Office Hours with Michael Seibel

let's start with the first question is about doing YC the program the core program that people know a common question is why is YC worth the 7% what do you think so when I think about YC and I talked to founders about it often times I tell founders it's in their best interest to start building up unfair advantages in their startup it used to be that an unfair advantage was capital mm-hmm but more and more now you see capital being very widely available and so I tell founders start thinking about what other unfair advantages can they get so with YC I think a lot of founders always want to know about fundraising what's the unfair advantage you get around fundraising first YC companies get higher valuations typically 50% to 2x higher then companies who don't do I see we see valuations on demo day ranging anywhere from 4 million dollars on the low end to 25 million dollar-plus on the high end with most valuations between 6 and 12 million put another way when you raise money through YC you get less dilution ii better investors we've taken the time and energy over over a decade to collect all of the best angels and VCs and put them in one room the YC batch is one of the most heavily scouted group of startups in the world and so we do the work for you to put the best people in the room and then the final one is that fundraising happens faster when you go through YC some companies can completely finish their fundraise in under two weeks and almost everyone is finished within two months as opposed to other processes that you might run alone which can drag out longer so first we give you a bunch of unfair fundraising advantages I say the next thing and I would argue even more importantly is we give you an unfair advantage around a batch your batched with other companies that are in the similar state as you are and even if you're an experienced founder and I've done YC twice in the second time I was very experienced founder I don't have at any given time a whole bunch of friends and colleagues who are all starting companies right now and so being able to literally be around a whole bunch of other people who were just getting started and who were grinding you know within the first year - and so grinding is extremely valuable from kind of a friendly competition perspective but it's always also extremely value of just from a support perspective do all the talk people who are there with you and to have this whole variety of people so you can find that people that you're going to actually relate to the most the next one is software what kind of software does a typical investor give you access to none with YC we give you access to a whole variety of software that gives you unfair advantages there's a forum that allows you to ask questions and hear questions from other founders came from for you there's work at a start-up which allows you to basically recruit off of ycs brand there's posting job posts on Hacker News only YC companies can do there's an investor database with over 5,000 entries including reviews and data from every company that's ever done YC theirs deals which are literally millions of dollars worth of discounts given by top companies there's a company a YC company directory which allows you if you're a b2b company to actually sell into other YC companies it's one of the secret advantages of being in Y see there's an alumni directory which also allows you to sell them to companies and also allows you to find specific people to give advice and finding there's a knowledge base that gives you actual clear tactical written advice on PR fundraising growth etc and so most the time when you're raising from angels typically you get some phone calls mm-hmm you get some email exchanges with YC I would argue that you get a platform and that's an unfair advantage the last thing is additional programming a lot of people think of YC is a three-month program one-and-done in fact YC is built to support you from the beginning of your company to the end of the company and two of the newest programs that we've built are specifically relevant to a lot of founders one is a series a program where we actually rebadge you with companies that are now in the anywhere between 150 to 300 400 thousand dollars a month in revenue who are going out and raising series a we teach you how to raise a Series A we teach how to deal with professional process we teach you how to do a great deck and then we send you out at the same time and connect you with investors having an advantage in terms of raising a series a I would argue is one of the biggest competitive advantages you can have last we have what's called the YC growth program and that's run by YC continuity which is our growth stage fund and if you're running a company from anywhere between 50 to 150 employees suddenly as a CEO your job changes it's not about product market fit anymore it's about how do you manage an organization how do you build an organization and our growth program essentially is a series of dinners that teaches you all the tactics around how to actually be a CEOs managing organization as a YC founder all of this is encompassed in the 7% there's no additional equity that you have to give to get in any of these programs gonna need a software and when your YC founder watch the founder for life so it argue when you're thinking about fundraising in this environment where there's a lot of money stopped thing what the money isn't unfair advantage and start thinking about what other unfair advantages the people who are giving you money can give to your company I think YC looks great on that perspective and it's pretty simple math why it's worth it yeah and in tagging on to that I wanted to cover I we don't have it in the notes but your most recent blog posts about generating leverage in fundraising yeah I think this is something that we oughta write more about in Aaron's trying to do it with a Series A program but can you explain that problem and your proposed solution for the average company I think the base of the problem that a lot of founders need to understand is that a lot of fundraising advice is written by VCS and the unfortunate problem when you're reading a fundraising advice from a Series A VC's perspective is that they're not necessarily on your side and so if you think about it the narrative around fundraising is typically something like you raise money when you're running low on money when you're at between 12 and 6 months of runway when you raise money you need to be most sensitive about valuation which i think is completely not true when you raise money I think almost strangely people think about raising money when it's the first moment that they think they can so I see a lot of companies who are like we're at we're an enterprise company we're at a million dollars arr isn't it time to go raise threes a that's where all the VC say right I'd argue that's like the earliest possible time to consider raising a Series A and so this whole kind of narrative around fundraising especially series a fund raising I think is designed to bring you into the front door of the VC as soon as possible to allow them to get the best look possible as early as possible right so we should clarify that in financial terms right so your valuation is probably a little lower at that point they can probably get a higher percentage of your company at that point and because you're scared that you won't be able to raise you sell early and even more so there are probably six or seven terms around a funder around to fundraise a series a fundraise how big your option pool is how many board members what the rights of the preferred stock holders are and if you're going into a fund raised without leverage you have a hard time negotiating any of those terms and so you might think valuations the game but actually there's six other terms that are really important so I think that you know Series A is what confuses a lot of startups and I really want to focus in on Series A I think some of these things are different when it comes to raising seed but Series A is really confusing to a lot of startups and I think a lot of the advice out there is tricky and a lot of the common wisdom is actually tricky the way that I like to tell this story is I talked to a founder I say every startup has a leveraged graph basically it has a graph of how much leverage the startup has over time and I'd argue that that leverage graph in a good company always goes up to the right but it has peaks in it as valleys the best founders I know we'll raise money when their leverage graph is at a local peak and the founders that struggle will try to raise money when they're in valleys and what's interesting is that when you're at a peak you might not feel like it's time to raise money you probably don't need money you might even be close to break-even you got a lot of customers you're building products great things are going really really well and as a CEO it's oftentimes hard to think oh let me take my mind off of my company to go raise money but in many ways that's the absolute best time to raise money mm-hmm that's the time you have the most leverage that's time when you can walk away that's the time when investors are going to be more ready to chase you versus you should chase them and so I really tell founders hey think about where they are on their leverage graph and think about this way before you hit that twelve months before you run out of money yeah and how are you spotting those points like I obviously I know that we're in a better situation than we were eighteen months ago who knows where we're gonna be in eighteen months but those local peaks and troughs how do you as a founder identify those I think the first peak tends to happen when you hit product market fit okay I think what happens when you hit product market fit is that you have a lot of growth but you are relatively understaffed and so your growth to expenses ratio looks very good I also think at that point if you're a revenue generating business you have more money coming in the door than you've ever seen before and so it's so funny because every startup wants to get product market fit I think most startups don't realize how much a punch in the face product market fit is but I think that's where the first kind of peak is and I think that what happens when you hit product market fit is you start investing in scaling your operation improving your product oftentimes takes a second priority just making sure your customers can consume your product and that counter-intuitively I think that's the most strategic time to raise a Series A I think that you know your graphs are gonna look great hopefully you've got revenue coming and hopefully runway is gonna look good and so to me like that's that nails it hmm I think when companies try to raise their series a and when I say seriously I mean you know five to ten million dollar round from San whole Road VC I think a lot of times in chat founders try to raise series a pre product market fit they have to be over reliant on their story and second time founders experience founders founders with exits tend to do disproportionally well with pre series a product market pre product market fit series is but I think that if you are not one of those founders if you're a first time founder go in with the numbers like it's it's just always easy when you're going with the numbers yeah and so a related question from the internet Yousef asked how did you validate your product market fit so if this is in the context of social camp I assume that's what they mean yeah I think that like we've we've written about this I think that you know the the phrase product market fit was invented by Marc Andreessen and then somehow nobody bothered to look at his definition and now it's just been misappropriated in every way and like the now common use of the phrase is like I've built the thing that my customers want but it's like even weirder than that because like often times I'll ask companies or companies ask me if I have product market fit and I'm like how would I know it seems like if you hit product market fit you'd be growing uncontrollably everything in your company be breaking you be doing all you can just to keep up with the current customer demand like that's the definition of product market fit yeah it's unambiguous whether that's happening to you and like I think a lot of founders think oh product market fit is I've built the right product right and it's like no product market fit is what happens after you build the right product and you distribute it well like it's everything else it was a culmination of some MVP kind of process exactly yes no an MVP and product market fit sometimes can be five years apart and so yeah no I totally grew see like you know an MVP the whole goals get any customers coming in the door yeah and then you kind of struggle struggle struggle and some companies find a product where now customers are just beating the crap out of them to get in right he says it put the market pulls it out of your hands exactly yeah and so if you're don't feel like growth is beating the crap out of you you are not in product market fit like unambiguously did you guys hit it at Socialcam I would say yes and no I would say that we definitely got hit in the face with growth however I would say that we were particularly good at distribution and not as good a product and so I would say that our product didn't retain as well as we wanted to but we certainly got a ton of growth and I think that you know in social you see that happen and I'd argue that like you know did we hit product market fit like I would probably say no I probably say that there's growth you can get that doesn't reflect product market fit because some part of pockemon product mark if it is not only have all these customers coming but they're doing what you want them to do like your your your your that your the goal of your product is being served and the goal of Socialcam was to get everyone to be video creators when we were blowing up we were blowing up on video consumption but not a video creation gadget so I think that's probably an important part of people don't talk about product that's like everything is going well but it's like also your business part is working right you're not selling a dollar for 80 cents exactly you're not you know you know negative margins you're not like getting users to do something that's like not the thing you wanted them to do yeah okay let's go into some questions general like YC application related so LC carrier asks how does YC feel about companies who don't want to raise VC VC money after the program and maybe a canonical example is zapier who did a seed round and then went on to be profitable so i think what's interesting about this is like of course we don't care like these are your companies one of the first things we say at the YC kick-off in the beginning the batch is that you're the boss you get to decide what you wanna do with your company we are not the boss and I think even more so what's interesting is that we have a large variety of company asleep a large number of companies that never raised from VCS are only raised from VCS way after product market fit profitable so and so forth no we love those companies just the same I think that um it's interesting like in many ways I think that as YC has become more mainstream we have to be louder about what we like were lumped in with VCS and we're not VC's that's not the purpose of this we're not here with the kind of sole reason of how do we make sure we make as much money as possible out of every single company we invest in yeah that's that's that's not the way YC works yeah and to be clear if your company raises money through YC and then goes on to be wildly profitable profitable that's a great outcome yeah provide no dilution no pro rata no no like that's and it's great for the founders like like this is you know like I think we provide an on board into VCS if you want it but like by no means do you have to consume it right yeah I mean I think this is kind of related to did you read Aaron's post this week about advice because we've entered in this position that's in between like VC traditional VC and universities we're just thought of us like the advice-giver and like you have to have permission to do this thing and we don't want certain people it's not really the case now related another super common question Emile s'en Rodriguez asked do companies need to be incorporated already to participate in YC so this is another thing that I think is extremely important to understand a lot of people talk about the growth of YC + YC certainly has grown pretty significantly batch sizes are a little bit more than doubles since I lasted YC in 2012 I would say it's responsible growth we've prepared ourselves and I think we still give a really good at high quality of service but what it's also done is this allowed us to have such a variety of companies at a variety of stages so YC has always been about the super early stage and will always be about the super early stage we can help you incorporate and we help a lot of in companies company could incorporate when they come in there are a lot of companies that literally start writing code when they join YC there are a lot of companies that are pre launched when they join YC I think why cease expansion has allowed us to also work with companies who are post-launch and might have incorporated or raised small amounts of money but I think sometimes people want to interpret that as like a change of strategy as opposed just an expansion you know this is not an either/or it's not an or it's an end so and and also I think it's really motivational to be in a batch where you have some companies that are pre-launch and it's still trying to kind of get that MVP out the door and you have other companies that are like starting to take off mm-hm and I think that you know when you want that motivation you come to a dinner you see it come be taking off and you think to yourself we got to get back to work I think that motivation is is kee-yai that like cohort pressure you see people follow-on after YC to just having dinners with their friends yeah every couple weeks yeah you had another question about YC types of companies so Alex Rodriguez asked what do you look for in startups that haven't had good growth but continue to push through for example Airbnb that makes you accept them into the batch I think what's interesting is like this concept of traction mm-hmm I think is very interesting I think that there are complicated complicated or not well-defined thoughts that people simplify so if I tell a start-up oh I'm looking for attraction I think what they think of is that I'm looking for growth and like they think that oh if I have growth why would I need YC right it's kind of this kind of catch-22 when I think about traction I think about a little differently I kind of think how much time have you been working and what have you done and am i impressed with the amount of stuff you've done in the amount of time you've been working and so to me like Airbnb what they had done in that year before they apply to I see and by the way I think this story is like told in such a strange way it was a year it wasn't like ten years everybody was struggling before they got into YC it was a year but what they had done was impressive they had launched multiple times they had been the housing host for the DNC convention and the RNC convention they'd been on CNN a bunch of times then like they'd done a lot of impressive things the product wasn't working but you couldn't look at the last calendar year and say oh these guys aren't out there grinding it and so to me like that's far more important than when they've been whether they've been successful I think the second thing is that the Airbnb guys felt like they were onto something like a lot of a lot of investors talk about like what's your secret sauce what's unique insight what's the thing that you know that other people don't write and it's such an overused phrase but it's it's kind of true the Airbnb guys really thought that people would stay in strangers houses and they thought that it could be a significant better experience than hotel and they believed that through and through yeah and even if you don't agree when you see three people who actually believe that you think to yourself well why not try right well why not run the experiment because you you were the one that went to bat for them you have to get into YC so what was it about them or about the project had you used a product before you told PG about it before I told PG I had not used the product no K I'd been on the bottle yeah I'm not used to no because back when I when I was working with them they were really focused on events and so not renting out whole house is either not rental houses renting out rooms and still doing the air bed thing yeah and I didn't go to the RNC or DNC convention what I saw in them was exactly what I said about traction yeah they just kept on working like one of the things that we say to YC founders some of the PG always used to say which is that companies to do well in YC you have office hours with them they tell you they made your problem you brainstorm some potential solutions and the next time you talk to them they've moved on to some other problem and with the Airbnb guys it was exactly like that and the other thing is that they were happy and gracious you know like it's easy to help people who are like nice they're nice they're hard-working yeah committed and I think that this part of the valley like doesn't get talked about a lot like if you're nice concise you know and hard-working like more often than not people will try to help you like they won't go out of their way they won't you know like stop their business to help you business but like will they give you an hour like yeah yeah I think that like sometimes you have to warm up right sometimes you have to you know show that you're being serious but yeah like this is not a situation where people feel that your success somehow it takes away from them or somehow reduces the size of the pie so yeah and I think people are always looking to meet motivated like it's not this weird like close friend Network situation where it's like I don't know I'm done with motivated inspiring people that's what I think is so weird about the valley is that like on the East Coast all of the networks in my experience tended to be around like what you've done in the past like where you worked where you went to school what club you are in right and like here it's the like strangers email me every day yeah I reply to them every day like this is like the way of the valley like stranger like literal stranger and so like the only thing we all have in common is we're all crazy enough to try to do startups and I feel like inside every founder there's this feeling like if you're stupid enough to do a start-up we should have each other's back because I'm stupid enough to do it too and there aren't a lot of people as stupid as us yeah and you have enough good will to keep replying yeah because in those emails you get a lot of crazy ones yeah and I would just say that knowing what to ask from the right people in a clear concise simple way you can get through to most of them is it a crazy cold emailing is a skill that everyone should work so related to that the Airbnb guys working on different types of things in the first year I think it's worth explaining that like that doesn't necessarily mean pivoting five thousand times so yeah that's a good point I really I've been trying to kind of nail down what's the difference between pivoting and iterating because iterating is clearly good and I think pivoting is oftentimes strictly inferior so one of the things I think about is that when you're iterating usually there's lots of things that you can learn about from the previous version of your product because oftentimes you are keeping the same customer or very related customer and you're solving the same problem or very related problem mm-hmm and so for me like I get smarter every time I enter eight I feel like iterating is kind of letting the running the scientific process and I'm learning every step of the way to me pivoting is when you basically take things outside of your realm of the previous thing you worked on mhm so in effect you're changing the customer drastically are you changing the problem drastically and usually even though you can kind of justify it to yourself often because there's similar technology like you don't have to completely rewrite your code I would argue that like you are not learning very much from what you just did you're just working on something else and I think that rapid iterating is amazing I think rapid pivoting is is really bad and I think that you know Sam and I can I give two different pieces of advice on this that I think reaches the same point you know someone asked Sam when do you should you pivot and he said when you've exhausted every idea every single idea on your current problem that you're solving yeah and I love that construction but I feel like founders lie to themselves like I lied to myself as founder all the time and so I like to tell people like time I like to say like give some in a year or two like it's it really can take that long like it often does yeah long and like it was like concerted hard work yeah just like I do it on nights and weekends sort of of constant iteration um I do think that like there are these there's this myth that if you build it they will come and that's just like a myth like behind every one of those stories is a lot more hard work mm-hmm I think another pivoting problem is that people pivot and apply the same solution to multiple problems and like the solution is just never that good and so you just get locked into this thing that won't work yeah another thing somewhat related to that Airbnb guys it's just how compelling they are phaidor Paretsky asked about basically pitching your company so they say what are your thoughts on the strategy of just like being very very aggressive in like enthusiastic about pitching your company in terms of pitching to investors and are there other techniques you encourage to make your pitches sound more compelling or exciting what I didn't understand as a founder was that anytime I pitched an investor it was the you know basically round to over a thousand pitch that they ever gotten mhm so think about it this way any gimmick or trick that you think might be unique has in fact already been tried by one of those thousand people before you and so I think that often times people kind of resort to weird public speaking gimmicks or oh I gotta make a memory or gotta like create an impact or like a sales type things and it's like honestly it's a lot harder to sell to like a salesperson and a VC is kind of a salesperson it's kind of like it's a lot harder to do an email marketing campaign to a founder that does email marketing like I'm a little bit immune to drip campaigns right it's like and you're smart that's awesome that you're smart but by the way there are a thousand other people you're smarter than you so when I think about doing the pitch these are the things that actually stand out to me the first thing is is clarity and conciseness I think that um more words are actually bad when you actually study really good salespeople on the phone it turns out the customer talks way more than the salesperson and so when you're in a really good investor meeting the investor is fully engaging and is basically like giving ideas and brainstorming it doesn't feel like a pitch anymore right when you feel like you are pitching for a long period of time that's a that's a bad sign typically especially an early fundraising later fundraising is different but see it even series-a so one clarity and being concise I really think most are apps can be explained in three sentences the two don't start with your background like you're telling a story and often times the mote and often times people default to telling a story chronologically and argue that like actually like you should be thinking a little bit more like pulp fiction laughs like tell the interesting parts of the story first get me hooked oh yeah and your background if your background isn't one of the top three most interesting things happen I'm gonna start up and it probably you shouldn't start with it now for some startups it is right like for some startups the person's background is but rare together I think the other thing that's important is that the investors to clearly understand the problem you're trying to solve clearly understand it I think so often founders when it gets straight to the solution and so what's weird is in that in that first couple sentences like what I want to get out of it is I want to know what you do right I don't have to be sold on it I just have to I just want to know what it is right you know me knowing that Google is a search engine where you go to a website you type in something you want to know you click the search button and then a bunch of web pages that are relevant to what you typed popped in great yeah I don't have to be convinced that I want that I just have to be convinced that I know what that is right then I want to know anything about traction anything like have you launched by is it growing you know anything like that I want to know that you have tacked on your founding team and I want to know why what's the problem that you're trying to solve and and why you wanted to try to solve it mm-hmm for me those are the things that like if you can get out in the first 30 seconds mm-hmm I can engage in a conversation with you mm-hmm and I think the other thing that I tell founders is that like if you do a bad job it's your fault like unfortunately like if the person you're talking to doesn't get it mm-hmm after the first 60 seconds it's not because they're an idiot like it's because you didn't explain to them well and like that's really hard to hear but like I just tell founders that straight and I'm like look I've been pitched like to infinite times so like I think I'm not dumb well I mean like it doesn't really matter if you're smart that's true maybe unfortunately you're asking me for something if you got a dumb it down for me either way so yeah and I think that oftentimes what's weird is you have to throw away other instincts yeah forced you always have to throw away your customer pitch the investor is almost never a customer and so it works when the customer is almost the exact opposite of what I work on the investor second you got a throwaway jargon mm-hmm right what makes you sound smart amongst your peers makes you understandable by someone who's not one of your industry peers and so I think there are all these like things that like people try to use to make them seem impressive yeah which are like driving people to do the exact wrong thing when they're pitching to a VC yes like I actually think you need somewhere between like sixth and ninth grade language like that's it oh that's a fundamental for me on your blog all of this does like why are you complicating no no no and I think that's what's weird is that like you're speaking right and so like if you're not clear and concise the more brainpower after you use to figure out what you're saying yeah like the more the less viable conversations gonna be mm-hmm and I think like related to this people can conflate salesmanship with confidence and so many of these founders are very confident yeah but oftentimes they you know it's like that Steve Martin quote like they're so good they can't be ignored that reason like they don't really have to like take the money from a certain investor so they can just confidently walk into any room yeah communicate it clearly well you know what I think creates I've only seen two things reliably create real confidence not fake confidence one is you've done something impressive in the past that makes confident the second is you have the numbers yeah all right like you got one of those two things like you deserve to be confident so you know for first-time doubt is the numbers huh and I would underscore this for international founders I think it's really really hard to clearly communicate what living in another country in that specific problem in another country is like to an investor here that's so important that's so important but what's fun is that when you get it right what's fun is like I mean we've invested a bunch of companies out of Nigeria you know when they explained to you that you can have five credit card processing machines at the hotel from five different companies and you can swipe your credit card in each one of them and it won't work yeah see I have to pay your hotel bill in cash you're like oh if that happened I'd be super painful but you know right as opposed to saying oh credit card processing doesn't work in Nigeria right yeah it's like I'm kind of worried I'm like come on you know right like when you can when you can tell a story and paint that picture and like it took me how long it took me 10 seconds to paint that picture and I get told up but you get it right as opposed to let me tell you about the history of credit cards in Nigeria right yeah I mean and by the way Niger is 200 plus million people another thing that like I don't know how I see actually that's a really important thing to facts are really important one of the things I think is interesting about a lot of investors is that they know like 2 inches on a lot of different subjects and like if you know like 6 inches they will think you're very smart and if you know 1 inch they'll think you're very stupid yeah and so like just doing some friggin research and like when you talk like oh i often tell founders like write down everything you just said and count the number of facts and like if you didn't say any facts just say some facts oh it's great so do you this is related so David Chen asks how do you find mentors and advisors but when you're pitching your company are you pitching it to mentors and advisers to get warmed up are you just pitching it to random people at Starbucks I think that like one piece of advice that Justin Khan gives that I really like is [Music] aggressively practice pitching friends colleagues existing investors before you go out yeah and that like there's something that you can learn from every run of it and I think that one of the strange and unfortunate things is that fundraising is so hard and the process in general has been made so painful that founder send the shy away from it and they want to do it as fast as possible with as least practice as possible and unfortunately I think that that doesn't serve them well and so I think practice is really really onto this thing about mentors so I get asked five times a day can I be a mentor to a company that I I would consider I have never met them a formula I don't like the mentor word I feel like it's an old-fashioned word it kind of it reminds me of the day of like master and apprentice mm-hmm where like you actually needed someone like you're not a blacksmith like someone has to teach you that or else you not be able to do like you could drive but you can't go on the internet and Google search box just like you know it's like and and I feel as though for some reason and and and by the way I think in corporate America mentors are probably extremely helpful I don't know I'm not really been punching more Cabrera but I think a lot of this advice comes out of corporate America and comes out of like career prep centers and all that stuff I think for me personally I give advice to a lot of startups and I'm happy to like this part of my job and I wouldn't do this job if I didn't like it to me when someone asked me to be a mentor it's asking way more of a commitment right it's like what I'm saying is that without being your mentor if you ask me a question in a clear and concise way I will 99% of the time reply within a week with what I think is the best answer you get that for free for free and so what I think about is again someone asking me to be a mentor I'm like oh god well what else do they want well it's like hey hey Michael we've never met do you want to be in a single relationship together yes a little right and Anna and I also I always feel like when those people if they just emailed me a question of yeah like what question do you wanna ask him it let's just pretend I am your mentor right let's pretend I'm everyone's mentor you already have that like what and you know if you're looking to like put my name on something that like that's silly who cares right like no investors gonna be like oh well because Michael signed up as your mentor I'm going to invest like no no good investor will say that I think what a lot of founders have found both in YC now is that if they asked me for help I'll try to help them yeah and like that's what you want so stop asking for a mentor like it's funny because I actually had this conversation with someone else and I was like you know this company that I helped a bunch I was like I don't think they like I'm not their mentor and then it was funny because one of the guys was like oh I talked to them and they say you're one of your they just they just asked for help and I and I was happy to help them so don't raise the stakes of a new relationship just just ask for when you don't and you don't have to and they also don't know like maybe you just give them terrible advice maybe you say yes to being their mentor and then you drive them off a cliff yeah I mean like advice is one of those things right like take it with the grain of salt yeah I don't think there was nobody who I felt fulfilled a traditional mentor role in my time at what at a in the valley like it that kind of like took me under their wing and showed me what was what right like nobody did that right a lot of people helped a lot of people and I asked help but nobody I almost feel like a mentor in some ways is taking responsibility for your success yeah and like nobody does that especially if they haven't invested in you but even if they have they don't do that usually it's just like after enough years your friends yeah and then then maybe that's it like after enough years you like meet up just because yeah which is great yeah all right let's go to another question so I just want to clarify this one on the first page building eat neat asks what if anything are you looking for in a start-up that wants to be part of startup school anyone can do startups anyone can do startup school okay I think we designed it like to be extremely explosive we designed it to be step one yeah like in any state you're in you can get value out of this thing and that's what we decided yeah and that there will be these grants given out but that's gonna be decided after the fact yeah or I guess at the end Ryan Karl Mercer a frequent podcast and the question asker asks what's your preferred way of organizing your time I hate giving advice on this because I don't think I do it particularly well I I have like an Mei star important emails and I use a to-do list you know that's I think like probably the biggest time hack I've had has been since I've had a kid I think the biggest time that I've had is that I've been one lucky enough that my parents close so they can help watch my baby and then I think the second thing is I've been fortunate enough to be able to afford someone to help at night I think those are probably the two things that are keeping me like functional right now but I do not think I am a model of organization let's go to the next one so John Rigler asked can intrapreneurship be effective and by that he means starting something within a company I believe I recently returned to IBM I have a patent and yet only a vague ideas about how to signal and organize other like-minded folks within the company could this path sabotage my dreams so in a caveat this answer by saying that I've only worked in a big company for I think 14 months of my entire working life and I have exactly one experience with intrapreneurship and it did not work out very well so you know in my single experience it didn't work I can't give you advice on how to make it work for you or if it does work I mean certainly there are big companies that invent new things all the time so somebody has figured out how to get that done but this is an area I have I would argue almost less than zero knowledge of okay Horacio Chavez asked how would you approach an investor who says I won't invest in you unless you have a patent I probably would just talk to another investor yeah that's not a typical response especially in in in technology startups I can't speak to biotech and so and so forth but in technology startups that is such an untypical response it's almost indicative that that investor is not very good yeah or they're trying to say no I'm sure I mean but like that's if that's a bad way of Solio nicely like greater ways to say no yeah yeah all right so yeah LM Ronnie asks why in a sense it's just we're gonna have relationship questions now why does it feel like entrepreneurs aren't marriage material SH and entrepreneur look for an entrepreneurial spouse marriage that's interesting question so I started dating my wife when I was doing a company I thought I was marriage material I don't know I think um I think what they're trying to get at is that so like say yeah so you're really dedicated to social kamon is taking up a lot of your time and all these justin.tv oh really yeah and that consumes all your time therefore you might not in someone's eyes be a great partner and I think that's what they're getting at but I mean I I think different people like different things I think that um you know some relationships are really motivated by work and people find someone who is really into their job is something that's attractive yeah I think some relationship some people are in LA way yeah you know but I don't think I think that it is pretty easy to see how intense an entrepreneur is working on their job pretty early in a relationship and you know if that's not something that someone likes then they should move on to something that they like yeah yeah in that second question an entrepreneurial spouse I would just say a spouse that's okay doing their own thing whatever that might be just they're okay doing their own hobby or whatever I hate to be like general on this but my wife certainly was that way my way is certainly somewhat who didn't need me to be around 24/7 yeah exactly and I think that's good all right yeah ha asked another question how intense do you really have to be to found a start-up I think that this is such an interesting question because like intense is such an interesting idea right so like okay I'll tell you like two different versions right yeah so justin.tv there were probably at the max point five or six of us living in a two-bedroom apartment one two people were shared bunk beds one person had a room to their own one person was sleeping in the living room and I was thinking on the balcony we worked the office was the apartment yes we worked you know when we're at home and our roommates were the people in the company so there you know that was you know that was that part and then moreover the building was full of other startups yeah and so my friends were started founders and we're going through YC and you know so on so forth right on one hand that sounds like really intense right I don't know though like college is kind of similar right you're living with people you're going to school with like oftentimes you know they have similar interests like you're kind of enclosed in this space you're all kind of doing something similar like yeah I don't see it as that different now what I will say is that like so so I think when describing the steady-state I didn't think of it as like this like massive intensive like thing what I will say is that the lows are low yeah like when people talking about emotional roller coaster I like I hate that phrase cuz so cliched but like there have been times in my startups history where I've like gone home and cried like there have been times where I've thought pack it up last five years of your life down the drain there have been times when I've thought you know I've lost my best friend there have been times where I've thought like all kinds of stuff right just bad bad stuff so I think that like you need to be resilient you need to be able to that kind of stuff I'm not saying that you like shove it away being able to get past those lows yeah you need to be able to wake up the next morning or a couple days later and get back into the game so I would almost argue that the resilience thing is maybe more important than the intensity thing I kind of feel like it doesn't feel like intensity when you're doing the thing you like to do and your setup should be the thing you like to do hopefully yeah yeah I think I think intensity can be used as a synonym for like guy and that that's definitely I would just wanted to spell that like that is absolutely not true that we likes know it just don't be an no I don't but but like I going back to the Airbnb thing I think intensity could also be a signal of working efficiently and many of the really great founders do that like not sure I don't like the word intensity because I feel like it's like morally ambiguous like I would say like passionate yeah like you know passionate yes no yeah like I feel like intensity could be passionate or it could be asked like I just have this horrible image of like hey I'm like the intense hustler like I just get done people don't like salespeople as well it's weird to like talk about this world but it's like like when I when I was at justin.tv were just starting rows three engineers in Mia right like it's sometimes I think people find hard to understand how much of an engineering backbone there is to this whole thing and a lot of the like norms are kind of I would almost argue invented by engineers or former engineers and so like you know people not wanting long meetings people not people wanting concise communication like a lot of these are kind of traits you find in the engineering community yeah and like salespeople and engineers are like water and oil like so or else is a stereotypical salesperson that yeah the kind of cartoonish con television ish sales person and engineer and so like I had to learn a lot like I had to learn a lot about just the engineering culture and I feel like I've embraced it as my own now but like it's different it's it's it's not business it's not New York like it's not business guy first here it's kind of engineer first yeah it's definitely not polish no don't wear a suit so just a couple more questions about startup school do you think there's a particular stage of company that this would be most beneficial for or doesn't matter you know it's funny I always get this question in the context of applying do I see yeah and I always tell founders it's like sometimes people phrase applying to startup school applying to I see as if we were charging $50,000 and it was a 10-year life commitment it's free yeah I think it's free to apply to I see it's free to apply and it's free to do startup school like if you're curious about it founders they don't tend to talk themselves out of things right try it yeah try to apply YC like if you get an interview you learn more like like try start of school if you like it great if you don't like don't like like talking yourself out of free things is like kind of weird right like you yeah okay Kevin Haley used to say that he would scream at people we're giving away free lottery tickets what are you doing it's so true it's so true so it's it's just like you know don't don't talk yourself out of stuff like yeah part of being a founder is just kind of like some amount of just do you know at some amount of just do and if you find yourself talking yourself out of things like maybe we can talk yourself out of the thing you should be doing right now yeah and so yeah there's no contract there's no like we're not gonna come hunt you down if you want to apply later to I see it won't count against you there's really no cost yeah like in any in financial moral occasional all of the potential cost is no cost yeah okay so then assume we get over the fear of applying of doing startup school how do you get the most out of it I think that the way you get the most out of it is you devote a significant amount of time to making progress in your company goals every week do not think of this as an educational program yeah don't think of this as a program where you sit there and you're gonna learn about how to be a founder like learn by doing this is a learn by doing type business and so you should think where do I want to be from a metrics perspective from a milestones perspective at the end of startup school and map out that path through startup school and like where do you want to be week over week to get to where you want to go I think that's how I get the most value but if you can move two times faster to get your MVP you two get to launch your first customers cuz you're in start-up school you've got a great service for free and it's way more it's way better than you know whatever lectures we could do yeah all right man thank you all right thanks much you

Channel: Y Combinator

Views: 56,511

Rating: 4.9224973 out of 5

Keywords: YC, Y Combinator, Michael Seibel, Office Hours, Podcast, Interview, Video, Craig Cannon

Id: JJ2BWOT4hfs

Length: 51min 32sec (3092 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2018