When Is the Right Time to Start a Company?

I think for any individual, there's a right time to start for them, but there's no right time to start in the world. I mean, there are so many examples of companies that have been started in downturns, in bubbles. You know, you think of Google getting started, I think it was the late 90s, right, right before everything, everything came crashing down. But, um, there's no time. There's no right time to start in the broadest macro sense, but there is a right time to start for you. So, for instance, one thing that I think really helped me was not starting a company immediately out of college. Um, and that was just for me. For some people, I think it's perfect to start right out of college. But what I needed was a set of technical skills, a network, right, A group of people that would help me get this thing off the ground. While I had met Mike, my co founder at Stanford, I met my first investors basically while I was working at Google, and I learned how to build a service while I was working at a company called nextstop. So it actually took, you know, a bunch of those chapters together to create the opportunity that allowed us to go start Instagram. But there's no right time in the world. There's just a right time for you. But I will say in general, it will never feel like the right time because you'll always feel like you can learn more, that you'll always feel like maybe it's not safe. I remember my mother, when I called her, saying, hey, I'm leaving my job and I'm going to start this thing. She said, but what about your health insurance? And I remember thinking for the next two days about health insurance and what would I do? And I mean, the other reflection is, man, you know, I now have a gray beard and I looked a lot younger in that video, but back then I felt a little bit more like anything goes. And it was fine. But I guess my point is there's no right time. But you have to make sure you're set up with the right skill set to get started.