Advice from YCombinator

Last summer I went through YCombinator. Every Tuesday for 12 weeks, all the founders meet and have group office hours, watch a presentation by one of the partners, and see a talk or panel by a famous speaker or set of founders. During all of the presentations by partners and visiting speakers, I took copious notes. Ed Catmull was so engaging that I covered three 9x12 pages, and circled or underlined every single note because they were all so profound.

All of the talks are off the record, meaning we can't share anything publicly in order to protect privacy and make sure that speakers and founders have a safe space to talk about ideas and opinions. However, YC did allow me to share the advice that the partners gave us at the beginning and end of the summer. For anyone interested in starting a company, doing YC, or learning more about the experience, here is a window into the advice you get from YC during the program.

• Stay Healthy
• Check-in with your co-founder
• Keep things simple
• Stay moral
• Action over inaction
• Focus on the MVP
• Build the business you want
• Don't be an asshole
• Growth is about retention, not acquisition
• Focus, focus, focus
• Do less
• Do almost nothing
• Care about what you're doing, do what you care about
• Be the standard bearer for your company
• Have fun!
• Filter all advice

Michael

• Pitch at the moment of highest leverage for your next fundraise
• Don't spend much, and keep your team small

Geoff

• The average time to fundraise is weeks, not days
• Stay calm, stay stoic
• Don't listen to the reasons why VCs say no

Sam

• Stay focused, stay calibrated
• Care about your impact on customers
• It never gets easier
• It's manageable if you look at a day or a week at a time
• Don't get tempted by conferences and press
• There are no shortcuts
• This is a decades-long grind
• Keep talking to VCs and your other batch mates
• Stay positive!! It takes a long time, and it's really hard.
• If it feels fun, be suspicious

Justin

• It's tempting to spend money to solve your problems
• Keep getting your hands dirty and learning the business
• You don't need to do anything except build your business and sell to customers
• Only do things that help you with the iterative product cycle

Qasar

• Manage your emotions
• Don't put your feelings on other people
• You are the standard bearer for the company

PB

• YC does not end today; you can still book office hours
• Keep in touch
• When companies are sick, they're like an animal; they go off on their own and die
• Long updates = no progress; Stripe only sent growth numbers every month
• Minimize expenses, maximize output
• Track your burn rate
• 95% of companies fail
• Write your own post-mortem

NOTE: Best PB moment of the summer was during pitch practice when he turned around a said to the group: “Two of you will be worth more than all of the rest combined, and most of you will die.”

Tim

• Be a good alumni

Jared

• Keep your company alive so you can go to camp YC
• Stay really connected
• You go through a really horrible process together and come out the other side with really deep relationships
• Don't delude yourself about what is work and what is not

• Fail at that position first
• You will probably fire 50% of the people you hire
• Only hire when the need is desperate; don't hire ahead of need
• When things work (with external validation), hire quickly and well
• Come up with hundreds of names for a position
• Hiring engineers is insanely hard