hello my name is Michael Seibel I'm a CEO and partner at Y Combinator before YC I was co-founder of a company called justin.tv that later became twitch in sold to Amazon and another company called Socialcam which sold to Autodesk so one of the most common misconceptions about startups is that you have to have experience at a big company in order to start one there's a little nugget of
truth inside of this misconception certainly getting experience in the working environment gives you access to a whole bunch of new problems problems you might not have considered before and problems that could be the base of what you create as a founder as a new startup however your actual experience day to day working at a big company is often not very useful for creating a startup
first often in a big company you're a extremely extremely small part of a very large machine and so the amount that you can actually learn is less and the pace that you learn is much slower than when creating your own startup where in effect you are the entire team and everything works or doesn't work because of you a second issue which winning a big company is that big companies are
very good at retaining their workers and this is not something that most young people really have any experience in a lot of big companies will give you a signing bonus will give you every six months or every year an additional stock option grant and basically they will structure your comp in such a way that at every point you feel uncomfortable leaving the acouple this by giving you a
lot of services and then you a high salary which it first seems like a great thing but in reality it often causes you to increase the amount of money that you're spending every month you know nicer apartment maybe get a car when you go in nicer vacations so while you were trying to spend this time in a big company to get experienced to create a comfo start-up of your own in fact you
increase the amount of money you are spending you weren't really learning at a fast pace and when you want to leave all of the money that you're leaving on the table motivates you to stay and so in reality it's often the case that working at a big company can be a trap especially if you don't go into the company knowing what your goals are you know if your goal for working a big
company is to save some money to get some experience at a specific technology or to meet a co-founder that's great then go there and do that specifically and don't fall trap to all of the techniques they're gonna get you - they're gonna apply to you in order for you to stay but if you actually don't need to work at a big company if you already have a problem they want to
solve if you already have money in savings if you already have a co-founder then just get started just start building you can't believe the number of YC companies we have funded that do not have a you know blue chip tech company on their resume it's absolutely not required to get into YC it's absolutely not required to be a good tech startup founder thank you for your time you