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 54 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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, …”
Hale: Founders should only give co-founder equity to actual co-founders
“And for us, we actually feel like the only people you should be giving equity, equity to for co-founder is two other co-founders.”
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: UX features and customer support improve retention, not conversion
“Customer support is actually a good one for improving retention. And it's something I also tell People about in terms of, like, that's a great, like, user experience, and most user experience features, like, a lot of people like to be forward on them, especial…”
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: 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.”
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.”
Hale: Founders work part-time due to lack of conviction, not resources
“It was the main reason why a lot of people are only able to work on their startup sometimes part-time. Yes, they might be stuck without resources, but they didn't have conviction.”
Hale: Startups are defined strictly by rapid growth
“For us at YC, the definition of a startup is a company that is designed or created to try to grow very quickly. So if you're not trying to build a company that grows very, very fast, ah, then you're just building a normal company. It's a small business.”
Kevin Hale never tells founders he dislikes their ideas at recruiting events
“If you ever meet me or talk to me about your startup and kind of recruiting or at one of these events, ah, I will never tell you that I do not like your idea.”
Kevin Hale: A startup idea is a hypothesis about rapid growth
“A startup idea is basically a hypothesis, and this is the way you should think about it. It's a hypothesis about why a company could grow quickly, and your job is to figure out how to construct your hypothesis, basically the pitch to the investor, so they unde…”
Hale: Frequent problems are vital because they provide more conversion opportunities
“The last one about frequency is super important because I like problems, and you'll find a lot of other YC partners like problems a lot that gives people a lot of opportunities to convert.”
Hale: Most Startups Struggle with Retention by Not Sending Enough Triggers
“And oftentimes most companies don't send enough, for example, email notifications, or triggers, or reminders, or figure out ways to come back into the app, or figure out ways to be back in front of the user at the right time.”
Kevin Hale: Startup Unfair Advantages Must Directly Explain Rapid Growth
“You have to have an unfair advantage that explains why you're gonna grow quickly. If it's not related to that, then it's not gonna be something that an investor is gonna find valuable.”
Hale: 99% of YC-Funded Founders Lack a True Founder Unfair Advantage
“And, 99% of the people we fund at YC do not fall into that category.”
Hale: Market growth is the weakest unfair advantage on its own
“If this is your only company advantage, then it's one of the weakest ones that you could have.”
Hale: Sole reliance on paid acquisition fails as scale attracts competitors
“If paid acquisition is the only way that you are able to grow your company, then I'm gonna discount that channel of growth greatly. That is because if you actually get really popular, you can actually start being someone significant, Let's say becoming a hundr…”
Hale: Blue Apron stalled after exhausting paid customer acquisition channels
“Blue Apron is a really good example of this. Almost all their acquisitions isn't paid, and then once they ate through that, there's almost nowhere else for them to sort of go.”
Kevin Hale: Enterprise startup success is determined by sales ability, not engineering
“So if you are heavy engineering team or doing a BDB or enterprise startup, again, the default is you have to build it. So if you can't even build it, then it's not even gonna work. So I don't spend actually a lot of time looking at that. For me, I'm trying to …”
Hale: Wufoo raised only $118k and returned over 30,000%
“For Wufoo, we only raised a 118,000 dollars for the whole life of the company, and our returns were over 30,000 percent.”
Hale: 2018 Startup School produced over 60 accepted YC companies
“So, last year we had over 15,000 people register and participate in startup school, and we had about 5000 graduate. From that graduating class we had about 391 of them. End up getting interviewed for the last batch, and then we accepted over 60 companies. It r…”
Hale: Startup School is the largest source of accepted YC companies
“So Startup School now represents the single largest source of companies that have, are accepted into a YC batch, which is super exciting.”
Hale: Having Builders Do Customer Support Creates Direct Incentive to Fix Issues
“One is that the people building the product, like, got all this awesome feedback on, like, how to improve it. You also have the right sort of feedback loop where it's just like, oh, I'm tired of getting this question. Yeah, exactly. I have to do something abou…”
Hale: Intentionally ugly UI defaults force users to learn software settings
“There's an affordance of something really ugly, especially in a design app or a photography app like Adobe Photoshop. And so when you put a border on something, the default was like this three pixel dark red line. And the affordance of that is like designers w…”
Hale: Video games excel at intuitive onboarding while B2B software fails
“I think the people who are the best at this are video games. They do a phenomenal job, and the people who are worse at this is, like, B to B enterprise software.”
Hale: Technical users recommend friendly tools that reduce internal support requests
“And so that humanizing element made it be like, oh, I can trust this app to be given to my non-technical people. And the roofie support is so good that they're not going to bother me. So WooFoo got easily recommended by technical people all the time.”
Hale: Y Combinator Accepts Single Founders and Teams Without Ideas
“We do take single founders. We do take people without an idea. We mostly focus on the team.”
Hale: Great technical teams face far less competition in unsexy markets than consumer software
“If you were a really great product technical team, and you're entering an unsexy space that's good, because you're entering a space with like less competitors. Those who are like great product teams, but entering in like Consumer spaces. It's like, my God, tha…”
Kevin Hale: Wufoo raised only $118,000 over its entire lifetime
“We only raised 118,000 dollars for the whole life of the company. So, so back in 2006 YC was only giving 18,000 dollars, and then we only raised from two angels 50,000 dollars each.”
Kevin Hale: Wufoo had only 10 employees when acquired
“Rufu was a company that only had 10 employees when we got acquired about five and a half years later, and we had done that on purpose, and we had profit sharing.”
Kevin Hale: Wufoo was one of YC's top-returning investments
“For many, many, many years, I think Wufu's returns were still like one of the top returns back for YC as a result.”
Hale: Founders should rethink strategy when runway drops to nine months
“Like, when you start getting down to nine months. Of runway, you should start seriously asking yourself about like, what would have to change definitively for me to know that this is a rocket ship?”
Hale: Narrative and storytelling are the most critical early startup tasks
“It's what we mostly do in YC is fixing your narrative and storytelling because people come in and they're so bad at talking about what they're doing. And because it's not clear, people can't understand. If they can't understand, they can't get excited. And if …”
Hale: Choosing a co-founder is more intense than marriage
“Getting a co-founder is like getting married to someone, and it's probably like even way more intense, and then you, and you don't have usually sex to relieve the tension, or fix a bunch of things, or smooth things over.”
Hale: Wufoo remains a top 10 YC exit by equity return
“And I think we're still in, like, top 10 biggest exits for YC still.”
Hale: Wufoo raised only $118,000 total from YC and two angels
“18,000 dollars. YC was 18,000 dollars then, and we raised money from two angels, PB and PG, and it was 50,000 dollars each. And that was it.”
Hale: Pausing Wufoo discussions after 15 minutes resolved 90% of issues naturally
“And so for us, we changed the rule to be, like, if you're discussing something for, like, 15 minutes, at that 15 minute mark, just, you gotta stop and go on to whatever the next thing you have to do, like, to get to, like, what you say is default action. And w…”
Hale: Wufoo spent up to 40% of development time on internal tools
“One thing people were surprised about with us at WooFoo was like, how much time we spent development wise,
On internal tools, actually.
It was, like, almost, like, 30 to 40% of, like, development time was, like, us building stuff for ourselves.
It's why we wer…”
Parker Conrad pitched Zenefits to YC as a solo non-technical founder
“Zenefits is a really good classic one. Parker was a single, non-technical founder who pitched an idea to YC, and he got in that way.”
Kevin Hale: Wufoo joined YC's second batch without a single line of code
“So when I founded Wufoo, and we entered that second batch, we also had not written a single line of code. PG had invested us at just the idea stage”
Hale: Startup ideas consist of a problem, solution, and insight
“So startup ideas composed of three parts. The first part is a problem, and it's basically the initial conditions. You have to explain to me, like, what is the setting for this company, ah, that allows it to be able to grow quickly. The second is the solution. …”
Hale: Paul Graham Bootstrapped YC Distribution via His Essay Audience
“PG was able to sort of build up YC and attract the right talent because he had a huge reach or audience when he got started. He had written that textbook, yes, but he also wrote all these popular online essays and had a large audience of his target users, hack…”