Battle-tested playbooks for recuriting, reading the market, and adapting to AI
Qasar Younis · Co-founder & CEO, Applied Intuition
Qasar Younis grew up on a farm in Pakistan, moved to Detroit as a kid, and worked at General Motors before landing at Google and becoming COO of Y Combinator. He then founded Applied Intuition, today a $15 billion company building AI for the physical world. In an industry where most people look up to tech founders, Qasar looks up to Sam Walton and Warren Buffett. Qasar is an N of 1 founder, and in this conversation, he shares his contrarian approach to company building.
Qasar Younis is co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, which builds software for autonomous and AI-defined vehicles. He was previously COO of Y Combinator, a product lead at Google, and started his career at General Motors.
The most quotable moments from Qasar Younis
A founder isn't made when they start a company. A founder is made when they get the market feedback and interpret it correctly.
Everybody wants you to win, and sometimes that works against you, because they don't want to tell you the hard truth.
Taste is understanding what's good and what's not. You have to build taste to know which feedback is actually good feedback and which is noise.
If you have a hard time recruiting a co-founder, you'll have a hard time recruiting employee one through five. Not seeing value in you as a co-founder is feedback from the market.
The most important person in a company is the first-line engineering manager. That is the company. A VC hack would be to interview first-line managers, not the founders.
You can tell a person's age by how fast and how hard they resist new ideas. Don't be the curmudgeon yelling at clouds.
The way to think about the first 10 is each of those people are going to hire 10 people. So you're hiring your first hundred.