I'm cat one of the partners at YC and I'm gonna bring on a bunch of the partners with me today to help answer some of the questions that you sent us thanks for sending all the questions let's bring everyone out all right what's up everyone introduce themselves really quick so let's go down the line we'll start with adora oh hey I'm adora I'm time already Michael I'm Dalton I'm Kirsty and so I'm we just took all of your
questions and are going to probably get through hopefully about ten and then if there's any that we can't get to today we'll try to answer them online for you and but let's start with if you know you want to eventually start a startup when should you do it what's the best timing and how do you navigate the trade-off between becoming a domain expert and like just doing it now if you want to start and you have an
idea you I think you should just start now instead of trying to figure out the trade-offs I think when you start and even if you're not an expert you should you know be on your way to becoming the domain expert and you can do a lot by you know going in the field and doing the actual job itself or whatever research you need to do to make yourself a demand expert but you know in one or
two years time you better be the domain expert in that field yeah I'd add to that if you don't have an idea I thought Marc Andreessen advice was really good go join you know hot startup for a couple of years get an idea of what a well-run startup looks like so when you do have your idea you're kind of ahead of the game I'm so what is a good process for discovering and like vetting new ideas that might be worth building I
always tell founders two things one look in their lives and look in the lives of their family in their community and their work and find problems that interest them and the other thing I say is think about what you want the first line of your Wikipedia article to be because you know every startup has the potential to be your life's work so you know don't think about warm-up startups
think about going on doing your life's work solving a problem in the world you you care about yeah I think sometimes people come up with ideas that seem impressive to other people you want you know you're gonna tell us more about your startup idea you try really hard to make it sound fancy and to use buzzwords and I think a better way to do that instead of that is to find something that you're deeply passionate about and
you can't stop thinking about and it may not it may not actually sound impressive to anyone right you're there's a good chance that when you try to tell people about the thing you're actually excited about it sounds stupid and they laugh at you and say it's a bad idea if your only criteria is what impresses other people or impresses authority figures that's you know you can even go way off track following that criteria so this segues
into another question that came up which is like how do you choose between an idea that you love that you're super passionate about but it might be impossible to monetize wait you know how do you choose between that and a product that has like great revenue potential how do you know that you should work for YC we would love to know that to do one of the things that YC has emphasized over and over again is how
hard it is to be a solo founder so there's a question um you know do you have any advice for solo founders or how did uh Sh'ma for example convince YC to accept gobble with what was it in her application that convinced you I think all things equal it's better to have a co-founder but quite frankly you know YC we've accepted many companies with solo founders and I think then you're gonna have to you know you just
have to come with us with something that's very unique to you so I'm not sure exactly what Ishmael had in her application but if you have traction if you have some really unique insights on how you can acquire users retain users all these things and you just know your and you come across as very competent you know more than confident then we would definitely would like to talk to you and I think the other thing
to bear in mind is that startups are hard for two founders for three founders for everybody and so coming in as a single Cove single founder you have to be pretty much superhuman because you have to do everything you know you either are out selling or you're out building the product or you're out fundraising and so you have to be able to combine all of those things whereas if you have a co-founder and one of you
is great at sell at sales and one of you is very technical there's more of an obvious split there so you know there is definitely a superhuman element to being a single founder yeah I'd also add to that that that starting a company is an emotional roller coaster and it's really hard to do by yourself it's always nice when there's someone else next to you that feels the same pain right that you
can commiserate with because it takes that to kind of get through some pretty tough times if you're in a room alone kind of kind of absorbing all the pain yourself it can be overwhelming sometimes specifically I remember and when Oshima came through YC and when she'd applied and I remember that we just said throughout all of us had like lumen never gives up like Sushma will never give up it was probably like keep on
fighting and until this works and I think we'd seen you know she'd already been working on gobble for a number of years before she'd applied and it was clear that this was something that she was very passionate about and that she was just gonna keep working on it like the story was similar to you know you have to be a cockroach it reminded a lot of people I think of how the Airbnb z-- almost failed you know three times
before they they actually got things up and running and so one question maybe for you Kirstie is what are some tools or services that you would recommend for founders who are just starting yeah there's loads of things out there to help and so as some background I work on more of the financial and operational side with with startups and so I often get asked this question and there's there's so much out there that can help
with that so from right from the very start when you're incorporating your your company the services like Clerke that can help you do that that creates very standard paperwork that all the YC startups use there are services like gusto that you can use to help you run payroll properly and make sure that you're withholding and paying taxes over there services like ironclad which is which helps you
store all your NDA's and sales contracts all in the same place so there's loads of resources out there to help you and I think it's it's really important that those are the things that you shouldn't be trying to reinvent the wheel you know use all your brainpower to figure out your product and to figure out how you're going to make your company grow with all of these other things that's
not going to make your company a success so just do the basic simple vanilla option and move on to other things so on that note is there anything that you find really early-stage founders wasting a lot of time on that you wish they would just like automate and move on or just or they're there any specific things that you wish founders would spend less time on early on so for me it's it's things like they try to come
up with funky voting structures or weird vesting schedules or they're trying to protect themselves from some unknown company that's going to come in and steal all their ideas and you know those kind of things you just don't need to worry about in the early days just keep it all simple and concentrate on everything else because as you start to grow if other things come up and could need to be fixed you
can afford to pay lawyers at that points and they can help you fix them I that being secretive and trying to protect your idea sometimes I meet founders who think they have this like secret idea and the idea is super valuable if they tell anyone they'll create a hundred copycats and in fact the the more common problem as a start-up is that you'll tell your idea to a hundred people and all them will kind of shrug their shoulders to be like
yeah whatever and so as a start-up in most cases you should in most cases you should be like telling your idea to literally anyone who will sit and listen because they might have some valuable piece of feedback do you've an thoughts on how people should think about competition beyond that I think you should be highly aware of it and what they're doing and sometimes they are doing some things right
and when they are failing you shouldn't assume you know that they're incompetent they're probably really smart people in fact they came with the same ideas you did so you know I think again just be aware of what they're doing track what they're doing but don't follow them and don't assume that when they do something wrong with that that's a bad idea you know there's a lot that goes into execution and and sometimes you know a
good idea is just badly executed and so yeah just follow but don't copy necessarily so is it more important to move fast or perfect your product talk to us a little bit about perfection so I'll take a crack at that sometimes when we do office hours founders ask us these binary questions like you know should we grow really fast or should we make a lot of money or like should I hire a hundred people or should you know
and and the point is they want us to give them an answer like it's like this binary thing and what's so frustrating is 99.9% in time when we're in office hours and founders are pushing us for a binary answer the answer is like well you know both you know people people would say well should I be focusing on the product or growing faster and it's like well both that's and unfortunately that is how most of life
is is a lot of gray area and you're gonna have to you're gonna have to do the impossible and so that particular question we're all chuckling because we're used to hearing that sort of thing and whenever we hear that it's someone kind of asking for permission to not work on the thing they don't want to work on right and and unless you know unless I'm really feeling sorry for them usually I don't give them permission to
you know know oh don't worry don't work on the product who cares if your product is good just keep growing you know that's I think that's what they want to hear and so if you find yourself these kinds of dichotomies right if you're like should I be working on revenue or should I be doing what I'm passionate about you know if you if you're trapped in these sorts of chains of thought I think it's always
good to try to zoom out and and and realize that life is not black-and-white and these are not usually zero-sum decisions and that if your get to the root of what you're concerned about or where you're trying to solve for and realize that you kind of you always have to do both let me add one thing if you have a retention problem with your product if only ten percent of your people are returning on a monthly basis don't spend
a lot of time on PR right so don't try to grow super fast if people aren't sticking around focus on focus on the product but focus on your real problem which is retention before you go try to tell the world very similarly the one one rule I tell a lot of people is like everyone wants to know should I keep growing fast or you know should I work on the product and make it really good it's I think you
know in the early days acquiring users is shows that this is something people want you should continue to do that but you should always have this metric where or this like a threshold usually something like retention or it's MPs or something and continue growing fast but once it gets below a certain point like stop and really focus on the product and why people are not retaining why the NPS is so low and don't even focus on growth
at all so for a start-up that's recently launched what would you consider a good growth rate i when I talked to startups and try to give them a rule of thumb around growth what I try to tell them is like what I look for when I read a YC application and basically what I look for is how long have you been working on this project and am i impressed with what you've done and so the growth rate is
very very dependent on a business and different businesses have very different growth rates I still think a better way of thinking about it is that like if you had to be super intellectually honest with yourself about how fast you're moving and how much progress you're getting in the amount of time that you've had to work on this compared to other people that's a good way to kind
of start figuring out Oh am i impressive what am i doing is impressive and I think that like having us reduce that to like seven percent or fifteen scent is like not really gonna be that helpful for you so this might be a good segue to the question like what do you look for when you're reading a YC application and the another question that came up was you know what do you look for when you're interviewing the companies
in reading the applications I look for do they have unique insight on how they're going to acquire customers and they're I mean they're many factors but that's the one thing I look for and then in terms of interview it's how can they communicate their ideas in a you know very brief manner such as I understand it if you send the entire ten minutes of the interview trying to tell us what you do that's really a bad sign
that you don't really understand the product quite yet yeah I think my biggest thing when reading an application or evaluating a founder is to be biased towards people that are action oriented and actually do stuff a very large percentage of people that have startups haven't done anything they haven't made a thing they haven't given the thing to other people and their application is basically asking
for permission from us as authority figures to let them work on their startups so they can quit their job or whatever and on the other hand you have folks like when we talked about earlier that hey I have shipped the service I've given it to real people here's what we figured out here's our website you can click on it we have customers and the more someone the more there's evidence that someone is action-oriented as
opposed to conceptual and their approach to startups that is highly correlated with success across the board and so that'd be my advice to everyone on this like well how do we think about what YC looks at I mean if you have evidence that you've made a thing and given the thing to people and gotten money for the thing that you made that makes your application 10x better than spending more time you know
rewriting your pros to seem a little fancier or something there's all these things people spend a lot of time on their application and actual evidence of action is infinitely better than you know getting in better camera angles or something and in your video you know there's a lot of things like people have all these tricks they try to do and those are much easier just like do your startup and make progress on it
that would be my suggestion I think the other thing that people often ask about this is is they they think we have kind of a checklist that says oh if they have 10% growth and they have revenue and they have this then great therein and that's that's not how it works it's a balance of a number of different things and they learnt a number of different things that we're looking for and so it's very difficult to say you know this
is this is what makes a successful application in terms of concrete things it's much more about can you concisely explain your idea can you can we get to the end of the application and we actually understand what the company is doing which you'd be surprised at how many applications we don't and so is it's much softer things than just being able to say yes I've achieved this specific thing
for me what's helpful is if you don't bury the lead you know we're humans and we have to read literally hundreds of applications so like don't wait for the last question the application to say and we have a hundred and fifty thousand users we're making 2 million dollars in revenue a month and growing 50 percent month-over-month like like let's you can knock that up probably into the like what does my company do it does this
and then I think the second thing is that I think a lot of these things actually service filters like what I would say is like you should apply the only way you know you're gonna get into I see is if you apply and it doesn't cost anything and it's open and it's pretty easy I would say like the software is good so um just apply like the number of founders who tell us that even and then not getting in answering
those questions helps them build their business is so high so you should never hear any of these answers and say oh that means that I shouldn't deploy oh I see even if you think you're a single non technical co-founder with a horrible idea and you haven't quit your job apply and roll the dice you know you don't need to know us you don't need an intro you don't need a warm intro just apply on our website there's a link
not the vast vast vast majority I know the stat off top my head of people we have no contact with whatsoever yeah and 40% I know the startups we funded in the last batch have never had a single touch point with YC like they haven't come to any events they have never exchanged an email with a partner or an alumni and it's and it's kind of cool I mean it's unlike other you know VC funding type
situations where you need the warm intro you have the ability to just apply and it's and it's free and it's open to anyone the thing that I think a lot of us tell a lot of people who are thinking about applying is that the application is very simple the questions are very simple and it's actually a really good way to think about your business it's a good framework and so if even if even if you don't I mean just just fill up the
questions and I think it'll actually help you I'm thinking about your product in business better so a question that always comes up and that came up today is at what point should a company applies or like an optimal time in the lifecycle of a company keep on applying I think I think there's two things here I think people people use this as an excuse to not apply because their company is too early or their company is
too late and they're like oh I can't possibly apply to Y Combinator and that's not true there is no too early and there is no too late we can be helpful to companies at all different stages and you know this this also comes back to the the should you polish your your products a little bit more it it doesn't matter you know we can we can help you at any stage and the other thing to bear
in mind is if you do apply and you're not successful first time around but no problem you know apply again there's no there's no black marks against you for doing that there's no problems with that so just even if you're a little bit early to the first time six months of more working on the company it could totally change things just to put facts on that in the last batch of a hundred companies there was a company that
literally didn't or multiple companies I didn't start writing code until two weeks before their application was submitted there was a company that had a forty million dollar revenue run rate and they and everyone in between and they all got tons of value out of YC so everyone is probably somewhere between those two points and to add a final stat - that question out of the hundred companies in the last batch of YC about
50 of them had previously applied and been rejected and they were being accepted on their second third fourth application so apply by twice it was I was on a panel and with a bunch of alumni and and the question came up from the audience and literally everyone all the alumni on the panel had applied more than once four times or three times interesting and so we're you know getting to the last few minutes so I
kind of wanted to go down the lines and ask is there anything you wish you'd known when you first got we're getting started any particularly helpful advice that you got or would like to pass on or someone can volunteer sure I'll start I wish someone had told me it was as rewarding as it ended up being right I just kind of did it because it sounded like it was interesting and I was passionate about
the idea but looking back on having started several companies it unbelievably rewarding because it's so hard and to get through it and be successful at it on money many different levels you know it just looked back to ed as some of the best experiences of my life I wished someone told me to let go of luck of being in the nitty-gritty so much because when you're starting to especially like for myself I went
through four to three or four years of just nothingness and so I was always the one coding and building the product and then as my company starts scaling up fast I cut I didn't let go that stuff fast enough so I think there's a lot to learn in terms of scaling a company and when you should you know what you should be managing and what priorities should be and yeah I wish I learned that faster I wish I had asked for more help and
when I started my first company I was 21 and I dropped out of college to do it and I never actually had like a real job before so I only had this sort of like dim understanding of how companies actually worked on the inside gleaned maybe from TV shows and all of a sudden I was managing like 30 people and I had no idea how to do it and I actually felt like very isolated and alone and I didn't know who to ask
for for help and I've learned since then that particularly in Silicon Valley people aren't incredibly willing to help even if there's like no even if there isn't anything apparently in it for them they'll just help you just because and so I really wish I just asked like lots of people for help best piece of advice I got was actually this guy named Gideon you yelling at us and telling us that we were stupid
we had got justin.tv profitable and we actually would making a couple million dollars a month I'm not year sorry in profit and we were kind of sitting back and patting ourselves on the back and Gideon said you've built something that's useless it will fade from the internet in the next three years and nothing you've done will ever be known ever again and after we kind of like picked up our egos
we started thinking about new things to build and a couple of them worked out so yeah that's probably the best piece of advice I got like don't rest on your laurels yeah I think my piece of advice is just to watch out for cargo coltan on a lot of the aspects of startup culture that you may or may not agree with I think a lot of people have all these ideas about how they're supposed to act or who they're supposed to go to meetups and
you're supposed to go to this and you're supposed to hang out you're supposed to network and you don't have to do any of that stuff like that's totally not if anything that can be a signal of being distracted from your startup and instead I would suggest the way to think about this is in most jobs in life you have to conform to someone else's you know culture or someone else's company you
get to control every aspect of things if you're designing your own job you get to choose who you work with you get to choose what your work styles like you get to choose your hours you get to choose what you're actually even working on and so you should open your mind to create an entire reality that really serves your needs and your passions and what makes you happy and not this cargo cult ideal if like hey I read on this
blog post that you know 14 of the most successful founders all you know went to Stanford or you know whatever that thing is just write your own damn story right like stop reading all these blog posts about how to be like famous people and like do it your own way and I just that's really my encouragement when I talk to people that are that are sometimes get lost and reading too much advice to remember that this is your
story and you're gonna do it your own way versus just like aping whatever you've read you know in the popular press so that's my advice to you I think my advice is that you know when you hear about people talking about setups all the time they're always killing it they're always growing they're always hiring people and that's actually not reality and so I think you know finding yourself some some trusted
people that you can go to and say things aren't going so well I'm finding this a little bit tough or you know things things aren't quite working how I want them to work and all right you don't have to broadcast that to the entire world but if you have if you have a few people that you can actually talk to about that whether it's other founders or whether it's a couple of your investors or whoever it might be that
can actually really help to take a load off so that you can feel like you're not constantly acting and you're not constantly having to be there I'm the startup founder who where everything's going fantastically well for thank you I think all of us are going to be out in the sunken garden for the reception so if you have any particular questions for us you can come up and just ask us in person and so I wanted to take this
opportunity to give a couple Thank You Saud I wanted to thank all the people that were involved with making this happen all the partners all the staff a huge thank you to Dominique who runs events for YC and Tom who got the Wi-Fi working and Jared who built a lot of the software for us and and Steven and everyone else and then also thank you to all of you for coming it's a huge pleasure to get to meet you and get to
get to hear what you guys are working on a big thank you to the startups who came up here and did office hours today and pitch practice like it takes takes them like a lot of grit a lot of them you know they were all really great sports and so there is a reception right outside until 7:00 at the sunken garden and we will see you there all right thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]