This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube talk titled "Gradual Growth Adds Up - Garry Tan (Y Combinator)" (created 2023-10-18) featuring Garry Tan presenting to a startup/audience context. He uses the video game Katamari Damacy as a metaphor for how startups grow: start very small, iteratively pick up co-founders, employees, product development, customers, and then capital to scale. He emphasizes the virtuous, reinforcing cycle among finding co-founders, building product, acquiring customers, and raising capital, and recommends an OODA-style game loop of shifting focus between those elements to steadily grow a company.
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One of the really cool things I like to tell people as you're going into this process of starting startups is that, who here has heard of a very obscure 1990s, 2000s game called Katamari Damacy on Sony PlayStation? Like 3 people. It's a great game, by the way. I swear this story is going someplace. You are actually in the game this alien that is sort of pushing this little ball around. And basically the premise of the game is you start off very, very small. You're picking up, as you can see, acorns or chess pieces and things like that. And if you hit something that is smaller than your ball, you pick it up and it becomes a part of you. And if you try to pick up something too big, not only do you not pick it up, you bounce off of it and your ball gets smaller. And that's sort of like the plight of every startup founder. You're out there just trying to get something to stick. And if you try to get something too big, it's just wasted energy and it's not going to happen. And so the game starts off very small, but then by the middle of the game you're picking up cars, you're picking up trees, you're picking up buildings, and then by the end of the game you're picking up entire continents. And so I guess that's just the metaphor that I learned from Y Combinator about when these startups actually start. They start off incredibly small. And then to use this game metaphor, when you're starting off, you're actually not trying to pick up physical objects. You're actually trying to pick up these three things: co-founders and people to work for you who then build the product that solves a problem that then gets you customers. And then capital comes and allows you to hire more people. And/or to buy more customers if you have to do it that way, right? So this is like this virtuous cycle that is happening absolutely all the time. And I think one of the things that I really encourage you to think, the reason why this is a useful analogy is because when you start out, what you'll find is like one thing helps you massively in the other things. If you get a truly great co-founder, or if you're technical and you need a non-technical CEO, someone to sell for you, or vice versa. Like, suddenly you're able to convince customers who you wouldn't be able to access any other way. Or, and you'll be able to raise money, and that'll help you hire people, and then you'll get better customers, and so on. Like, basically that's all we're trying to do. It's just a useful thing that I find myself trying to explain to people absolutely all the time. And one thing that this is also useful for is this actually sets up a little bit of an OODA loop, like a game loop. It's literally just keep trying to get each of these things push as hard as you can, and then if you can't get any more of any one of these things, go to something else, go get that, and then come back to those other things. Like, you can basically, you know, you're not going to be able to get absolutely everything all of the time, but by actually switching between different focuses, like these specific 3 things, you're always going to get closer to basically taking over the world.
