Qasar Younis. Applied Intuition.

Qasar Younis: The way to think about the first 10 is each of those people are gonna hire 10 people. So you're hiring your first hundred. We lived in a house together, and it just set a pace. And almost like our pace today can be traced to the house. I often said, I wanna be the hardest working person you've ever met. And that became my identity. This is very difficult and it's unsustainable. It's not sometimes even fun. But I do work a lot, and I think I get those extra reps — and those extra reps just compound.

Nakul: In some ways, Qasar Younis is the essential Silicon Valley immigrant story when it goes right. He grew up on a farm in Pakistan, moved to the US as a kid when his parents immigrated to Detroit. He became a founder early in his career, landed at Google and subsequently was the COO of YC before starting Applied Intuition, which today is a $15B company building the future of AI for the physical world. And he's not stopping here. In many other ways, he's the antithesis of Silicon Valley founders. He worked at an old school company like General Motors early in his life. His idols are Sam Walton and Warren Buffett, not some tech entrepreneur. He has some of the most contrarian views on talent and startups and building companies that I've heard from any founder. This is truly an N of 1 founder. Qasar, welcome to the show.

Qasar Younis: Thanks for having me.

Nakul: Great to have you. Uh, so there's a quote of yours I want to start with, which is—you've said before: a founder isn't made when they start a company, a founder is made when they get the market feedback and interpret it correctly. What do you mean by that?

Qasar Younis: I think, um, that's the hard part—that's what I mean by that. The hard part actually isn't, I'm quitting the job—'cause it used to be 20 years ago, where, uh, it was a big deal to start a company. I mean, I left—

Nakul: Yeah. That was the hard part.

Qasar Younis: When I left HBS was—for those who don't know, uh, so I'm an engineer originally, but I got this MBA and HBS particularly has large graduating classes, like the Walmart of MBAs is kind of the joke that people make. And, uh, I think our class of 2008, there was a small group—I recall less than 10 people who were really into startups. And, uh, today that's not the case. So when I go and do talks there, we recruit from there—there are hundreds of people in the class that are into it. So, what's happened over the years is entrepreneurship has become a very viable career path, uh, it was always kind of the off path. Today, even being a content creator is a viable career path that didn't exist in 2002. Um, so that's not hard. Now, raising money then became the next constraint. Now there's lots of good funds out there. Um, the history of Silicon Valley is one where in the nineties, it's really a valley of two funds—it's Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. It's John Doerr, it's Moritz. That's the game. If you don't know those guys, it's more, more difficult... of course, there are other funds that existed, uh, around the world and, and even in the Valley. But then comes YC. YC really opens it up for everybody. But there's been a revolution post YC—which is, there's tons of seed funds now that are looking at each individual sub pockets of...there are funds that are just dedicated to Berkeley. There's funds that are dedicated to Stanford. Uh, there are Affinity funds, ex, ex Googlers, et cetera. So now that constraint is actually a lot less so. And kind of peripheral to that, or, or tangential, that is a lot of people wanna work in startups. So even if they don't wanna be a founder, working at a startup is a very viable kind of a goal. So then, well, what is it to me to be a founder? I think the, the hardest thing today is all those things are pretty easy, or relatively speaking, getting out, raising money, et cetera. But, um, there's no real playbook on how to interpret feedback. And one of the reasons that playbook is a difficult one is because every company's different. Almost by definition you are entering the market with a new product or a new approach to distribute that product. And suddenly you have to interpret something that there's no playbook for and that's where you kind of—

Nakul: Could I fast forward that or interpret that also as if you didn't get product market fit, you're not really a founder. Is that the standard you hold yourself to? And maybe that is the standard you hold yourself to that, Hey, if I didn't get to product market—

Qasar Younis: I have a lot of empathy for founders. I think it's a very difficult, um, experience and we can talk about why that is. But I try not to judge. Even if you've decided you're gonna go out and you never raise a dollar and you never get a co-founder and you never make a product, you still are doing something more difficult than vast majority of people who just stay at the company. So I think, I don't wanna be overly harsh and say unless you get to be a millionaire you're nobody. It's not that. Uh, but I think when you're going up that hill, I mean, the hierarchy...the way to think of it is the ideal state. The Nirvana is a sustainable business that generates cash. If you don't have that, the next kind of is a break even business. Below that is a business that generates revenue, below that is a business that just is a product that's heavily loved and consumed repeatably, but below that is just a product that's consumed once. Below that is an idea. Right. And so you're just in the game of being a founder—you're trying to go up that ladder.

Nakul: Can we get into a real example from your life? So would you say when you started Talkbin, you did not interpret market feedback correctly. Was that the failure mode there or was it something else?

Qasar Younis: Talkbin did better—I think the first company I worked on with, uh, my, some of my college buddies, uh, was a company called Cameesa, which was essentially a crowdfunding apparel company, for lack of a better term. So, so I don't know if you remember that era, but the mid two thousands you had companies like Threadless, they were doing graphic tees, they were coming—E-commerce was kind of the boom that was starting to happen at that time. And then the view was, is everyone gonna consume the exact same stuff online or they gonna, can they make custom stuff? And you'd have these websites where you could make your own mug and make your own t-shirt. Uh, we kind of came in that ecosystem of crowd product development. So I won't go too deep into it because it's so far ancient history, but I think there's a bunch of mistakes that we made. Um, one is, when we had this crowdfunding thing, we should have actually become Kickstarter. We were so close to Kickstarter, but without actually being like, Hey, why are we actually making these t-shirts? Why are we actually make apparel? Actually just have a platform that people can crowdfund an idea. Um, and so it was just five or 10 degrees away from us. And I think when you talk to founders, who—and I really implore, when I speak to founders, I always talk to them about it being a craft, you know? And when you talk to founders who have done it for three or four or five times, they'll look back just and they'll say, oh, the first time I just didn't act on the feedback that I was maybe not perceiving, but typically you do perceive some version of it. But you hear this conflicting feedback, which is you should really have a strong opinion and kind of charge down that opinion because the world doesn't understand you, the world doesn't get you...this is kind of true. I've...I've always been in the view, and this is personal from my school business, which is you really got to be hyper attentive to the market and what the market—what that signal is. And it's almost...when sometimes you meet somebody who's very frenetic, they're running from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing, and they're not, sometimes, getting the subtle feedback or signal. And then you meet sometimes people, leaders who are very calm and those leaders tend to listen to the very, very subtle feedback and they can kind of clue in. I'm not saying change your personality to be a different type person. I'm just saying when it comes to feedback, really pay attention. And then I think you have a better shot. And—when we were in our first time, I think we're just in a fog of war...first time starting a company, excitement of that, incorporating bus—getting business cards, and that kind of overwhelms actually the only thing that matters, which is does the market want your product?

Nakul: What's the most common way founders misread the market feedback?

Qasar Younis: That's a great question. I don't know because my uh, volume experience comes from Y Combinator. Yeah. And even that's now a little, a little dated. Um, but I would say that the biggest misread is that actually the customer or the business—the consumer or the business doesn't need the product. That is probably the most common thing. There's something there, but it's not like, wow, I really need it. And typically it's when you work out. You're eating food. For years I've been trying to dial that in. Um, you can work out inconsistently, and have good eating habits and you'll actually get healthy, right? That, that's already better than, than a lot of the population. But to really chase that last bit — and I only know men — getting sub 15% body fat, that's not easy. That level of dedication and cleanliness and eating and consistency and working out, and I'm nowhere near that. But as I try to get healthier and get better, it's really dialing in every snack. And so the same thing exists in feedback. What ends up happening for founders is they'll hear this thing could be better—oh, onboarding is kind of a little easy, but they're not maniacal about making it really, really, really, really easy. A little bit of obsessiveness. In my YC time, I used to call that determination—that the founders are determined to build a great product and therefore they chase every piece of feedback down and make sure that that feedback is really, really addressed. Um, but it's tough because you have a limited amount of people and limited amount of time and the feedback can be conflicting, it's not always easy.

Nakul: It's interesting, you're bringing up this point where 90% liking a product is not enough. It's the last 10% where delight happens, and that's where unbelievable product market fit comes—

Qasar Younis: Just getting into my own psychology, Uh, so before, at Google I was in product engineering. So we, uh, would debate these kind of things all the time at scale. The thing that I try to really envision from the end user's perspective is —we would look at workflows on Google Maps, and they would make sense in a conference room, perfect internet, you're completely focused and you have a device which is brand new. The real user experience is getting in a car with a mom who has kids in the back. The screen is broken, the wifi or the connectivity is not very good, and they have to make it to a doctor's appointment. That's when the product has to work well, right? It's not in the perfect environment. So I think for founders, my recommendation there is, just be a bit cynical and, and really be—did they really like this? Also, you gotta remember human psychology. If—if a founder comes to me and has me use a product as direct of a person as I am, I want them to win. So I'm gonna be encouraging to them, even if I probably will never use a product again. And I—I'm somebody who's pretty direct, as my team knows, right? And so you have to just remember, as a founder, everybody wants you to win. And sometimes that can actually work against you because they don't want to tell you the hard, hard truth.

Nakul: The hard feedback. Yeah. So, uh...

Qasar Younis: Can I use a very, very pithy example, uh, that everyone can kind of experience? Uh, look at all the different coffee shops that exist in South Bay or San Francisco. Everyone does the exact same thing in very different ways, whether it's wiping the tables down, whether it's the breadth of their menu, whether it's the cleanliness of their bathrooms. Doesn't every owner of every one of those coffee shops want clean tables and a good menu and clean bathrooms and easy parking. But why doesn't it happen?

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: Some owners really care and some owners don't.

Nakul: And you can see it. You can see the difference. Yeah.

Qasar Younis: There's something about the details really matter. So if I could give, again, more feedback to founders as like: chase down that one comment. I mean we at Applied—I can tell you, and previous companies—entire product strategy was made off of one comment, like, oh, they said this thing, and this is probably true for everyone we've talked to. So you have to build it...what is taste? Taste is understanding what's good and what's not good. You have to build a taste to understand which feedback is actually really good feedback and which feedback is maybe more noise. And that's difficult. That's really super difficult.

Nakul: So a few years ago, MZ and I came down, uh, and spent a few hours with you and specifically on the topic of recruiting, because so much of what we do at Audacious is recruiting. Uh, it was a phenomenal conversation for us. There were a few things that stood out, but one of the key things that stood out for me was that you said you draw a pretty hard line on recruiting. You, you said something like: everybody at Applied has to be an impressive person. They have to have experienced excellence, and people within the company need to look up to each other. Yeah. And so can you talk about your overall philosophy on teams and recruiting and where this comes from?

Qasar Younis: So two different things there. Let me — let's talk about teams and then we'll talk about recruiting, kind of separating those into two different buckets. In terms of teams, um, and again...this is for founders who are building their own teams. Don't take my way of the team. My way of the team is built from my company and my products and my customers, so I'll have to generalize a little bit. Maybe I can use the counterfactual. Why is it that every founder wants to have the best team in the business, but not every founder has the best team in the business? The reason is a couple—the realities of building a company, right? You have limited amount of time, you are who you are, Um, and the market is who the market is. If you are building an AI company in San Francisco, you're gonna have to compete against Anthropic and OpenAI and a plethora of competitors. So I think in terms of recruiting, some of that stuff is—it's like in tennis, or any racket sport—they say half the game is position. So, set up the company and the product and your position in a way that it's very obvious why somebody would come to you versus come to an OpenAI, or go to an OpenAI. Now, when you're very young, as a small company, that's a huge advantage. You can say, be one of the first five, be one of the first 10. And um, and the people that are excited about it are your people. So that's really, really important. So in terms of recruiting, the reality also is who you are as a founder is also gonna impact your ability to recruit. And this is, again, this might be slightly controversial—but this is where young founders have a really hard time. If you're 22, you're 24, and you're trying to attract a staff engineer from Google, they're really gonna look at you and they're like, what am I gonna learn from you? And you have to have a good answer for what they're gonna learn from you. It can't just be 'I'm young' — well, that's not enough. There's a lot of young people. Uh, so, I think it's almost treat recruiting almost like a product and come up, how is your position gonna be different from other people's positions? And what are you offering at this stage with you and this market that's different than other people? And you should have a very clear answer for you versus Nvidia. And that should be easy. Nvidia's giant, we're small. Now this is you versus two other YC companies that came out of the batch before and the batch after. They're doing the same thing. But you have to have a very real good answer. Um, but I think in terms of the actual team—team dynamics, which is very different. I think for at Applied, and this is true from maybe all companies, but really the sum of the company is literally the individuals that are in there. And so the couple of things you referenced, exceptional indicators, we look for exceptional indicators, uh, previously. The main reason we did it was because our engineers sit in front of our customers and our customers have to have confidence that they're being advised and working with some of the best in the business. If your company's not one where you're gonna do enterprise, deployments and things like that, then maybe that becomes less important. Because with every constraint that you put in, you're narrowing the field of potential engineers — that can actually join you. But the team building and the team aspect is a vast arena. I think some of the core tenets we've had other than exceptional indicators, is we really love startup people. I think for founders, try to find those people rather than—I always find it a little difficult if the recruit is looking at you versus Google.

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: That doesn't really make sense. Either they don't really understand what you're offering, or you're not communicating what is the specialness about your company at your size in your, your area.

Nakul: When you meet someone exceptional though, what are the signals you are looking for that this person is truly exceptional?

Qasar Younis: Um, that's a tough question because it's so broad. It's everything. Uh, so let's maybe break it down into specifics in engineering. Um, particularly, specifically we're talking about software engineering. Um, someone who's done—who's deployed into production, uh—nothing teaches you like that actual experience. Um, I think someone who's worked on either side—really the kind of barbell ends—they've worked on really complex scaled systems. Or they've done everything themselves, forcing them to either really know a particular system or service really, really deeply and then therefore understand all the interconnectedness and interdependencies in a large system. Or somebody who has to do everything and they just know how to hack things together quickly. Who's DevOps? I'm DevOps. Who's running front-end? And who's backend? I'm backend, right. So, uh, I think that those are indicators, literally what they've worked on. I tend to look for—again, in terms of taste and not taste. I tend to try to find engineers who love being an engineer. They're not using engineering to be a product manager. They're not using engineering to go to design. They're using engineering to be a CEO. They just love software engineering. And I think that's another indicator. I think another indicator specifically in engineering, in terms of exceptionalism, frankly speaking, is personality types. And this is why the general exceptional person is very difficult in engineering. You have to find people who get emotional satisfaction out of building things and being very detail oriented. That's not what a designer gets emotional satisfaction out of, it's not what a marketing person might get the most satisfac... So then when you go to each of those functions, let's just take marketing, 'cause I just said it. Um, how do you find an exceptional marketing person? Yeah, they have to love marketing. They have to have seen it exceptionally, but the person who embodies a great marketer, it's almost, they almost bleed it. They like the billboard. You know they think about the billboard on the 101—it's an interesting concept to them, and they read Ogilvy and advertising just because they like it.

Nakul: Would it be fair to extend that to, um, that trait you look for across the board is obsession as I'm hearing you speak.

Qasar Younis: Yeah. I think it is. I think obsession slash determination slash subject matter expertise slash, uh, exceptional experiences in the past. They're all kind of related. Uh, sometimes people broadly say focus. And they'll say the truth is, the reps matter. If you spent 20 years doing marketing, you just get really good at that thing. You get really good at that thing. So I think maybe a more meta thing to look at is, um, meeting people who just love the craft and been doing it for a long time. That's always great.

Nakul: And so actually taking a little bit of a step back. The first and the most important hire is the co-founder hire. Uh, how did you and Peter decide to work with each other? Why, what did you see in each other, maybe from your side?

Qasar Younis: Yeah. Uh, we'll talk about that. But I also wanna talk about the macro of why there's so many single founder companies as well. And, and so we'll go back to that. But for Peter and I, we worked together at Google. We come from the same neighborhood in Michigan. So when we met at Google, we immediately connected on that. We're both in product engineering at, uh, at Google. He was both a PM and a software engineer. And so we're working in the same function so we can see each other work on a day-to-day basis, highly recommend. This is classic YC advice that—over the years has slowly been diluted. Uh, but I'm in that camp of work with your co-founder previously or have gone to school with your co-founder previously, because you'll see their good days and their bad days, and you'll see them over long periods of time. If you were with somebody for two years, three years, you'll see them have things happen in their personal life and how they deal with it, how they live, how do they come in? Show up every single day, and are they really obsessed about the thing that their expertise is in? For us, also complementary skills. Um, Peter and I are not the same people on, in terms of personality. We're very, very different. I like to say I'm crazy and Peter is sane—works really well. Uh, but in terms of actual technical capability, we also have different, uh, strengths and weaknesses. Peter's a Compilers PhD dropout. Um, I was a mech-E [mechanical engineer] in my background. So we're really approaching these problems from kind of a different, different technical vantage point as well. We work in hardware and software—we're in that universe. Um, so personality complements. And the thing that's hard to say is, the je ne sais quoi. Peter and I share very similar values and we're not trying to flip this company—we're in it to win it, long-term thinking. And, um, so those are all the reasons Peter and I got together and you can kind of glean some of the things that you should. But let's talk about the—I would say epidemic that's happened in the Valley. There's lots of single company founders, and historically, if you look at Paul Graham's essay '18 Mistakes That Kill Startups': number one mistake is the solo founder. Fast forward to like 2026, there is more of an appetite to be a single founder than ever before. Partly it's because they have all these AI tools. Partly there's so many people starting companies and nobody wants to join each other's mission, they wanna be in their own mission. For me, as advice to a founder — let's say you're a future founder, you're working at Slack or Zoom or something like that right now and you're thinking about leaving and starting your own company. Make that the number one thing because it is a test in itself. If you can't recruit somebody and they don't see value in you as a co-founder, that's some feedback from the market. And the feedback is very, very subtle, because if you have a hard time recruiting a co-founder, you have a hard time recruiting employee 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. One of the things I learned that I didn't know at YC that I've learned in, in this experience in the last 10 years is just how important recruiting is. I gotta say it might be top three things that a founder needs to know. I mean, it is really up there, maybe more than anything else. So if you kind of break apart what is recruiting? What does that really mean? It means the ability to identify talent, persuade that talent, and then convert them into working for you, right. Not only persuade them of your mission, but then actually get them an offer with a title and have them join and you have to close the deal, now, close the loop. And so as a founder, your first rep of that is your co-founder.

Nakul: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about the first 10 hires? Because those set the standards, those set the culture in a pretty big way. How did you go about finding your first 10 hires?

Qasar Younis: Yeah. Yeah. Hugely important. Even this long in the company, I think we still have three or four of the first 10 or so still in the company, which is crazy. And I think if we were talking year five, I think all 10, or year six, all 10 were still at the company, which is kind of unbelievable. It's something I'm very proud of, of course. Um, how we found 'em was a mix of things. There's no simple answer to anything, but one is existing networks. People we already knew. Employee one is somebody I've known for many, many years before Applied, and I just saw him last weekend. So, it partly is that, partly it's the network of our friends and literally people who worked at Google and, uh, and other folks like YC. Then the third bucket is from our VCs. Literally our first 10...I would say group of that first 10— I can think of two people who were new grads. And so we convinced them, you know—we didn't know them at all, they were coming outta MIT, coming outta CMU and we just convinced them to join. I won't repeat the cliche things that you want out of the first 10, but I'll say maybe things that are different about ours. I think all 10 maybe, our first salesperson was number 10 or maybe 11, somewhere around there—but they were all technical. Everyone wrote software. Because in the early days you need to just make product.

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: And you need to make products that you can put in front of customers to get feedback. Remember everyone, we're all trying to get to feedback. Right? That's the goal. I think we made the goal. More companies have picked this up now today, which is we lived in a house together. That was really important—the amount of turns you get.

Nakul: Lived, not just work?

Qasar Younis: Yeah. Well, I have a family, so I didn't live there. But my co-founder lived there and, uh, four employees lived there. So, um, that was where we worked—that was our office. And the reason I bring up the house concept is at some minimum amount, those four guys are really cranking all the time because their house is the office and it just set a pace. And almost our pace today can be, you know, traced to the house. The way to think about the first 10 is each of those people are gonna hire 10 people. So you're hiring your first hundred. If two or three of them are weak—now that's the ideal version. And in many ways, I'm happy and I'm proud that we had a kind of an ideal setup. Let's say this is my third company...my first or second company, much more difficult, everything was more difficult. So how would I do it? I would consider exiting people much faster, because it's just a reality that those early employees are gonna have a disproportionate impact. And by the way, are gonna get disproportionate amount of equity and disproportionate amount of, you know, of influence as a company grows. So if one of them isn't good, they're gonna actually have a longer, longer impact. Yeah. And then that's particularly tough advice to hear, because guess what? That's when you need the people the most when there's seven of you.

Nakul: Yeah. Give us some of your interview hacks, how do you know somebody who's actually impressive? Uh, so one thing I'm hearing from you is that you had some unfair informational access with people. It's, it seems like a core philosophy that hey, interviews can be a misleading indicator, let's get some unfair access to. Is this person actually good? But let's say you don't know the person from before, are there any interview hacks that you have?

Qasar Younis: I mean, number one, the most obvious thing, which I'm still surprised a lot of companies don't do, is all the interviewing should be doing the actual job. Uh, so as much as this is an actual bug, this is an actual, uh, design doc—I want you to review the design doc. Um, that's what you should do. I think today in the age of AI, we're changing our interview methodology and much more is along the lines—and this is still in flight, so I don't know what'll actually work. But broadly speaking, the prompt is, um, you can use all the tools that are out there, what can you build? And, and then if you do enough of that, you can start getting...it's kinda like the Berkshire 10-Ks. If you read enough 10-Ks by the absence of material in a 10-K, you actually learn, is the company a good company or not? And so I think if you're a company today and you know, Claude and everything else are not a core part of your interview, I think that is a big, big deal. So I'm sure—one day will be a hack, but, uh, or it will be a way that companies can identify talent faster, uh, or more reliably and more accurately—Um, but that's being figured, out how that's gonna happen.

Nakul: Um, there's a wisdom often being uh, repeated across the valley, hire fast...uh, hire slowly, fire fast.

Qasar Younis: Yeah, super easy to say if you have to.

Nakul: You have a philosophy—correct me if I'm wrong—which is hire slow, fire slow? Can you talk about that? And is fire slow just not an excuse to make delayed decisions or avoid hard decisions?

Qasar Younis: I think both of those things, higher slow fire slow—are not because of some sort of philosophical thing that we wrote down on a whiteboard and it be...it's because of the way the company is and our culture is. And I would say both are negative—uh, 'cause it's almost antithetical to being a fast company. But let me tell you why I think it's been there, whether we like it or we don't. And I think, to be honest, we've been trying to change that for a long, long time. But that's how, how it is. Everything in a culture is really on a spectrum. And specifically, we're a five day in office company. And so the spectrum is, uh...transactional or committed. So think about that. When you're a transactional company, you people are—everyone's a contractor. You hire people, fire—you don't really interview. Everyone's essentially a contingency workforce, right? Um, you hire and fire. On the other end, the most committed version would be once you take the job, you have the job for life. And once a company, right? We obviously are not gonna wanna get to that. But on that spectrum, we fall closer to the committed part—we're five days in office, we do a lot of training for employees. We just give people a lot of slack to kind of screw up and make mistakes. Now the reason is, again, all the logic I'll just expose is—the view is, let's say you joined the company and it's not working out. My natural first reaction is, well, why did we—why did we think he was gonna be so good? Or why'd we hire him? Either we have to change the recruiting process or we have to really double click, because maybe this person is good and it's their manager, or the culture we have in the company that's not good. Because one of those things has to be true. Either the filtering method is incorrect or our, uh, day-to-day is incorrect. And so often more than not, I think it is the manager, it is the actual culture that's broken rather than the filtration method because we have such a high bar in terms of who we, who we let in. And so now we could—so how have we tried to change that? Change the filtration method—maybe do less interviews or do interviews in different ways so we're letting more people in. Um, issues with that right?

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: And now the advantage you get is you get a lot more people coming in. You can literally just increase the velocity of hiring. That allows you to let more people go faster because you can replenish the workforce faster, but that doesn't necessarily make the team better.

Nakul: Yeah, yeah.

Qasar Younis: Right. So it's a tricky thing. So we say we hire slow and we fire slow, and it's accurate. Um, but it's not all rainbows and bubblegum, right. There's downside. And so I think maybe a better takeaway for a founder who's listening to this is just be very intentional. Don't be sloppy. Be very, very intentional. You could have an interview method, which is just we do one conversation and then we bring the person in. But then we'll exit them with one conversation, right? But then you have to tell that to the recruit. It's like, 'hey, our recruiting system is very light, but so is our exit system.' Where you're gonna have issues is if the recruiting system's light, but the candidate doesn't realize that, they expect to get a little bit of slack and you immediately fire them, your reputation will go down in the market—That's the reality of the situation.

Nakul: So let's actually get into—we've touched on some of this, I've heard from many people that, you know, Applied is just run differently. Many people. And we've touched on some of those things. But walk, walk me through how your week looks like as a CEO. How do you run the company operationally? And then we'll get deeper into it.

Qasar Younis: Yeah. That's less related to my role particularly. I can, I'm happy to answer that. Uh, but it's more related to how do we develop products? How do we talk to customers, how do we give feedback, uh, and hold the bar of performance. Um, and then how—what infrastructure we put around all of this stuff. The short version of it is, we're an extremely technical company. Every company's different. In our case, we're very, very technical—where 80% of the folks are — engineering and very technical, writing software. Um, so you're already gonna get a different type of company. Yeah. When you have so many engineers.

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: There's the bulk of—everybody's an engineer. Um, and so in terms of the customer orientation, this is our second value—first is speed—the second was never disappoint the customer. We're an enterprise business, so every single engineer is interfacing with customers. That is not common. Um, and when I say every single engineer—IT is not, but even then when we talk to IT, the IT view is, there's gonna be a customer on site, make sure the wifi works, make sure we're secure—we do defense work, all of that stuff. Um, and then in terms of actual performance and feedback is where I think most founders are always most interested in...it really is around—we do monthly reflections for every IC. Every IC will get a red, yellow, green on a monthly basis

Nakul: From their boss? Or also their peer?

Qasar Younis: From their boss. We'll do red, yellow, green, they'll just get a little bit more detail. I think if we could literally —and I've done, uh—we did a dinner conversation a couple of—about a month ago where we spent two hours on this topic alone. It's a very deep topic, so I'm trying to keep it, you know, uh, digestible. But in the monthly example, we do red, yellow, green, on output, and red, yellow, green on behavior, which is roughly values adherence. Um, why are we doing that? It's red, yellow, green is very lightweight. It's very, very quick to...and both people do it. So you're my manager, I'm the engineer. You're gonna do red, yellow, green on my output and red, yellow, green on my behavior. I'm gonna do red, yellow, green on my output, and my behavior Let's say I and this has happened, I think I didn't do, I wasn't that good this month. It's a yellow, but my behavior was a green and you actually think the opposite. So it's double blind. So when that's shown, that's immediately gonna trigger a conversation, and that conversation's like, why do you think that you're a yellow on output? We think you've been doing great it's like, 'oh, I pushed this thing wrong and we had this regression and I was sick for'...well, yeah, but that's not a part of red yellow green.

Nakul: Yeah, so they have a conversation after this?

Qasar Younis: Yeah—have to. Just the two of them.

Nakul: Just the two of them.

Qasar Younis: And so what you're doing is you're doing a little bit of feedback pretty consistently, rather than some big performance metric. So then how do you give the manager feedback? I continue to believe the most important person in a company is the first line engineering manager. That is the company. A VC hack should be just interview first line managers at a company. Don't talk to the founders, don't talk to previous investors, don't even look at the financials. Just look purely at the first line engineering managers, and you'll learn a lot about a company because they truly know what's actually going on. Uh, and so how do you give them feedback? The way we do do it is we take our values and we put behaviors under those values. So first, value on speed. The first behavior we want to test a manager on is 'my manager is decisive'. So then, so we have about 50 of those behaviors and we—they're all quantitatively given feedback by their direct reports, not their peers, not from me and Peter, their managers—purely from their subordinates. And those subordinates then will tell you in a one to five—you can't put three, is my manager decisive or not? And you'll start creating almost a numerical view of the manager. And early, one of our managers said, well, can I just fake this? I can take the 50 behaviors—and I was like, if you can fake 50 behaviors, good for you. You're indistinguishable from a good manager. That's not easy to do. And so I think that performance — it's all very detailed and nuanced and so rather than if you're a founder listening here and feeling, oh, should I do red, yellow, green, or should I do, just think about performance management very, very deeply. People have said, uh—Applied folks who've gone before have said, 'actually the product of the company isn't the products, it's the company.' How we're working together has created great products and has created great, you know, customer satisfaction. And there's some truth in that. By the way, I have no, uh, qualms about trying to learn from other companies. The closest to that is Amazon. Amazon has 14 operating principles, something like that. There, there's a little bit of that. For each of these major companies, I can tell you what we took. From Google, we took software engineering hygiene. I mean, Google is a great software house and then still continues to be. Um, from Apple, that maniacal detail on design and on product. And it's not random or head of design and marketing comes from Apple. Uh, so each of these functions, you kind of look at the market and say who does it best? And let's try to do that. On the specific performance function, we thought Google did it really poorly and so we came up with our own version and we didn't—we kind of looked at the ecosystem and there wasn't anything good. So, first principles, what do we wanna do? We want to get feedback often—we don't want it to be this heavy handed thing, so just build an app. Five, seven years ago, building an in-house app was a big deal—today, everyone should be able to build custom apps for feedback. Um, but if there's a macro point you're learning as a founder, all the details matter. You can't just say performance and it just kind of figure out—I think deeply with your co-founder or on a weekend alone at a coffee shop, or read some books, this is how I'm doing it. Read some books on these things and then literally sit and think and say, why wouldn't that work? And then just write it down, then bring that proposal back to the team and just have that debate. And if you have a culture where you're, as a founder, willing to listen to your direct reports, and you're not already coming into the meeting with, I spent a whole weekend on this thing and it must be right because I, I have an ironclad view on it. Um, you will get good ideas and then you just keep iterating. One of the things that's absolutely true is, everything I talk about the company is up for negotiation. Hire slow, fire slow — up for negotiation. Values — up for negotiation. Uh, two exceptional indicators, up for negotiation. We actually removed two exceptional indicators and we actually saw less exceptional people come in. And so we're putting back in. But why do we remove them? Because it constrains immediately—It's hard. You are looking at a resume and you have to find two things that are 'wows'. And not everyone has two wows, especially if you're early in your career.

Nakul: Actually, double click on that. So you said something, uh, earlier. The, uh, criteria was two things that are 'Wow' in the resume...

Qasar Younis: Yeah. As in two, two areas where they have seen

Nakul: Excellence.

Qasar Younis: Excellence and they've seen exceptionalism. Sometimes that's a great undergrad and a great internship. That can be enough. But what happens if you have a somebody who's really great and they never did an internship—but I mean, that's where they're not gonna hit the bar. And suddenly you have somebody who's like, I went to Stanford, uh, and you don't think I'm good enough...

Nakul: Yeah, you moved it and now you're bringing it back.

Qasar Younis: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the point I'm making is, when I was in high school, I, I don't remember the book's name now, but it was a Bruce Lee book about his, uh, form of martial arts called Jeet Kune Do. Uh, I forgot what the book's name is now, but one of the concepts he had in there is great martial arts is not just practicing the same move again and again, it's adapting to the situation that you're in. So learn the system—one of the reasons to work at a high growth company or one of the reasons to work at Google or open AI or Anthropic, whatever, is to just have examples. You can only learn so much from those examples. Ultimately, you have to do, and what I'm really telling founders here is the way that we do is all the things I just said, but then being open—

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: To change speed.

Nakul: So, um, so let's talk about speed and intentionality. So number one, company value at Applied is speed. I also think of you as a very, very intentional person. Uh, do they ever conflict with each other? And beyond you, how does speed and intentionality play out in the company?

Qasar Younis: Yeah. So, um, I don't think they're inherently in conflict because I, I do think when you wanna make speed a core value or a core part of the company, you have to accept mistakes. Because you're moving really, really fast. Some areas you, you can make mistakes hiring somebody, even letting somebody go—it's not the end of the company. There are other areas you can't make mistakes on: safety, uh, some regulatory stuff. We do things around the world and we do things in defense and stuff like that, so some of those things you can't make mistakes on. I don't think it's necessarily at conflict, but one thing is true is, a core part of being decisive is understanding why you're making that decision. So then you can... you can kind of traceably find out what was the underlying thing. Why that's important on intentionality is because then if one of the assumptions changes, then you can quickly propagate the new decision. So the key cultural convention really is openness, debate and being technically very good. One thing that we're completely avoiding here is if the person's not good at their job. No, it doesn't matter. A lot of things don't matter. If they're the best designer for that specific task, they can move quite fast. And in many ways, the organization gets in the way, often, of the good people doing, doing fast work. So why does that do that? Take really big companies as an example. Why? I don't think there's any big companies who want to be slow. It's because they've gotten burned in the past. Somebody made a decision and then they had to do a recall...like something happened. And so then they put a new rule and over time those rules get added. It's kind of like the way a government works, all these laws get added. So one of the things you have to do is with intentionality, you are also saying when this doesn't work, we're gonna remove this rule or we're gonna remove this heuristic. And that's tough because now you have to keep state of so many things. Um, but no, I don't think it's inherently at conflict. Yeah. And if anything, I don't know how you can be very fast consistently without really being intentional.

Nakul: Otherwise you're just gambling decisions.

Qasar Younis: Yeah. You're just going in all these different directions.

Nakul: Yeah. Uh, how does your week look like as a CEO?

Qasar Younis: Yeah. Um. I mean, I think it's not different than most folks who are running companies, which is basically you deal with the things that are the most time sensitive immediately. Uh, typically, roughly speaking, I would say it's three big buckets that I've always spent most of my time in. And I, I communicate this to the company often. The first bucket is I want, well—I need to make sure there's money in the bank. Obviously, we're at a different scale, and money in the bank is not a literal thing anymore, but that means customers and investors. So making sure — and it's really customers, since our investors are luckily a small group and they're pretty sophisticated. Uh, number two is making sure that our products are the best products in the market. So understanding where we are—what our product plans are, guiding them, giving feedback and understanding what's happening with competitors and what's happening with, in the industry. Papers gets written. It's not exactly, uh, relevant to us or maybe our competitor, but it might have an impact on our long-term product — like, what's Anthropic doing? Not necessarily relevant to Applied directly, but it is relevant to Applied in, in many ways. And the third is recruiting and retaining people. So money in the bank, products, and recruiting and retaining. And I think everything else, I'm quite thoughtful of putting time towards. Let me give, uh, an example of something that we've been wrestling with—me doing podcasts and doing things like this—historically I've never done these things. And the marketing team, about a year ago really said, we weren't even getting out there. Now talk about intentionality—the reason is, um, and I always want just actual reasons rather than the vibe, that we should be out there more, is inbound to outbound for recruiting. There's this, I don't remember what the exact percentage is, uh, but at our scale, let's say I'm just making up a number—50 50. Um, and we're 60% outbound, 65% outbound. So our recruiting team is like, hey, we're actually, it's almost like looking at—a whoop or your, your sleep score, you're seeing one of these metrics are off and why are you not getting whatever deep sleep or whatever. And the view is, oh, people don't know the company at our scale. They don't know the company. The downstream impact from the marketing team is we need to get the message out more. Now, me and Peter, we're just not people who enjoy this type of stuff. I think I just enjoy, um, spending time with our company and on things that I feel are directly impacting product and customers 'cause that's the only thing that's gonna move the needle. But I think, they very compellingly show that, hey, by being on X and being in the AI conversation, being on—having conversations with folks like you—net, net, actually helps the company. It's, this is not in that traditional way—Sales. We're not just talking about how great Applied is or whatever, but we are propagating our ideas on how to build a company, our ideas and what we've learned, which I think is very valuable for founders. I, I do think, it doesn't help the company, but it helps the ecosystem, and we're part of the ecosystem. And then also what's happening in AI in this very dynamic field, which we're a player in some, in some verticals—a very significant player. And how are we contributing to that conversation?

Nakul: Now with AI, everything is changing. All playbooks are out the window.

Qasar Younis: Yeah. Everything.

Nakul: So how have—and you guys have been building AI for 10 years before LLMs became a thing, right? So talk about how AI has changed you as a CEO, how are you using AI? And then we'll dive into how the rest of the organization is...seeing the impact.

Qasar Younis: Um, obviously it impacts us in terms of—we build self-driving products. Self-driving as an industry has actually gone through a huge change. If you think about LLMs. It's hard to even think about chatbots pre-ChatGPT, but there were companies at YC—we funded a bunch of them that were doing, uh, AI chatbots before. Um, similar actually has happened in self-driving. It's just not emotionally resonating with everybody because you don't interact with it as much, but that has happened. Um, so that's a whole slew of work that—we sell developer tools, uh, to make software that ultimately goes in vehicles—intelligence software that goes in vehicles. Those tools themselves have gone through massive reshifting and they're heavily impacted by companies—hey, if we're using everything, Claude, to tools that Cognition or Google or everyone's providing, then I look at our tools and our tools should be the same way. They should be easy to use, multimodal. And again, it's different—when they're different tools to do different things. But we cannot ignore that reality, and we can't allow a new company to come—to take our place. And lucky for us, our systems are quite complex and they interact with hardware. So we, we have a little bit of a moat there—but just in pure interface and things like it, there's changes. And then, the intelligence part—broadly you say autonomy, but intelligence broadly, that's including in-vehicle. The actual tooling is different. But then let's talk about Applied as a company. And in that way, I'm very afraid that we're a legacy company. Um, it is a company that's almost 10 years old. And when I say we talk about this and we're debating, we're talking about it every single day. Every single day we are talking about this—as in there is a meeting that is, we wanna do X, Y, Z, and how we're running the company and let's come back in a couple of days. Just this week we did. Um, so roughly—of 150 managers in the company, there is a little more than that right now, but, um, we were seeing different level of adherence. Obviously our engineering teams, you don't have to talk to them about AI tooling, that's their bread, bread and butter. Uh, but like legal and HR and those functions, they're using tools kind of on the periphery. Maybe they're trying some startups or things like that. Just this week we had a four hour workshop for managers to build their own applications. All the way from we're gonna get your development environment set up—So you never used Cursor? Let's show you how to use Cursor. And crazily, those initial humps were actually preventing some of the managers from really getting into it. Um, but there's no simple magic wand. We are going manager by manager and making sure they can build and deploy applications, including myself. Um, can build and deploy applications without anybody else — so you just understand the kind of the edges and the limits of it. And then the next phase is getting to making sure a hundred percent of ICs. I've made that very clear in the company at the all hands yesterday. I expect 100% of people in the company to be building applications and tools to make their day-to-day easier. And it can be something as simple as IT ticketing to something as complex as log triage in Stuttgart. Everybody has to have that. So there's no—so that's how we're doing it. There's no simple thing. You can't just get, get and say or proclaim and suddenly it works. One way to think about this, and I'm a big fan of using history as the indicator—In the late nineties, the internet booms. There were companies that never got to the internet, and it sometimes started with the leadership. I think you see that less today than ever before, whatever. I don't know the Delta or United Airline, CEO, but they're talking about AI. That wasn't always the case with the internet. I think, you had a lot of companies that died, and if they didn't, then mobile knocked 'em out. We've had these technical revolutions, now no one really resists it. So now the question is, can you actually get the company to really be truly a native company?

Nakul: Is, uh, is AI native going to become a cultural behavior or a behavioral requirement? It seems like it—

Qasar Younis: Yeah. For, yeah, for employees, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. In recruiting, that's already a thing. We no longer — it's not acceptable...imagine if someone is interviewing and they say, uh, don't know how to use email. You're okay, well I don't think we have a role for you here. Or they're like, slack—uh, I can't use Slack, it's like that? we don't have a role for you here.

Nakul: On the engineering side, have you seen a dramatic change in productivity per engineer already?

Qasar Younis: Uh, it's too easy of an answer to say yes. Uh, I think probably the more nuanced and thoughtful answer is, um, we are—individual workflows. We build self-driving tech—individual workflows, we're seeing huge productivity gains in. That doesn't necessarily mean, now suddenly the teams disappear or something like that. Um, but maybe you don't need as many people to do the exact same thing we were doing before. Now, this is very particular to scaled companies, not, not young companies. Um, you have a thousand engineers, uh, and you have the capacity to hire hundreds, you know, a quarter, let's say. Now the question is, do you?

Nakul: Yeah, that's exactly where I was going with this...

Qasar Younis: Yeah, I mean, I think that's an open debate.

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: I think if Peter was here, who's our CTO—uh, my co-founder Peter, I think would say, I think you can make a debate that you don't need to hire as much. Peter's—I think in our heart, we know the answer is yes, but I think the reason I wouldn't jump two feet into it is we work on the intersection of safety hardware and software and you don't wanna be callous about those things. If we were building a calendar app or something like that, or if we were Slack or something, I think it'd be very different.

Nakul: How has the role of a senior and junior engineer changed over the last even three—I guess, the crazy thing is it's even within the last three years. So how has it changed for you guys? Are you looking for more senior engineers who can think architecturally? Are you looking for more junior engineers because they are more AI native, just by—

Qasar Younis: I was gonna say the latter rather than the former. Um, I think we as a company, as a strategy of how senior so early—So the first roughly 10 years. First, let's say three, four years, we were very much in the camp of hire, young, hungry, particularly MIT, Stanford and Berkeley grads. That was our philosophy. Then through feedback, both in the company and just seeing as a product matured and the complexity of the systems and scale started emerging, we flipped. And for the next, let's say three, four years, three years—or maybe two and a half, three years, we really went into hiring very senior people. And then we hit this watermark where the average tenure, uh, at the company was 10 years of engineering experience before you came here, which is a crazy senior team. Um, and that was, and I think it manifested in a positive way, you're building systems at scale. You're—you have folks who've deployed, and it's they're coming in, look at all these amateur decisions made, and they, they clean all that up. Well, what's the downside? Downside is you slow down, right? Downside is you're gonna get that resistance to changes in the industry. More luck than, uh, than intentionality. When we started flipping back—my ideal mix of engineers is kind of a third, this is their first job or maybe a quarter, this is their first job, a third or maybe a quarter—they have over 10 years experience. The bulk of the team is five years to 10 years of experience. So it's not their first job, but it's also not—they weren't working for 15 years in the process. That arc of engineers where you have senior engineers mentoring, uh, that bulk of mid-career engineers and then you have a hungry group of new grads who are getting opportunity I think is the ideal for us at this stage and this scale. Um, if you had to force me to choose, I would definitely choose engineers who are AI native. I mean that's just the reality of the situation. By the way, for everybody who's listening, who's over the age of 30 or 35, um, there's this great line I heard early in my career, which is, you can tell a person's age by how fast and how hard they resist new ideas. And so when you do anything you've heard today or, or you'll hear in the future and you're like, man, that sounds like bullshit. I'm just saying be a little less cynical. Don't be the curmudgeon yelling at clouds — these

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: These things are real. These people, are not making 'em up. And like I said, today, more than ever before, people don't really debate it. People debated mobile phones—you remember the five years, people would say, I'm never getting a mobile phone. And so today, if you meet somebody who doesn't have a mobile phone, you kind of look at them. You can be an earnest person who's not transactional and who's in the moment and still have a mobile phone. And I think one day we'll be in that world of—you can be a person who is hardworking and really likes the human interaction, but still uses intelligence to extend their quality of life.

Nakul: What does a VP engineering role look like in an AI native engineering team?

Qasar Younis: We're figuring that out to be very clear. Uh, but I think, um, they tend to be...what we're seeing between the strong, strong leads and weaker leads is they tend to be the most, uh, up to date on everything that's going on. I, I had some of these folks that I talked to—I'm thinking of a couple people in particular, no matter how fast I learned something, I text 'em and they're like, oh yeah.

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: It's like get with the program.

Nakul: Yeah, that's not a bad feeling as the CEO.

Qasar Younis: It's just a great feeling. I feel like, okay, I got competent team members who are looking at all this stuff. Um, and I think if we had talked, uh, six months ago and you asked me what are the biggest risks in the company, I would say this like dislocation that's happening—could be it. I actually don't think that's our biggest risk now. I feel like we've made it over that hump, which is very satisfying. Um, but I'm telling you, it's not number one. It's not like we've won. We're gonna continue to push on that stuff, but I see that we're not gonna be a legacy company.

Nakul: But just to go back on the VP engineering role, it used to be the CTO would do architecture, VP engineering manages a team...

Qasar Younis: Yeah.

Nakul: To ship time, high quality code, all of that. That's a people management job, a lot of it. Does that change with agent swarms? And the VP engineering role going to become, I manage 10 engineers who can actually manage hundreds of agents under them?

Qasar Younis: That is what everyone is propagating, I would say in the industry—that's the norm that's being propagated. And that sounds logically true. Um, I think maybe the more debated version is instead of anchoring on the people, it's like how much output can you get out of that team? Um, so it's like they're running the multiple agents in parallel, that's gonna happen, there's no debate in that. The big question that still has to be figured out and I think will be figured out—is writing a lot more software. Does that necessarily mean a higher quality software? I think you'll definitely get more features, um, but scaled products that are in production that can be debugged. I think if Peter was here, he would say, yeah, that'll also be taken care of—um, but I think it's I just keep an eye on that.

Nakul: Yeah. We all know what AI native engineering is beginning to look like—AI customer support, but what does it, what does AI native sales look like...

Qasar Younis: Yeah.

Nakul: At Applied? What does AI native marketing look like today?

Qasar Younis: Yeah, see, so our sales function is very different than traditional, let's say, a SaaS function where you're gonna have—where you're gonna have thousands and thousands of companies. We're a concentrated business and so, um, it's much more business development than it is raw leads. Um, so let me answer from a perspective of your company that has thousands of potential customers or tens of thousands. So not necessarily Applied. If you have 10,000 potential customers, historically, the way that would be done would be some fairly unsophisticated databases—forms and databases. That's basically, that's what Salesforce was. Now it's much more this thing happened in the news that's relevant for this customer—these 10 customers. And is there a way to engage the customer on this specific thing that happened with these 10 customers out of 10,000? That's the level of specificity that I think, uh, is gonna be required in the future. Maybe even just deconstructing what sales is at a really fundamental level. Uh, you're trying to show to that person or that business that the problem that they're facing, that you can help solve that problem through X, Y, and Z. The more specific you can be, the more likely it'll resonate. It's one thing to say hey, I have something to help you be more healthy. It's another thing that says I particularly have a plan which fits your literally genetic history of your family, and it's also super cheap, and you're like wow, this level of customization is—and so sales, I think is entering that realm of hyper context, very, very deep context. Um, and I think that changes the function.

Nakul: It's a capacity model, and again, Applied might be different, but historically, you hire a salesperson depending on SMB midmarket enterprise, it's $600k to $2 million of quota. And the constraint was how many concurrent conversations can somebody manage in their head.

Qasar Younis: Yeah.

Nakul: Do you think all of that blows up?

Qasar Younis: Yeah. I mean, I think absolutely right. You're already seeing... I don't know what it looks like, but I do believe that that fundamental value exchange changes. What you're gonna see, I think, is young companies that are built— and this is why the public investors are hammering SaaS companies. You can use AI to build a pretty thin version of a product. As in a thin version—let's say you're looking at a company that offers a hundred different features. You can go after one feature and then you can use your new sales function to only go after that solution.

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: And now there's just one reason less to buy the whole thing. And that happens five, six times. And before you know it, people are asking, why am I paying millions of dollars to this company when these other guys are offering it for 20, 30 bucks a pop? And they're offering 20, 30 bucks a pop because their own employee base is like 3, 6, 9 employees.I think we could be in the golden age of small companies.

Nakul: Yeah. I agree with you actually on that.

Qasar Younis: Which is very positive. I mean, it's great for the economy. It's great at a personal satisfaction level, working in a team of three to five people. I think that working for a lot more people than people think. And I think the reason they go to IBM, General Motors, uh, Google, uh, OpenAI is because those brands know they're giving you security and they're giving you social proof and they're giving you all these things. They're teaching mentorship and somehow the van life and content creator economy is somehow related to this. It's all in this breaking up of the value chain and then more efficiency now being brought in.

Nakul: Yeah. But mental models I do want to cover. Uh, I I think of you as a very independent thinker and some of that has come through here. You've gone and built a physical AI company way before LLMs were even —it's close to a billion dollar revenues with cashflow positive. You have only one board member. So there's lots of things that we can talk about, but were you always an independent thinker or that came through early influences in various places.

Qasar Younis: Yeah. I think the root of it is, immigrant—weird name. So those things have a huge impact when you don't speak the language and growing up in the US. Um, and I think that just made me a bit cynical of the mainstream, let's say. And so I think that just baked in that skepticism maybe—people say contrarian, contrarian thinking. One thing I'm very careful is I'm not contrarian as, uh, identity. I think you have to be very, very careful that you take this mantle—be like the Bruce Lee—you're like water, you know? So I do think if you are a founder specifically and you're bringing a new company into the market, almost by definition you have to have a different view. Because if your view is the market is actually well served right now, well then — you have to look at the market or look at a product or look at a distribution methodology and say, well, that's not actually the best way to do it. I can, there's maybe a better way to do that. So I think, uh, I am contrarian, but I wouldn't say like...it comes from being a kid. In terms of my recommendation to founders, um...I think the best way to be contrarian is actually, do as much as you can to create and do things and make things rather than just consume things from your peers. Ironic thing to say on a podcast, but I think especially the SF ecosystem. You just get so...the whole drinks crowd and everyone constantly texting each other's group chats about what's going—try to turn that noise off a little bit. And I think it's difficult because you simultaneously have to still stay in the loop.

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: So you have to find this balance of know what's going on. I think you can, without automatically just accepting everything that your peers say. Investors are sometimes the worst at this. You know? I think group chats have made people hundreds of millions and lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Just because you ask a buddy, well, what do you think about company X that's raising at maybe a crazy price? Or maybe you don't ever heard of it. Or that person isn't very good. And that's it. They might be thinking of a different Rohit or a different Rohan—literally, they're like, oh, Rohan? Oh, I was thinking of somebody else — man, I passed on that deal. Today. Right now is happening today. So I think it's even I think harder to be a contrarian investor, actually, than it is to be a contrarian founder. These investors—there is some concept of does money make a company, does a company make money? When all the investors agree, this is the company to make. It's really hard to go against that. Right. Um,..but that's also changing, there's more money in the ecosystem.

Nakul: At YC, you saw thousands of startups. Did that inform your mental model—

Qasar Younis: Absolutely.

Nakul: Of company Building? Can you talk about one or two things that you really took away? There's a unique vantage point.

Qasar Younis: Yeah. Yeah, a super unique vantage point. It's all volume, just saw volume. Um, top of the list is, I say often is—the good companies tend to be good pretty quickly. Um, I think co-founder relationships, you know, very technical companies and technical founders tend to do better. I mean, people don't like that because if you're not an engineer, it seems insulting, but that's just the reality of the situation. That's a correlation. Again, another one that I've said for a long, long time, and I still believe—Bay Area companies tend to be the return drivers. After COVID — we've always been a five-day-in-office company, always based here in, in South Bay and Sunnyvale Mountain View. We had Mark Andreessen come in and Bilal come in. They're two of our major investors. Uh, and they did a talk right after we came back from COVID. Uh, it opened up so summer of '21, let's say. And I asked a question, 'do you think the future is remote?' Because we're the only company that's doing five day in office—nobody was doing it. And they said, roughly, in 2021 — this is before the AI boom. They said, probably of the top 10 software companies on the planet, eight are gonna be within 20 minutes of here. I think that's also been something that I feel is true.

Nakul: In this new world we are living in now, um, what mental models are you updating of your own?

Qasar Younis: All of those things are up for debate always. I find it hard to find —the location one is just a pithy example. Where can you find a mass of engineers that all wanna work hard, work together, even at a high—even with all these AI tools, there's still a human element to it. Um, but that's a big question. I think a big question around, um...are the biggest companies gonna be necessarily the largest companies?

Nakul: Biggest — like in employee base, you mean?

Qasar Younis: Yeah. Now there's a pretty direct correlation to—you're a trillion dollar company. You don't have a small group of people. I think I'm the first person who said this, but I've heard other people say it. But in 2013 or 2014, I did a interview and I said, I do expect, and I believed this in the mobile age—that there'll be an individual app that can be built by a person that can get to a billion. I think finally that might come true. And I obviously, I was thinking because my mental model at that point was the app store is creating amazing distribution—So one person can get that distribution, and if they figure out like a product, maybe it could work.

Nakul: Instagram came very close to it.

Qasar Younis: Very close to it. 11 to 13 people with 3 engineers is what I recall. That had happened already at the time. So in my mind the natural—natural extrapolation is that. The mental model of the biggest companies—are they actually the biggest employers? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. One thing is absolutely true, in that industrial revolution type of—mode of thinking—man, everything's up for grabs. And I think a lot of people meet that with fear. But I think that's a huge opportunity for everybody, which all the systems are being reset and therefore you can—you can jump in. Suddenly, maybe you don't need a Stanford CS and worked five years at Google. Maybe you don't need that. So I think are all those, I would say heuristics are up for debate. Yeah.

Nakul: Uh, so let's go into our quick fire round.

Qasar Younis: Yeah. Sure.

Nakul: You ready? Um, red flag, you never ignore when recruiting?

Qasar Younis: Never is a big word. I would say job-hoppiness is very consistently a bad sign. If they've jumped three companies, maybe even two companies, for 10 months each — the chance that they're gonna be at your company for five years?

Nakul: Okay. Most overrated startup advice?

Qasar Younis: Um, oh man, that's a good one. Most overrated startup advice. Um...There's a lot....oh man....I think this concept that suddenly, um, it's all—I'll be contrarian...

Nakul: We want you to be.

Qasar Younis: My instinct is to say: raising a lot of money, don't. Be very, very conservative. I'm more in the camp today, which is actually if you can raise a lot of money, raise a lot of money because it signals to the market a lot of things. And I wouldn't have agreed with that myself. Probably, uh, 10 years ago.

Nakul: Uh, what's something you believe about building companies that most people disagree with you?

Qasar Younis: Uh, one of my first engineering managers had this quote over his desk, which was, no problem can withstand the constant onslaught of thought. So I do think you can outthink other people, which is kind of tough—I'm not sure it's true, but that's my instinct.

Nakul: Best thing you learned at YC that founders don't talk about?

Qasar Younis: Sometimes people are not meant to be founders. When you see enough people who wanna be founders—If me and you wanted to be basketball players, I think people will kindly tell us...

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: As much as your ambition is there, it's not gonna work.

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: The same actually exists in almost every job. Being a founder, being a VC, there's—sometimes you don't have the right personality, skill, drive, whatever it might be.

Nakul: A founder you admire who doesn't get enough credit?

Qasar Younis: Oh wow. That's a great question. Um, I think Immad [Akhund] at Mercury.

Nakul: Yeah.

Qasar Younis: Yeah, I think he's great. And he—I say that also, I think I was the biggest pre-seed investor in Mercury.

Nakul: Yeah. No biases here!

Qasar Younis: That's a great company. No, I just always say, it's a great company. Why? Why? People talk—

Nakul: It's similar to you guys in the sense that it's profitable. Uh, you know, he builds a little quieter than most people in Silicon Valley, and it's a behemoth. Yeah, so it's similar to you—

Qasar Younis: Yeah, I love the style.

Nakul: Uh, a mistake you still think about?

Qasar Younis: I think the biggest mistakes we've made, it's the higher slow fire slow—the fire slow. I mean, we brought in, sometimes, new folks and they blow out the function. Imagine we had this person two years before, we would've been even better. So again, it's easy to say, do X, do Y, but the reality is it's always conflicted.

Nakul: You have one superpower that explains most of your success as a founder?

Qasar Younis: I dunno if there's one superpower, but I work a lot. I dunno if it's a superpower. Yeah, just and this is a bad—please don't take this, uh, mantle for founders. But I often said, I wanna be the hardest working person you've ever met. And that became my identity. This is very difficult and it's unsustainable. It's not—sometimes even fun. But I do work a lot and I think I get those extra reps, and those extra reps just compound over years.

Nakul: Kobe Bryant philosophy there.

Qasar Younis: I don't know Kobe well enough to agree or disagree.

Nakul: Okay. Uh, let's get to our closing question. So, uh, given everything about life that you've accumulated as wisdom, plus this moment that we are living in today, if you were 25, what would be the single advice you'd give to the 25-year-old Qasar in 2026?

Qasar Younis: Build stuff yourself. Build stuff yourself. Don't just read stuff that Andrej Karpathy is doing—and uh, whoever else is talk, talking about, excuse me. But it's just build stuff yourself. I think you'll learn so much. It's an amazing time where I think you don't have to have any formal technical education. You don't need to know the jargon. You can learn all that stuff. So yeah, build yourself.

Nakul: Great. Qasar, thank you so much, uh, thank you so much for doing this.

Qasar Younis: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Cheers.