"Kevin Hale welcome to the podcast hi Craig you are running startup school this year me and adora okay are hosting and the main instructors for start school so many people know about startup school we'..."

"mm-hmm because the founders in start school are so different than what I think a lot of people think a YC company is so more numbers there are you um 83 percent of people who started doing start at sc..."

"for example a pivot or evaluate like which of the ideas is worth spending time on the other thing we did was for all these single founders we realized there's like holy crap it's like over six thousan..."

"these international people last year we did the tapings weekly at our office and we invited people to come and attend the live tapings people are flying from all over the world it was incredibly popul..."

"matching program for the group session so you're matched with people based on your time zone your level of progress you're sort of preferences that you put into the software etc so Kyle Corbett he's t..."

"and just to clarify for people listening and watching we always put all this content on YouTube it's not paywall that's not behind anything absolutely yeah so we believe and the thing is like I actual..."

"a really nice difference because some lectures I felt like for companies who were really early they're just like I'm so far away from even thinking about this stuff yeah and so like to me I was like o..."

"down the 26th yeah right cool so let's get do some relevant and important advice okay we have a bunch of office hours questions for you great many of them I think for whatever reason maybe it's the mo..."

"difference one is that the people building the product like got all this awesome feedback on like how to improve it you also have the right sort of feedback loop where it's just like ah I'm tired of g..."

"Photoshop which i think is really brilliant intuitive thing and so for us and we've we tried to do that in a lot of other places and a lot of that had to do with like just helping discover certain fun..."

"don't realize like how important it is to get that were telling and that natural feeling right mm-hmm they just think like oh I just sees someone else has this force walk through we should just do thi..."

"great like user experience and most user experience features like a lot of people like to be forward on them especially designers it's like it's really beautiful it's really easy to use intuitive and ..."

"really really difficult so one thing is like we changed the level response matsuda you could build form really quickly the other thing we did on top of that was build an interface that was like simple..."

"so I think we got into YC for winter 2006 we rubbed the first lines of code in January of that year we launched an interface demo in early February meaning a video screen work no no no it was like an ..."

"had an audience of huge you know hundreds of thousands of people who followed them before they launch and so when they got started they were not starting from zero mm-hmm and they their piece of advic..."

"multiple years about two years and so when we launched this prototype we launched it on the blog hey we've you know we've taken all these skills and we're starting to build a company we're building th..."

"early pop did you guys have any interesting referral mechanisms or Regis word-of-mouth um so when we finally launched of wufu has by its very nature could spread itself so what we had his arm we had a..."

"like we're satisfied with customer sort to help them deal with whatever sort of will weird features and I think it was the design of it because it was so strange like it's a very casual app for someth..."

"screen goes so far especially in the early days uh definitely I think definitely for sticking out yeah because if someone's evaluating a bunch of different tools then it's like Oh what are you gonna d..."

"friendliness mm-hmm like it's like oh I'm here and then while there's a lack of jargon and the help kind of talks to me a way that's very human rather than in a way that like it's like a robot talking..."

"it's really working and it's really pivot we've got a lecture for you as well for us we actually pit like back in the day you could pitch multiple ideas it wasn't like a separate question for what oth..."

"and then this other one was not actually woohoo the way we described it we called it a new type of content manager with something we called reversible forms so the idea was that like oh you know the f..."

"come here to get help with that and then actually we're able to use that information that relationship with those founders during start-up school to actually say like hey yeah we want to take you in a..."

"well thought out and told really well to people that's enough to get people excited because like what I am as an investor is trying to figure out is like can I imagine a world where this team with thi..."

"so to me entering a tedious boring space is about mindset about like what's your mission and the best advice I've got I'd heard about this it actually comes from Ben chestnut he's the founder of MailC..."

"because like everything in it was something we're like oh I put some attention to detail and at a fundamental level it just worked right yeah geez proms are also like usually huge markets there so lik..."

"how they think about stuff and so like I get excited about it yeah let's just I mean just having a customer driven mindset makes a huge difference all right so shifting a little bit to slightly later ..."

"people with searching that way there's no need to buy an ad for that and it was one of the things that was a trade off like what do we want from the culture of our company I got to choose based on our..."

"of it was reinforcing well so yeah I was gonna say just trying to get back to the question yeah when do you know if you've achieved product my office so as a result I feel like there's never really be..."

"it was controlled yeah so to me it's like it's just different like there's an argument that you make is the path that we have and that I have to talk to companies about this like you might have a grow..."

"extra equity many people who might have that be a path they're like oh I gave up all this I clean it out all this you know and and then I increase my burn that like I don't have a chance to go back de..."

"and so when that happens it's usually a tragedy almost always a tragedy that happens and so this was why I'd like our biggest advice that's kind of ignored is treat every fund raised as if it's your l..."

"had a little addition to this question okay which was on the other hand how do you know if your product just isn't even noticed yet and so I mean I think you could lump this into the category of like ..."

"I would recommend is that you want like when you start getting down to nine months yeah of runway you should start seriously asking yourself how about like what would have to change definitively for m..."

"time it's like well if we get everyone in America we're gonna be a total hit so you shouldn't do that I actually think you always want to do this bottom-up calculation and then for consumer apps it's ..."

"success in startup school so for us so at the end of the program but we have people do is apply to YC YC and then when you apply you're also applying to you get this $15,000 equity free grant so the m..."

"yeah and I would like to think that like if you're thinking about your startup and for most people that I know who think about their serve it's like non-stop this should be an easy thing to do the rea..."

"that's number one number two participate in the group sessions so like every week we're gonna match you up with six to eight other people on Thursday evenings is kind of what we figured out was the id..."

"its own and it's so exciting and I do such a good job that people are attracted to me last question a high percentage of these people are solo founders say they are looking for a co-founder what would..."

"and so the dating is super important I think founders single founders are unsuccessful when they are kind of desperate about it yep that's the same problem in normal dating yes actually the second thi..."