Yc Quotes

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

As Geoff Ralston, a YC partner, told us: people don’t really change, they just become better actors.

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you. Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

La creatividad y la persistencia de los fundadores de Airbnb como «emprendedores de cereales»1 los llevó a las puertas de YC; una vez en el programa, perfeccionaron su negocio y pudieron persuadir a dos importantes empresas de capital de riesgo, Sequoia Capital y Greylock Partners (donde soy socio), para que invirtieran. Ahora,

Today, there are two kinds of revolutionaries: technological and political. And there are two kinds of backers of these revolutionaries: venture capitalists and philanthropists. The backers seek out the founders, the ambitious leaders of new technology companies and new political movements. And that is the market for revolutionaries. Equipped with this framework, you can map the tech ecosystem to the political ecosystem. You can analogize tech founders to political activists, venture capitalists to political philanthropists, tech trends to social movements, YC Startup School to the Oslo Freedom Forum, the High Growth Handbook to Beautiful Trouble, startups to NGOs, big companies to government agencies, Crunchbase to CharityNavigator, and so on.

Being a CEO is lonely. It’s important to have relationships with other CEOs you can call when everything is melting down (one of the important accidental discoveries of YC was a way for founders to have peers.)

No, Sophia, let me talk. You’re my life, my first choice. I’ll burn and kill anyone who dares to get in the way. You can’t think about what we have is worth giving up. Until you, I thought I would never be capable of love. Love was just a word with no meaning. But you, Sophia, have flipped my world on its axis. I love you, printsessa.” I refuse to give her up.

Sam Altman is the current president of Y-Combinator and was previously a founder at Loopt, which sold to Green Dot Corporation for $ 43M. As head of YC, Sam often dispenses an entire guide’s worth of information through his blog. Sam’s “Startup Playbook” will walk you through everything a great startup should have from ideation to product instantiation, and is an invaluable tool for aspiring venture investors. Additionally, Sam’s been kind enough to host the 20-episode video series, How to Start a Startup—originally a lecture at Stanford—on his blog. The series includes talks from luminaries like Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.

Like the canniest early-stage investors, YC cared a lot more about the team at this point than whatever improbable idea we might have. The latter was really there only to judge the former; it was valueless in itself.

In a research study called “How today’s fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers,” startup veteran Lenny Rachitsky interviewed early members of teams from Slack, Stripe, Figma, and Asana. In studying how these earliest companies found their first customers, it was concluded that a significant number came from the founders tapping their personal networks: Only three sourcing strategies account for every B2B company’s very early growth. [These are: Personal network, Seek out customers where they are, Get press.] Thus, your choices are easy, yet limited. Almost every B2B business both hits up their personal network and heads to the places their potential customers were spending time. The question isn’t which of these two routes to pursue, but instead how far your own network will take you before you move on. It’s a huge advantage to have a strong personal network in B2B, which you can also build by bringing a connector investor or joining an incubator such as YC. Getting press is rarely the way to get started.44 Just as Uber’s ops hustle worked for solving the city-by-city Cold Start Problem, B2B startups have an equivalent card to play: they can manually reach out and onboard teams from their friends’ startups, building atomic networks quickly, as Slack did in their early launch. Or, many productivity products begin by launching within online communities—like Twitter, Hacker News, and Product Hunt—where dense pockets of early adopters are willing to try new products. In recent years, B2B products have started to emphasize memes, funny videos, invite-only mechanics, and other tactics traditionally associated with consumer startups. I expect that this will only continue, as the consumerization of enterprise products fully embraces meme-based go-to-market early on, instead of leading with direct sales.

One of the first things we ask YC companies is what they’re building and why.