y.c. had gotten big. i was never suited to it. >> you would get your brain back. did you get your brain back? >> yeah. i had, this afternoon, the best conversation i've ever had. i had lunch with patrick collison. 100% was about ambitious plans. that is like the best possible office hours. >> how involved are you, jessica? >> i'm still very much involved i'm doing all of the same things i used to do. i miss working with paul but i also love working with sam. >> he was the founder of one of your first companies. when you stepped down, there were people who said he is not cut out to be you. >> it is a good thing. i was not cut out to run something as big as y combinator is now. >> is sam going to be better? >> they're going to be different. sam brings a lot of things to the table that neither of us had. which is this amazing amount of energy and patience that is needed to broker deals with investors. y combinator is doing a lot of different things. >> i want to talk about each of you and where you came from. where you grew up, your parents. >> my family came here fr

what do you consider the most successful y.c. companies?> it is pretty much the ones with the highest evaluations. airbnb, dropbox and stripe. >> did you know early on they were going to be hits? >> we knew the founders were good. >> what was it about them? >> different things. different things about the two of them. in drew's case, he was the guy who could write this software. dropbox suceeded by solving an almost impossibly hard problem. airbnb is different. it is this mass movement where people are staying in people's house worldwide. >> we were skeptical and i remember thinking we don't remember what the idea is. these founders are awesome. we're funding them. >> patrick from stripe, i have known him since he was 14. back when he was a high school kid in ireland. he used to email questions about programming language, and i had no idea he was a kid. >> now these companies are worth billions of dollars, if you look back, would they have sold? >> if someone came along with a big enough offer at the right moment, they would have taken it. w

y.c. was an instance of this. >> how did you come up with the y combinator. >> the original name was cambridge seed. >> we were in cambridge. >> the y combinator is a trick, which is a formal expression to a math concept. >> how did you decide to work together? you were not married yet? that is a big decision. >> we were only dating for a year. ♪ >> there are myths about so many of the great companies, start-ups, founders that are boiled down into legends and what is the myth of y combinator and what is the reality? >> people don't realize how much we were not interested in making money. of all these people, all these forums, all self-serving, we weren't trying to make money. >> it was an experiment to see if these new ideas could work. >> a lot of people think why y combinator. >> there is a myth. >> you call jessica the secret weapon. >> nothing has happened that jessica did not like put her seal of approval on. she has veto over everything. >> first time you guys have been interviewed t