Office Hours at Startup School 2013 with Paul Graham and Sam Altman

TL;DR

The video captures Paul Graham and Sam Altman conducting office hours at Startup School 2013, where they interview three startup teams: a multiplayer programming game (later accepted into Y Combinator on the spot), a video platform for tracking 100‑day skill improvement (GiveIt100), and a tech‑enabled customs brokerage (Flexport).

Key insights

• The programming game founders initially set the bar too high; they assumed for‑loops were simple but discovered that non‑programmers struggled with the concept of formal notation.
• The game’s monetization model (recruitment lead‑generation) is unvalidated; the founders acknowledge recruiters say “all sorts of crazy stuff.”
• GiveIt100’s founder built the product for himself (short attention span, 10‑second clips) and used his own successful dance‑learning YouTube video as proof of concept.