And Tim and I had this idea of starting an [00:06:00] accelerator and I went to Paul Graham and said, Hey, Paul, what do you think of this idea, Paul, the founder of Y Combinator. And he said, that is a great idea. You should do that. And you should become a partner at Y Combinator at the same time. Which I thought was odd, but I, in the end I agreed to do that.
So I actually became a partner and founded, imagine K12 not sort of the recommended path for entrepreneurs, usually it's takes a lot more focused than you can afford to have with you split jobs. But so yeah, I joined Y Combinator, founder magic K-12 five years later, I at least had had enough of having that split personality.
And so we took the magic K-12 and merchant into YC. And I took over as president about 18 months ago now from my predecessor, Sam Altman. As longer than I meant it to be.
Gopi Rangan: This is a fantastic journey. Fascinating journey. You call yourself an engineer. I know that you still write code and you've written angel spreadsheet.
Geoff Ralston: Angel calc. Yes.
Gopi Rangan: Yes, but I want to on one piece that and dig a little deeper, starting out as a software [00:07:00] engineer, you got your 10,000 hours very early in your life. You made your way into Silicon Valley got recruited by HP. This is the early days of Silicon Valley. That all sounds already adventurous, but that I can relate to.
But from there you decided to start your own company and did a few gigs where you founded initiatives. That is a big leap. How did that happen? Like what does startup mean to you and why did you pursue that path?
Geoff Ralston: I'm chuckling a little bit about you talking about me coming in the early days of Silicon Valley, because it makes me sound older than I even am because you know, the early days of Silicon Valley one might say were one bill and Dave founded Hewlett Packard in a garage in Palo Alto in 1957, excuse me, 1956.
Those are really the early days of Silicon Valley. And I was not around for that, but. When I came out to Silicon Valley and it was a long [00:08:00] time ago, you are right to point that out in the eighties, being an entrepreneur was kind of the dream. It was what started Silicon Valley.
Gopi Rangan: I like to point out that the founder of Adwell, we went to business school, both of us, where we both went to business school.
Geoff Ralston: Right. George Doria was actually the founder of venture capital in so many ways. That wasn't 1957. When he funded a company called digital equipment corporation with $70,000. And. Made 35 million. And that sort of brought everyone to Silicon Valley to sand Hill road where all the venture capitalists, maybe not all of them, many venture capitalists have their offices and that created or helped create this.
Silicon Valley explosion of ideas and innovation entrepreneurship, partly seated forced by my Alma mater when I came out in the eighties, the idea of being entrepreneurs was in [00:09:00] everyone's mind.
And even though I stayed at HP for a long time, every weekend I was, or every Friday night I was. Going and hanging out with my friends and we were imagining what company we would fund and how we would, what we would start and how we would do it. The real issue was there wasn't really a playbook. No, it was, it was very different than it was now.
There was no Y Combinator, there was no Y Combinator startup school or there was no. Common set of knowledge about how to go start a company. It was very mysterious and it was much harder. The bar, the threshold was much harder and it wasn't really until much later. In fact, after I finished that business school in Seattle, that you mentioned it came back to United States because NC ads in France that I did take the leap.
It was just because, you know, again, I mentioned that I ran headlong into the worldwide web. I really did. I was a little sad that I was still at HP back after so many years. And I hadn't started a company when I got a phone call from a friend who said, Hey, have you seen [00:10:00] mosaic?
And I said, what? He said, have you seen mosaic? And I said, well, what's mosaic. I have no idea what you're talking about. He said, it's, it's the thing that lets you look at the internet. And I had no idea what he was even talking about. I said, you mean, it's like a protocol analyzer? Or he said, no, no, no, you just gotta, you gotta try it.
And so mosaic of course, was the first browser that integrated images and texts created by Marc Andreessen. Of course, the famous Mark Andreessen at Champaign-Urbana Illinois, the national center of supercomputing, and then gave it away for free. So I downloaded mosaic and. I saw immediately a world that I had believed in for a long time.
And I quit my job three weeks later and that was it. And I jumped and I still remember my manager HP. At the time, this is a meet Jeff. You're making a huge mistake. You should never ever leave a job without another job waiting for you. I couldn't articulate how I knew he was just wrong [00:11:00] as it could be, but I knew it, but I knew what he meant because entrepreneurship is hard.
I felt that when I was off on my own, just trying to create something, it was complicated and scary and hard, but, you know, luckily in the end at all, it all worked out.
Gopi Rangan: It's a big leap to leave a stable, steady job that gives you a paycheck and into something that's unknown. That's still hard for everybody these days.
How is the different today compared to when you started companies? This is about 20 years, plus has anything changed substantially? Are there some basic principles that still remain the same?
Geoff Ralston: You know, the ability to get funding early, to get knowledge early. That one of the ways I used to describe the difference that the internet brought to the world was that one of the important things that did anyway was to remove information asymmetries.
So for example, Back when I was first buying a [00:12:00] car, you would go to the car dealership and they knew everything. And you knew nothing. They knew exactly what the price of everything was. They knew how much demand there was from certain cars. They knew all of the information that they needed to cut a good deal.
And you knew none of it generally. The internet flip that entirely. Now, when you go to buy a car, you know everything about the car, you know exactly what price you can get, you know, what price it's been sold for, you know, their price, you know, how much profit they make, the Tom Friedman put it. That ground has been completely flattened.
The former information asymmetry is. Complete symmetry. The same thing has happened now for entrepreneurship and I credit Y Combinator, founder, Paul Graham, and Andy, and his co-founders Jessica, Trevor, and Robert for playing a huge role in that. And we continue to try to do that with things like startup school or even an immense library of content about starting startups.
But of course, Paul started. Creating that content. Well, before any of the [00:13:00] content we created with his essays and entrepreneurs know so much more now about. Starting a startup and how to start a startup than they ever have before. And I think that alone is a huge difference for entrepreneurs. And of course the existence of Y Combinator, and other accelerators that allow entrepreneurs to learn as they go and to work side by side with other entrepreneurs is a huge difference.
The last thing I'll say, Gopi is. Then a major change is in the entire venture capital ecosystem. Again, partially driven by YC, but partially driven by people like you who are creating small funds and angels and the amount of capital that's available. And the very earliest stages of startups life is well different than ever has been in the past.
And that as well has made a huge difference.
Gopi Rangan: The information is cemetery has been tipped more in the favor of the small [00:14:00] guy over the years because of the internet. Now we can see that in so many different verticals, but I'm really curious to see, like, what was the Genesis of YC? Why did you get excited about it?
And especially why did you choose to take the president role 18 months ago?
Geoff Ralston: So Paul Graham, the founder of YC has started a couple of companies. One of which was purchased by Yahoo. It was called via web, and it was really the first SAS business on the internet.
It was an online shopping cart and it was. Purchased in 1998 to, um, to create Yahoo store. And that's when I got to know Paul, because the company that built rocket mail was purchased in 1997 to create Yahoo mail. So we overlapped for a year at Yahoo. Paul did a bunch of things and in 2005, actually both him and his girlfriend at the time were kind of mulling over what they were going to do next.
Coincidentally in the spring of 2005, Paul gave a talk to the Harvard computer society called how to start a startup. [00:15:00] Where he's sort of outlined his thoughts as to what was important, what he'd learned from starting strong and what was important. And he turned that talk into an essay, how to start a start up.
And that was the Genesis for when Jessica and Paul were talking about what came next for something they called the summer founders program. Where there were a few changes to the way typical venture capital worked first, they were going to fund companies synchronously. They funded eight companies all at the same time.
Secondly, they were going to do it with standard documents. There wasn't any, this weird. Raising money, like hundreds of pages of lawyerly, things that you need to spend 15 or $50,000 putting together. It was you're talking about the safe, right. And not talking about the safe and at the time they used convertible notes, but they made it all simple and standard.
It was very, very easy. The safe came a little bit later. That's another story. And the third thing they did is they focused on, well, Hackers engineers [00:16:00] technologists, the people who Paul believed were going to be at the center of value creation, hence forth, because technology was going to be at the center of value creation everywhere in his estimation software.
And thus began YC, it, it started in Cambridge mass, but Paul realized that really the center of our gravity of entrepreneurship was still out in Silicon Valley. So he moved out to mountain view and began why see, when I left.
Yahoo in 2006, I started doing a whole bunch of angel investing and Paul knew more about that than anyone in the world. He'd written more elegantly about that than anyone in the world and clearly about it than anyone in the world. So I started going down to mountain view and going to demo days and hanging out with Paul and Jessica and Trevor Robert was back at MIT teaching.
So I kind of became. Part of that early funding ecosystem and seed ecosystem and start to watch what they were doing at YC. A bunch of things happened [00:17:00] in from 2016 to 2018, but it was really time for YC to get new leadership.
Sam was moving on to run open AI, and I hadn't thought that I would. Take on another leadership position at an organization, but it just felt like the time was right. I really was searching for another purpose in life, and I believe so much in the mission of YC and in fostering entrepreneurship and creating opportunity everywhere in the world by.
Enabling founders to create Epic companies. It had really made a difference in so many people's lives and, and that really spoke to me. And, um, and frankly, I just, I love talking to founders. I love working with entrepreneurs. And so there was a, there was just a moment when it became clear to me that it was the right time to step up and take on a bit of a bigger role than I had in the past.
And so when Sam and Paul and Jessica proposed that I take over. I [00:18:00] thought about it long and hard, but I had talked to my wife long and hard about it, but in the end, decided to take the job.
Gopi Rangan: Why is he's come a long way? It's really changed the startup ecosystem. What is your vision for YC and what role do you anticipate YC playing in the future?
You've had so many success stories like Stripe and Airbnb and get lab and Reddit and Twitch. And Mixpanel's Zapier. So many successful companies have already come through. What's the future. What's the vision for YC.
Geoff Ralston: Yeah, we're really excited.
Uh, you know, we had a pretty terrific year in the midst of a pretty awful year and I almost hesitate to say it cause I don't want it to sound crass, but it just turns out that the global pandemic accelerated a secular move towards the digital that YC has been part of. From the very beginning. For companies like door dash went public at the end of last year and Airbnb, although for Airbnb, it was initially very difficult, but in the end, the company recovered remarkably [00:19:00] quickly.
Both of course, Airbnb and door dash went public. At the end of last year, our company segment was purchased for $3.2 billion by Twilio towards the end of last year as well. So, you know, it was, it's been sort of a remarkable run and I think we'll see more of that in. 2021 because of this continued move towards the set of companies that are transforming how we do everything.
Stripe transforms how we do digital commerce, Instacart transforms, how we shop at grocery stores and so on. That will continue. And my simple answer for what my vision is for the future of YC is, is more, we started funding. Companies in 2005, as I mentioned, and we fund companies in sort of two classes, we call them batches a year.
The first batch in the summer of 2005, we run in the summer and in the winter was eight companies and we have scaled up to well over [00:20:00] 200 companies per. Batch, that will continue. I would like for YC to fund as many companies as we can, we have figured out how to scale our operations. We have an extraordinary group of partners who work with companies.
We have an extraordinary software infrastructure to support everything we do, and we have an extraordinary. Teams and finance legal, et cetera, to support the overall infrastructure that we need to support these much larger groups of companies and more we've expanded how we hope with the companies go be.
We used to sort of work with companies in our core batch programming, and then. You know, occasionally do office hours and work with them afterwards. But now we really talk about working with our companies from the very earliest stages. From there the time when they create their idea all the way until they IPO, we have something called startup school.
I think I mentioned startup school [00:21:00] earlier, which is a free online course for. Any founder to take, it's really extraordinary tens of thousands of founders and tens of thousands of companies have gone through startup school. Since we launched it in 2017, we have a series, a program and a growth program for companies that are starting to scale series.
A's tend to take place at 18 to 36 months after our batch program and growth. Companies tend to have dozens of employees and are at the next level of scaling. And as you may know, we've also raised a growth fund called I can't annuity fund, which can write bigger checks to companies that are series B, C D level of growth and inching towards that going public or whatever the next stage for the company is.
So we've both expanded vertically and horizontally in the way we think of. Why C's place in the venture ecosystem. I intend to continue that. The last thing I'll say is that we used to be a fairly narrow in the [00:22:00] beginning, sort of. Consumer internet companies were way broader than that. Both in a vertical sense, in a geographical sense,
for example, we funded a supersonic jet company, boom aerospace. We funded nuclear power plants. We have the largest portfolio of biotech and health tech seed stage companies of anyone in the world. So we've really expanded the set of companies that we work with, but we also have expanded. Around the world.
So we have incredible companies in South America, in Indonesia, in India, in Europe, around the world.
Gopi Rangan: You see these entrepreneurs at very, very early stages and you don't spend a lot of time on due diligence and try to get as much information out of them and then go into a room to debate about it for weeks and months, you've actually spent very little time and you make really quick judgements.
How do you do that? And what do you see in these entrepreneurs that convinces you ?
Geoff Ralston: I don't want that to be misunderstood, which is that we're not [00:23:00] making sort of uneducated, rash judgments on these things. In fact, the way YC works is there's an online application, which is quite extensive and.
That application includes a number of questions as well as a video. We review all those applications and every application gets at least three people reading it. Then we rank them and we have a number of criteria that we use, but a certain number of those applicants make it through to the next round.
In that next round, we do an interview. Which is in the past in person in mountain view in COVID-19 world, it's been a zoom interview in the future. That'll probably be some hybrid. People get one and sometimes two interviews, and then we make a decision as to whether to fund them or not. So it's not.
Quite as snap is, you might have implied. It actually takes quite amount of review at the [00:24:00] application stage and then pretty intense interview process. After that we make our call and we have all of us interviewed thousands of companies , and read many thousands of applications. So the fundamental answer to your question of how do we make our.
Decisions were pretty good pattern matters. We are pretty good at seeing what success looks like specialty entrepreneurs, but also the directions and the ideas they put forth and the teams they put in place to execute on those ideas. And based on that, we're able to make our decisions pretty rapidly.
Once we're at the interview stage.
Gopi Rangan: Can you give an example of one or two startups? What did you like about the founders? How was the interaction? Are there some characteristics that you typically see in founding teams at such early stages?
Geoff Ralston: Sure. I'll [00:25:00] give you, uh, a couple of stories airbnb is still sort of our classic story. In 2009, they came in and they interviewed and. Not very many people were interested in their idea, which was, we kind of don't think about the Genesis of the name, but it really was about air beds. It was about putting air beds in people's apartments.
And when there was no hotels available, say it because of a very crowded convention, the overflow would go to an Arabic, Airbnb and Arabic, one of these people and you would serve them breakfast and talk to them. And it would be this really nice little community, small idea of a sharing economy that did not sound like a very big business, but in the interview and I wasn't in this interview, what he saw was extraordinary determination and real vision in the founders.
And that was enough to make the company fundable by YC. [00:26:00] Another example that my colleague Dalton Caldwell likes to use is there were these two kids. They were really young or early twenties. One of them may have been a teenager. I don't think so. Maybe 20 and 21 who were at Stanford. They were from Brazil though.
And they applied with a. A pretty weak idea. In virtual reality, I believe to create a school in virtual reality. And it turned out these kids were amazing. They had already sold a company in Brazil in FinTech and something like halfway through the batch. They, they pivoted to another FinTech, but. We didn't really like their idea, but they just were so impressive for us.
The decision was fairly easy to fund them, regardless of that idea. And they ended up starting this company called Brex, which is a multi-billion dollar company, another company that I interviewed a long time ago. I just was super [00:27:00] impressed with the guys where the guys from a company called five Tran.
I think what's special about these guys is they were just great engineers. They were just clearly really good. And they had this idea of turning Excel into a spreadsheet. This was a long time ago, but they kept working on it and working on work on it and eventually evolved their business. They just never, ever, ever go be.
They never gave up. And. You've probably never heard of this company, but just wait. This company is an amazing company and they're going to be a very big company. I think somebody soon, you can find them, they create data pipelines and they've just morphed into a key part of the data ecosystem going forward.
And the story is not dissimilar. You want to find incredible people and when you find them, you should take whatever bet you need to take.
Gopi Rangan: I see a common thread of contrarian ideas here that are very different, unique compared to anything else that we may have seen in the world. That is the [00:28:00] core of Silicon Valley.
Over the years, Silicon Valley has supported so many startups and the business of supporting startups, the venture capital or angel investment accelerators, all of those that has not really. Changed a lot until I would say YC is one of the greatest phenomenons that happened in the recent past, where it's really changed the way entrepreneurs are supported, that brought a lot more diversity in entrepreneurs.
How do you see the future of Silicon Valley? Do you feel like there is going to be a massive change now that we're all working from home and remote is very common or do you feel that Silicon Valley will still be the epicenter of innovation?
Geoff Ralston: I know there's a lot of controversy about the Bay area now in San Francisco in particular, and a lot of talk about people leaving the Bay area, and there'll be some of that.
That's great. And it's great if you know, there's a entrepreneurship hub formed in Miami. That's terrific. Especially if it can do great [00:29:00] things for whatever local geography it grows in, but. I think there's special stuff about California. It's hard to replicate the weather, the variety of things to do and places to go.
It's hard to replicate the extraordinary talent that is here, partly because of how great the place is. Partly because of the educational institutions from Berkeley, Stanford, USF. San Jose state, Santa Clara, et cetera, to the home base of so much of the venture capital community here to the culture of the Bay area, which has many decades old, as I pointed out earlier of entrepreneurship and of a incredible tolerance for failure and for.
Taking that leap and, and making that your career choice [00:30:00] as opposed to something more stable or more safe or more sane. I think we'll find that the Bay area and Silicon Valley is an engine of economic growth for decades to come. And it may be less unique in the future maybe, but that's hard to predict.
I also don't want to ignore the fact that I think there's secular change is going to be brought about by. The pandemic and many companies will embrace the idea that people don't have to live locally wherever their base is, whether it's a Silicon Valley or in New York city. And there's going to be far more flexibility in the future.
There's certainly we'll be at Y Combinator as sample organization. And I think that will be true across many, many organizations, Google and Facebook and others have also announced the future to be somewhat more hybrid than. It is right now. So forecasting this stuff is, is very hard, really [00:31:00] impossible.
And, um, no one turns out is really good at forecasting. And I think this kind of thing, no matter how much they pretend to be a pundit and pontificate, it's just, the variables are. Too complicated in the proliferation of probabilities to a map. So I don't know, but again, I'm not leaving Silicon Valley. I think it's going to be a pretty amazing place in the future as it is now.
And I do think there's some serious issues and problems here that need to be addressed, but also we're pretty good at problem solving and addressing those things. So I have confidence that many of those things we'll see progress in the not too distant future. So you're going to stay put, you're not leaving?
Gopi Rangan: I'm staying put.
So there are some issues that have been created because of all the proliferation of technology, whether it's, uh, influencing people through social media or sudden surge of capital that came into the venture capital that keeps companies private and evaluations are hyped up. [00:32:00] And they're not really tied to the fundamentals and various other things.
Even the spirit of the. Entrepreneurship and the way it attracts the right kind of people is different from what it was 15, 20 years ago to where it is now connecting with people is a lot, lot more harder because people are groups are more siloed and you have to kind of break through to get to know everybody.
It was not that way. When I came to Silicon Valley 20 years ago, are there one or two top of your mind issues that you feel like these are problems? And I wish things were different.
Geoff Ralston: What does worry me is that the technology is changing us and changing how human beings relate to one another.
How we do everything, really, how we work, how we socialize, how we congregate. How we process information. Some of that has not all been positive. Some of it's been quite negative as everyone has seen with the proliferation of things like conspiracy theories. It turns out that computer viruses are [00:33:00] not that dissimilar from mine.
Viruses means to us. Richard Dawkins called them that get into people's heads and it's hard to dislodge them. And this is a real issue, but you know, this transition is very young. I think we'll figure a lot of those things out. I really do. I don't think that these are. Likely to be unsolvable problems. I think they're really gnarly.
Another really gnarly problem, which is exacerbated if not caused by technology is income inequality and the creation of an entire society of haves and have nots. We need to address that as a society. I don't think any of us want to live in that world. We want to live in a world that looks like 17th century France, or pick whatever error.
You could say climate change is caused by technology, but I think we're talking different things there it's caused by industrialization and the use of carbon fuels, which is a different.
Technological era that [00:34:00] is just continuing today. And hopefully technology will be part of the solution there because we desperately need solutions, but increasingly you can see some of those on the horizon. The real question is will they be fast enough? And will they come about quickly enough? And will they do enough to prevent some of the worst possible effects of climate change?
Gopi Rangan: And that has an important issue. Indeed. I want to switch to the last part of our conversation, where I ask you about your community involvement. Is there a nonprofit organization that you are passionate about and which one
Geoff Ralston: We have supported a number of organizations over time, local and national. And I think this is, uh, uh, going to become extremely important in 2021 for people with means to, to pitch in.
So for example, uh, an organization we, we support is called the second harvest food bank because the possibility of people going hungry has been massively exacerbated by the [00:35:00] pandemic. And you know, that the first order of business is making sure. People are healthy. You can actually look at the, on our website, the number of non-profits we've supported it YC.
And there's a number of, of really great nonprofits. We've supported ones called second measure that I love. There's a few national organizations. AmeriCares is really an important national organization that takes care of kids in need, specially and teach for America is another organization that I feel very strongly about as you know, I care deeply about the future of education.
I will come back to education, had a latter point in my career and work again, to find ways to transform education, to really improve outcomes for children in the United States and around the world. I do think there's an immense opportunity there, and it's more than an opportunity. It's an obligation because the world has changed so much and the education systems have not caught up.
Regardless of. Of whether you're considering just the education [00:36:00] gaps that exist or the, the gap between how we're educating all children and the real needs of 21st century adults and their style of working and the infrastructure in which they will be working is real for all of us. So that's going to be something I'm going to spend a lot of time on in the future.
Gopi Rangan: Jeff. Thank you very much for spending time with me and sharing your stories and insights. And thank you for being a generous early believer in so many ambitious entrepreneurs. I look forward to sharing these stories through my podcast.
Geoff Ralston: Thanks Gopi. It was really nice to talk to you.
Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to the shore shot entrepreneur.
I hope you enjoy listening to real life stories about early believers, supporting ambitious entrepreneurs. Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast. I look forward to catching you at the next episode. Yeah.[00:37:00]