The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 44 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Seibel: Hiring a designer for a startup pitch deck is a mistake
“If you need a designer to build a slide deck, you're doing it wrong. And here's an even deeper, more important point. Your designer has no idea what the most interesting and important points of your pitch are. So if you hand them your pitch to design, they wil…”
Lemkin: 95% of new AI support and contact center startups will fail
“Now there's like, 200 folks in the last YC batch that are doing bots and others to automate contact center, to automate support. It's exploded. And they're all promising 10 times better functionality than exists today versus AI. Mathematically, there's no room…”
Seibel: Investors convince themselves to invest the more they talk
“What most people don't realize about investors is that you're not really convincing an investor to invest. They're convincing themselves to invest. The more they can talk, the more they can talk themselves into giving you money.”
Michael Seibel: Startups need separate pitch explanations for investors and customers
“You need two different answers to what do you do. One that you give investors, and another one you give customers, and they're different. The words on the front page of your website are for customers. If you're using that for investors, more often than not, yo…”
B2B startups need $150k-$250k MRR for maximum Series A leverage
“Usually our guidelines for B to B companies is trying to be in the 150 to 250 K a month range. That, and close to profitable. That puts you typically in the maximum leverage category, which significantly increases the chance that going out and raising a series…”
Lemkin: AI-vibe-coded sites all look like Claude and share a recognizable smell
“At the end of the day, all these sites look like Claude. Once you see one Replit or Lovable site and you can just smell it. You know, there, someone was saying that like, 30% of this YC class vibe coded their app. And I want to see a couple. I'm like, I, that …”
Cabane: Full AI SDR agents from YC startups produce mediocre results
“For example, like all of the YC companies that are doing like AI agents that does the entire SDR for you, like the output of that is like, eh, it's not great. It's okay, but it's not great, ok? What we're seeing working, however, is like very specialized LLMs …”
Hariharan: Fast hiring before PMF creates resistance to product changes
“If you hire too fast before you have product market fit, now you have a bunch of people whose jobs depend on you not changing the product.”
Lemkin: Y Combinator combines prestige of Harvard, Stanford, and MIT
“YC is Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Caltech all rolled into one. And even if you don't learn a goddamn thing from the program, It, all things being equal, you might as well go to Harvard or Stanford or MIT, right?”
Lemkin: Undecided founders should always join Y Combinator for institutional signaling
“If you're not sure, I always tell founders, just do it. Even if you have the revenue, even if you have, if there's a missing slice, like, just go to Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, get it done, and it's worth it, right?”
Bedecarre: 81% of top 160 YC companies adopted hybrid work models
“We did a study of the top 160 YC, most valuable YC companies
published last year 81% of them are going hybrid in some form or fashion.”
Lemkin: Failing to raise quickly out of top accelerators creates negative signaling
“I think if you are in a top tier accelerator and you don't get funded quickly, there is a bit of a black star, a scarlet mark. It's not huge, but if you're, it's not just YC, but if you're in a top program, there's an assumption that Bessemer has an army of an…”
Reaching 8-12 employees forces pre-PMF founders to manage instead of iterate
“Around that size the primary job of a CEO has to start switching to management. And usually for a pre-product market fit company, the primary job of the CEO should be to focus on product market fit.”
Seibel: Non-essential hires after three months indicate a bad hiring decision
“If someone is not an essential employee within three months, that's often a great sign that you didn't make a good hiring decision.”
Seibel: Pre-PMF startups must minimize non-essential staff and fire frequently
“An early stage pre-product market fit company should be trying to minimize their non-essential employees, and you should not believe you're great at hiring, which means, unfortunately, you're probably gonna have to do a lot of firing.”
Seibel: Selling to startups works if the product is critical infrastructure
“We've seen a long history of YC companies be very successful in selling to startups initially. If they're selling key components that if they work, they will not be ripped out. If your payment system works, you're not going to rip it out.”
Lemkin: 85% of Y Combinator batch startups hit their funding target
“85% of their batch get funded. And they hit their funding target.”
Seibel: Founders fail by omitting timeframes from traction slides
“The biggest mistake YC founders make here is they say this list of things, and they didn't tell me do they do it in a month, or four months, or a year, or two years. Without the time, I'm not impressed.”
Seibel: Founders should never pitch life stories unless explicitly asked
“There is no opportunity in your pitch to tell your life story unless the investor asks explicitly for your life story, and you should double confirm they want to hear your life story.”
Seibel: Founders establish expertise by showing personal experience with the problem
“If you can weave how you've experienced the problem into the team slide, suddenly I think of you as an expert.”
Michael Seibel: Explain your startup in two sentences and one example
“You need to be able to say what your company does in two sentences, and you need to be able to give a specific example.”
Seibel: Pitching unique insights requires first explaining what the startup does
“You only get the right to do this if I know what your company does and if I'm impressed with your team. A lot of founders try to skip to this point And if I don't know what your company does, I can't tell whether your insights good or not.”
Michael Seibel: Demo Day auctions help startups raise higher and dilute less
“Running a demo day means that you're running a fundraising auction, and everyone knows you're trying to get the highest price for any product, good, or service. You want to run an auction. So YC companies tend to raise at a higher valuation and dilute less.”
Seibel: Early investors value execution speed over revenue numbers
“What investors are looking for is momentum. They're looking, do you get things done quickly? They're not necessarily looking for, do you have a ton of revenue or a ton of users? If they're investing in an early stage company, they know that you might not have …”
Seibel: Founders must earn investor attention every two minutes of a pitch
“A lot of people think that an investor is going to sit down for a 30 minute meeting and give them 30 minutes of their time. It's not true. Especially on Zoom, it's very not true. You earn every two minutes of that meeting. If the last two minutes sucked, that …”
Seibel: Bottom-Up Market Sizing Math Matters Far More Than Headline Numbers
“The reality is how you calculate the number is what's important. As an investor, I don't know how many potential users you might be able to get. You have to educate me about that. You should do that research. I don't know how much you're going to charge the us…”
Lemkin: Seed investing is an artisanal craft, not money management
“Seed investing is not money management, okay? ... Once you get up to a certain size, you are money managers, right? You're money managers of these illiquid investments, and you do want these huge teams, and you want the IR team and the folks doing this. ... Th…”
Braverman: Top VC Recommendations Provide Highest Signal for Career Decisions
“If people are willing to give you sort of their best 30 minutes, so to speak, you know, the best company they've found in years of searching, in the case of YC, through hundreds or thousands of companies, there's really nothing that's going to be higher signal…”
Hariharan: Nearly 100% of YC startups underprice their products
“The second mistake, which we've seen pretty much hundred percent of YC companies do, including the founder who's going to talk after me, which is Josh and Gusto, you should ask him, is they all underprice.”
Hariharan: Raise prices 30% to test whether customers are underpaying
“The best way I often tell you, tell founders to test is increase your price by 30%. And if your customer's not blinking twice, then you probably have underpriced a lot.”
Hariharan: PostHog converted only 30 of 30,000 signups when launching paid tier
“There's another company that went through YC called PostHog. It was one of the most successful open source product analytics launch that they did through YC. Top number one on Hacker News. 30,000 signups. James was extremely confident that when he turns on the…”
Hariharan: Startups lack PMF if under 40% of users would be very disappointed
“And if at least 40% of your customers don't say very disappointed, you probably don't have a good enough product. It's just moderately appealing. So we say a rule of thumb is at least 40% of your customers will be very disappointed if your product goes away.”
Betakure: 95% of top YC companies plan post-pandemic hybrid offices
“We just did an analysis of the top YC companies that they publish every year, the largest market cap coming out of YC in the history. 95% of those companies are going to have offices post-pandemic, and most of them will be hybrid.”
Seibel: Most Common B2B Mistake Is Miscalculating Customer Acquisition Cost
“If we really look at a lot of YC companies nowadays, we have a ton of B to B companies, and the most common mistake they make is they don't really understand if they can afford the process they need to do to acquire customers.”
Most startups fail from running out of iteration time, not flawed hypotheses
“I think that most of them fail not because their hypothesis or thesis was wrong. I think most of them fail because either their timing was slightly off, or because of some of these problems, they didn't have time to iterate their products so that they can find…”
Seibel: Financial transparency makes employees rally during crises
“When you're transparent with your employees, they will actually rally to the cause, even when it looks like you're in your darkest hour. When you're not transparent with your employees they're not gonna rally, unfortunately, and they're probably gonna be prett…”
Seibel: YC has funded around 75 companies with over $100M in revenue
“YC has funded somewhere around 75 companies that generate over a hundred million dollars in revenue.”
Blond: Brex acquired most of its Y Combinator batch before launch
“We restricted the outbound to the YC batch that they were in into prior YC batches also. And we acquired most of their YC batch and dozens of companies from prior YC batches also.”
Blond: Y Combinator is the largest shareholder of Brex
“YC was the largest, it was and is the largest shareholder of Brex”
Braverman: Paul Graham identified Flexport as breakout before official YC acceptance
“Paul Graham had already identified Ryan and Flexport as a breakout from YC before he went into YC, and you know that because he got called on stage at startup school by Paul before he was officially accepted into YC.”
Early Rippling had no paying customers, selling exclusively to YC startups
“And so at that point we were really just selling to YC companies. Like we had come out of the recent winter batch. And so that was really what our top of funnel was selling to other YC companies in the batch. And we were really starting from zero. I mean, we h…”
Brescia: Interview unhireable top executives to define criteria for your open roles
“Go and meet as many exceptional folks for whatever role you're trying to fill as possible. Find the folks that are really at the On top of their game, even if there's no way you'll be able to hire them, and ask them about their roles, what it makes takes for s…”
Seibel: YC portfolio is worth $100B across 2,000+ funded companies
“To give you a sense of YC, we've now funded over 2000 companies, about 4000 alumni. Our companies combined are worth about a hundred billion dollars. We have about a hundred companies that are worth over a hundred million dollars and 17 worth over a billion, a…”
Stripe, Mixpanel, and Brex acquired early customers through the YC network
“One of the superpowers that not many people understand about YC is because we have so many companies who've done YC, In effect, you get warm leads to anyone who's ever done YC. So it's a lot easier for YC companies to sell to one another. That's not a surprise…”