Research Y Combinator Advice
- It’s much easier to build when you’re optimistic. - YouTube
- Cool people may say everything is bullshit but it is better to be optimistic
- None of your heroes were people complaining
- What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? - YouTube
- The hardest part of management if making sure everyone understands what you understand.
- People do not have the same context you have.
- You can always get better at explaining things clearly and concisely.
- Tech startups live and die by their speed of shipping software. - YouTube
- I was the one business guy on 4 person team, the three devs built everything
- Ideas are a dime a dozen
- More business people need to embrace the idea that great software companies are built by great software engineers.
- Talk about doing things that don’t scale. From Doordash’s YC app in 2013. - YouTube
- We interviewed 100 small business owners to find what they want
- Doordash found that delivery drivers had a lot of time
- We, the software engineers, were also delivery drivers
- Go with what you can get started on most quickly. And get that first user. - YouTube
- How to find what to focus on?
- What can you get started with most quickly?
- What can get you a customer more quickly?
- Get going with something easy
- Forcing yourself to launch with one user
- I see people start an idea and abandon it before they get a single user
- What do you do to help yourself prioritize and focus? - YouTube
- If you have 10 projects, you will only do top 3, actually fuck it just do 1
- A lot of stuff is really a distraction
- People have too much stuff on their TODO list
- WHAT IS YOUR ONE THING
- The most successful startups have technical talent on the founding team. - YouTube
- The best business founders recruit the best technical co founders
- Startups take on the personality of its founders, so work on getting yourself right. - YouTube
- It took years of therapy to learn how to deal with conflict effectively
- Startups end up taking on the personality of their founders
- When you have unexamined demons inside of you, what happens to your startup
- Therapy is good ROI
- Know what you’re worth. - YouTube
- Technical people know your worth.
- Nice people get ripped off the most.
- Use our checklist because you have this amazing skill.
- Business people, when your tech guy leaves, you fucked
- The biggest red flags in YC interviews - YouTube
- Signals that people are not telling the truth
- Signals that the people on the team do not like each other
- People cut corners in their past
- Empathy and knowing the problem you're solving are core to design (and making something people want) - YouTube
- We think of products as machinery, it is really about throwing the best possible party you can.
- What do bad startup ideas have in common? - YouTube
- New Niche Social Networks,
- Why Now?
- What's Different
- These are the questions you should be asking at a late-stage startup. - YouTube
- Do you have product market fit?
- What is user retention like?
- Do users like the product?
- Are we charging as much as we could?
- Answer questions,
- What are the Customers doing?
- Biggest waste of time for startup founders - YouTube
- Spending too much time consuming advice, when you can do the thing
- Biggest mistake first time founders make? - YouTube
- Waiting too long to do the thing
- Actually build the thing and get one user.
- With one customer, you are in the top 10%
- Simply caring about customers is how you give your startup a competitive advantage. - YouTube
- People can tell if you care.
- Determination is the most important trait for a startup founder. - YouTube
- Determination > Intelligence
- Ignore the haters, and keep on building cool stuff. - YouTube
- Dropbox is a wrapper on top of S3
- Doesn't matter just create something that people want
- Focus on solving customer problems
- What they forget to mention about "overnight success" is the years of work it took to get there. - YouTube
- You just need to keep launching over and over again
- The Startup is the opposite of a Movie Premiere
- It's all about talking to your users. - YouTube
- People think ideas come up randomly on Sunday or a late night coding session.
- Great founders talks to future customers before they even build something
- Founders keep talking to their customers as well
- Tracy Young on the importance of representation and recognizing unconscious bias. - YouTube
- Making Money and Impact are not the same thing
- Legacy makes you feel good about yourself not money
- There are a stack of people that progress society and others that don't
- For founders, it's critical to be honest with yourself. - YouTube
- You gotta bridge reality and your dream world
- Dealing with not knowing is a skill
- Hire independent thinkers to disagree with me
- Experimentation and Criticism is key to sucess
- Don't get caught up in the current fads and "doing what's cool." - YouTube
- If you start a video conference fad during Covid you retarded, you should be thinking about the post covid world
- Beware of startup tarpit ideas. - YouTube
- Tarpit is where you find fossilized remains
- Animals think Tarpit is like water
- The smell of the dead animal attracts more animals
- More animals fall in
- 3 common YC interview mistakes - YouTube
- Founders can not concisely tell them what they are building, lots of rambling
- When founders can't articulate who they are solving this problem for
- Sleek marketing answers people have rehersed
- The secret to better product demos - YouTube
- Great demos focus on the user not the demo
- BAD
- Demo, Dashboard, feel like walking from room to room
- GOOD
- Tell a story about your user
- The product is a prop to solve a problem
- Learning is so much easier when you care about your customers. - YouTube
- Reasons to do YC. - YouTube
- Honest Feedback
- Take Responsibility
- Not get fucked over by investors
- If someone says YC is bad, they need to explain why they are better
- Being accessible is one of the major advantages startups have over big companies. - YouTube
- People like to talk to the founder and the developers
- The "Most Money Raised" game - YouTube
- Lose control of your company
- Burning Money, people who gave it to you
- People think they working for next google
- Makes it harder to pivot
- Change the way you think about launching. - YouTube
- Launch something and no one will care
- Always be shipping
- Launching is something you do continuously
- Your outreach emails should probably pass this test before you hit send. - YouTube
- Outreach emails with template
- Ask yourself would you respond to this email
- Doing these things might feel good, but they won’t derisk your startup. - YouTube
- The collecting of mentors and advisors is a bottomless pit of time suck
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- Talk to customers
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- Build and Launch Product
- How do you prioritize your tasks? - YouTube
- My TODO list comes first, then check email and stuff
- Investors don’t validate your startup — users do. - YouTube
- Some people get rejected over and over
- What are some things you’ve had to unlearn? - YouTube
- Nothing in your job translates to a startup
- How do you structure your schedule to be most productive? - YouTube
- If you program in hour increments you are fucked
- A makers schedule is like an 8 hours of uninterrupted time
- Email can be done in 20 minute increments
- Hedging your bets while starting a startup? - YouTube
- Don't hedge bets
- Be real with yourself and take some risks
- Launch quickly, and iterate. - YouTube
- Don't do 600 user interviews
- You only learn about your user when you put a product in front of them
- Hiring a FAANG engineer won’t miraculously save your startup - YouTube
- Sebastionism
- Don't hire the Google Engineers
- Real vs. Fake progress - YouTube
- IMPORTANT
- Talk to users, build and iterate your product
- Cringe
- Attending Conference
- Focusing on winning awards
- Events
- Optimizing wrong metrics
- Don't startup startup vanity, deliver value
- Could your side project become a startup? - YouTube
- Create a product that a few people love rather than one a lot of people are indifferent towards
- Did you know that these companies had more than one founder? - YouTube
- Startup founders have to do a lot of… everything. - YouTube
- The Founders should do the shit work
- Be personally accountable for everything
- Growth = Product Market Fit - YouTube
- No other signals really matter
- Beware of fake progress. - YouTube
- KPI
- Do
- Talk to Users
- Iterate the Product
- Fake
- Lots of advisors
- Press announcements
- Pitch competitions
- Twitter activity
- Meeting Famous People
- The best way to have startup ideas is to just notice them organically. - YouTube
- Notice them organically
- Advice
- Become an expert in something valuable
- Work at a startup, become expert in what that startup does
- Build things you find interesting
- Adulting (and running a startup) is hard. - YouTube
- You might have to adult more than the people around you
- My room mates don't do this so why do I have to
- Maybe you need to be better than the people around you
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