The Wisdom Wall

“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.”

“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.”

“if you have to ask the question, you definitely don't have it.”

“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. Like that's like hitting the lotto. And to me, optimizing for…”

“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. Uh, 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, oh, you have a greater unfair advantage than someone…”

“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.”

“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, especially designers, it's like, it's really beautiful, it's really…”

“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.”

“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.”

“Freemium won't work for every company. Mostly because, like, what it requires is a very, very large, um, market.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 understand how it can go grow quickly.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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, it's not gonna be something that an investor is gonna find valuable.”

“If this is your only company advantage, then it's one of the weakest ones that you could have.”

“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 hundred million dollar revenue company, then you're gonna attract…”

“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 figure out success will be determined by how well you can do…”

“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 about it.”

“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 want to change it. They'll do whatever it takes to change…”

“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.”

“if you were a really great product technical team, and you're entering an unsexy space, uh, 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, that is, uh, a crazy Mad Max arena. Where a lot of good…”

“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, uh, for me to know that this is a rocket ship?”

“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 they can't excited, you can't grow and you can't recruit and…”

“getting a co-founder is like getting married to someone, and it's probably like even way more intense, and um, and then you, and you, and you don't have, uh, usually sex to relieve the tension, or fix a bunch of things, or smooth things over.”

“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. So this is basically, what is the experiment that you're…”

“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, hackers, to come and evaluate his product.”

“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,…”