How to apply to YC in 2022 and start your startup (with John Coogan)

today we're going to talk about whether you should start a startup and whether you should apply to y combinator spoiler alert the answer is yeah you should because it changed my life and put me in touch with some of my closest friends and collaborators today we're talking to one of them my friend john coogan co-founder of soylent and one of the best tech youtubers today he went through yc himself twice let's get started [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] one of the most common questions i get is hey gary should i start a company if you're a recent grad you're probably wondering if it's safer to join a company like microsoft or take a risk at a startup you might have seen this in one of my older videos but one of my biggest mistakes in my life was saying no to peter thiel when he first invited me to join palantir as their first software engineer but you know what i get it the thing i was always taught at a young age was to go get the steady job for a big tech company it was impossible to think of an alternative when you have a job offer from microsoft here's john's story of when he decided to become the co-founder of soylent i grew up in los angeles i went to school in boston i studied economics at northeastern university and i actually i i like to think i went there because biz stone co-founder of twitter went there and sean fanning co-founder of napster went there but really i don't know probably just a random school that i applied to i don't know if you remember this but my first my first company was a software company and uh yeah of course and i actually pitched it to you yeah yeah at imagine k-12 and at the time it was a much smaller it's like a smaller spin-off of y combinator right imagine k12 has now been absorbed into y combinator that's right but there were some similar partners and they had a little bit of it wasn't a full demo day it was just kind of a show-and-tell uh was it quiz on facebook yes it was it was a it was a quiz app on your phone on your phone you had to authenticate through facebook yeah to meet a competitor right so the idea was you could load up some trivia questions and then you would um be presented with some some multiple choice questions based though so we could kind of programmatically generate the questions then we could compete and see who who won and hopefully we learned something in the process didn't really go well i was still learning to code at the time i remember you coming around and me i'd read your blog and i was like oh that's gary tan but we got to make a good impression and you were very polite and you gave some really good feedback and i mean we asked you a bunch of design questions because that was kind of your specialty at the time yeah great blog so it was just a very funny thing and then you know a year later um something gets going and we got to work together again for people who don't know soylent is people no it's actually food yeah it's actually this idea that maybe you can make personalized food out of the thing you know the things that your body actually needs right yeah but that wasn't the first version of that startup it was actually originally um meow global networks yeah right so it was actually a networking hardware company and they were your housemates yeah exactly so i was living with rob and matt and a couple other guys who were working on a wireless networking technology company it wasn't going anywhere we couldn't get venture capitalists to point to pony up millions of dollars to go install cell phone towers essentially it would be a very very capital intensive business but it was really fun to tinker with the technology so even though it wasn't going anywhere we liked what we were doing and we started getting faced with this problem like we're running out of money we don't want to go get real jobs we want to keep tinkering and what's the best way to do that well if we can make a product that will allow us to eat you know food more efficiently and save money on food which is really the only thing that we're spending money on other than rent which we paid a year in advance and our internet bill we already owned our computers what else do you need when you're building the startup other than just pizza ramen or something to eat exactly so that's where rob starts coming up with this idea for a more efficient food so we could stay healthy because ramen famously not the healthiest if you at least buy it at costco like we were doing it just became kind of a little bit of a mini viral phenomenon in in silicon valley was kind of my first introduction to content marketing because rob was such a powerful writer he would put out these blog posts and they'd be incredibly controversial because they'd go viral because everyone has an opinion about food right everyone wants to say you know i eat food i eat food i have an opinion i know something about it and and so that's how we just got so much attention and then of course we built the business and developed i have to admit um you know i was partner at y combinator at the time and rob came by and said he was working on this and i was like this is super interesting like you know this probably you know if people are really resonating with it that's great but you got to change the name yeah which was terrible terrible advice and that was actually a really big lesson for me to realize that you know eight or nine out of ten people might hate it yeah but it actually didn't matter because one out of ten people found out about it and they were like this is awesome actually i mean i was one of those yeah totally i lived on soylent for at least a year i don't know something like that yeah that's a that's a success story for us yeah i mean it's kind of the the idea of like niching down to blow up so you you create this very thin niche and then you kind of build out from there so the people that didn't get the joke and didn't understand there was a reference to assignments cycle they spread it they spread it or they were upset about it or they thought it was a bad name they would spread it and then people that got the joke they became the in group i mean how many tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars of earned media do you think the name alone was worth maybe billions i'm not sure i mean rob went on the colbert report that's late night tv you can't buy that the only other startup that i'd ever seen on the colbert report was brian chesky airbnb yeah and we were not at that level we were like five people on a shoestring budget and he was on when i think he was probably past unicorn stuff and that's such a crazy moment actually to just realize that you can reach that many people what john and soylent taught us is how important it is to validate your idea with potential customers talk to your users and really make sure that people want what you're building and once you figure out what problem you're trying to solve with your product the next most important lesson is how do you get it in front of other people you can't sell a product if nobody knows about you [Music] another question i get asked all the time is hey should i apply to yc getting into yc can feel like winning the golden ticket to willy wonka's chocolate factory at least that's how it felt for me it is the silicon valley golden ticket but maybe let's back up for a bit what is the experience actually like for a founder going through yc you know the first time i applied to yc i actually got rejected and it's kind of an interesting lesson that i think a lot of people should kind of have in mind when i applied we had uh myself and one co-founder and then a third co-founder who was had a great pedigree he was a computer scientist from columbia even stronger programmer than i was i was still kind of learning at the time but he had actually taken the whole coursework and but he was kind of one foot in one foot out he was in his mind he was like i will join you guys if you get into y.c yeah if you don't we had one of those guys too actually yeah and i mean i i completely respect it like you're you're trying to de-risk i understand but it's just like it's not what yc looks for yeah totally and i think you put it well where you said like if i were you know a a yc interviewer and i said like gary what are you going to do if you don't get into yc what's the what's the correct answer we're going to prove you're wrong that's the answer actually yeah that's so funny you had one of those guys we had one of those guys too yeah and uh you know what he left to do what do you do to go be an intern at mckinsey wow yeah instead of start a company with us wow yeah and you probably learned so much more you would have made a lot more money but like more importantly i think you would have learned yeah all the things we learned that we use now yeah like how how do you actually get these things off the ground like mckinsey happens like any time honestly it's like come on dude like that this can only happen now exactly exactly yeah which is actually like the best you know when people are trying to get people to come and work on a startup that i think is one of the most powerful things you can say to anyone you're trying to recruit whether it's a co-founder or an engineer or executive or whatever it's like that other thing it's safe it's gonna be there yeah right like that thing already has product market fit yeah yeah it's like finance or whatever else it's like finance is not going away like that job you know opportunity like that's gonna be there it'll might might not be that team but it'll be a thousand other places but this is only happening now so you gotta quit okay let's say you watched this far and you've decided to quit your cushy job maybe it's a tech maybe it's finance maybe it's like me a decent day job as a pm at microsoft and you've decided to apply the next big question that matters a lot is how do i get in and what's the application process like john actually went through this process three times as a founder what i found about the yc application because i filled it out i think three times now for different companies is that it it helps clarify your thinking around your business in some ways in the same way that building a slide deck can but it's a little bit lighter touch than building a full slide deck and it just gets you writing and it gets you thinking about how can i express these concepts in a simple way that is still powerful enough to let someone understand how this can get really really big and i think that a lot of people are taught when they learn to write that maybe they should like leave the best for the end no yeah no inverted triangle for sure is the right way to do it yeah inverted triangle just like when you're writing a newspaper article you know you want to lead with the most important facts don't bury the lead don't bury the lead exactly and that's absolutely true in a y combinator application because people are reading these things fast they need to understand what you do why it's important how how it will get big and most importantly i feel like just where you are oftentimes i'll hear from people who say hey i'm building this really cool thing and i have to ask five questions to learn that it's two people or they have 50 people or they've raised five five hundred thousand dollars or ten million dollars and just just helping people understand because all these different traction metrics and and kind of understanding the energy that's going into a company it's all highly dependent on where you are if i come to you and say hey i have a business that's doing a million dollars in revenue yeah that means nothing to you yeah you know if it's if you raised 100 million like hey maybe we gotta pick it up yeah the tricky thing about this is i mean especially on youtube like we're talking to people like out there who are from all over the world totally and like have totally you know they might be literally still in high school all the way up to like later in their careers and so they might be anywhere yeah and so you know if we zoom out enough the uh really interesting thing is actually how do you build a team of people who are complementary to sort of span the set of things that that particular startup idea actually needs yeah and then you know one thing that i do think yc really wants but then not out of like some arbitrary thing it is actually necessary for a startup to actually work yeah it's like does your initial team have the skills necessary to get to that first milestone right like and it might be software engineering skills might be design skills might be pm skills might be sales might be you know direct marketing usually usually a startup needs five skills so you're hoping that those skills can be found in just two or three co-founders so a lot of times you'll have the person that can do you know some design and some engineering and then you'll have someone that can do some product development and some sales and and really showing that you can kind of hit all the different elements you know if you only have the startup and that's it exactly when it gets hard these things start flying apart actually and that's the number one thing that kills startups actually yeah i've been working with the same co-founder for 10 years now and i don't think it's a surprise that like we went to preschool together because we kind of know where each other live and we're our families our friends and we kind of know that hey like we have a shared value we we understand that there's something like bigger here that we're building obviously the startup's really important but we that relationship is really really key some of the people who are watching this right now are sort of in a rush they're like i want to do this i want to do this now yeah and um we're sitting here with the founder of flexport ryan peterson a few weeks ago and he was saying you know he moved to china he like was became one of the top importers for i think like electric motorcycles in the united states for instance and so he had all of these like 10 000 hours of all of these other experiences before the moment that he started flexport and all of it sort of fed into it i mean that recalls steve jobs famous sort of story of like you know auditing a calligraphy class and that's why we have fonts in our software today right crazy so you know i think that's one of the weird things to sort of temper this advice right like hey like you know it's good to be in a rush it's good to have urgency for like starting a company yeah but also like get good at some stuff yeah actually i mean some of that is like in your story where you're like in there making an app from scratch right and like over and over again yeah yeah there's definitely like a craft to all of this and you have to have respect for the process and develop some mastery it's yeah i've talked to a lot of like middle schoolers and high schoolers who are like i want and i'm always like do not drop out right now let's let's let's build some more skills let's enjoy the time you have because um i i keep coming back to like obviously we focus a ton on zuckerberg because he dropped out of college and it was this phenomenal success but the founder of workday was practically a senior citizen when he took his company public there's all kinds of different times you can really you can really be any type of person and be a successful entrepreneur there's certainly not just one mold and i think that that's that's something that needs to be said more often i think for sure that's it for this episode this was a special one for me because as i said to john i felt you know kind of like he was a kindred spirit we both started our youtube channels from just an idea we weren't sitting around waiting for someone to come and teach us anything we just gave it a shot and made a bad first version and then we kept doing bad versions until it got mediocre then good and then you know we're still out there trying to do our best to this day i'm forever a student and i still you know try to share youtube tutorials with everyone i meet we do this to help each other and to continuously improve our craft so that each and every video is better than the last one if you watched all the way to the end and like this series be sure to head over to john coogan's channel right now and click subscribe and watch his video with me on john's channel we talk about what you do after you get accepted into yc and how to get the most out of your yc experience thanks again for watching and i'll see you next week [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Garry Tan

Views: 47,900

Keywords: Andreessen horowitz, Garry Tan, Garry Tan initialized, Garry Tan initialized capital, Garry Tan vc, Silicon Valley vc, a touch of class, a16z, adam neumann, best Silicon Valley vcs, get into YC, how to get into YC, how to get into y combinator, how to raise money, how to raise money for your startup, initialized capital, john coogan, john coogan soylent, michael seibel, sf vc, start up, startup, startup school, startups, startups 2022, y combinstor, yc, yc application

Id: _0se9PXfAH0

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2022