The two-part question gmail creator Paul Buchheit asks startup founders

After reflecting on common threads across the biggest companies in the world (e.g. Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc.), Paul noticed that all of them were “sitting on top of a big exponential change in the world.”

Intel, Microsoft, and Apple were early to microcomputers and ended up owning that space:

“If it weren’t for microcomputers, they wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Google was sitting on the growth of the internet and the exponential growth of information online.

So when he’s advising startup founders who want to build big companies, Paul asks them to imagine they traveled 10 years into the future and gives them a two-part question:

1. What is the big exponential change that pertains to your startup?

2. Why is your startup going to be the one who captures it?

Full video: Y Combinator “The Path to $100B by Paul Buchheit“ (Oct 2018)