Pete Koeman

“The bad news is that you're probably the only person capable of selling your product. That is, if you aren't able to sell your product yourself at first, chances are you're not going to be able to hire somebody else to do it for you.”

“The single biggest mistake that founders make is thinking that implementation is the customer's job.”

“In fact, we closed six-figure deals with customers that were excited about our product, and then we discovered a year later when it was time for them to renew that they hadn't run a single A-B test with Optimizely.”

“Sales isn't about tricking people. It's fundamentally about helping people solve their problems, and engineers are great at doing that.”

“The pricing mistake that founders make most often is charging too little for their product. Or even making it free in exchange for product feedback.”

“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.”

“Keep timelines and scope of work out of the legal contract if you can, and put them in an order form or a shared project tracking document instead.”

“Sales is the number one concern during the batch for most of the founders that I work with at YC.”

“When Dan and I started building, we booked demos with all of our competitors, and every single one of them used a dummy website to show what it was like to use their products to run A-B tests. And we thought this was really lame. So we spent weeks building a f…”

“In the real world, you're almost always selling to an individual human, not a big monolithic entity. And that's good news because humans are easier to understand than organizations. And that turns out to be really important. In the real world, sales is not adv…”

“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.”

“It's basically every profession I think will have its cursor moment or its windsurf moment.”

“When I use tools like Cursor and Windsurf to build software with AI, it feels like the most powerful tool I've ever used, right? It's this feeling of being able to create anything I want, anything I can picture in my head you know, will materialize in front of…”

“My contention is that A lot of AI app developers, including the Gmail team in this case, are treating the system prompt the same way they've been treating code for decades.”

“Some of the work that we've done at YC, building agents to automate some of the repetitive work that we and our teammates do on a regular basis, actually suggests to me that writing prompts is going to be part of the day-to-day flow for a lot of people.”

“And I think the same thing is going to happen with prompting. So I think this is actually going to happen a lot faster with prompting, because writing a prompt is a lot more accessible than, you know, operating your file system manager on, on your computer. Yo…”

“Unless you have your own prompts and you can write it for yourself, like you are You know, below the API line for some PM or developer that is not you who like will not understand you will not understand your needs will not understand what you uniquely care ab…”

“The best AI software that I've used, whether it's inside of YC or tools that others have built, tend to be very small, and just add kind of the smallest amount of code ahead of time that you need in order to let the model shine. And you can build an awful lot …”

“I suspect that a lot of commercial software will come with this capability out of the box in the future.”

“One of the cool things that happened in the last month or two was that a couple of the other partners took a meeting that they had with a group office hours they had with a bunch of the companies in the spring batch and just went through and had every founder …”

“I think one of the big problems that I don't think has been solved well yet by anybody is the multiplayer harness, right? It's enabling that kind of superpower, but on a team or an organizational level.”

“And we had like 20 tools at the beginning, including this magical ability to query our SQL database. But over time, Teams have added more and more tools. Every time we kind of come upon some piece of work at YC that we think could be improved with an agent, we…”