Inside the ex-YC partner’s $15B self driving car company | Qasar Younis

Brett: Thank you for coming on. I'm excited for the conversation.

Qasar: Thanks for having me.

Brett: What's your current thought in nature versus nurture as it relates to great founders?

Qasar: I think just in terms of hiring leads and stuff like that, I mean, the company's at a certain scale that we talk about this in terms of an individual person and head of design or individual person of head of sales or something like this. I think I'm more and more in the belief that, I'll address the nature versus nurture thing after, but either you got it or you don't. I think that we've swung so much into everybody can be everything and it's just as long as you watch enough YouTube videos, you can be it. And I think we have natural proclivities and natural strengths and weaknesses.

In terms of, for me, in specific, I got into the startup game at a purely practical level of, grew up poor and I kind of deduced at age 14 that ownership is the way to go. And I grew up in the Detroit area, in Warren, and which is Eminem's hometown if you like rap music. So, it wasn't Silicon Valley. So, it wasn't like everyone's starting companies and things like that.

Saw my dad start a company, he is a laborer, so he's just working at fairly unskilled jobs. And then ultimately when a bunch of jobs went to China, we grew up in Michigan, he ultimately started his own small business of one, which he still runs today, which is hugely informative to me in the sense of I see he got his dignity that way. He really became the master of his own destiny. And I think, probably to this day, I still have some level of insecurity around, got a weird name. I didn't spend my whole career at General Motors. I went to General Motors Institute undergrad. You used to spend your whole career at General Motors or at Google and you get to a certain point and your name is just kind of a weird name and they don't promote you.

And whether that's a true thing that happens or just an insecurity that minorities have or people who feel marginalized have, I think that played into my brain as well. I was like, I can be the master of my own dominion by starting something, but fundamentally, most fundamental, this is the path to wealth. Then over the years I basically learned all the traits. I mean, even at post-business school ... So, I was an engineer originally. Then I went to business school. Post-business school, for a couple of years I worked for a holding company of a hedge fund, and I did that because I was like, "I need to know finance. If I'm really ever going to really run a company, I need to know finance." And so for me, I think it's a mix of both. I mean, I think my personality ... This is the job I'm the best at, for sure.

I worked at large companies for over 10 years and I was a good employee, but I don't know if I could have made it to this level of success in that thing. So, I love this job. So, that's the nature part of it. And the nurture part of it is like, I'm doing it for a practical reason, which is it gives me control over my own destiny. I think it was like, Bill Gates has this line about whatever you're obsessed with when you're in your teenage years is kind of a good indication, and I was obsessed with working and not being poor. I mean, I got my McDonald's job at 14 and I worked multiple, two jobs all the way through college. Yeah, I mean, I just worked a lot. I've worked seven days a week for as long as I can remember. I've never not worked seven days a week. So, whether it's actually having multiple jobs or having one job where you work all the time.

Even, you just do the ... Forget the seven-day week, you just work 10 extra hours, per week that compounds in significant ways. In an annual basis, that compounds with three extra months. And Brett versus Brett plus three months—Brett plus three months, even if you waste two thirds of the three months because you just hang around the office, you're drinking coffee or whatever it is, just an extra full month worth of work.

There's two things that I think the Valley kind of underestimates on founders, or under, let's say, indexes on founders. One is work ethic and then the second one is being well-rounded. So, that was always in the back of my mind, it's like, I need to know all these different functions. So, how do I get that broad experience and, technical and non-technical?

Brett: Share more about the point about being well-rounded.

Qasar: So, I'm in the school of business that building a company and making it effective, by reading Roman history you actually learn how to build a company. I really believe that. And that's the well-rounded, like, knowing what good art is makes you a better founder. I still read a lot. And I don't read the airport books which are relevant for the whatever, high-growth hacks. That's not the content I'm consuming.

The closest would be something like The History of Standard Oil, which is kind of a business book, but it's written in 1905. But really things that are just not in this universe, whether it's great music, great art, great ideas, they're all outside of the domain of your job.

Brett: Can you point to something when you were reading about the Roman Empire or Standard Oil that translated to the way that you think about building a company, where it's not like that, it's just these kinds of residual things that sit in the back of your head and you can't possibly explain?

Qasar: I think it's that, it's the latter. And books like Andy Warhol's autobiography, how does that impact? You can see patterns. The important thing is consuming high-quality content, because if you consume low-quality content, you're going to get low-quality ideas.

And so, then the question is how do you find high-quality content? For me, it's like the older the stuff, the better, because just time has filtered out a lot of the, let's say, the trend and the short-term noise. And so, it's simply just read books that are over 25 years old.

Brett: At some point in the future when there's a book that's written about you and Applied Intuition, what do you think the big idea that somebody might take away or the thing you would hope that they put it down and the take-home value is what?

Qasar: Probably, I mean, on the product side it is like this concept of intelligent vehicles and the broad category of vehicle intelligence, which is a category we're in many ways creating and we occupy, which is the intersection of things that move and AI. So, people sometimes say that's autonomy. Autonomy is definitely a big part of it, but there's in-cabin experiences, the engineering tools that you use to build these intelligent systems. I think we called that, I think, before a lot of people. I think we saw that a long time ago. And that's one.

I think, number two, building up actual business. And what I mean by that is we are a profitable company, we've been for many years. We've grown. We've raised hundreds of millions in the company's history, close to a billion. We have all of that in the bank. That is a functioning business. And so, I think building a high-growth company in a way that's sustainable, I think that that's probably the second thing.

And then the third thing is just the way we operate inside the company is typically we have folks from every autonomy company, every AI company, every big software company. We're about 1,000 folks in the company. And consistently people say this company's just run very, very differently. And so, we use software to do that. And folks come from, I would say, high-culture companies like a Stripe, say this is another level of that. And I think that story of the innards of the company, I think are all unique. And all that I think contributes to our success as well. But who knows if that book will be written? TBD.

Brett: So, winding back the hands of time a little bit, in the mid-2000s you were at YC, you were COO and group partner there for a number of years, and then you obviously started Applied Intuition. Did you decide, "Okay, I want to go build another company," and started to explore? Did it not occur to you until you bumped into this problem space?

Qasar: I just fundamentally see myself as a founder and as an engineer a lot more than I see myself as an investor or an employee or something else. And then there's like, well, let's see if I'm actually good at this stuff in a real way, because now I'm playing on easy mode. I have a huge network of people. I have my own established brand. I can raise money, all that stuff. I worked at YC, I saw lots and lots of patterns.

And so, to be very, very clear when I go into YC, I'm expecting to start something again. And so, as I'm at YC, all my assessment of companies is me always thinking the other side, "How would I do this? What's right about this? What's wrong about this?" And places like YC are fantastic for that. I think they're not maybe as good if that's the only thing you've done, but they're really good if you've been a founder and then you start doing pattern matching or some differences.

I think if you, let's say, you come out of college and you go straight into being an associate and then you become a partner, I think you don't realise that what investors see and what actually happens on the ground is actually quite different. And so, when I'm assessing companies and advising companies at YC, I know there's this delta that I ... It's kind of like, Mark Andreessen was our major investor when we started the company and he is formally the only board member we have, even though we're like a pre-IPO company, which in itself is a crazy, weird thing.

But Mark has been enough of a founder where he knows where his advice ends. He's like, ah, like, he's going to think about the problems that we have for minutes to tens of minutes, and we're going to be thinking about it for hundreds of hours. So, it's like, what is he going to uncover that we haven't ... So, his biggest value is going to be pattern matching. His biggest value is, "By the way, I saw this at Coinbase, I saw this at Facebook, maybe you guys should try this." But it's not like, let me actually get into the whatever, management of an executive. It's just like, well typically a head of engineering is going to act this way.

Brett: You mentioned you explored the full-stack robotaxi idea. Talk more about that. How seriously did you look into it and why did you decide to shelve it or not go after it?

Qasar: Yeah. So, this was before all the robotaxi companies kind of existed. So, seriously looked at it in terms of pitched a fund, right? Like, that serious. And then talked to Paul Graham at YC about it and then he was like, "I don't know if it's a good idea or a bad idea." And at the time, my wife was pregnant with our first kid and he's like, "I wouldn't start a family and a startup at the same time." And he's like, "Why don't you come to YC and basically get a job?" And so, we weren't sure enough, where that did dissuade me enough to go take the job. And my co-founder, Peter, he stayed at Google and he became one of the founding engineers at Android Automotive, which has a huge impact also on Applied Intuition's founding story.

And so, it was, I think if you're really convinced that this is a thing, you probably don't just let a couple of people say, "This isn't a good idea," dissuade you, but more practically, we just didn't see a good business there. You're going to spend long time, we estimated five years, which ended up being short, to ultimately replace a driver who is really cheap. And it's like, that just doesn't make sense in terms of the sensors are going to be really expensive. And it's like, well, probably one day the sensors will be cheap enough and all this stuff. It's like now we're in a dangerous game. It's kind of like being short a company, the markets will be irrational longer than you can be solvent. So, that all turned us off from it.

I mean, we were very practically were like, "This is not a good business. Let's not do this." Yeah, it's not only about passion. You have to also think is this thing going to work? You have to be quite objective. And if there's anything that founders have a really hard time getting feedback on is are they being objective? Because all of the training and all of their instincts have told them, "Generally speaking, people are not going to get your thing, so just keep at it." Sometimes you actually shouldn't keep at it. It's a bad idea. And that's tough. That's tough.

Brett: So, that's a very interesting and accurate point. It's like the most conventional advice that's pushed all the time is just never give up. And I think that, yeah, there's amazing stories and then there's 99% of people that destroyed themselves for 10 years smacking their head against a wall.

Qasar: It's more difficult to quit than it's to start. Absolutely. Because the pragmatic reason or the practical reason is unlike taking a job ... You take a job and you go work at Meta and you quit three months later, you get fired six months later. There's a thousand reasons. You can rationalise that and your cohort and your friends can rationalise it and your loved ones can rationalise, your family can rationalise it.

When you start a company, it's all on you, baby. And that's like, it's like, you win, you lose, it's all on you. And it's a very personal thing. When the company's just the founders, what is the company? It's just the founders. So, there's no distinguish ... It's literally a one-to-one match. So, then it's like, okay, well, so when the company fails, I fail. There's no hiding in that. And so, people will rather than face that reality, they will just continue to try to will it. While at the same time, everyone is saying, it's all about just willing your way there.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things I saw at YC were the good companies were good pretty quickly and then were good for, like, 10 years, and then they went public. This out in the woods for a long period of time, it's the exception, not the rule. The rule is the good companies are pretty good pretty quick. And also, the other uncomfortable truths are like the rule is mostly the highly educated, connected founders do better than the not highly educated, connected founders. I think we want to have this feeling that it's egalitarian, it's a pure meritocracy. That somehow brands and schools and things ... Working at Google is not meritocratic, but doing a startup is meritocratic. It's not meritocratic either. It's a different type of ... People can't basically suppress you for having a weird name, but there's still a system that exists and you have to operate within the system.

Brett: The original point that you made, I think is a really important one, which is that the conventional advice is you have to ignore all the naysayers or people that are critical of your ideas, but a lot of times, people are critical for good reason.

Qasar: Yeah. I say listen to the naysayers.

Brett: So, maybe expand on a little bit, what is a founder to do with that perspective?

Qasar: Yeah. I think the mistake you can make is taking advice from uncalibrated people who haven't done the thing themselves. Like, if I ask somebody who's in the suburb of Tulsa, who works as an accountant at a tool and die shop, "Should I start Applied Intuition?" They're not the right person to ask. But if you ask a partner at First Round and they're like, "This is not a good idea." Then that's an issue.

Now, the reality is the partner at First Round or wherever, is not going to tell you this is not a good idea, because they also don't know. All they can say is, I'm going to invest or I'm not going to invest. But there's signal there. If you get 5, 8, 10 funds that say, "We're going to sit this one out," for whatever reason, you should think about that. I think a lot of founders just don't think about it. Now, if you get three people to invest and 25 to say no, you've got three people to invest, that's fine.

But I would be really listening to advice. I mean, one of our strengths as a company, talk about writing a book, feedback is a big part, not only giving and taking feedback, but as a company in our strategy. I mean, literally right before this podcast, all-hands with the whole company, and we talk about very openly, "These are the faults in the company. These are weaknesses in the company. We need to address these." I talk about it, the leads talk about it. And you're like, if you sat in those companies, we had new employees starting all the time and they're just like, "There's doom and gloom there." And it's like, yeah, because we have to have a clear eye because success is a lagging indicator. The fundraising, we did this $15 billion round and we're a profitable company, we're on the way to one day being a public company, it's like, "Oh, you've already made it." And it's like, no, that's right when you start failing.

Brett: And you have to grow forever, that's your job.

Qasar: And you have to like that. And you have to like that, right? You have to like that. But the way that you grow forever is you take feedback and you listen. And so, I think probably the biggest blind spot or one of the biggest blind spots is the founder themselves, the CEO is not actually the right person to do that thing. And no one's going to say that.

At YC, we would write feedback letters for everyone who gets rejected, right? Literally emails that's like, "This is the issue that we saw." So, if you going to interview, I don't know if they still do it, I've been gone eight, nine years at this point, but at the time we did it for everybody. Everyone who interviewed, you'd write an email, little email that'd say, "These are the reasons we didn't like..." Except when it was, "We don't like you. We love your ... It was a phenomenal idea. A great market. It's going to explode. It's just you. It's just you. Literally, if you can find somebody else to do this, we're going to fund this immediately."

Brett: "We'd be delighted."

Qasar: "We'd be delighted." Yeah. So, I think if you're a founder then you're getting this, let's say, negative feedback or even getting positive feedback, it's like how do you interpret that?

I've always said a founder is not made when you decide to start a company or even when you raise money. Your founder's made when get feedback and you interpret it correctly, about the product and the market, or just about you, about everything. So, you could have 15 people in a room and it's like some AI agentic framework and you could have one person giving feedback who's a developer. All 10 people are going to interpret that feedback differently, extremely differently.

And so, how do you know that you are actually interpreting it the right way? It's not only that you start a company, it's like you have to also be right. And if we were playing basketball, it's like, more times when I threw the leather ball through the hoop, it went in, and you threw it less, and therefore, I'm a better basketball player because I just ... How do you do that when you're a founder?

And so, I think this feedback concept becomes really, really important because you have to somehow discount some people's feedback and you have to over-index on some people's feedback, and then you know all this stuff that they don't know because they've only seen a little ... It's like this analysis interpretation is the true heart of being a founder in that way, especially in the early days. Those roles change as you grow. Feedback is always important, but your interpretation of market signals.

Brett: Is your take that your context loading in your brain through your whole life before you start this company, and either you have really good instincts for taking all this data or you don't, or there's heuristics and shortcuts and other ways to manage that?

Qasar: Warren Buffett just stepped down earlier this year from his role at Berkshire, and there's a line from one his family members that said, "If Warren Buffett had gone into hot dogs, he would've been the king of hot dogs." I think there's some people who are just good at this thing.

There's another aspect to is there is luck, but there's some ability that the great founders master that luck. They figure out how to just keep getting lucky again and again. And so, what do you call that? I don't know what you call it, but it certainly exists. Some people will just say that's just nature. They just have an instinct. I think that's true. I think you practise that.

You do startups for 10 years in a row. Let's say your life mission is, "I'm going to be a founder." Just like a craftsman, if you spend a long time on it, you will just get better at it. Now the question is, there's some craftsmen who are already at the LeBron James level and they're going to get to the next level. And there's some people who are like me and they're never getting to LeBron James level, no matter how much time you spend on trying to be a better founder, being a better basketball player, being whatever.

Brett: So, going back to the founding moment for Applied Intuition, you spent time seriously considering building a robotaxi company before you started helping lead YC. So, what was the actual founding insight for Applied Intuition?

Qasar: Market timing is the biggest thing. After a good co-founder, market timing is everything. It's the beginning, middle, and end. And so, we just focused a lot on that aspect, like this idea we're going to have, is it the right time? Now, the way very practically how we ... And this is, I always say my order of operations that I had since when I was at YC of starting a company is one, you find a co-founder. Secondly, between you and your two co-founders, ideally with one co-founder, suboptimally, certainly don't start a company alone, don't start a company with four people. Again, this is the formulaic version. It's worked for me for a couple of companies. So, I continue to propose it.

Between you two or three, what markets overlap in the Venn diagram of you three? And why that's so important is then the thing that you build ends up being so bespoke to you, because then you need two people with those precise background because it overlaps. So, that's one person's idea. So, you pick the market, then the idea. So, it's founder, market, idea. Market being the overlap. Idea, and then within idea, it's like number one for us is, what is a problem? Can software solve that problem? How many people have that problem? And how many of those people are willing to pay for it through attention or dollars? It's like a formula and it's worked. I should write it down and trademark it or whatever. But I think you have to do it in that order too. It's not come up with the idea and then go find a co-founder.

Brett: Why is that a bad idea?

Qasar: Because then it's my idea and then you join, Brett, as really a glorified employee, because you weren't there at the birthing of the idea. And most likely then, the idea has nothing to do with your skills, because I independently came up with it. So, maybe it's something to do with my skills or my interest. But if we're like blank slate, first we decided we're going to work together and then come up with an idea-

Brett: Talk through how that instantiated itself.

Qasar: Yeah. So, Peter. First, decided Peter is a co-founder. We actually were going to have a third co-founder, which ultimately didn't work out, but it was me and Peter. He ended up building his own great company, which is fantastic. So, I really believe the co-founder thing is first and foremost. And I think it's very difficult to compress that into a two-month or one-month thing. You need that over many years where you see this person evolve, they get married.

I've seen people that have very, let's say, non-linear lives, a lot of problems, sometimes self-inflicted problems. It's like, wow, you might start a company with somebody like that. And when you're starting a company, you're going up the side of the mountain and you're hooking yourself to that person. They fall off that mountain, it's going to have a lot of damage to you. So, it's really important. And people don't take it with that level of seriousness, which is like, I am really connecting with this person because they're just like, "Well, I'll just fire them." No, the company then fundamentally is falling apart.

And then another thing is Peter and I's parents, Peter's parents and my parents live a quarter mile from each other in Michigan. I mean, when we say we grew up in the same area, we have some version of shared values without it being explicit. That stuff matters. I mean, our relationship unequivocally transcends an economic boundary. It is a personal, intimate relationship where we really respect each other. And I think you talk to anybody at Applied Intuition who's worked here or was working here, they'll often refer to like, "Oh, the balance between Qasar ... Literally if Qasar was the sole founder, it is a bad company, and if Peter's the sole founder it is a bad company. They really complement each other really well and together lead the company." So then from there, we both know automotive, we both know software, and that's the area that it leads us.

Brett: And was that obvious that you were going to start exploring that or you started with the aperture was wider and you narrowed?

Qasar: Aperture was wider. So, first we said the first kind of view is what markets are growing? Because this is another kind of, again, if you're a wannabe founder, you've got to go to a market where it's exploding in growth. You go to a market that's like dentist CRMs, that already has seven players, it doesn't matter that you can do it way better than them. It's tough to penetrate that market.

Like all startup advisors we're so general, you could have an AI CRM today that could maybe displace all the existing players, but generally speaking, there's a big competitor in the market, competing against them is very, very difficult. And so you want to typically go to markets that are growing. And so, at the time, markets that were growing were voice, were crypto, it was AR/VR, and it was autonomy. And the autonomy one, after actually building demos and other products and we're like, "Well, what are we doing? We don't know shit about voice. We're just unnaturally pushing ourselves into this thing. The thing that we really know is software. We really know the car business. Autonomy is the growing market. Let's learn about that."

And then in terms of timing, the idea that we had or a couple of ideas we had, which I think have turned out to be really beneficial, is one, is we didn't believe raising lots of money and doing research was the right answer. And which a lot of these self-driving companies, like I said, the humanoid and gen AI companies that are not doing, some of them are doing.

And then secondly, our view was, just getting into the details, like, how do you actually build a product that's going to be used when you're talking about this ecosystem where you don't know is this self-driving car going to win? Is it going to be self-driving truck? Is it going to be a college shuttle? Is it going to be the Tesla style? Is it going to be Waymo style? It's like, "Oh, let's build a horizontal company and basically fuel the ecosystem because we don't know when..." The biggest risk in our business was, when is autonomy going to hit? Our view was like, if you can survive long enough to where autonomy technology will converge, then you will not only have momentum, but you will be there at the right time when the market is ready to turn, but we know the market wasn't ready to turn in 2017.

Brett: When you started to point your attention to automotive and autonomy, what was the actual work that you were doing?

Qasar: So, number one, just talking to people. I mean, you got to remember, we come from the ecosystem, so we also know what the selling dynamics are, et cetera. So, we started with tooling. It's still one of the big parts of our business is just engineering tools they use to build and test autonomous systems fundamentally. And then, broadly just software. You're deploying software in a vehicle. When you think about building a web application or you think of a mobile application, you have all these tools that help you make a web application and deploy a web application. You don't have any of that when you're making software for a car. You don't have even the testing frameworks that you would test the infotainment with and specifically.

So, we knew that those problems existed because we knew how to build web applications and mobile. It was like, "Oh, these tools don't exist in this other world." That's the thing. But we also knew that these car companies are very hesitant to buy stuff from young companies, from startups. They're working on five, seven-year programmes, that just doesn't make sense, right? And so, to them, to work with a little, dinky company.

And so, that early insight was actually let's sell to Bay Area companies that are working in autonomy because the size of the companies that are similar. I remember calling Kyle Vogt at Cruise and calling some of the big, big Level 4 companies, and they all said, "No. No. We'll use your tools if they exist today. We're not going to wait a year until you raise money and then build V.1 and all that stuff." So then we came back again, feedback from the market, Peter and I were like, "Well, if the Auroras of the world never use your tools, can we actually be successful as a business place?"

Actually, we didn't know at the time are they doing it the right way or the wrong way? The Cruises, the Auroras, the Argos. Two out of the three are gone, Cruise and Argo don't exist anymore. Because they're all saying no, but it's like, oh actually, the smaller companies, the Voyages and the RideCells, the Kodiaks, we're almost the same size as them. So, then if I talk to somebody who's running a self-driving company with 1,000, 2,000 employees and raise $2 billion and we say we have five people working on simulation, they're like, "Well, I'm just going to hire five people working on simulation myself. Why am I going to wait on you?" That's not the case once you go into the manufacturers where they buy tools all the time. They're in the business of building cars and shipping cars. They're not in the business of building simulators, because they're smart enough to understand that when you verticalize all this stuff, it's so expensive that literally the costs will crush you.

You take Apple, Apple spent tens of billions of dollars trying to build a car. You never even saw the design of it because this whole misunderstanding of how this business works, where these vertical costs are just so high. And it is the people who are leading these companies, they don't actually understand the market. They're very confident, but they don't understand the market, and they're very competent in the sense of they went to great schools and built great companies. And so, they think, "Well, surely I can do the same thing." But they don't know actually the way automotive works.

But the automotive companies, who they've already dismissed ... I remember the folks at Zoox saying basically, "Screw the OEMs. They're dumb, they don't understand what's going on." And no disrespect, because a lot of people work hard at Zoox, some of those folks work at Applied. Zoox raised a billion dollars, sold for a billion dollars. That wasn't the right way. And even under Amazon, we don't see tonnes of Zoox vehicles outside. So, there was a misunderstanding of the cost structure of how we're going to get this technology out. We understood those things.

And in 2017, I didn't know, and even now I'm hesitant to have opinions like this, because we could still fail. The market is not static, it's a dynamic market, but I think we correctly understood the market in that era to say, "We don't know when this is going to come to fruition. We think that manufacturers are going to be a key player in this. We want to try to hook ourselves to the manufacturers because they're not going away, and it doesn't really matter that the vertical AV companies said no."

Brett: Were you worried that you'd have five customers? The TAM is maybe they could all pay 500 million or a billion a year?

Qasar: I worked at Bosch, the large, Tier 1 automotive supplier that does ... Just in automotive, they do like 65 billion in revenue a year. I mean, companies that are at scale that are just even hard to imagine, that are in 100-plus countries globally. So, we knew the market existed. Even, I think a misunderstanding that people have who are not in the car business is, they think, well, there's like 40 or 50 brands globally and that's the whole market. And it's like, well, individual brands, individual companies, like a Stellantis has like 12 brands. Individual brands within ... 14. Within them will have lots of product lines and then each of them might have their own self-driving team.

A company like Volkswagen has 600,000 employees. That's 600,000 different views of that company. It's not just one company. And so, you have to understand how can we sell? And again, it's getting really into the weeds. I could do an hour on how automotive is different than other businesses, but we know those things. And so, I think we organised our go-to-market motion and we organised our products to fit into that. And so, first bootstrap with the Silicon Valley companies and then ultimately springboard into the traditional OEMs and then use them as your long term.

And then, now we do things outside of the automotive industry. We got into defence about a year-and-a-half after we started, and then we did construction and mining and then commercial trucking. And so, we got into all these adjacent industries also to diversify the company, right? So, it's not just you got to get three car companies.

Brett: So, who was your first or second customer and what did you decide to build and sell to them and why?

Qasar: Yeah. It was the local, small-barrier companies. It was like the Voyages of the world who ultimately was acquired by Cruise. And we built them their engineering tools that they would use to build and develop their autonomous systems. So, it was, in that way, a very traditional Silicon Valley company.

I think, you fast-forward today, the company is a mature company doing hundreds of millions in revenue, has been profitable for a number of years. We have lots of different products and lots of different areas, but that was the original wedge in order to get the right to sell. Sometimes people call us a vertical SaaS company. I don't know if you remember this company, Viva, or some other companies like it, which they're like, they supply almost everything in their vertical. And that's what we do. We're a vehicle intelligence company, so we supply all the things that you would need to make your car, truck, tank, plane, drone intelligent. And that's tooling, that's an operating system, that's autonomy itself. I mean, it's just like, we go from just tooling to a full mature line of products.

Brett: What was the path from the first couple very small Bay Area companies? Then what was your fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth customer use case? How did you go from a 20-person Silicon Valley company to really what you would consider your first important customer?

Qasar: So, one is those are still real customers and we have customers to this day who come from that cohort of the first few companies. So, they're real in their own way. The key thing that we get is we just mature as a company in a product set.

We are a company which only gets judged on our products. We are a hard tech, software only, enterprise company. The only analysis is, is this product do what it can do and do it in a fashion that's promised? And so, it was literally just building stuff. And those early customers, they not only give you dollars, they give you a lot of feedback.

Brett: How did you know that building something for one of these Silicon Valley companies and delighting them was going to translate to GM or whatever?

Qasar: Yeah. Because they're working on similar problems, which are autonomy problems. There's a different level of automation. Again, now we also know enough about autonomy. You have to know, okay, what is level two system? What is level four system? At the time, the view was level two and level four are never going to converge. They're very different. Today, that's a very different view. There is an ever-increasing view that actually the strategy of a robotaxi and the strategy of a passenger car autonomy are going to collapse in China, it's showing that more and more. So, we had some of those ideas, and they weren't fully fleshed out, but the view was we can supply tools to both sides, on the ADAS side and the autonomy side. On the car side, and the truck side. On the tanks, and on the what are passenger vehicles. And so, all of that gave us information as we got more information, more feedback. Then you build your next-generation product, next-generation product.

And so, at some point the product is good enough that you can actually pitch a General Motors, which we did in a formal RFQ that 28 companies bid for that tooling business, well, many years ago now 2018, 2019. And we won against big companies like NVIDIA and Ansys. And we were a small company at the time. So, then it's just literally your products are good and then that's how you win, and that's the business that we're in today. We have to build great products. Now, people are not like, "Oh, should we work with Applied Intuition?" They're just like, "Are the products good? Are they well-priced?" And then, now the fear is will there be an upstart that can disrupt us or will any technical changes change the value of our product? So, that's the kind of things that we're paranoid about.

Brett: So, how long after the company was started did you get your first big account?

Qasar: Depends on what big is. I mean a year in, we thought we were getting some big accounts, which would be a million dollar account or something like that, over a couple of years. Now that doesn't move the needle, but yeah, it's all relative, right? It's like, even today it's like, what big is today might not be big three years from now.

But it was true, I mean, from fairly early on in the company we got traction. It wasn't this, was like, we're like, "Whoa, is this going to work? Is this not going to work?" It's worked pretty well. I mean, we've preserved all the capital we've ever raised in the company's history, which is an evidence that the company is an efficient, cash-generating entity, as in the products we build are wanted by the market and the market's willingness to pay us more than it cost to build the products. And then we just save all that money for an eventual war, which is maybe there's a competitor that comes or something, where we can deploy hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions of dollars into a specific fight. But yeah, luckily we haven't had to do that.

Brett: Maybe you can talk through how you sequence the different products that you built in the early days and the different customer segments?

Qasar: I think, I mean, this is the YC kind of way, which is always having conversations with customers and having that view that okay, now we went from our first product being a planning simulator and then to being a perception simulator, and then to a data logger. Literally conversations. And from the early days of the company, as a founder you kind of have to make a decision of are you going to be a single-product company or are you going to be a multi-product company? And early days we decided to be a multi-product company.

Now, why don't all companies become multi-product company? It's really hard to find product-market fit again and again and again. It's really hard to manage dozens of products and make sure they're all the right products and the market needs them and you're not just holding onto them because you started them four years ago, five years. This is a much more complex business. I mean, one thing about Applied is, it is a complex business. We have many products across many geographies, in many verticals, and just the permutations are pretty significant. But yeah, we built the muscle for it. We built the muscle to take feedback and then act on building product around that feedback.

Brett: Is there anything else you think you did uniquely that made you really successful as a multi-product company?

Qasar: I think in the objective way that people assess talent and stuff, I think whether it's experience, brand, et cetera, we have a lot of great people. I think we've managed to retain them and have low attrition and all of those things, and low turnover, but that's kind of the unwritten story as well. It's like we just have really, really high-quality folks. I've seen actually some folks though that have left the company and not sometimes be as successful in a new company that might even be, let's say, it's a robotics company or something like that. The reason being is also the aggregate culture is something we've also focused on a lot.

And it's something that is talked a lot about in Silicon Valley, but often the reason it's not implemented well ... It's kind of like, why doesn't every founding team do a good fundraise? Really hard to pinpoint. Is it a bad idea? Are they bad communicators? Were they literally entering the market in a bad time? Did they mis-price? Did they not have the right brands? Did they not have the right traction? There's many reasons that are the origin of why a fundraise isn't successful.

There's many origins of why a culture is not good, but when it is good, it's apparent. And I think we've done a lot to make a really strong culture. So, even the people who come in, we're just maximising what their potential is within the company. Some people call us a barrier, a bridge water, I've heard that as kind of a missive. So, it's an intense culture. It's not a work-optional culture. I mean, on the spectrum of Google to working for Elon at X, we're more on the Elon, X, we're not anywhere near there, but we're more towards that than being like Google. And even though we've recruited so many people, we've recruited hundreds of people out of Google, but we're not like Google in that way.

We're much more of a intense fighting company. And that culture then ... And it works really well in our heavily competitive field, because we're a global company. So, our competitors come from all over the world, right? And so, we have to play to that.

Brett: How old was the company when you launched your second product?

Qasar: A year. Under a year.

Brett: Do you think that's one of the reasons ... Is there something causal there where you just developed the muscle so early on, you didn't wake up at year five and say, "Okay, we're ready to launch our second company"?

Qasar: The second product, yeah. Yeah. I think I would do that again. That is the right move. We did it out of a practical reason that the first product that we were building had covered so much space that the customers were still paying for a much richer product. So, our ability to build fast in those early years is really, really important. And so, we had built a mass of a product which became our second product, that we could actually charge for it as a separate, distinct product. And it's kind of like an amoeba that's just kind of a cell that splits, and then you have your second product. And that kind of blobbing was the early product. And at some point you just have that muscle and then you're like, that's a new area.

I talk about an onboarding for new employees. Amazon isn't a great company because it's really sharpened shipping books. The books thing is long in its past. Nobody talks about their ability to ship books, but that's where the company started and that's the core, original, embryonic, single-cell organism and then that ultimately it implodes to AWS and all the other product lines they're in. So, we very much intentionally were going down that path.

I think as a founder, I would try to do that. It's not easy though, because you have limited resources, so you're trying to run and if the first product isn't succeeding, the natural reaction is going to be, why are we splitting the six engineers that we have on two products? On the first product, everyone go on the first product. So, you have to build fast and you have to build the right thing and it has to get traction, and then you can invest in a second product.

Brett: When you were talking to customers in the early days, were they just building all this stuff from scratch themselves? Like, there wasn't a true competitive set and you were creating this new thing for them to buy?

Qasar: Yeah, that's part of it. There were competitors. There were a bunch of sim companies at the time and north of five, I don't think any of them exist. I mean, if they exist, they exist in name only, they just are kind of zombie companies.

Yeah. They had options. And I think we did a good job at winning all those deals. And so, why is that? We had the right products and we would turn around feature requests fast, fast, fast. So, it was like just impress the customer. It's like all the blocking and tackling build the great product company.

Brett: When you were talking to early customers and you were explaining and demoing the product, did they immediately get it and they wanted it and there was pull, or it didn't feel like that in those first year or two?

Qasar: They already knew they needed tools to build these autonomy products. If you're coming out of a Waymo, or a Tesla, or somewhere, you're like, "I had all these tools, now I got to rebuild all those tools." And Mark Andreessen, when he was funding the company in that first round, he said, "You guys build all these tools. That might be as difficult to do than doing the autonomy thing itself. Why wouldn't you just do self-driving? Because the tools are as hard to build as the self-driving thing. And it's like, the reality is we can get paid for the tools, we can get paid for the self-driving thing." And that turned out to be good. And again, paying is not only dollars, it's also feedback.

Brett: What about this market opportunity and the way that you've run the company has allowed it to not be massively cash consumptive?

Qasar: I mean, I think number one, where the Valley is really perturbed on compensation is historically the right way to incentivize in startups was low cash, high equity, and get rich through the growth of the stock. Somehow, because of large fundraisers, which really come from lots of funds existing, which has a downstream impact on valuations increasing and round sizes increasing, founders have just a lot more cash on their hand. And so, what they do is they turn around now ... And you can just look on levels, FYI, you get paid more to go to a startup than you do at Google or Facebook, and those companies generate billions in cashflow a month. So, you wonder why all these companies raise money and are never profitable, it's because they actually have a really bad compensation strategy.

And so, how do we, in a very competitive ecosystem, play against that? Our stock price has grown. We recently did an exercise, vast majority of our employees are on the 99th percentile of compensation, but they're not there from their first offer. They're there because the stock price grew. And that's the right way to do it, right? That way you get stock while it's cheap, you contribute to it, the company gets better and then you get rich over it.

Instead of what the expectation normally now is, "Pay me for that growth upfront." And the founders are like, "Well, yeah, I raised $150 million, I'm going to pay." I bet you if you did this simple exercise of the top 10 most compensated people in a company, you could see which company's going to be successful, which one's not, because there's some companies in their top 10 employees or their top 50 employees, I'm positive a bunch of these big AI companies, just their top 10 folks are over 50 million in compensation, just 10 employees.

Same thing as like, you're making 150 million in ARR, 200 million ARR, just your 10 people are consuming a lion's share of that. And I think it might be even worse, as in companies aren't making any revenue and their top 10, top 20 employees get egregious returns. And so, then the little bit of the fraud that's happening in Silicon Valley, which people don't often don't talk about is goal is raise big rounds, take some secondary, and YOLO. And if the company goes to zero or the company has a big down run on the future, you quietly step out of the CEO role and you took 10, 20, 30, $50 million in secondary.

And in any other industry, if we're working in real estate, and you gave me $100 million to build a skyscraper, or you gave me a billion dollars to build a skyscraper, at the end of it, I liquidated 10 of it for me and my staff, or 20 of the million, me and my staff, and the skyscraper was never even attempted to be built, you would be arrested for fraud. Like, you literally raised money, paid yourselves, and you didn't even buy property for the skyscraper you were supposed to build. You, quote, unquote, "lied to investors."

In our ecosystem, what you can easily do is you can just say, "Well, we had these ideas, they just didn't work out." And so, I'm not saying that it's like we need to send the SEC here into Silicon Valley and start knocking on doors. It's just that the incentives are not there, in many ways, to build actually a functioning business. They're just not. And so, we tried to build a functioning business. That's the reality.

The other big thing is, is a lot of times, folks, I alluded to researchers early on, a lot of times ... Forget research, a lot of times people who are managing these companies which are worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, don't have that experience. And this is part of the Silicon Valley way, the Steve Jobs at 19 starting Apple, but now the ecosystem is way more mature and actually having some experience might be relevant. I don't think you can go back to the '90s where it's the professional CEO who comes in and fires the engineer, but there are right ways and wrong ways, and it's just tough. There's no simple couple of lines you can say that makes a great company or makes a company fail. For us, we kept that in focus, make this a viable business and it's kind of worked out. There's a parallel universe, Applied Intuition doesn't work out, and we're not even on this podcast. So, you can't over-extrapolate on one person's views because I'm just so over-nexing on my view of the world.

Brett: In the early days, did that just translate to cash comp was much lower than most other companies, and thus, burn was much lower?

Qasar: That's a part of it, for sure. And just like, we didn't waste money. Also, compensation is only a part of the formula. On the low end it's maybe 50%. High end, it's maybe 70%, depending on software, hardware, a mix of company, et cetera. But it's not the only thing. How you do business trips, how you pay for office ... I mean, we in this office pay an X amount for rent per square foot. There's a very well-funded, high-growth company across the street that pays 2X, literally two times the per square foot. I know the founder, it's a late-stage company. I called him and I said, Dude, you're screwing up the local real estate market by not negotiating here. It's like it's actually way cheaper, because the landlords are talking to each other." And he said, "Ah, this is well below the top 100 things I care about. Who cares if I pay a little extra on a building in Mountain View?"

And so, it's just like that's a prioritisation as well, right? It's not a simple silver bullet, but we are cheap. It's one of our core values. Be cost conscious. It's one of our core values. Remember, business, revenue, expenses, profits. We talked about the revenues. We keep an eye on the expenses, and we've got profits on the other end. I think a lot of companies just don't, they don't really think about the profits or revenue, they don't really think about the costs. And they're like, "We're going to build great technology. It'll work out." And sometimes it really does, in incredible ways. Amazon, Tesla. Sometimes it doesn't. So, it's like you have to find out what your market is and your products are.

If we had three super well-funded competitors, you bet your bottom dollar we're not a profitable company. We also, early in days, even these podcasts and stuff like that, I just didn't go on a lot of them. I didn't want to reveal our strategy and our secrets. And now, we have enough momentum and we do it for recruiting and all these other ... Brand building. My marketing people tell me to do these things. And historically, we just didn't.

Brett: You said there were other companies doing something similar, but what were you figuring out or what was the reason their weren't 70 YC companies doing the identical thing? Talk more about that, because I think a lot of the general idea that competition doesn't matter, just focus on the customer, I think is quite misguided.

Qasar: That was the case in 2005 and 2010 when it's exotic to build a company. Now we're in the industrial age of venture capital. There's a VC who's a vice president. We are when the Rockefellers were in the White House. We are when the Carnegies ... Silicon Valley has become this institution which runs the country in a very, very real way. And so that means, which you're exactly saying, many more startups, many more dollars, and many more competitors.

So, even from 2016, that's a different ... Here in 2025. So, we didn't know anything more, I feel like, than our competitors. And I feel like some of our competitors are actually smarter and better than us. And the reason we survived, I think, is we worked more, we worked better, and then we got our products built faster and took the feedback more correctly. And then we got luck. We mastered some of that luck.

And it's like one of these ecosystems ... This being venture-backed Silicon Valley companies, one of these ecosystems, when you get just a little ahead, if you keep it, you can become the number one player. I mean, you look at in the code completion universe of Cursor, we did a whole internal evaluation with hundreds and hundreds of engineers of all the products that are available. And Peter, my co-founder, in an all-hands, I don't know, six, nine months ago, whenever, when we ultimately concluded that we as a company are going to use Cursor, I said, "Okay, we evaluated all these companies. These are the pros and cons, et cetera."

And I asked, "Well, I just hear Cursor from everybody. Is it the really best product or is it incrementally better?" And our head of infra and our CTO are like, "Definitely, incrementally better, but incrementally enough where we're going to pick it." So, then it's like, but that compounds, right? That's how Cursor becomes this juggernaut over time.

So, if we had two or three really aggressive competitors, I'm not optimising for profits or even cash ... I'm going to be like, "Hey, my edge is, I know all these VCs and we're going to raise another 500 million because we have some traction." So, it's like you have to play within the bounds of the game that you are playing and who you are. We were fortunate enough to play in a game where, by staying quiet in that era, we learned more about our competitors than they learned about us. And I mean, maybe over exaggerating that. Really, we're learning a lot from our customers and we're just taking that feedback really to heart.

Brett: What did that look like in the first year, when you say that? Obviously, quantity of hour, you are busting your ass harder than anyone else.

Qasar: We all live together. I mean, we have a house. We had a house and I have a family, so I'm not living there. My co-founder is, and five of our early employees. That just gave us an extra turn. Literally, the first year was we were all in the house. And then we ultimately left there because we got to the size where we couldn't all work in the living room. Four people lived there and then the whole company would meet there.

And then hilariously, the neighbours started ... Literally one guy was walking into the house one day, it was in a cul-de-sac, and he says, "You guys running a company out of there?" And I was like, "Ah, it's just some friends working from home." And suddenly we all got a notice on our door the next day. It was like, "This is not a zone for..." Because they probably looked in the window, there's all these computers. And so that was helpful. I mean, it's so many things. I mean, I think we worked on the right things. It wasn't just raw hours. We worked on the right things.

Brett: Was there anything that did have a disproportionate advantage, where looking back there were a couple critical things that you got right? Or, was it just hundreds of little correct things?

Qasar: Peter's father and grandfather work in automotive. I went to the General Motors Institute. I mean, the pithy thing is, is we forgot more about the car business than a lot of people have learned, in this time we've been around. Peter has this line about how every dinner conversation growing up from middle school to when he went to U of M, to ultimately become an automotive engineer, about his father who was a chief engineer, was about how cars are made, what happened at the plant, how do you even catch up to that? I mean, literally how do you catch up to that?

And Peter, one of the reasons also I co-founded the company with him, I remember, I was at Google once and there was something about some sensor, we work on Google Maps, and it was like some sensor we were putting on the Street View car. And I asked him question, and to a group, and he was like, "Oh, the spec is like this, but it's not that." And I was like, "How do you know that?" And he laughed and he goes, "Just incidentally, I read the spec over the weekend." I was like, the guy enjoys reading hardware specs as a software engineer on Google Maps. And so, all that stuff plays into us, and we know the markets, got the right people, the right products, we know the market. Those are the big, big things.

And then, we had great investors around the table. You can't understate that having $10 million and Mark Andreessen on your board as the starting point didn't help the company, because it's like asking LeBron James, "Why do you think..." Well, the first thing he should really answer was, "Well, I was," whatever, "6'6", and that is a huge advantage."

Brett: Does it make you think that the sort of broad topic of domain experiences is somewhat undervalued in Silicon Valley? That there actually is goodness that comes if you know a space backwards and forwards?

Qasar: Today it is, because there's, again, the Valley is different today in 2025 than it is ever before, because now there's no idea ... I mean, you can go to an individual YC demo day and you'll see three companies doing the same idea. So, it's a true advantage because no one can get that fast to get to that knowledge.

I think broadly speaking, like if you worked in a hospital group and you worked on software in a hospital, you're going to know more if you're selling software to hospitals. Now, let's say you did that for seven years. I was in the automotive engineering for seven years, before I ever came to the Valley. You just learn a lot. You just learn a lot about the innards of this company. And we could do a five-hour podcast on automotive. I mean, there are thousands of YouTube channels on automotive. I mean, it is its own universe, and that's not trucking and defence and construction and mining. We play in all of those in a real way.

And so, what do we do then? We pattern match. We're like, "If we're going to get into defence, we got to find people who are like us in defence, whose dad and grandfather were in the military and who work at the DoD." Then we do trucking, same thing. It's like you start pattern matching to what worked in automotive. And today, that's how we built a diversified business. Also, it's not random that I lived in Japan, I lived in Germany. That's the automotive industries other global epicentres. That helps. It's relevant. I meet customers there and I have a sense of relationship to them because it's like, I actually lived here before, and they appreciate that. All those things, I think, helped at the beginning. That I think you can call it domain expertise, broadly speaking, but absolutely.

Brett: So, just to wrap up, we always like to end with the question of who's the person that's had the biggest impact on you in this founder role? And what is the thing that they imparted on you that's still something that you lean on or come back to, or is a part of the way you see the world or think about building the company?

Qasar: Yeah. I mean, I read a lot and so a lot of those influences are not people that I've ever met. Andy Grove's Only the Paranoid Survive, or more accurately for our company, High Output Management, it's kind of like the book we use to train our managers. All those are positive.

I think we take a lot of ... Honestly, we're Googlers, so we just learned a lot from Google, Larry and Sergey, and the senior managers, senior executives there. I haven't worked with Sam in many years, Sam Altman. So, I talk to him, obviously, our companies are working on things together. But working with Sam, I learned a lot from Sam in the way he thinks about technology and people. From him specifically, Sam is particularly good at understanding people. I mean, he is an incredible people person, and that's under-emphasised, he really does understand people really well.

I mean, Mark Andreessen, Paul Graham, I mean, Hemant, our Series B lead, Elad Gill, old friend, and Bilal, maybe our most impactful investor. I mean, I really liked Bilal at Lux. Now he has his own fund called Red Glass. So, there's a lot of people, right? You can actually look at all those people and they all have actually a pretty consistent, let's say, through line is they're all practitioners. I think every one of those people are founders. Andy Grove technically wasn't a founder, but also, it is relevant to my thing.

Brett: Cool. Good place to end. Thank you so much for the conversation.

Qasar: Yeah. Thanks for having me.