Hale: Online businesses evolve from web presence to forms to data automation
Kevin Hale · Mike Knoop on Product and Design Processes for Remote Teams with Kevin Hale · Y Combinator · Mar 6, 2019 · at 2:31
Kevin Hale, Y Combinator partner and co-founder of Wufoo, outlines the progression of software needs for online businesses during a discussion with Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop.
0:00 / 0:37exact quote · 37.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“It's actually interesting that like, I think the life cycle of people like getting their business online, it's like you start off with like, I need like a presence. It's like, how do I get my stuff out there? And so use like website builders, like by default become really big. We didn't realize this when we started, but we understood this later on was that like, oh, then people need to figure out like, how do I collect data from all these people that are coming to us? And so form building, contact forms, et cetera, like all of that became really relevant in surveys. And then the next thing is like, oh, now I have all this new data. What do I do with it? And that's like, Zapier's like the next step. So these are like the three, like stages of every company of like, oh, this is what I need. And they have just giant markets.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Kevin Hale
Hale: Investors should figure out how non-obvious startups can win
“His job and the way he sees our work at YC is that it's not to figure out what's wrong with the company, but to figure out how it could possibly when. Cause our bets, the ones that when, are the ones that are non-obvious.”
Hale: Great investors imagine billion-dollar paths and pitch them back
“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.”
Kevin Hale: If you must ask if you have PMF, you don't
“If you have to ask the question, you definitely don't have it.”
Hale: Companies over-optimize for serendipitous chance encounters instead of focused execution
“I actually think a lot of companies or organizations, the group over optimize for serendipity. Like they're like, what about that chance moment? But to me, like serendipity, like we were like some random thing happened, all of a sudden we have a great idea. Li…”
Hale: Big Tech Experience Does Not Give Founders an Unfair Advantage
“And so if you think it's like, well, I'm a product manager at Google. There's a lot of product managers at Google. If you say you're an engineer at Microsoft, there's a lot of engineers at Microsoft. It's like, great, but it's not one that will make me think, …”