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 635 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
Mañalac: Founders should pitch 'what' their startup does before 'why'
“So first, we recommend leading with what, not with why.”
Epstein: Platform-dependent startups face structural risk of being shut down
“If your business is built on top of another big successful platform, and your business starts to work, then it's actually in the interest of that platform To shut you down and capture all of that revenue for themselves. So that's why even if these look like th…”
Most good startup ideas have existing competitors, proving market demand exists
“Counterintuitively, most startup ideas, most good startup ideas have existing competitors. When founders go into spaces with no existing competitors, they often find out that the reason that there are no competitors is because no one wants the product.”
Over 70% of the top 100 YC companies generated their ideas organically
“If you look at the YC top 100 companies, at least 70% of them had their startup ideas organically, rather than by, like, sitting down and explicitly trying to think of a startup idea.”
No founder in 20 years of YC built a successful friend-meetup app
“Well, it turns out that there are some structural reasons why this idea is hard, which is why in, like, 20 years of people applying to YC with this idea, nobody has actually pulled it off.”
Taggar: Academic and workplace success poorly predict startup performance
“You might think you could just look at how well someone has done in school or at work and assume success there would lead to success at startups. That's definitely what I thought when I first started working at YC in 2010 and began reading YC funding applicati…”
Taggar: Wanting to get rich is a legitimate reason to start a startup
“For example, it's become popular to say that you shouldn't start a company just to make money. That's considered a somewhat flimsy motivation, but I actually think it's fine to start a startup to become rich. Startups are one of the few ways to make life-chang…”
Seibel argues that misconceptions about Y Combinator are deliberately designed attacks
“What are some of the other misconceptions that you saw that were, you know, obviously, I mean, I would argue like obviously designed to try to convince people to not do YC. Like these were like designed attacks on YC.”
Caldwell: People with strongest opinions on YC never did a batch
“I think another big misconception was just folks, a lot of folks that apparently have the strongest opinions of telling people about YC never actually were in a batch.”
Seibel: Investors who only attack competitors are just selling fear
“If you ever see someone making an argument that's 100% ripping something else down and zero percent explaining why their thing is good, if all of your talking points is the alternative is bad, you know, maybe all you're selling is fear because that's all you h…”
Caldwell: Non-Technical Founders Who Have Shipped Nothing Are Overly Optimistic
“If you can't build a product and you don't have a tech co-founder or whatever, or you have never once built a product and given it to anyone and you think it's going well, you are too optimistic. Like it's not going well, like, sorry.”
Seibel: Overly pessimistic founders are easier to fix than overly optimistic ones
“I actually think I rather help someone being too pessimistic, strangely, because usually when I try to help introduce realistic expectations, they can adjust. You know, usually we just need to tell them what's reasonable, and suddenly they're like, oh, ok, I g…”
Seibel: Founders do not need to sacrifice relationships or incur extreme debt
“What I think that this is what's tricky is that I think someone needs to be out there saying that these aren't the things you have to put on the table to win. Yes, when you're working hard, you're gonna probably have to spend less time with your family or frie…”
Seibel: Anti-SF narratives ignore recent college graduates eager to move there
“I think that a lot of that content marketing is unfortunately written by like people our age, people with kids, people living in San Francisco for like the last two years who were generally pissy about COVID. And it was like less responding to someone who migh…”
Caldwell: Outside venture capitalists get angry at YC for empowering founders
“And it's just funny how like doing that really seems to annoy investors that we're like, again, we're like giving away We're like on the wrong team a lot. They seem really mad at us.”
Caldwell: Downturns are ideal times for low-burn underdogs to attack high-burn rivals
“Cause again, for some folks, the actual move is to go on offense, right? Just like we said a moment ago where they're like, okay, I see. So this is the score. Got it. Time to go hard against my competitors who are have higher burn. Yeah. You know, like this is…”
Seibel: Founders want to join established ecosystems, not build new ones
“I think the founders I talked to, they don't want to build a startup ecosystem. They want to be a part of a startup ecosystem.”
Seibel: YC Summer 2022 batch will be fully in person
“For the first time since winter, 2020, this new batch, the summer 22 batch will be in person.”
Flora: Claiming 'No Competitors' in a YC Interview Signals Ignorance
“Cause it just shows, it shows kind of a lack of understanding of the customer and what the customer is doing right now to solve the problem. It's very unlikely that no one, the customer has never tried another solution to whatever the problem is that they're t…”
Caldwell: Cycling through startup mentorship programs is a massive time suck
“I'm not saying like it's all bad, but it's a bottomless pit of time suck. Like you could go so far deep in there. You could be in that bottomless pit for years and be a startup founder that's never built a product and has never gotten a single customer because…”
Caldwell: Filing patents for early IP is a classic overthinking mistake
“Michael, should I file patents for all of my IP? Exactly. That's a classic overthinking thing. Probably not.”
Caldwell says non-tech investors often demand crazy terms and operational control
“If someone made all their money investing in real estate or in strip malls or franchise McDonald's franchises or something like just something that is not remotely a tech startup, they will often ask for crazy terms that would make sense if they were investing…”
Seibel: Technology platforms change faster than fundamental human problems
“The platforms change faster than the human problems.
So like you and I have lived through one, Web one O, Web two O, mobile, and whatever the hell you call it.
Turns out that like, I want to go grocery shopping, but I don't want to go to the grocery store.
…”
Caldwell: Brian Armstrong's original Coinbase YC pitch wasn't about buying Bitcoin
“Another thing I want to note is even Brian and his YC application Didn't really believe in his own idea because what he basically applied to YC with was the P to P transfer parts. It wasn't buying Bitcoin and holding it. It was the idea that he could build som…”
Seibel: Stripe deliberately launched as the most expensive payment product
“When the Stripe Finders came to speak at YC, the other detail they added was it was the most expensive product in the market. Like, to make sure people really wanted it, they didn't give it away for free, they didn't price it comparably, they made it more expe…”
Seibel: Comfortable founders often default to abstract, immeasurable global problems
“I think there's a whole set of other people who don't have very many problems in their life. And I think those people kind of reach for like the UN problems or the global problem, right? The problems that like they are told they should care about, but they don…”
Seibel: Co-Founders in Many YC Teams Lack Equal Passion for the Problem
“I would argue that in a lot of the teams that we fund, two, three, four founders, They're not all equally passionate about the problem, right?”
Seibel: Startups with real marginal costs must charge from day one
“In any situation where you actually have real cost, you should be charging from day one.”
Seibel: Digitizing paper workflows alone does not guarantee a billion-dollar company
“If something's being undone on paper, There is a business in putting it into the computer, and like, by nature of the fact that it's being done on paper, you could build a billion dollar company and bring it to the computer, and that's actually not true. Like,…”
Seibel: Founders should charge uncomfortable prices to find desperate customers
“Charge more than you might feel comfortable so you can identify the people who are most desperate for it.”
Betts-Lacroix: Y Combinator accepts fantastic founders with terrible ideas
“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…”
Hard-tech YC applicants have a 10x higher acceptance rate than others
“Hard tech companies that apply to YC actually have about a 10 x higher acceptance rate than other kinds of applications.”
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: 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…”
Hale: Investors Cannot Accurately Predict Which Startups Reach $10B
“Part of the shotgun model is based on the fact that it's like, we actually can't accurately predict who's going to be a ten billion dollar company.”
Hale: Video lectures are the least important part of Startup School
“Like, I actually think the lectures are the least important part. Of startup school. Like, it's a one thing that, like, it brings a lot of tension, it helps build up the brand. But those lectures are a way for people to understand and like get help. You know, …”
Hale: Needing over 10% market share for $100M revenue is implausible
“If they need to capture more than 10% of the market just to get to that hundred million dollar revenue, that's probably not plausible.”
Rossmann: Make School is the only surviving young dropout startup from its YC batch
“My co-founder and I are the only young founders in our batch whose company is still alive. So when you look at it from that perspective, you look today, what are the companies from my YC batch that still exist and are still successful? There is, there are zero…”
Hale: Freemium Business Models Require Very Large Addressable Markets
“Freemium won't work for every company. Mostly because, like, what it requires is a very, very large market.”
Allred: MIT PhDs and 1600 SATs do not correlate with startup success
“But just because you went, you have a PhD in computer science from MIT and you got a 1600 on the SATs as a freshman doesn't necessarily mean you'll have a successful company. It's not directly correlated.”
Fines: The Narrative That YC Lacks Women and Black People is False
“This misconception of there are no women at YC. There are no black people at YC. There's no, you know, there's all these things, and it's like when I'm working around with all these different people, it's like, it's definitely very diverse, and we're doing eve…”
Caldwell: Investor hype is not predictive of startup success; retention and revenue are
“Excitement around the core product or feeling like other investors are excited about it and things like that definitely give a founder, like yourself, tons of leverage. But that I actually have learned to not take that too seriously as an investor, as a signal…”
Khosla: Rate of founder change is the strongest indicator of success
“In the three months that they're, that they've been at YC, what's their rate of change? If we've had multiple points of intercept. That may be a stronger indicator than any other single indicator.”
Bosmeny: Free trials provide startups no commitment, validation, or revenue
“Folks, when you are starting your company and when you are out there trying to make your startup work, you need things like commitment. You need validation. You need revenue. And guess what? A free trial doesn't get you any of those things.”
Cannon: Early-stage startups should ignore brand building entirely
“There's this third thing called brand, which is kind of this like vague, misty thing about like how people perceive you. You really don't need to worry about this early on.”
Seibel: Solving a startup problem typically takes two years, not months
“So, if you're not thinking that the process of coming up with a solution for this problem is probably more like a two-year process, you're doing it wrong. If you are unsatisfied with significant progress in under two years, you're probably doing it wrong.”
Seibel: Pivoting changes the customer or problem; iterating changes the solution
“So, I define pivot As changing the customer or changing the problem. This should be rare. This should happen infrequently. Many times this means you should start a new company. I defined iterate as changing the solution.”