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Adora Cheung

Co-founder, Instalab · 6 appearances on the record.

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founderinvestorengineeroperatorhost@nolimits ↗LinkedIn ↗adoracheung.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Adora Cheung is the co-founder and former CEO of Homejoy, and subsequently served as a Partner at Y Combinator leading Startup School. Today, she is the co-founder of Instalab and an investor at Outlier Film Fund.

16statements → 4claims → 2claims resolved → 3.75/5average certainty → 1/5average debate potential → 8said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 1 opinion · 9 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Adora argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Adora Cheung: Early Airbnb founders fixated entirely on missed growth targets
“This is in fact what the Airbnb founders did in the beginning. And if they hit the numbers, great. Ah, if they did not, then that's all they would talk about.”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 21:08 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Cheung: Y Combinator has backed hundreds of biotech companies by 2018
“She's also a part-time partner at YC, which means in her free time, she helps all our biotech companies at which, at this point it's like hundreds, I don't know what the exact number is, but hundreds of biotech companies.”
Adora Cheung Oct 3, 2018 ▶ 0:54 A Conversation with Elizabeth Iorns - Advice for Biotech Founders · Y Combinator

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
0% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Everything Adora Cheung said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Adora Cheung: Monthly active users is a poor early-stage startup metric
“A lot of people pick MAU, monthly active user but this is, but this is usually not a great metric because it takes time to understand the impact of movement especially in a startup this early as in your startup. And so many things can happen within a month. An…”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 5:03 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Insight
Adora Cheung: Free user feedback is a trap for early-stage startups
“That's a trap because free users will give you different types of feedback The users who are actually paying you. Paid users are just more serious about the product and hopefully will be more serious about giving you feedback.”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 6:30 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Opinion
Adora Cheung: The 'north star metric' concept misleads early-stage founders
“People have referred to the primary metric as a north star metric, and I actually don't like the term north star because it kind of people have interpreted it as something you just focus on this one metric and then ignore everything else.”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 11:18 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adora Cheung: Top YC Demo Day startups grow 5% to 10% weekly
“So I actually went back and I looked at the good startups who pitched in recent YC demo days. So these, if you think about these startups, they were three months prior, they were all in the phase that you are probably in today. And it turns out the growth rate…”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 15:40 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Insight
Adora Cheung: 1% weekly growth means a startup lacks billion-dollar potential
“If you only manage one percent weekly growth, it's a sign you haven't figured out things yet. It doesn't mean that you have a horrible business. You can run a great small profitable business growing one percent week over week, but it's not a good sign that you…”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 16:55 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Insight
Adora Cheung: Good enterprise startups compress sales cycles from months to days
“Like good enterprise startups that time to sale goes from months to hopefully days if not hours.”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 19:02 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Insight
Adora Cheung: Acquiring early users through paid channels is cheating growth
“I think in the early days using paid users is actually cheating growth and you should avoid it as much as possible.”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 19:33 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Insight
Adora Cheung: Tracking one primary metric outweighs juggling multiple variables
“If there's a way to get 90% of the job done with just one variable, that's better than having a bunch of variables that gets, Let's say, 91% of the job done. In this case, the job to get done is quickly determining how well your startup is doing.”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 2:09 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Insight
Adora Cheung: Revenue is always the best primary metric for startups
“Revenue is always the best metric. I pay you a hundred dollars to use your product, your software. I must at least value that a hundred dollars. Active users, ah, using the product once a week, or, ah, once a day, we call that weekly active user or daily activ…”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 2:46 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Insight
Adora Cheung: Marketplaces must measure metrics where both sides receive value
“Well, you pick a value that actually represents them both getting value. So in Airbnb's case, it would be nights booked, right?”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 8:58 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Insight
Adora Cheung: No single metric tells 100% of a startup's story
“There's no metric that actually tells a story that tells a hundred percent of the story, maybe 90%, but not a hundred percent. And so sometimes founders fool themselves by literally only tracking their primary metric and nothing else.”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 11:33 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Assertion Supported
Adora Cheung: Early Airbnb founders fixated entirely on missed growth targets
“This is in fact what the Airbnb founders did in the beginning. And if they hit the numbers, great. Ah, if they did not, then that's all they would talk about.”
Adora Cheung Aug 1, 2019 ▶ 21:08 Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator
Assertion Supported
Cheung: 38 Startup School companies got into core YC batches
“So we had 38 companies who actually got into our core YC program after going through startup school, and so they don't, they, I think for the most part, most of them did a lot of their iteration and talking to users during startup school, and they learn a lot …”
Adora Cheung Aug 7, 2018 ▶ 6:36 Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung Discuss Startup School · Y Combinator
Assertion Contradicted
Cheung: Y Combinator has backed hundreds of biotech companies by 2018
“She's also a part-time partner at YC, which means in her free time, she helps all our biotech companies at which, at this point it's like hundreds, I don't know what the exact number is, but hundreds of biotech companies.”
Adora Cheung Oct 3, 2018 ▶ 0:54 A Conversation with Elizabeth Iorns - Advice for Biotech Founders · Y Combinator
Disclosure
Cheung: YC Startup School offers a 10-week course with weekly advisor meetings
“So, we, ah, it's a 10 week course, and you can either audit the course, or you can actually be part of the, you can apply to be part of the course. And to be part of the course, you get, ah, obviously access to the materials and lectures. You're put into a gro…”
Adora Cheung Aug 7, 2018 ▶ 0:52 Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung Discuss Startup School · Y Combinator
Disclosure
Cheung: Startup School Offers AWS and DigitalOcean Credits and Stripe Atlas
“So we have cloud credits from Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean and maybe some others and then every company that comes through will be able to incorporate and create a bank account with, through Stripe Atlas.”
Adora Cheung Aug 7, 2018 ▶ 9:35 Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung Discuss Startup School · Y Combinator

The other half of the tape: Adora Cheung's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 8 episodes on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Suhail Doshi 1Mathilde Collin 1Kevin Hale 1Jessica Livingston 1Craig Cannon 1Carolynn Levy 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00335520152016201720182019episodesmentions
03520152016201720182019episodes it came up in
000.52.51520152016201720182019episodesmentions per episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 5 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
2015 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (6)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Vidit Aatrey on Building Meesho, India's Top Reselling Platform, with Adora Cheung · Y Com May 22, 2019 8m
A Conversation on Hard Tech with Eric Migicovsky · Y Combinator Oct 12, 2018 6m
A Conversation with Elizabeth Iorns - Advice for Biotech Founders · Y Combinator Oct 3, 2018 8m
Running Your Company by Patrick Collison · Y Combinator Oct 3, 2018 9m
A Conversation with Ooshma Garg - Moderated by Adora Cheung · Y Combinator Sep 8, 2018 6m
Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung Discuss Startup School · Y Combinator Aug 7, 2018 5m

Played on the show (1)

Episodes where a recording of Adora Cheung was played rather than Adora taking part, or where the tape carries an address with nobody putting questions to them. Listed because the words are on the record, kept out of every score on this page because they were not said on this show. We read this off the tape: who was spoken to, who was asked something, who answered whom.

EpisodeDateOn tapeWhat it is
Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals · Y Combinator Aug 1, 2019 20m aired address
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