founders

“I think a mistake that founders make is that they come to the equity discussion, and they're only looking backwards. They're thinking about who had the idea, and who worked the longest on it at the beginning, and who has the MBA, and who's going to be CEO, and…”

“The most successful founders, I've noticed, are totally focused on two things. Building their product and making something people want, which of course is our motto and talking to their users. And they do not let themselves get distracted by anything else.”

“Unfortunately, the trick to great execution is to say no a lot. You know, you're saying no 97 times out of a hundred. And most founders find that they have to make a very conscious effort to do this.”

“When people say get on planes in marginal situations, they usually mean it well they don't usually mean it literally, but I think it's actually good literal advice.”

“In fact, this is the one thing that we've learned, best predictive success of Founders NYC. If every time we talk to a team, they've gotten new things done that's the best predictor we have that the company will go on to be successful.”

“The best founders usually respond to email the most quickly. They make decisions the most quickly. They're generally quick in all these different ways.”

“Before 20 or 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder. It's totally flat. And that's really good, and that's what you want. And at that stage, that is the optimal way for product, that's the optimal structure for produ…”

“Before product market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product, or your number one job is to build a great product. As the company grows, and at about this, you know, 25 or so employee size, your main job shifts from building a great product…”

“That's how most founders delegate. And that does not make people feel good, and it certainly doesn't scale. A subtle difference, but really important, is to say, hey, you're really smart. That's why I hired you. You go off. Here are the things to think about. …”

“So I tell founders, like, you should think about, you know, for the next 10 years, you're going to be giving out three to five percent of the company every year, because you just get bigger and bigger.”

“The other thing on communication that people get wrong as you scale, and we're supposed to go to questions, so I'll make this a short point, is how much of the time, or how much time you have to spend repeating the same message. so a lot of people, like, wan…”

“The number one reason why people stay in research is they can't build their MVP.”

“You know that if you don't have the resilience you need, the toughness you need, the determination you need, the belief you need, it, none of the other things matter. Nothing else. How big the opportunity is, how much of competition there is or isn't, how much…”

“In fact, if you think about it, if you act like a jerk to a founder, that might be, even if that gets you an extra 50% of your return, your investment back somehow, That might actually cost you way more in the long term because the way you get deal flow is bec…”

“Don't try to be the last money in because you don't have any confidence in yourself. So some of the worst investor behavior is to say, Craig, I like you. I like your company. You're raising a million dollars. I'll put a 100,000 dollars in as soon as you raise …”

“You only have to do really well at a few things to do well, and you can do badly at a lot of things, but if you don't do well at those few things, it doesn't matter how well you do everything else, and so what you don't want to be is the founder that gets ever…”

“The network has gotten big enough that the asymmetry that used to exist Where investors had a lot of leverage is gone, and I don't think it will come back anytime soon.”

“Many of these companies that are sort of a generation defining companies are started by people who are out of network, who are not well known, who are not sort of the people that, you know, can start a company and get a bunch of press right away.”

“If you don't have really strong communication skills, or if you don't develop them quickly, you're at a big disadvantage. Think about, there are obviously famous exceptions to this, but if you think about it on the whole, the founders of the really super succe…”

“I've, I have never once made a lot of money backing a founder that I thought was only okay, but a business that was otherwise good.”

“Even in our 10 minute interview, if you give like a founder a chance to sort of tell you about the unethical things they do, they will often do it. And Yeah, surprisingly often.”

“I think what I have seen the most successful angel investors do is just start helping founders for free. Realizing they may not get to invest in those companies, but that they'll get the referrals down the road.”

“It is way more important to your future success as an investor that founders like you and say, that investor did the right thing by me, than it is that you squeeze out, you know, a few drops of juice from a failing company.”

“Sometimes angels think that they need to ask to be on the board of directors in order to be officially helpful, and you don't, and please don't, because it's actually not something the founders probably want. Sometimes, I mean, there's exceptions, but usually …”

“Something that we see a lot as an anti-pattern in investor behavior is folks that just do meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting and don't ever make a decision. And that's actually worse for founders than just saying no.”

“And one thing to look for in your own gut is if you feel more or less convinced the more you talk to the founder. Because it could be you hear about an idea, you see their demo day pitch, and it seems great, and you're a yes, and the more you talk to them, the…”

“If it's a very small amount, and you're just part of a large syndicate don't make it hard. It's only going to foul up the process, and often the founders will just push back on all this stuff.”

“Why would you do a safe? Well, because it's simple, it's easy, it's fast, and it's cheap. It's better for founders.”

“A very common thing we hear a ton from founders is that investors that just look at their phone the entire meeting, or otherwise act super distracted. Not recommended. Very basic, but holy cow is that common. That happens in a double digit percentage of meetin…”

“Cause it's not, maybe you already saw their deck, or maybe you already read about the company, it's not necessarily about learning what you didn't already know, it's about hearing the founder tell their own story and their own words. And that's such a good rea…”

“So one thing that we hear a lot of, especially for folks that haven't done much of this, is they say, okay, I'm in, once you go find the rest of the round. And this is the cheapest of cheap shots that you can possibly do because what you're actually saying is,…”

“I think in general, when you help companies, it comes, it goes, and spikes, versus it's sustained throughout. If you're sustainably having to interfere or help with a company every day, then there's either something wrong with that company or with the founders…”

“It's nearly impossible to be a really great culture leader if you're burnt out, if you don't, if you're running on fumes, because to really build culture in a thoughtful way, you need to kind of embody the spirit of almost generosity and deep caring for your p…”

“If you're a founder, if you're growing a team, you know, even if you started as, let's say, an engineer or hacker, you're probably having to get good at sales and marketing. And culture, and being a culture leader is one of them.”

“One thing I've learned from Y Combinator is that the most successful startups grow organically out of the founders' lives”

“And the most successful startups do tend to be weird. They're usually such outliers that they seem preposterous at first to everyone except the founders because the company has grown out of their own experiences.”

“Another thing that we've noticed among our best founders, again and again and again, is that they are, have a confident and definite view of the future. They may be wrong and so we say it's good to be confident and flexible, but this idea that you are confiden…”

“No investor wants to put money into a company with founders who may decide the next day that they're burned out, so they take their shares and they leave.”

“One of the reasons why we think, ah, Clerky and Stripe Atlas are so great is because they don't stop after formation. They also have post incorporation documents, and some of the not so good platforms stop after formation, and they don't do post incorporation,…”

“What you will get wrong is that you will not pay enough attention to users. You will have, you will make up some idea in your own head that you will call your vision and then you will spend a lot of time thinking about your vision in a cafe by yourself and wri…”

“You only need three to five testing sessions. I think you really only need three to be able to tell the most critical and important UX bugs, if you will, that you have.”

“Investors do not care about getting their money back. That is not sexy to them. You shouldn't say that. Founders are kind of like hedging against themselves and saying, don't worry, I'll still protect your money. But You need to up level that when you go talk …”

“I think it's really hard for the average founder to actually just be focused on something boring. We tend to have, like, ADD or something, and, like, we just decide, decide to get very easily distracted and I think it's hard to do something, do the same thing …”

“You shouldn't bother thinking about hiring a firm or someone in-house until you have more funding and so much inbound that the founders can't deal with it themselves.”

“Reporters get incredibly offended. They think you're questioning their journalistic integrity if you ask Ask to see what they're writing before they publish it.”

“As founders, you also have some very unique advantages that will, that can make you actually incredibly powerful at sales and very potent. And the two advantages that I've noticed, one, ah, is just your passion. You are more passionate about the product that y…”

“Think about who in your company is really owning this, and it should probably be a founder, and it should probably be as much of a full-time job as you can spare.”

“Founders are always very committed to making their company work, and that's good, but they should Also realize that, you know, their company is just a company, and you have a life outside of your company that's also super important, and you should enjoy every …”

“Also, a good sign that an investor meeting is going well is when they talk at least as much or more than you do.”

“Startups, founders think they want to be the way to network, like the way to get out there is to network and just be everywhere, you know, but the way to build a strong network is to build something impressive”

“I think the best way is to get an introduction through a founder that I already know, or somebody else that I already know, so that it's in network. I think if you can't find a way to do that, then you're probably not going to find a way to get customers, you'…”

“Your biggest strength as a founder is typically that you're a control freak. And that greatest strength turns into your greatest weakness kind of in scale up mode, that, that desire to control decisions, desire to control the organization. And I think almost e…”

“I really got to say that to me I think more designers should be founders. I think that that skillset is so, so relevant to the work it takes to actually get a lot of people together to work in a system and to create value from scratch.”

“And so we have to, like, work on our imagination, we have to work on our optimism to figure out, Oh, what is the way that whatever story that they're telling me could become a billion dollar company? And then a great investor pitches that back to the founder.”

“At the core of kind of YC's teachings, there are only two things that you must do in order to start your company. You need to code or build your product and talk to users.”

“Very few people have the self-awareness to say, I'm not the right person for the job at this point. And the reason, what I'm suggesting here, this long rambling Set of thoughts on startups, children, and writing is the emotional part of that ownership is so fa…”

“The stock market doesn't feel that way. The stock market includes many people who bought it recently who didn't get to enjoy those romantic idealistic times. They expect future growth. And that's a treadmill. That's the hamster wheel that, you know, I think ma…”

“The biggest mistakes founders make is to start working on online marketing when they don't have people paying for the product.”

“A lot of founders come into the YC with terrible ideas but they're like, sometimes when they're fantastic founders, they're like, let's just accept them anyway, because I know that The, when they're exposed to the richness of this network and the community her…”

“Building a company is a longterm game at the end of the day. And so what that means is you want to ensure that you're finding the best partner for your company or your business and really take the fund out of the equation.”

“Too many founders treat product as an afterthought. They're basically trying to do financial engineering, and the product is like delegated.”

“The founders that made it work believed in themselves and they knew that we couldn't fix it. Like they actually internalized the whole meta point of this video, or at least what I'm trying to get across with it, which is like, you know, they took bits and piec…”

“You can get a lot more honesty out of somebody when they're not financially incentivized to kind of blow smoke up your ass to, you know, to say nice things.”

“They're pattern matching to previous successes and answering the question, like, do you pattern match to founders I've had success with in the past? And then they're stack ranking, like of all the founders I've worked with and are currently pitching me, like, …”

“When founders are fundraising, it's like the first thing, the first time they tell me there's a rejection and a why, I ignore it completely. If they've gotten like 15, 20, 25 rejections, I then ask, are the whys consistent? And only if then the whys are consis…”

“I think we see this in practice, too, because we will see founders who will pitch to investors, get no's, apply to YC, get into YC, and those same investors will say, now I want to invest in your company, and nothing has changed. No fundamental thing has chang…”

“So if a founder actually, like, actions on your feedback in sort of like a material way, like, it makes you less than like, if you're a good investor, I think it makes you less than likely to want to invest. You don't want to invest in someone who is relying o…”

“One of the pieces of advice I repeat after demo days over, over and over again, is keep a list of the investors that said no, like, who seemed reasonable about it, and like, just keep, like, keep sending them updates. Keep sending an update every month. And st…”

“If a founder can't come back, if I feel like I better understand the user than the founder does, that's a bad sign.”

“I think that's extremely rare for an investor to be demanding you to like burn like crazy. I think that the horrible truth is that founders don't need much of a push.”

“They also always tell us like, hey, like we're funding your companies. Like you shouldn't be like, you know, like telling the founders not to have high burn.”

“If you are in an operationally intensive business, you know, a la DoorDash, you better be 10 X better than the people around you at knowing your numbers at steering that plane well.”

“If you don't need a deal, man, you're going to pitch better. Like this, that's the way life works. Like when you don't need something, you're way more convincing than when you're begging for something.”

“This is what's so weird about this business is like, who has to live with the rest of their lives that that was their startup. Or that they could have done something different. They weren't able to versus the investors like, yeah, whatever. Cool. And they go, …”

“I think that in general investors are allergic when we tell founders that there might be situations where their incentives and the founders incentives are not aligned perfectly.”

“The best people, shit goes wrong, and they go take a hike or something. And the worst people think shit goes wrong and they drink and do drugs.”

“And it might turn out that if you want to be a founder of a very successful company, you might have to adult harder than the people around you. In fact, it almost assuredly requires adulting harder than the people around you.”

“Most people don't realize how the founders who they are impressed with actually take advantage of therapy, actually take advantage of medication.”

“For the best founders, no action is like, you know, 2030, 40% of the time what they do, maybe more. But for other founders, they don't even know the play exists.”

“And I think the best founders Have techniques and they can do it. I think, and they can like be really good at it. I think something to aspire for is a founder is someone who can know both. Oh no. Like my star employee just quit and says my startup is horrible…”

“And it's like when you're a second time founder, the investors know that you know more people. They don't want to give you bad feedback, right? Like they're incentivized to tell you nice things so that you'll continue being nice to them. Whereas when you're a …”

“And what they didn't tell that founder is that every subsequent investor would say to themselves, huh, this investor put in a relatively small amount of capital, bought so much of the company that the founders are going to get so diluted that they're not going…”

“It shouldn't cost 50,000 dollars to a price round. Like you're just ripping off founders, pure and simple ripping off founders.”

“The way you build a company is not, you're not baking a cake where you sprinkle in three different investors and then a cake pops out. Like, that's like the stupidest thing I've ever heard. This is a really common misconception out there, which is like, I hate…”

“If your idea for how you start a startup is to first create a pitch deck and go pitch VCs, you're setting yourself up to get screwed. You're setting yourself up to get taken advantage of by people who are gonna have 20 different ways to rip you off, versus if …”

“The reason I have conviction that your initial motivations don't matter so much is that I've seen motivation to change over time. I've seen founders who started out a company with a plan to sell it within a year, change their mind as they kept working the comp…”

“Often an idea grows on founders over time as it starts to work. As I'm going to talk about in a moment, a lot of the best startup ideas are in boring spaces like tax accounting software or something like that, like no one is particularly passionate about, like…”

“Unfortunately, most founders still don't build personal connections with their users today. They hide behind info ad emails or do not reply emails.”

“The biggest mistakes that most founders do is they don't do enough outreach because they don't work backwards from the goal.”

“One is this assumption that we are like godlike advisors with complete understandings of every user base and every problem in the world. And like, They can kind of like shortcut talking to users if they just spend enough time talking to us. And so that one is …”

“And I think as an, as a YC partner in the early days, I think I measured my effectiveness based on how much fun founders had talking to me. And only after a couple of batches that I realized that doesn't really do anything. And then when I started having hones…”

“Founders have had more, have more control over their companies today than ever in the history of startups. And why is this? It's because when you raise with safes, you don't give up any board seats. All right. There's no board seat nonsense in safes. After you…”

“Like one of the things I noticed at YC is a lot of the folks that later on become great founders. They worked on projects in high school that may not be commercially, like, venture-funded companies, but they were, like, pretty cool.”

“Maybe the base conclusion here is that you have to do some copying. You cannot innovate everything.”

“These are things that founders do to impress themselves, to impress other founders. The user is not essential.”

“Like, the folks who learned and didn't succeed are often motivated to go out and do it again, or go work in a company in that space. Like, this is an additive experience in their life, even if their shop didn't work. The ones who do the random walk, like they …”

“When you spend all your time trying to triangulate what other people say is good, and that's how you decide what startup idea to work on. You're gonna have a bad time.”

“What middle manager is going to give out their personal cell phone number when trying to win a customer's business? Like nobody's going to. And so if you make people feel like you care about them and you're going to stop at nothing and your personal career dep…”

“The biggest mistake that I see founders make at this stage is getting surprised and discovering that what they thought was a done deal is in fact not done at all and may take weeks or months of additional back and forth or fall through completely.”

“Many founders start by talking to anyone who will take their call, and the problem with this approach is that it selects for the people who are easiest to talk to, not the people who will be great customers.”

“I think this is a great example of probably the job of a founder or product leader, which is to clearly articulate to the entire team and to the world What this product is for and how you're supposed to use it.”

“Well, similarly to sales, I think founders should lead marketing for a long time, maybe forever, actually.”

“If you as the founder cannot sell your product, Nobody else can.”

“No one can sell the product better than the founder.”

“I think when oftentimes when we, when I see founders that are spending too much money it's because they haven't yet had that moment, that light bulb moment with any customers. That this is a thing that people want. And so they're kind of chasing that. They're …”

“Like, you definitely can't farm this out. Like, literally, the founders themselves, they're technical. They have to be the great product people. They have to be the ethnographer. They have to be the designer. You want the person on the second meeting to see th…”

“Founders are often very afraid to have a willingness to pay conversation. They feel like if they bring a dollar amount up, it might scare the customer off. But honestly, that's almost always not true.”

“My advice to people, if they're thinking about where to join a company is I tell them to join a young company, not necessarily a small company. Right. But a young company, because a young company is still figuring things out. It's still learning. It hasn't suc…”

“VP of marketing is like notoriously high churn job because, and it's not because the VP of marketing folks aren't good. It's because the founders have the wrong expectations of what those people do, and they haven't been curious enough to learn about that job.”

“Like, I have a great idea is not something that founders would have great ideas say generally.”

“I think as soon as you're making multiple hires I like to think I can work on one hire really well at one point in time and my co-founder can do the same. And so if we're working on two hires, that's roughly where we're at capacity. And so if you're hiring mor…”

“So really to emphasize the selling piece, that's the number one thing we see founders do wrong. Is in the first call, they're just interviewing the candidate rather than selling the company. You should flip that order. The first thing you do is sell the compan…”

“Recruiters Can never sell the company as effectively as the founder.”

“It really matters that the founder, ideally the technical founder, is going to be reaching out for those suite hires.”

“And so in some ways, the risk that an early employee is taking on is somewhat similar to the risk that a founder takes on.”

“It's much easier In my mind, I think, to be a large company executive, because you have all these resources, you have all this leverage, you actually work less hard in your product market fit”

“One of the tricks that I think founders use is you put like a cannery at the beginning of the context. There's something very esoteric that it would only help. It's like something really funny. It's like, I don't know. My name is Calvin and blah, blah, blah. I…”

“We also do this every Friday where the founders do it in front of the whole company, where they're walking the store.”

“Dual class is defeated all the time. I give a bunch of examples in the book, like, you know, the stock price drops. Everyone panics. Founders forced out anyway, because at the end of the day, like having the votes is not the only thing that matters. There's a …”

“Founders either have to agree to or not this system. And so we actually are the ones propping it up. We're giving it the fresh meat it needs to survive because it's so value destroying.”

“You forget that you take a venture investment from a venture firm. You're not taking investment from that individual person. You're taking investment from a company. Then that person leaves. And now you're stuck with some new person and you've given all these …”

“There are actually choices we can make as founders, and especially choices we make early that can change the trajectory of the company so that, as you say, its longevity could be measured in decades and centuries, not quarters.”

“I would bet that this generally will cut against many years of experience in favor of people who have a lot of fluency with the tools.”