I'm going to switch from talking about my own story to give you my general advice for Founders this is very sort of quick advice um the most important quality you can have is determination I've seen so many smart and talented Founders uh fail because they just couldn't stick with it when things got
tough you can't even imagine what you're going to have to go through if you you know on your way to becoming super successful um you need to be able to withstand rejection um people will think your idea is crazy or they'll think it's lame um investors will say no um reporters won't care and so on three is empathy you need to be able
to talk to your users and really care about their experience that's why it's best if you yourself are a Target user of your product then you can like have a conversation with your users just by thinking um it's true it's true four you need to make something people want a lot um it's not enough if they just want it a little
bit they have to want it enough to actually sign up and to keep coming back and to tell their friends about it even when you're just like this crappy little startup um at the beginning number five is um live cheaply at the beginning if you don't have a lot of money you have to live in a way that buys you more run
way it often takes startups a while to figure out exactly what they should be doing and if you spend too much money you won't have enough time for the necessary Evolution to happen I constantly start see startups that like I think they've almost got it figured out and then they run out of money and they
die um lastly is just focus I can't stress this one enough um it's easy to waste time on the wrong things because in a startup there's always a hundred things you could be doing right um and if you spend time on those other you know 99 instead of the one optimal thing you aren't doing the right thing um so that was just like my super
brief distilled advice for general for Founders um but now I'm going to give you some advice specifically for women and I thought about what advice like I'd give to my own sister if she were starting a startup and so I wrote a draft and then I read what I said and as after it I thought oh my God I should
just toss this part out um I was terrified to say anything because things seem get pretty heated out there on the internet on the topic of women in Tech and I was nervous um so I was really like agonizing over what I should do like do I keep my life simple and avoid controversial stuff or should I really
try to help and like Risk getting flamed on the internet which is like my nightmare um and then literally in the middle of this crisis I got this email from a woman named bura who I've never met and it just like really it hit me I was so appreciative and I don't know if you can read it back there but she thankss me
for this blog post that I wrote about what stops female Founders and she's like thank you for being the finger pointing to the moon and I like I think I teared up I was very touched and so I knew what I had to do okay so in the spirit of sharing prce practical information at this conference I'm going
to risk it and speak candidly okay that's my baby he's five now so Paul took this picture in 2009 and he jokingly refers to it as combining work in life which it was and I have two sons now they're five and two and based on my own experience I'd say it's easier to start a startup before you have kids
okay shocker I didn't have kids when we first started YC and I'm honestly not sure if I would have done it if I had um in the first few years of YC when I was doing like everything I was working like really long hours seven days a week it was all consuming and I just don't know if I could have worked that many hours
with kids even now when there's a great team and there are more people that do things at YC I struggle to manage the balance I mean I love doing both but I struggle in fact just yesterday I was really I was writing this talk and I got so into it that I almost forgot to pick up George from school like I L something
hit me I was like oh my God and I rushed there um it's definitely possible to combine having kids and doing a startup Diane Green and Julia Harts have done it and I hope they'll come out here and give you good advice on how to do it um I'm just telling you if you have a choice it would be a lot easier to do
before kids because I found that um after I had kids I didn't want to work 12 hours a day I wanted to be with them kids pull you in a different direction than a startup does and these two competing forces are very very powerful um so YC has funded women and men with children of all ages including
newborns um and we'll continue to do so um but for your sake if you have an option I'd suggest doing it before kids if you already have kids start the startup but know what you're up against against and try to like Outsource things that aren't directly related to your kids like I mean I use instacart for groceries all all week long