Summary Y Combinator Startup School 2019

Summary YC Startup School
Videos
2019
Summarized by Hannes

The road to success is paved
by mistakes well handled
Step by step guide for start-ups
Building blocks
Summarized by Hannes

1. Define the problem you want to solve
2. Talk to people who have the problem
3. Embarrassing MVP
4. Grow: weekly growth rate of 5% to 10%
5. Measure your Business with analytic tools. E.g. find out if you achieve Product Market Fit. Send weekly analytic emails
to family and friends.
6. Metrics to measure for different business models, common mistakes to avoid.
7. Find product market fit and only then start to grow
8. Have your weekly numbers ready and send them in a newsletter
9. Build relationships, style of communication
10. Build the right culture, mission, vision
11. Know how to evaluate ideas to make good decisions when to change them
12. Find a good price for your product or service
13. Manage your time most effectively
14. How to apply at YC
Step by Step Guide
Summarized by DevMatch

Getting the ideas started
Problem
Solution
Insight
Problem
Popular
Growing
Urgent
Expensive
Mandatory
Frequent
Solution
Startup = Growth
We can use growth as a compass for every decision that we make!
Don’t start here!
What is the
experiment that
you're basically
running, within those
conditions, for it to
grow really quickly
Insight
Founders: 1 of 10
Market: 20% / year
Product: 10X
Acquisition: $0
Monopoly: in the
Monopoly game sense
Your startup idea
is a hypothesis
about growth.
Hypothesis: A
good startup
idea consist of
What is the initial setting for
this company that allows it to
be able to grow quickly?
What's explanation why the thing
that you're going to try, is going to
end up being successful?
B = M + A + T
To change
Behavior
you need
Motivation
Ability=Startup
Trigger Can you do sales?
Takeaways for us: We
should think more about
the problem we are solving.
Many people want to start
their business and just need
a good website.

Talk to Users
The Mom
Test
1. Talk about their life, not your idea
2. Talk specifics, not hypotheticals
3. Listen, don’t talk
Idea Stage
→find users with problem
Prototype Stage
→best first customer
Launched
→find product market fit
Questions for every user interview
1. What’s the hardest part about[doing
this thing]?
2. Tell me about the last time you
encountered that problem...
3. Why was that hard?
4. What, if anything, have you done to try
to solve the problem?
5. What don’t you love about the solutions
you’ve tried?
Find first users with
problem
-Friends, coworkers,
intros
-Drop by in person!
-Industry events
Identify best first customers:
-How much does this problem
cost them?
-How frequent is the problem?
-How large is their budget?
Ask users:
How would you feel if you could no
longer use the product?
A) Very disappointed
B) Somewhat disappointed
C) Not disappointed
Measure the percent who answer “very
disappointed.” Achieved PMF when
value is >40%

Minimum Viable Product MVP
Pre-launch startup:
●Launch quickly (MVP), even if bad
●Get initial customers
●Talk to customers, get feedback
●Iterate (improve the product)
Lean MVP (in most cases)
●Very fast to build (weeks not months)
●Very limited functionality (you need to
condense down what your user needs)
●Appeal to a small set of users
●Base to iterate from
Takeaways for us: Our
website is not lean enough,
we need to limit the
functionality to appeal to a
small set of users
●No payments
●No map view
●Part-time CTO
Example MVP Airbnb
Hacks for building an MVP quickly
●Time box your spec (So your spec is a
list of stuff you need to build before you
launch, time box it)
●Write your spec
●Cut your spec
●Don’t fall in love with your MVP!
After launching the MVP you
want to know: Does it solve the
problem I wanted to solve?
When do I have product market fit: What tends to happen when you
have product market fit is that, people start using your product so much,
you transition from doing anything other than just keeping it online. So
you stop thinking about new features, you stop thinking about improving
your conversion through funnels, you stop thinking about how to get
better distribution, and you are literally just like, "Holy shit, I don't know
how I'm going to serve the people who are coming to my product." And
there's such a horrible reality is that, almost no-one gets product market
fit.

KPI=a set of quantitative
metrics that indicate how
healthy your business is
doing
KPIs and Goals
Choose one major (primary) metric. This should be
one variable which gets 90% of the job done. There are
really only two primary metrics to pick from: revenue or
active users. Ideally you're picking revenue
because nothing tells you more about delivering real
value than people. Even better is picking revenue that
people keep giving you over, and over again, like
monthly recurring revenue, MRR.
Select a set of three to five other metrics, secondary
metrics, to pair with your primary metric: there are
many to choose from e.g. retention.
Your primary metric should have the following
qualities:
1. How much value you're delivering to your customer.
Users often indicate the value through either money or time.
2. Has your product recurring or enduring value to your
user. E.g. in a SAS tool, most SAS tools use MRR, monthly
recurring revenue or e.g. an online digital daily newspaper,
then obviously DAU, daily active user, is a good one
because you delivering content to the users that is valuable
every single day.
3. Lagging indicators: (A lagging indicator is a financial
sign that becomes apparent only after a large economic shift
has taken place. Therefore, lagging indicators confirm long-
term trends, but they do not predict them.) Common trap
that founders do to trick themselves is by picking a metric,
e.g. email signups, because it's easy to move, but while it
may eventually influence revenue or actual usage, it doesn't
represent real value the best. The best indication is when
the value has already been delivered, it's already occurred,
e.g. users who paid for services.
4. your primary metric should be usable as a feedback
mechanism, because in a startup, one of the key things to
being successful and getting past product market fit stage
is to iterate very fast
When to start using
metrics; if you know what
the problem is you're
solving and who your
customer is or might be.
Once you get to the point
where you're building the
product, even if you
haven't launched yet, you
should defining your
primary metric! you can
use the metrics and goals
to hypothesize on how you
might get your first few
users.
Each week, your goal should actually be to set a weekly growth rate, e.g. 10% or greater!
Do things that don't scale today, if that's actually
the best way to reach the weekly growth rate.
It's okay if you don't hit your goal one or even two
weeks in a row as long as you understand why. You
should be always asking yourself what is the biggest
obstacle in my way of hitting my weekly target?
How fast should we grow? Examples from YC startups:
At YC startups growth rates
range anywhere from 20% to
200% month over month, but
clustered more closely to
20% to 50% month over
month. It amounts to about
five to 10% week over week.
If you can hit 10% a week,
you're doing exceptionally
well. On the flip side, if you
only manage 1% weekly
growth, it's a sign you
haven't figured out things
yet.
Goal setting:
Consider the time to sell; try to make it instantaneous.
Focus on organic versus paid users, or paid growth in
the beginning. Organic means they discover it through
word of mouth. Basically, you're not paying for the user,
they just maybe searching for it and using it themselves.
Iif you're focused on paid growth, is to look at payback
period in the early days, and hopefully that payback
period is zero, like zero days.

If you see users that
are addicted, that are
coming back week
over week, that's a
really good sign of
product market fit. E.g.
after week 4 retention
should be around 20
or 30%
Retention
When you're thinking about growth, it's really important to have organic user growth:
We do not have Product Market Fit if we tend to go zero,
because people just don't care about the product. We
should be between 20 or 30% to have PMF
primary metric
Revenue
Use analytics & data to:
1.Test product market
fit.
2.Focus the team.
3.Operate/grow the
company.
It’s a way to understand
your business and
where we should be
spending their time. Use
metrics to operate and
drive teams.
Put all the analytics on a dashboard, and
then put this dashboard on a T.V. In your
office. This is incredible important. Basically,
this is kind of the difference between being
a data driven team and not a data driven
team.
Next what you want to do is have some
kind of social accountability around your
metrics. So if you have your friends, your
parents, your advisors, your investors
package up how your business is doing into
an email or WhatsApp. This helps you
synthesize what is actually happening. And
then send it out to those advisors and tell
them where the business is struggling, and
what your plan is to fix it.
Analytics Build Business

Analytics Tool
Building MVP
Initially you're building the MVP. It
can take several times before we
find the right one. The process of
building the MVP is incredibly
important.
Install Google Analytics, install
Amplitude. Google Analytics will tell
you who's coming from the internet
to your website. And then
Amplitude will tell you which
features are they using, how
engaged are they with that feature
set. Unless you're able to stand
over the shoulders of all of your
users a 100% of the time, Analytics
is the next best alternative for that.
Launch
So at some point the
private beta is going
well. People really
care about this
produc and you
understand your
target customer. Then
you want to get a
larger market
segment to use it.
That's the launch. Try
to get there as quickly
as possible. And then
a launch is just more
users that you get to
test product market
fit on.
Scale
If we
achieve
product
market fit,
we can start
scaling
In the beginning of Segment,
customers would ping us day and
night. And that's where we got the
most valuable feedback from. Use as
many open channels of
communication as possible. Next,
data warehouse: democratizes the
data for everyone. Company
dashboards, and Email and push
tools. So as soon as users sign up,
you send them an email. And then a
help desk: a shared inbox where
multiple founders can respond.
Improving product usability:
Almost every product that's
launched is unusable or highly
unusable for the first three
months. And we see this with
every single product, no matter
how much effort we put into it
ahead of time. As soon as
customers hit it, they start
using it in ways that you just
don't expect.
Recommended Tools
Private Beta
Once you the MVP have a little experiment built,
you want to enter private beta. Which basically
just means getting 10, 20, 30 customers to actually
try this product, and then having very direct lines
of communication open with them. What Segment
does nowadays, every new product we ship, we
open Slack channels with each one of our
customers. And we have the product managers
sit in those Slack channels and talk with the
customers. For the products that don't get
product market fit, the customers just stop
responding and we're asking, asking, asking and
they're not responding. And for the products that
do have product market fit, the customers are
immediately being like, "Oh, why don't you have
this feature? This is broken. I tried inviting my
team.
Will help you to understand how
the user is using a product and
what can be improved.
It's a behavioral email tool, which will say every time a
user signs up, wait 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes,
whatever. And then automatically send them this
content.
After MVP stage when you have good product market fit. You can
install a data warehouse like Google BigQuery.
One common failure mode
that we see with customers
is trying to pick the perfect
tool, Mixpanel or Amplitude,
BigQuery or Redshift. And
spending way, way, way too
long thinking about that. The
truth of the matter is, you
shouldn't optimize for picking
the right tool right now and
prepare for change in the
future.
Intercom is like a list of all of your
customers. They're a really good
CRM for early stage folks.
With Segment/ YC we can get all of these tools for free: bit.ly/segment-sus
Tools

Business Models
The best way to think of metrics is how do you plan to charge your users, which is the business model?
Common mistakes
● Don’t use Bookings and Revenue, or
Bookings and ACV (Annual Contract Value),
interchangeably
● Don’t include letters of intent (LOIs) and
verbal agreements in bookings → they are
NOT yet bookings!
Enterprise business model: A
company that sells software or
services to a large enterprise. Very
few startups do that. So very few of
you try to or planning to launch
something from day one that sells
to say Facebook or Google or
Apple or any of them.
SaaS model: SaaS is
Software as a Service
in terms of business
model. It's really
subscription business.
You charge something
monthly for a software
that you provide.
●Don’t use Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and
Annual Revenue Run-Rate interchangeably
○Multiplying one month’s all-in revenue by 12 = Annual
Run-Rate, not Annual Recurring Revenue
●Don’t include one-time or non-recurring revenue such
as fees and professional services revenue in your
monthly recurring revenue (MRR) calculation → only
include recurring revenue
SUBSCRIPTION: A
subscription
company sells a
product or service,
usually to a
consumer, on a
recurring basis.
●Don’t measure CMGR as a simple
average of discrete monthly growth
rates → use right CMGR formula!
A transactional
company enables a
financial transaction on
behalf of a customer and
collects a fee (usually a
percent of the underlying
transaction).Examples:
Stripe, PayPal,
Coinbase, Bre
● Gross Transaction Volume and Revenue are NOT
the same thing
→ revenue = the $’s you keep!
● User retention is acohort* metric, meaning it is re-
calculated to include each new cohort acquired
*Cohort = a group of customers acquired within a given
period (usually a 28-day “month”)
*Retention can be calculated on a month 2, month 6,
or month 12 basis (depending on your business model)

A marketplace company acts as
an intermediary in the sale of a
good or service between sellers
and buyers, generally collecting a
percent of the total transaction
value. Examples: Airbnb, eBay
Common mistakes
● Paid CAC: failing to include all costs associated w/
user acquisition such as referral incentives, discounts,
credits, etc.
You're acquiring a bunch of users organically and
some users through paid and you'll blend everything.
You'll say, "I acquired a hundred users this month and
so my CAC was 12," but what had happened was if
you truly measured who you acquired from paid
advertising channel, it could be as high as 70 and so
you have to ask yourself, is it sustainable?
An e-commerce company sells
physical goods online. Generally, e-
commerce companies manufacture
and inventory those goods (or brand
them as their own brand) Examples:
Warby Parker, Bonobos, Memebox
● Gross profit: not breaking down
all costs included and those
excluded in gross profit calculations
An advertising company offers a free service
to consumers and derives revenue entirely, or
predominantly, from advertisers. Common
advertising companies include social networks
and content sites. Examples: Snapchat,
Twitter, Reddit
Not defining what “active” means in
the context of your business
A hardware company sells
physical devices to consumers or
businesses. Examples: Fitbit,
GoPro, Xiaomi
Common mistakes
●Cumulative charts
●Not labeling Y-axis
●Changing Y-axis scale
●Showing only % gains
Solutions
●Monthly data
●Label with the right detail
●X and Y axes intersect at zero
●Show absolute number and %
24:26 Video Youtube
Should we talk to for investors. No,
at this stage, the bet is only on two
or three things, which is you as the
founder. What unique insight do you
have that you're building this and
can this be a big company?
I say focus on getting the users and how do you monetize on that. That's the first step!

Answers from Q&A
Areas which an investor evaluates:
it all comes down to only three things. Team, product market fit, market opportunity.
And more importantly than not, you should always assume you are teaching the investor about the space and the company, don't assume they know it. And so they, they
measure by how well you're teaching them. So that's really the measure.
But again, here I'd emphasize don't do things to satisfy investors. Build the company you want!
Clarity of thought
Example Brex founders, Henrique and Pedro: they actually literally iterated from a VR startup idea to Brex, which is corporate credit cards. And they had built Fintech in the past.
But the both of them knew the stakes were high, at least for them because they were dropping out of Stanford. They literally came out of Brazil to attend Stanford. Before hiring a
single person, they wrote down very clearly what Brex could be with all the products that they could build in the roadmap. Tested it, it was not a huge sell way, but they just wrote
it down to really understand, built a financial model. Henrique actually attended the accounting class in Stanford because he had no idea how to build it. And he built a whole
model year by year, tested the assumptions of market demand and what penetration they would need to hit for it to be at least a billion dollar company. And only have the after
they both got comfortable that there is a path and this is worth quitting Stanford for and putting our entire life, probably for the next 10, 15 years on this, they hired their first
employee. That is an amazing clarity of thought.
Q: Is it sensible to start engaging with potential investors prior to finding product market fit or should you just wait until you have real traction?
A: At this stage I would say focus on building the product, focusing on getting your first a hundred users and then you know, meet with angels.
Q: How do you find the perfect investors? So this person started with 30,000 on Angel Lists, had a bunch of filters, and then has like a thousand left. How do they pick from the
thousand investors?
A: Basically you contact all of them. I mean it's like a sale. If you think about fundraising, it's basically same thing as a sales game. You have leads, you have conversion, you
have to follow up, you have to send personal messages. I would just use whatever spreadsheets you're using for your sales game for this and just go for that. Try to avoid the
investors that you don't have confidence in or if the founders have referenced that
Q: So if we're finding investors, how much traction should we have before going to them?
A: So just the whole premise of the question is the problem that I have. This is like, oh, what do I have to do to get this guy to like me? And the whole thing and is like you're going
to an investor because you're like, "Man, I figured something out and I need some money to make this grow a lot faster. I'm a little impatient. So you are fundraising when one
you need the money to grow. Two, you're willing to give up the equity to grow. Number three, you clearly know what is the milestone that this will get your company.
PG has written an article essay talking about how fundraising should be done as a mode. And what that means is like fundraising is so distracting and so time consuming
because it's basically a whole business model. It's like you doing B2B enterprise sales, like asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars from people and so it takes such a long
period of time. It's so much effort that it will distract away from your company. And so when you do fundraising, you should really only do it when you really need the money and
that when you can dedicate time to it or like you're able to dedicate time to it without it's sacrificing the growth of the company.

Launch Again and Again
Ways to Launch
•Silent launch
•Friends and family launch
•Stranger launch
•Online community
•Request access launch
•Social media/blogger
•Pre-order
•New feature/product launch
•Press
Why Launch Continuously?
•A/B test your short pitch
•See how users respond to your product
•Launching to different channels
audiences or channels: Are you talking to
the right users?
Once you have
an MVP, do a
friends and family
launch as quickly
as possible.
Friends & Family Strangers Online Communities
If you're not part of these
communities, I'd reach out
to someone who is and ask
them for advice, ask them
for the best way to launch
because there are going to
be tips for every
community.
women in tech
Do not talk like a
marketing robot
People want to ask you questions but sometimes
don't know exactly how or which questions they
should ask you. So tee it up for them. Say, "Hey, I'm
an expert in X, Y, and Z, and I'm happy to answer
questions on these topics."
When “Magic” couldn't serve
40,000 users immediately, so
they launched a wait list.
They also gave people ways
to skip the line. So, for
example, if you tweeted
about Magic, you'd get to skip
a few spots in line. So you
can build these viral
elements into your launches
that will help get people to
spread the word for you.
Social Media/
Bloggers
Pre-Order
New
Productor
Feature
Ask them, "Hey, can I add
you to my update list?"
Build our own email list.
Every single person we talk
in the context of our
startup, we should collect
the emails and send them
updates and ask them to
share the word.
You would be really
surprised by who comes
out of the woodwork to
help when you ask for it.

Growth for Startups
On week zero in the case of Lyft, you've got 100% drivers and
then with every week it goes down. Repeat usage is the best,
most unbiased way to figure out if someone is liking your
product. It's more true than what they tell you. They might tell
you things, but what they do is going to be the most important
thing.
working on growth before you have product-market
fit and good retention is not a good idea
Find out first who is using your product again and again
and only when you know them try to reach the
channels where you can find them to grow.
Airbnb Example: n the
case of Airbnb, we call
the home page P1, the
search results page P2,
and then the booking
page, and the listing
page P3, and then the
booking page was P4.
Four pages. That was
the entire website. Now
what's the funnel, what
percent of people make
it from P1 to P4? What
percent? Not that
many. 1%. 2%. Most
people don't make it
that far. Your job is to
figure out how many
people make it that far,
why are they dropping
off, what can I do to
increase that number?
Optimization areas for website
•Internationalization
•Authentication
•Onboarding
•Purchase conversion
For Marketplaces
Discounts
Make a list of your
customers
lifetime
value
SEO - Two main levers
On-page optimization
•Every optimization starts with keyword research.
•Which page am I trying to rank for what keyword?
•SEO Experimentation
Off-page optimization
•Who is linking to you?
Most of you guys don't have to focus on
A/B testing at all. It won't matter for a
long time.
Market place reputation is very
important.
Search Engine Optimization

Startup Finance Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
How long can
we survive
with the
existing money
we have
This is
looking at
the rate
revenue is
increasing
http://growth.tlb.org
Depending on location,
a good rule of thumb is
an employee will cost
about 25 to 50% more
than just their salary.
Never polish this number!
Keep in mind is that even
though the bookkeeper is
doing the books and preparing
those numbers, the
responsibility is still
everybody's in the company
especially the CEO.
Do not hire
too quickly!
be prepared to fire
fast, if necessary
Measure: Ratio of
revenue to employees
E.g. do not think, that you have to hire more
developers because then I can build feature X, Y
and Z, and then obviously, everybody will buy it. If
you have product market fit, then even your janky
V zero that doesn't have all of these fancy things, is
solving a big enough problem for everybody that
they are willing to pay for it.
you should be aiming
to get to profitability
for every money that
you raise.

12 months runway, that's the point
where you're thinking, "Okay, maybe I
need to think about whether I raise
money or whether I'm thinking about
getting into profitability.
Startup Finance Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Seed stage money is the money that you'll raise off
and on just an idea. You'll be able to talk to investors
about an idea for a product you've got a hypothesis,
that you want to be able to check and they will give
you some money.
Once you get to series A and beyond, that becomes
much, much harder. You need sustained growth, you
need to have more of an idea, you need to have
product market fit.
https://blog.ycombinator.com/advic
e-startups-running-out-of-money/

How to Work Together
In a startup founders basically have to figure out
how to optimize for a relationship that lasts for
like 10 years.
There's four major things we
want to avoid when we're
fighting, and when we do
these things they will create
sort of leading indicators
that the relationship is in
serious trouble
So criticism, this is basically like you're talking with someone and you're like, "Hey you know what? I have
a serious concern about this bug that we are trying to fix and I'm really worried about this thing and I'm not
sure that we're going to be able to deploy on time." And someone comes up and says like, "Well, you
know, what I don't like? Is the fact that you leave a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink." Criticism is
basically this idea that we don't fight on one topic, we start trying to bring all these other issues
into play instead of addressing the one issue at hand.
This one is a super dangerous one. And it's when basically
you're like, "Hey, I got a problem and the person just walks
away." Won't engage, won't talk to you. And so there can be
no way to create any kind of resolution.
Is the intention to insult. So basically I say like, "Hey, I'm worried
about this bug and we're not going to be able to deploy on time"
And someone says, "Oh, I don't like your face."
Someone not owning responsibility about the problem.
And so we can't move forward because someone won't
admit that there's a problem out there. We defend that we
haven't done anything wrong and therefore there can't be
resolution between two people if the other person thinks
there's a problem.
4 different things that we can do to avoid and protect us from those four horsemen:
Define who's responsible for which category. This will help, if there's a problem in a specific category,
then that person that we have assigned to ahead of time to be in charge, we'll be the ones that will
ultimately either make the decision or ultimately are responsible. This protects us from defensiveness.
Define success and
failure. Talk about it
while emotionally sober!
The second defense against the horsemen is knowing yourself. This will
protect you from stonewalling
The secure attachment style means basically:
"Hey, you know what? I don't have a problem going
up to people, relying on them and having them rely
on me and sort of like us creating a relationship. I
don't mind being vulnerable and I don't mind other
people being vulnerable with me."
The anxious style: So there is a type of person that will be like, "You know
what? I kind of don't get enough love as not as much as I want. I kind of want
to like hold on to people and I kind of want to have people confirm with me that
they want to be with me.”
The avoidant style who's like, "I find it kind of difficult creating relationships with
people and I kind of want to run away sometimes because it's really scary." Or,
"I'm worried that I'm going to mess it up?"
And the thing that's important here, especially with your co-founder is you want to
know your co-founders attachment style because that's going to dictate how you
are going to be able to resolve and understand your differences.
How to deal with: If you're an anxious person, and you're talking to an
avoidant person, you just have to realize like, oh, that person's needs
space. But that doesn't mean they're running away from you. And if you're
an avoidant person and you're with an anxious person that if someone
needs your attention or if you need your space, then you have to let them
know as like, "Hey, I'm going to be back. I realized that you're going to
need an answer for this. I'm going to go away. I'm going to figure stuff out.
And I promise a time that we will deal with this.
This will protect
you from criticism.
Examples of this comes from the company called Matter. And they created a
spreadsheet for dealing with disagreements. Basically it's a disagreement, decision
framework and basically it just talks about, it's like, "hey, when we have a disagreement
we should just document it. This helps. Makes things really, really transparent. Makes
us understand both sides very, very clearly. We'll talk about the different options we say
who makes the decision, what the decision was, the date it was done and then
rationale and so when we walk through this process, if we've decided this ahead of
time, then it means that we are not afraid when disagreements come up.
what you are
going to do.

This strategy will protect
you from contempt
So basically what you want to do is start your
disagreement or criticism by anchoring the
something that is concrete. You do not want it to
be something that is connected to opinion. It
should be something that you actually saw or
heard because therefore you can't disagree with
something that actually happen
Notice when we start with observation, we start with a fact that can't be
refuted and so we're not going to end up arguing about something else.
There is a way you can tell if something is a thought or a feeling is you
substitute the phrase I think with I feel and it still works. So I think
frustrated. Doesn't work so that's a feeling. I think that you aren't taking this
seriously. Oh, that's a thought.
Link to table
Every negative emotion lies and unmet
universal need.
And the thing that's really tricky about
universal needs that you have to be
careful realizing is it a strategy or is it a
need? And is it truly universal?
When you're feeling one of these
frustrated or blamed or scared or hurt
feelings, there's something that's
missing that you're going to need. And
the thing that's really tricky about
universal needs that you have to be
careful realizing is it a strategy or is it a
need?
You might say something like, "I
need you to copy me on every
single email." But the thing is
that's not a universal need. That
becomes very, very specific.
A universal need would be, I
need some transparency about this
process. You have to be careful
of not making needs about
something that's very specific to
yourself or just that situation.
Because once it's a universal need,
then it's something that everyone
can agree that everyone should
sort of have.
Make a request, not a demand. The
difference is that a request is an
invitation to the other person to
meet our universal needs. It's
much easier to be able to do than to
say like, "I order you to do
something. So what we want to do is
make it very specific, our requests.
So I request for you to be more
respectful is not that great
because who defines what's
respectful? My version of respectful
might be different from someone
else's. Your request should be
something like, "I request that you
arrive to meetings on time." Say
what you want. Don't say what you
don't want. So what a lot of people
will say is, "I request that you don't
dismiss other people's ideas
straight away." The thing is it
doesn't indicate the behavior that
you do want. And so it becomes
really difficult to act on a better
one would be, I request that when
a team member shares an idea,
you ask two or three probing
questions before sharing a
conclusion. And then stay curious.
And so sometimes you might make a
request and someone might say,
"No." And what you need to do is not
just freak out that the whole process
isn't working. The idea is actually
they'd be like maybe I haven't put
this request in a way that can meet
more needs than just myself.
Article
You want to pay this down every day. So it turns
out also in John Gottman's research that it
wasn't that people who were really good at being
in a marriage only thought about really big
things. It turns out they like would immediately
bring up stuff even when it's really tiny or
small. They would never let a small thing
grow to be a medium thing. And then
eventually a big thing they immediately will talk
about is like, "Oh man can you close your mouth
when you're chewing real quick. It's just like kind
of bothering me right now." And then do it in a
way that sort of respectful.
And so like when you're with your co-founders
and you're in this really sensitive relationship
and you're finding stuff that's being really
troubling, like you can communicate those
needs really quickly and you will prevent
those small things from becoming big things.
The best way to start doing this
is the practice. So at YC we cal
these level three conversations.
So level one is that informal conversation and we
have other people where it's just like data
exchange, passing information back and forth. Level
two conversations, have some emotions, talk about
some things that are personal. Level three
conversations are relational, they're engaged with
something that's happening right now between two
people. It is a deep dive into what might be really
troubling and what might be really mattering to both.

Let's go through some examples of what we can do:
You can start having hard conversations right now. There's no doubt
there's probably some issue that the team is not talking about.
You'd be
surprised at
how often
people are
not on the
same page
about this.
hitting
So as you start building up a team, how do you reconcile firing
fast with forming a good relationships?
Questions
There are some cases where if you've done all of these things and the
person does not want to engage, they don't want communicate in a
nonviolent way. They refuse to do the things that will prevent them. And
you basically notice that there's all these conflicts with those four
horsemen. Those are indications that like, "Hey, this person we've already
talked about, we had a plan for how to deal with this stuff and you're not
sticking to the plan. And as far as concerned, you're not meeting your end
of the bargain." And so to me, again, there's a balance. There is like you do
all this stuff, yes, but if it's not working out, you need to move on because
otherwise you affect other people in the team and the other morale. I've
never talked to a founder who eventually fired someone that they were
having a problem with and then regretted it. Usually you're always like,
"Why didn't I do that sooner?" The best advice I ever heard about this is
from Max Levchin, who's the founder of PayPal. And he basically says like,
"If there's doubt, then there is no doubt." So once you start feeling like
there's something wrong, the problem... It's basically not going to go away.
While working remotely how would you strengthen those
co-founder relationship?
I talk a little bit about this with Mike. He's the head of one of the
founders of Zapier on a YC podcast. But basically when you're
going remote, there's a lot of things that you have to now do up
front in terms of your communication and relationship building
that you took for granted when you just work in a building with
someone else. So number one is like, trust has to be really
high. You have to be really, really clear about like what we're
doing, what is shipping, what's being done, and making sure
everyone understands that everyone is on the same page.
You have to overshare. And that's something that a lot of
companies when they're just working together in the same
space, get to not have to practice very well. It just kind of
naturally sort of happens in discussions. So remote working.
You basically have to plan it. You have to deliberately do this
sort of action. Secondly, you have to be very, very good at
written communication. And so you actually get really good at
saying like, "Hey, I have a problem, I have an issue, et cetera."
But also you have to be really good at giving people the benefit
of the doubt. Like the people you'll bring on for remote workers,
you have to trust them because they're working from home. You
can't see them. And so by default, your relationship with the
other remote worker is that I trust you that I can't see you, but
you're going to still do what's best for the company. And that's
such a powerful feeling to have that you don't realize that you
take it for granted when you just work with someone inside of a
building that immediately changes when you see the person
leave and you're like, oh, are they even here? Are they even
doing anything? Et cetera. So to me, for remote working, all
the stuff that you have to do to state all this stuff ahead of
time, you actually are the only way that you'll be successful
at remote working. And so I actually think is it's more that if
you're working in an office altogether, what are the things you
have to be cognizant that you are being lazy about, right? That
our remote working team is going to be ahead of you on it.
And so a lot of that is communication, transparency and
trust.

Building Culture
And company culture is that implicit set of behaviors
inside of your company. They should inform your
employees on how to behave. I guess, when done right,
they should inform the employees inside of your
company how to behave when it hasn't been explicitly
laid out for them.
And the people that you have
inside of the company prior to
hiring a lot of people are really
your cultural DNA. Those are
the people that are going to be
involved in hiring and training
that next wave of people.
Get the first employees right!
They will be the launchpad
for the culture.
For the most part, it's just some conversations with
your co-founder.
If you don't have the problem yourself, you need to
identify with the people that do have the problem,
and you need to be really proud of the fact that
you're solving it for them!
Because building a company's hard. It's a long
process, and there will be some really difficult times.
And if you're not proud of what you're doing, it's
really hard to maintain the level of energy and
enthusiasm. Sometimes where we see founders go
wrong is they choose an idea with their ego. They
choose an idea because it sounds good to tell their
friends at a party. And when times get tough, it's
really hard to maintain that level of energy. And
the reason energy, enthusiasm, is important,
not just for sustaining the company, but
everyone around you will see how you feel
about the company, and to a large degree that
will set the tone for your culture.
You can call it a North Star for the company.
And say it in a way that will inspire people. It
should give purpose to the work you're doing. It
shouldn't describe the work, but it should talk
about the purpose of that work.
Have a conversation with your co-founder about
the types of values and behaviors you want to
cultivate inside of your company. Ultimately, the
purpose of this at this stage in your company is
to use as a filter for the hiring process.
A short list. Less than five things. And this
will help you during the hiring process to
make sure that you're letting the right type of
people inside the company.
Atlassian:
● Open company, no bullshit.
● Build with heart and balance.
● Don't fuck with the customer.
● Play as a team.
● And be the change you seek.
You can see how this came from a
conversation between co-founders.
Like I don't want to work in an
environment that's highly political.
No bullshit. That translates into kind
of a hiring filter of just like if
someone seems political in any way,
let's not let them in the company,
him or her in the company. So come
up with this list.
It's much better to build a culture that's
focused on the customer than it is on how
you treat one another inside the company.
Look, your shortlist can have both.
Can you create a culture where
people with diametrically opposed
opinions, strongly held, can coexist?
Can you foster conversations that are
loud, but then people walk away and
are, okay?
There's plenty of research out there
that suggests that companies that are
able to foster this type of
environment, have a diverse
environment, that isn't always
agreeable, tend to be more creative.
From the very first employee,
make sure you're following a
process. Consider all those
conversations you had with your
co-founder, the type of values
you're trying to instill in the
company, and the type of diversity
you want, and make sure that's
part of the process from day one.
After you hire your first couple of
people, make sure you get back
together with your co-founder a
month or two after and discuss
whether it did what it should have.
Did it filter the right way? Do you
have the right type of people in
your company at this point? And if
it didn't work well, improve it. Plan
on evolving it. You want it tested
by the time you get to the point
where you have to scale fast. You
want a process that you know
works by then. Just conversations
you can have, kind of thought
experiments, with your co-founder
that can help kind of build a solid
foundation for building a culture
later on. Thanks everyone.

All About Pivoting
•Honest assessment of founders
strengths/weaknesses and attempt to find something
with better founder market-fit
•Best to find something easy to get started and
validate market feedback
It’s OK to not work an idea that requires
venture capital
•Most companies in the world that people start don’t
require VC. That is good.
•Trying to raise money for a company where VC
doesn’t make sense is not a great use of any ones
time
Good reasons not to pivot
• You are trying to run away from doing hard
work
•You are repeatedly changing ideas and
giving up on them before launching and
doing sales
•You read an article about some hot new
trend that is popular with investors and want
to chase it
Why people take too long to pivot
•Loss aversion
•Have a little bit of traction
•People are polite and have a hard time
telling you they don’t want what you are
making in a direct way
•Fear of admitting weakness/defeat
•Putting blame re:why things aren’t working
on customers/investors
•Belief given to you by inspirational sources
that “if you just believe hard enough things
are going to change”
Anecdotes
•There are lots of anecdotes about people
who “just believed hard enough”
•These are nice and uplifting and
inspirational which is a good thing
•However just as stories about people who
win the lottery don’t help you yourself win the
The term “pivot"
•If you are very very early stage it's not even
exactly “pivoting" - its just idea iteration -
“pivoting” usually implies changing a product
that is fully live and has customers (for
example, Slack)
•Pivoting is not a big bang moment - its just a
thing you do when you iterate on ideas - its a
lightweight thing
•A company that is not quickly ideating and
rapidly learning and changing assumptions in
the beginning is probably not moving fast
enough
Why pivot?
•Opportunity cost: “the loss of potential gain
from other alternatives when one alternative
is chosen.”
If you've worked on something for months
and months and it's not happening, that's a
pretty good signal to pivot.
Good reasons to pivot
•I hate working on it
•It’s not growing
•I’m not a good fit to be working on this idea
•I am relying on an external factor outside of
my control to make my startup take off
•I’m out of ideas on what to do differently to
make it start working
lottery - these anecdotes aren’t terribly
instructive or helpful
•Ultimately you are the ultimate decider of
what to do, you have by far the most
information, and you reap the rewards or loss
of the decisions you make
“I would much rather give people advice
to play the statistics of this and to take
accountability for their own actions in
the world than just hope and dream that
you might be one of the anecdotes too.”
Reminder about product market fit
•Most people never get it
•You know you have it when growth is not
your biggest problem - keeping up with
demand is
•If you don’t have PMF and you have given
an idea your best then it can be easier to get
PMF by changing ideas than continuing to
throw good time/money after bad
•“shots on goal”
•A damn good reason to pivot is you get
another roll of the dice, you get another shot.
And so I've just seen people that use these
opportunities really well. It's much easier to
be lucky when you get half a dozen shots on
goal than one
How to find a better idea
•Try to find something the founders are more
excited about and makes them feel more
optimistic to work on it
•Corollary: being more ambitious is often
counter-intuitively easier

All About Pivoting
•If the way you evaluate the quality of an idea
is from investors you are going to get pushed
down the VC rabbithole
Venture vs non-venturescale ideas
•There is no guidebook I am aware of for
what “venture scale means”
•Some suggestions I have:
•Can I imagine this business possibly
generating 100s of millions or billions in net
revenue per year?
•Can I imagine the revenue growth to get to
that scale taking less than ten years?
•Can I imagine this as a publicly traded
company?
•Technology is a key component, and the
technology is built by the founders rather
than outsourced
•Extremely high “software” margins
•A large % of stuff on Shark Tank is not a
venture-backable business
When is the best time to pivot
•You have launched and have been trying to
get users for weeks or months and it feels
hopeless
•When the idea is impossible to get started
on b/c it takes years of building/ too much
capital etc
•You know in your heart its not going to work
More pivoting thoughts
•Pivoting over and over and over again can
cause whiplash
•Whiplash makes founders give up -> kills the
company
•Founders that are incapable of changing
ideas struggle,founders that change ideas
too much struggle. Find the happy medium
•Having employees while pivoting is extra
hard and not recommended - best to do it
with just founders
“If you get really sad and hate your life while
you're working on your startup, you will
definitely not succeed and it's because you
will give up. And so this is weird, like it's kind
of better to work on an idea that's not the
best one if you're really having fun. And then
you just want to be in a happy medium”
Idea quality scores
•Here are some criteria you can use to
evaluate your idea
•How big of an idea it seems to be: 1-10
•Founder/market fit: 1-10
•How easy it is to get started on the idea: 1-
10
•Early market feedback from customers: 1-10
•Overall score: 1-10
Examples of Pivoting
Brex overview
•Was in YC W17 doing a different idea
•Pivoted during the batch
•True product-market fit
•Raised 100s of millions in 2 years
Brex pre-pivot
Brex pre-pivot
•VR headset hardware
•How big it seems: 5/10
•Founder/market fit: 1/10
•How easy to get started: 2/10
•Early market feedback: 2/10
•Overall score: 2.5/10
Brex post-pivot
•Credit card for startups
•Overall score 7.8/10
Retool pre-pivot
•Venmo for UK
•Overall score: 5/10
Retool overview
•Was in YC W17
•Started with a different idea from Retool
•A rising star in our SaaS portfolio and a
product every one of you should probably
use!
Retool post-pivot
•No-code internal tools builder
Magic overview
•In YC W15
•Pivoted during the batch
•Successfully built a profitable, sustainable company used and
adored by many loyal users
Magic pre-pivot
•Blood pressure coach
In summary
•Changing your idea is part of doing a startup, and
the earlier you lock into the right idea the better
•When you are considering a pivot it should not feel
like some huge monumental decision
•You should follow pivoting best practices
Look for ways to very quickly validate or test it
or get customers, get quick market feedback.
You want to see your iteration cycle on the order
of weeks, like major progress.
Magic post-pivot
•“Text a number to do anything”
Segment overview
•In YC S11
•Pivoted several times, including over a year after the batch
•Worth >1B now and a top data infrastructure company
Segment pre-pivot
•Classroom feedback tool
Segment post-pivot
•Data collection tool

How to Improve Conversion Rates
This is a typical example, conversion rate funnel,
and when you're trying to improve in conversion
rate, you're trying to improve the efficiency of
going from one step to the next.
When should we work on the
conversion rate?
Why we care about conversion rate is because it's part of
two different aspects of growth: Growth is the balance
between conversion and churn. And basically growth
happens as a gap between the two.
Every conversion rate problem looks like
every other user interface problem
Your product and your user sits on two points
on that line. Just two dimensions. Your user
sits here at what we call the current
knowledge point and your interface, your
landing page, the thing you want them to do
is it's here at the target knowledge point.
And every interface problem that's trying to
be solved is trying to close what we call
the knowledge gap: You either are going
to increase the amount of knowledge that
is needed by your user or you need to
decrease the amount of knowledge
needed to use your product or interface.
The most helpful exercise that I will use from this, once
I understand this concept when I'm trying to design a
landing page or to improve it, is to simplify things very,
very simply. And what I imagine is something called
the one button interface.
The question becomes, what do I have to put on this page to get
someone to push the button? What's the minimum amount? That's what
you ideally want to have on there.And is there any information that I put
on this page that keeps me from pushing the button or is there any lack
of information that keeps me from pushing the button?
Magic Moment
Is the button, is
the thing I most
want my user to
do? Is it super
obvious? Where
do I find it?
The magic moment is basically the
experience, the knowledge, the
information, the interaction that
someone has with your startup, and
all of a sudden they get tingling and
inside the light bulb goes off and they
go, "Holy fuck. I've been waiting for this
my whole life. I now get it. This is super
exciting. I can't wait to use this." And
your call to action should be as close
to that magic moment as possible.
And your call to action should be as
close to that magic moment as
possible. That when I click that
button, I'm going to be taken to that
point. So often I go through a design
critique with someone and I'm like,
"What's your magic moment?" And
then somehow the call to action is
like 27 steps away.
7 Questions to
Improve the
Website
What is this
magic
moment?
Litmus test: can I just copy paste a
sentence on this page, the landing
page that I can put into an email and
send it to my mom and my mom
goes, "I understand what this is.”
So people who are super in a rush,
impatient trying to solve their
problems, they're quickly trying to
identify themselves. This is like, am I
in the wrong place? Is this the right
product? And the way they're trying to
determine that is see like is there any
reflection of themselves in this or any
reflection of their problems?
So the threshold is low here. Just
can't look like a spamming website.
Shortcut for trust. And people often
are trying to say like, "Oh, if so and
so is already using this, then I
should actually give this a chance."
How many times do you go to a
website and go like, "well I'll use this
without knowing how much it costs."
No one does that. So let's say you're
giving away something for free and
really your business models, you
make money some other way. You
should explain that to people because
otherwise people feel paranoid or
worried or feel kind of weird.
There's always a percentage of users
who go to your website and it doesn't
matter that you have written everything
down, they will just go like, "I just want
to ask someone." If you don't make it
really easy to find and contact you or
make it look like that you were going to
help them, if they start using the
product, they probably won't use it.

company. And usually the rule of
A survey of over 500 SaaS companies: the amount
of effort that they put into each one of these
strategies and the returns that they got as a result
of it. When you're optimizing pricing that gives you
your biggest bang for your buck in terms of impact
on your business. Yet it's the one that is most
neglected and I think it's the one that everyone is
so afraid to touch because they're so scared that if
they get the pricing wrong that they will lose all
their customers.
Startup Pricing 101
The gap between
price and cost, that
is your margin.
The larger the gap,
the easier it is for
the customers to
sign up for the
product.
To figure out price there are two ways to go about
it. You either start with the cost if you know what it
is and you figure out where your price is based off
of that. That is called cost plus. The other way to
do it is figure out what is the value of your company
or product or service and then you figure out your
price from that and that is called value based
pricing. You should strive for value-based pricing.
It allows you to charge a whole lot more.
The problem is to
understand what
are the costs and
That you think, "Man, if I built a better product
and I charge half the competition, I win." The
thing is that almost never happens, and the
reason is because you as a startup,
customers are not the mainstream people
who are going to look at the price.
In the beginning you're going after people who
are willing to take a risk, and those are early
adopters.Those are people who care about
benefits above all else. That the highest
value to them is beating their competition,
doing something much better and taking a
chance that something new will give them
that edge over anybody else. Those early
adopters therefore are not price sensitive.
This is the number one piece of advice; fix
the pricing. Most startups put it too low.
As a result is a problem with the margins;
they aren't enough to cover sort of
acquisition.
How your company thinks about the
problem that you're solving for them or
how they value it. Or customers don't
understand your value aka you don't
know how to convince them of the value
that you think you offer. As a result you
can't get the price that you want.
what are the value that the customer
is going to think about the product
4 different types of mistakes.
There are five different
stages of a company.
Are you in a danger zone? Calculate what
would your business look like or what does
phase. And the thing to keep in
mind is that the customers in the
first two stages, don't look like
mainstream customers that you
find in growth and maturity stages.
it going to look like to be a billion-dollar
thumb there is to be doing $100 million a
year in sales and revenue. And so that
basically is like at your price that you give,
how many customers do you need to have
make a $100 million in that year?
Being in startup school you are in the first
two stages, product development stage,
introduction. You are not in the growth
of the sales
process
1
2 3
4
1 If you are having a product that is $2,000 or
less and is basically self-serve. This affects
completely what you can do in terms of what

The garbage zone, right?
And you know, if you're
potentially in this, and this is the big wake up
call for you, if it's taking you months and
months and months to close someone, but
you're not making a lot of money to cover it,
you have a process where your acquisition
costs are just too high for you to be
sustainable and you have to get yourself out
of that problem. All of your work should be
towards increasing the perceived value of
your product or service.
Startup Pricing 101
drives your business, what you can spend
on to get that sort of growth, that price
point here at $2,000. It needs to have
almost all marketing be inbound. You can't
spend a lot of money outbound on ads, etc.
Your support has to be completely self-
serve or very, very minimal. You have no
sales team at this price point. You can't
afford it. But conversions can happen on
the same day, must be in a self-serve
model.
2 So between two and $10,000 when
you're able to charge this, you're able to
have a few new toys at your sleeves and
so marketing now can be focused on
generating qualified leads. Your customer
support can now offer SLAs or you could
start paying for training people get
onboarded. For sales, you can't hire a
dedicated salesperson, but maybe you
could have an inside sales rep to sell
within companies or within your
customers. You could maybe have an
SDR and you can maybe have someone
dedicated to giving product demos. Sales
cycle here should not be longer than one
to three months.
● Do you understand the value? When you go into a sales meeting or a call, do you
talk to people or you basically say, "I know exactly what this is going to be worth to
you." So when I tell you what the price is going to be, you're going to be like,
"Damn, that's totally worth it."
● So when you are talking to customers and they are taking a really long time to make
a decision, or they're wanting to have a lot more proof that other people are using it,
you are not talking to an early adopter. You're wasting a lot of time on non-
believers.
Enterprise, so over $25,000. Now for
marketing, you can start spending things
on branding, on building up trust with
customers. Your support is very, very high
touch that you can afford. You can do
phone support, you can have a customer
success person dedicated to the client.
And for sales, you're going to start thinking
about sales managers, dividing stuff into
territories and having sales engineers that
participate in terms of conversion and the
sales calls. These will have a sales cycle of
about six to 12 months.
3
4
The first thing is, to have things where the
value is 10X. And I want to have it so that the
value is easily understood to be a 10X. So for
example, if I charge for a product that is $10,
then it should be in terms of perceived value
by my customer that it's worth $100 to them.
If they do not immediately understand the
10X value of the price, it's going to be hard to
get them to move. Their incentive to buy
might be too low. Once you have any kind of
price, and this is particularly important for
people who are doing B2B or enterprise sale,
you should start practicing raising prices. And
I like to just start by raising prices by 5%. If
you feel really confident, jump it up by bigger
numbers if you want. And you want to keep
raising prices until you're losing 20% of your
customers.
Gross margin
Cost based
Competition based
Value based
We can make the best
pricing if it is value
based, while pricings
which are based on
cost or competition
will be lower and lead
to lower margins!

How to Prioritize Your Time
It's super important to use your
time the best way possible to
maximize your startup's chance for
success. Which means you need
to be really good at identifying
and prioritizing tasks that are
going to be the most impactful
for your startup's progress.
Your primary KPI almost always is either
revenue or active users and you should
always be setting
weekly goals for this
To move the needle on the
KPIs, the highest leverage
thing you can be doing always comes in the form
of tasks that involve talking to users and building
and iterating your product. Nothing else.
While you may convince yourself these are good things to
focus on, there are actually many steps away from
delivering real value to your customer. And so if all the
things you could be possibly doing, spending any
significant time on any of these things is almost always a
bad idea. The goal is not to optimize startup vanity, but
actually delivering value to your customer.
How to determine if you're
prioritizing the right tasks.
Have something like a task list in which
you put new ideas to eventually work.
Make a real clear distinction between real and
fake startup progress. This is the easiest way to
classify whether a task goes into the should
do or the should not do bucket.
So real startup progress is when you're really
focused on things that really move the needle
for your startup and in the beginning, the best
way to show this is through growth, in
particular growth of your primary KPI.
There are hundreds of things you could be possibly
working on to increase your primary KPI. Is what you're
working on right now, the best thing you can do to meet
your weekly goal? Have you tricked yourself into doing
something else? It's actually quite easy for a low value
work to unnoticeably, creep into your schedule. And it
actually takes a lot of work and effort to not let this happen.
Do an experiment: Try journaling in great detail of each day in the
past week, every single hour, so hour by hour, what is it that you
were exactly doing? And be honest on what you thought the impact
was before you actually did it and what it was in increasing your
primary KPI. I think you'll be surprised by how much of it was
actually low value work.
The reason is not because you're lazy. It's
more because we tend to be as humans on
autopilot. So we don't give much thought
to what we're doing with our time. And our
natural instinct is actually to go for low
value work because it's usually the
easiest and quickest thing to accomplish.
Once you're aware of this, preventing it is
actually quite simple, but it does take
time, thought and discipline.
So first, you should keep a spreadsheet of
ideas that can move your primary KPI,
these tasks are almost always a variant of
two things: One, talking to users and
two, building product.
Make A List
Evaluate KPIs!
Talking to users helps you
with three things: It converts
them into customers and
revenue, it helps you
understand if you're on the
right track or not, and It helps
you figure out your product
roadmap.
And then building product
actually delivers a solution to the user to see
if it actually translates into more customers
in revenue. So as you come up with these
ideas, you should log them into your
spreadsheet and keep doing that as every
idea you get.
But the key is don't do them right away. Just
write them down because always switching
to the thing you just thought of, which always
sounds better now than later causes a ton of
whiplash. Track this list. Then once we go
through each item in your spreadsheet and
grade the new and regrade the old
items based on how impactful you
think the task would be on achieving
the weekly goal for your primary KPI.
Example:
So a very common mistake technical
founders make is to build things first
and then go talk to users.
We also need to consider a second
dimension of how complex the task is.
That is, how long would it take for you
and your team to complete it?
An easy task is
something that you can
do in less than a day

So making decisions thoughtfully and quickly
is super important. Time is often wasted in
indecisiveness. The key is to be okay with
making a wrong choice and learning fast.
So of course choosing the right thing to do at
How to Prioritize Your Time
A medium task is something that takes one or two days for
you to do. And a hard task is one that takes many days to do
and you may not complete it within the week.
So just as important as selecting the right tasks
to work on is making sure you don't try to do everything at once. Pick
enough tasks that you can complete and do well. Doing too many things
means you won't be able to complete much of the tasks with much
conviction and makes it really hard to show progress from week to week.
Ultimately, you know you've done well
if you're hitting your weekly goals
consistently.
you're doing
well if your
graphs look
like that.
Sadly, most of us have graphs
that look like this.
So one way is writing weekly updates and
being really consistent and honest about
it. So the key components of weekly update
is pretty straight forward. What was your
weekly goal? Did you succeed? If not, what
was the biggest blocker of the growth? What
did you do and what was the predicted
impact and what was the actual impact and
what did you learn this week? What were the
big learnings this week?
Weekly Updates
Once in a while you should review all your
weekly updates, like from
beginning the first one you
ever wrote for your startup to
the current one, to the last one.
Check for things like, do you
feel like you're learning fast
enough? Are you predicting the impact of
each task well? Did you let low value work
or even worse, fake progress creep into
your schedule? Is your biggest blocker the
same thing for every week? A lot of people
actually get in a rough spot where they're not
learning anything new and just doing the same
thing over and over without realizing it.
If you're finding yourself always running
out of time to complete tasks, you felt
was totally possible to complete in the
week, I have two suggestions for you. One is
perhaps your task is actually too complex
and you should break it down into medium
and easy tasks. The second one is, maybe it
is that your schedule needs to be rejiggered
a little bit.
I recommend a modified version of what we
call the maker's manager schedule, which
was popularized by Paul Graham, the essay
is linked in the startup school library. The
basic idea is this, there are high context
switching costs to different types of
tasks. For example, coding and meetings,
like talking to users. Meaning it's hard to
restart and ramp back up on a task,
especially like coding and it's costly to exit
at a time when things are finally flowing
and you're getting stuff done. So if you find
yourself switching back and forth too much,
it may be that you're wasting time and
need to rejigger things so you have a
continuous chunk of time devoted to each
one.
So many people will actually divide their
week into days. So one full day they'll just
spend coding and the next full day they'll
spend meetings and talking to users and
so forth. Instead of me having like one hour
here, one hour there, one hour there.
the get go is the best thing
possible. But it's also the
case that a person who
chooses the wrong task to
work on today but moves
quickly, learns why it's wrong
and moves to the right one is
a better off than the person
that takes forever to choose
the right tasks to work on
and as twiddling their
thumbs working on low value
stuff in the meantime.
Sumup: Always be
working on things that
directly impact your
primary KPI. Do the things
that have the highest
impact to meeting your
weekly goal. And that
usually always means
what? Talking to users and
building product.
Q&A
Q What do you think about
using OKRs at this stage?
A I think the concept of OKRs is
good. Meaning you have key
objectives and then tasks. I
think at a startup you don't
need them. You just need
something much more simple
than that, which is here is my
weekly goal and here are the
tasks I want completed. And
then over the time as you build
out your team and you have like
50, 60 people and you need to
manage that organization,
OKRs are a great tool to use.

How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Pt. 1
How to package up your idea and communicate it to
an investor. Tips on how to craft your pitch in a clear
and concise way that effectively grabs your
audience's attention.
So an average investor, what they do is they talk
to you when you tell them about your idea and it
feels like they're poking holes. All the questions
they ask about what's all the reasons why this
could go wrong. A good investor does it the
other way around. They hear what you say and
they imagine and they use your optimism and
they use knowing that some kind of rare event
has to happen for you to become a billion-dollar
company, and they try to imagine all those rare
events that could possibly happen to you.
At YC they evaluate the following
The best companies in
YC or around the world
grow organically. They
grow by word of mouth.
It's basically means
people talk about your
idea at the dinner table,
and the person telling it
is the most interesting
at the dinner table.
Word of mouth is
something where I
remember what you
do, I talk about it
enthusiastic and it
spreads on its own.
Marketing and
advertising, it's a tax, I
believe, companies pay
because they did not
make something
remarkable.
Startup School curriculum is designed
around helping you constantly
practice talking about your startup.
This is because you are going to
need a lot of people if you're going
to become a billion-dollar company.
Talk that doesn't give
any extra information
and then buzz words.
When you say certain
types of words that as
an investor I've heard
over and over again, or
I will equate with zero
information or value then
I will ignore them. The
result is parts of your
pitch will end up being
not even heard by me
and therefore, I will not
remember them. What
you want to do is be
conversational.
A great pitch is one where you can tell it to your
mom and she gets it. She's proud of you. She's not
going to shake her head. That means it's got to be
conversational, and that's really good for word of mouth
because we talk in normal conversational speak.
To make things reproducible I need to know nouns. I
need to have objects that I'm going to imagine in my
head. There's three types of nouns that I should
understand from your startup idea. The first one is
what are you making? That should be really clear.
What is the problem, and then who is the customer?
The two are kind of related to the market, but I should
have these kind of three nouns in my head.
some examples
Number one, all the
nouns that you see
down here are abstract.
They're ideas. I can't
reproduce, based on
this. I still have to ask
questions to answer the
three nouns that I need
to have.
It starts talking about the story of the company or basically it's
like in the beginning there was this problem and we're going to
go through this issue. Then there's these bad guys and they
showed up, but then who's going to save us? We're finally here
to save... And you're like, "I have to read another thousand
applications.” [Investor].

A great pitch on the stage:
The goal of you being on stage is
not to say all the things that's great
about your company. It's to get
people to want to have a
conversation with you, to say, "I
can't ignore having a conversation
with that person." That's what a
great pitch does.
What that means is you don't
make the slides be the thing that
How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Pt. 2
It's descriptive. I understand what they're
building. I have a sense for what they're making
and then I can start thinking about my other two
ideas of whether I'm excited about it and then am
I going to like this team.
This is it's refreshing but also there's no pretense.
They aren't playing defense. I see a lot of
company descriptions where they're like, "I'm
worried about this," or, "I've gotten this kind of
feedback." They give up clarity to make
themselves look bigger and blow themselves up
or make themselves try to look more interesting.
We don't have to go deep into the details. I
don't need to understand how they exactly do
this, et cetera. This creates a foundation for my
curiosity. Now I will start from here to try to figure
out oh, how do you do this? Is this the right team
to do this? How far along are they? Do they
have traction? Do they have customers? I start
going down the route of asking all the right
questions based off this one description. This is
a good one.
It doesn't perfectly connect me to what they're
sort of making, but I'm intrigued. I'm excited
about someone building into LinkedIn and I
know it's some kind of social network for
business people. Now I'm curious about how.
I don't need you to answer how in the
description, but I understand what you're
doing and then now I can start making
questions in my head about how would I
evaluate whether this is working or successful
or promising or not. Is this the right team? Do
they have a certain amount of traction, et
cetera. It gets me on the right track.
A lot of companies who try to use the X for Y,
and what I mean by that is LinkedIn for
whatever or Uber for blank or Airbnb for
blank. X for Y is okay, but most people abuse
it or do it incorrectly, so I'm going to give you
some tips.
Lead with what, not why or how. You
don't need all that other stuff. That
stuff gets in the way of your clarity
Use as few words as possible; be efficient
I can picture what it is, but again,
it's not a description that helps me
get excited about it. It doesn't help
me lead to all the other things. I
have to do now more work to
understand why this is fast
growing and has potential. I also
don't know, based on this, some
nouns. I don't know exactly who
the customer is. Is it people that
they're selling stuff to or are they
making an e-commerce store for
other shop owners?
This is most of the descriptions that
we see on Startup School. It makes
it really, really hard for us to
understand it.
The thing is I want to know for what?
For whom? I don't even understand
what the problem is that they're
solving, based on of this.
Sounds more like a mission. I can't tell what
the product is and how they're starting to go
about it. I couldn't reproduce this. If I had 10
companies build, based off this description,
you'd have 10 very different products. The
other thing that's odd about company
descriptions is you guys tend to capitalize
and make proper nouns very weird words and
phrases.
How to improve
The first thing I want to do is just figure
out what are the nouns in the description
Everything else that gets added on
here, whatever verb, adjectives or
adverbs you want, you want to be
really careful. You want to know is it
getting maximum punch for this?
they remember. You want to
make yourself. It's about your
presence, the way you talk, how
confident you are, et cetera.
Basically, do you present
yourself in a way that people go,
"I want to interact with you."?
The presentation is more about
making the founders look
formidable and impressive.
They're using language that
everyone understands and is
clear, but feels inevitable. The
goal is not to do all this fancy
stuff. It's to do very simple
fundamentals and talk about
them in a way so that everyone
will understand. Right there.
Q How do the best, most
memorable applications make
you feel?
A It's like, "Man, these guys
seem really cool, they're super
smart. I feel like I'll learn a lot
of stuff from them. Man, how
do I get on their
bandwagon?" I'm thinking
about quitting YCs. That
would be like the best ones
possible. In the second tier,
it's really just like I'm
energized. When I hit an
application where all of a
sudden it goes like, oh, it's a
breath of fresh air and I want
to ask them a bunch of
questions.

Structure: the actual document
that we use for early stage
fundraising has changed
Access: nowadays you can find
fundraising documents online, and
they come with annotations and e-
signatures and it's just incredibly
easy to get documents. Back in the
olden days, the only way you could
fundraise was by hiring a lawyer
because there was no way to get
the documents you actually needed
to sell your preferred stock.
Focus: fundraising takes much
less time
As founders, you will buy common stock. That's how
you become owners of your corporation and typically
you will buy common stock for a fraction of a penny.
You may contribute some intellectual property as part
of that purchase, but basically they're going to be
buying your stock and own 100% of it for nothing.
You cannot raise a meaningful amount of money by
selling common stock.
So, your option is to sell to investors a completely
different class of stock called preferred stock.
Preferred stock is more expensive.
Modern Startup Financing
So, you have a company idea and the first thing you're going to
do is form a corporation because it's a separate legal entity and
it protects the founders from personal liability
So all of these things mean
exactly the same thing.
Convertible securities
are the right to get stock
in the future. It converts
into stock later.
Two things are valuation and dilution. So,
valuation is just the value of your enterprise &
dilution is stock. Like how much of your comp-
any have you sold. So, if you are selling investors
a percentage of your company, you previously
owned 100% of it. After you sell some, you're not
going to own 100% of it. That's dilution. Really
important is communication with investors
Preferred stock financings are no longer the
way that companies do their first fundraising.
But that process and those documents
themselves really haven't changed over the
years. It's just the when that's changed.
https://ycombinator.com/resources/#documents
When do priced rounds happen? They are still the primary way
that startups raise money. They're are no longer the way that
most startups raise their first fundraising.
All five of those priced round documents, you can get them
online these days. Everyone tends to still hire a lawyer for them.
It's very hard to tell
how much ownership
of your company you
have sold when you
sell a convertible
security. They're not
on your cap table, the
stockholders. You're
still 100% owner if all
you've ever done is sell convertible securities. But the day of reckoning
is coming when you do your priced round and all those convertible
securities convert into shares of stock. they become stockholders when
you do a price round and then you need their consent because
corporations have stockholder consents. Kind of hard to chase down all
those signatures.

Q&A: How do you know basically what to do?
If a VC wants to give you $5 million as your very first fundraise, do it. So,
if someone wants you to do a priced round and it makes sense for your
company, valuation wise, dilution wise, money raising wise, do it.
Otherwise, it does not matter how much you're raising on convertible
securities. It's about what you're comfortable with. And it's about tracking
dilution. How much are you actually selling? We had a YC company that
did a $50 million SAFE and I almost choked because I was like I didn't
build it for that. It's this very simple document. Like it made me nervous
thinking about it, but it's fine. It worked. It's fine. So, it depends on what
your investors want to do with you. Again, like you need their money. So,
if they really, really want to do convertible promissory notes and that's
how you're going to get to the next milestone and you need that money,
take it. It's better than dying. But should you not do a SAFE just because
someone wants to do a $500,000? Do a $500,000 SAFE, it's fine. Just
again, track the dilution.
Modern Startup Financing

Who's heard of Boom? Boom is a YC company from
three years ago, and they're doing something
completely awesome. They are building this, it is a
supersonic passenger jet to replace the Concorde. It
Advice for Hard-tech and Biotech Founders
If your company is building a normal website or a
mobile app, you probably have mostly market risk,
which is to say you have a new idea. It's not totally
clear that people are going to want this thing that
you're making, but you probably don't have much
technical risk, because building websites and apps
is a solved problem at this point.
will fly at Mach 2.2 and take you from
San Francisco to Tokyo in five hours.
The founder of Boom is a guy named
Blake, and Boom is not Blake's first
company. Before he started Boom, he
started a very ordinary company that
made a mobile shopping app. And Blake
came and he talked at a YC dinner, and
he reflected on the differences between
his first company, the mobile shopping
app, and his second company, Boom.
And he said something really insightful.
When he was building his mobile
shopping app, getting the product
live was easy. You can build a mobile
shopping app in like a few weeks, but
then everything after that is really
hard. See, it's hard to get press to
write about your mobile shopping
app because it's not an interesting
story. It's hard to get really talented
employees to want to work on it. It's
hard to get investors to want to meet
with you, to hear about your mobile
shopping app. In short, it's just hard
to get people to care about it. So,
while launching the product is easy,
turning the product into a really big
company is actually really hard.
Whereas with Boom, it's exactly the
opposite. Building a supersonic jet is
incredibly hard. But everything else
around it is really easy. And from the
very beginning, back when Boom was
just an idea, Blake was able to get
some of the most talented people in the
world to want to help him.
There is an incredible amount of investor
demand to fund really crazy, ambitious
ideas.
For easy companies t's only easier to
get started. It isn't necessarily easier to
turn it into a really successful company.
AIRx is a YC company that originally planned to make their
own medical device. Making a medical device is really
hard. Their original plan was going to take several years
and millions of dollars in order to get FDA approval for this
new device. Then they realized that they could launch a
basic version of the same core service they hoped to
launch, by using an existing medical device that was
already approved, and writing some software around it.
Notable Labs is a YC company that is developing new
drugs for cancer. Developing new drugs for cancer is
super expensive and takes a super long time, and so the
way they got started
was by providing
services to screen
tumors to pharma
companies. The
services that they ran
enabled them to
generate both
revenue and data
that they're now
using to develop their
own drugs.

So, because of that, we created something
called a letter of intent, or LOI. And a letter of
intent is a nonbinding contract to buy your
product when it's ready. Now, a nonbinding
contract seems like kind of a silly idea.
Nonbinding contract is kind of like a
paradox. But it turns out that it's actually a
kind of very clever construct, because it's
not binding. It doesn't actually commit the
customer to buy, but because it looks like a
This is important for you to prove to yourself,
because the last thing you want to do is spend
Astranis is a YC
company that builds
telecommunication
satellites and launches
them into space. That
is obviously not a
cheap thing to do. It
turns out, actually, that
the cheapest
telecommunication
satellite that is useful,
costs at least $10
million to build and
launch, and so
Astranis's hack was to
start with a test
satellite. The satellite
in this photo was their
first satellite. They
built it in less than
three months during
YC, and for less than
$50,000. Now this
satellite doesn't do
anything really useful.
You can't sell it, but by
launching an actual
fully-functional
satellite into space
and showing that they
could do that, they
were able to generate
the credibility that they
needed to go and
raise the money to
launch a full-scale
useful
telecommunication
satellite.
Ginkgo Bioworks is a YC company that does
genetic engineering of organisms. And in order
to engineer their first organisms, they were
going to need millions of dollars. And so, their
hack was, they went around to some large
companies and they closed contracts to create
those organisms before they had actually made
the organisms. The contracts basically said, if
Ginkgo makes these organisms, we will pay you
lots of money. And they used those contracts,
and they took those contracts around to
investors as proof of customer demand, and
they used that to raise the millions of dollars
from investors that they needed to actually
make the organisms that they had promised to
customers. So, basically, they sold it before
they made it.
years working on some product only to find
that people don't actually want it at the end.
But it's also important to prove it to investors.
Unfortunately, doing presales is not always
possible. For example, if you're doing
something medical that requires FDA
approval, it's actually illegal to do presales,
so don't do that.
contract, customers take it really seriously.
It's easy, when you're talking to a customer,
for them to be polite and casually say, "Sure,
I'd buy your thing if it ever worked someday,"
because it's no commitment for them. But if
you ask them to sign an LOI, you'll find out if
they're actually really serious about buying
your product, and investors know that.
The more specific the LOI is, the more
valuable it is.The cool thing is, if you can get
a customer to sign an LOI like this, it literally
gives you a roadmap for what you need to
build in order to generate revenue from your
product.
The fact is, it's just impossible to get investors to give you $50 million for an
idea. You have to make some progress first. Do a step by step plan: This still
gets you to $50 million, but it splits it into five discrete raises that start very
small. The key thing here is that for each of these fund raises, you want to have
specific milestones that you hit. So, you start off, you want to be able to make
some progress with your company before you've raised any money at all. And
then you want to use that in order to raise maybe a couple hundred thousand
dollars, and then you want to use the couple hundred thousand dollars to make
more progress, which enables you to raise like a million dollars.
A lot of the skill in building a hard tech company is in fine tuning this
fundraising plan, so that all the steps are as small as they possibly can
be. Because the most important part of this fundraising plan is that no step
should be too large. The thing for hard tech companies is to figure out ways to
prove as much as possible, as early as possible, in order to reduce the
perceived risk that
the idea is going
to work.
Advice for Hard-tech and Biotech Founders

How to Lead
It's a really important for the long term because if you are going to succeed in
building a big company in the long term, you've got to really get good at
leading, motivating, retaining great people.
3 observations on leadership:
1. There's no single archetype for a
great leader, no single archetype.
Great leaders come in all shapes and
sizes, all personality types and
characteristics.In your quest to
become a great leader, in your quest
to have other people follow you, you
have to be yourself. You have to be
authentic to who you are. You can't
try to be someone else if you want to
be a great leader.
So you can only be yourself in the
end because humans are very
good at detecting inauthenticity.
We're really good at telling when
someone is being fake, and we don't
generally follow or trust those that we
find in authentic.
1. Great leaders share three
fundamental attributes
a. Great leaders think and
communicate clearly. If you're
going to have other people
follow you, if you're going to
have other people want to do
the thing you're compelling
them to do, you have to be
able to paint a clear and
compelling vision of the future
for them to be able to follow.
And as a company grows, as
any organization grows, your
communication has to get
better and better and better
because you've got more
a. diverse people who are hearing it.
And your processes that you use to
communicate can no longer be one-
on-one, but they have to scale as the
organization itself scales. Great
communication needs to be simple.
And simplicity in communication is
really hard and to communicate
simply takes a lot of time and
preparation.
i. So the way you get better is;
clarity of thought proceeds
clarity of language. You have
to think clearly to
communicate clearly. And so
the first step is to free up time
in your schedule to just think
and try to note down your
thoughts and try to think
about how do I express these
thoughts in clearer and clearer
ways? And plan and practice
your communications.
b. Great leaders have good judgment
about people. As your organizations
grow, as your startups grow, before
long when you get to have 20 or 30
employees, you're going to have to
either hire or promote other people to
be leaders in the company, to be
managers and directors and one day
vice presidents and so on. And the
decisions that you make in terms of
who to empower as leaders in your
organization have a really profound
impact on the future of the company.
a. And, if you make consistently bad decisions on the
people that you're bestowing authority and power
to, then your authority, your followership, the trust
that people have in you will diminish. So you have
to make really good choices in terms of who you
empower because in the end they become
extensions of you. So how do you get good at this
one?
i. How do you get good at this: When you're
starting to recruit for any position in your
company, you should try to meet a lot of
people. You should put real time and
energy into it. You should try to even meet
people who you have no hope of hiring
because it's important to kind of get a sense
for what really great leaders are like, what
great engineering managers are like, what
great sales leaders are like, et cetera. And
just talk to them about their jobs and their
backgrounds and how they came to be
where they are. Ask them about how they
lead people, what they think goes well,
doesn't go well. This type of kind of
educational interview will really help you or
really help hone your judgment about
what's good and what's bad. Don't cut
corners, spend time meeting people and
honing your instincts. Just make sure that
you view the hiring process as something
that you can learn from every single time,
and just be very diligent in terms of
learning who you hired, why you hired that
person, what went right, what went wrong
in terms of their original hire, their
onboarding and their career at the
company. Be self-reflective about the
development of people in your organization
3. Great leaders have strong
personal integrity and commitment. That
means standing for something meaningful
beyond themselves and being motivated by
things outside of their narrow personal
interests. It means avoiding behavior that
diminishes trust, diminishes credibility in a
leader like favoritism, conflicts of interest,
inappropriate language, inappropriate work
relationships, et cetera. Commitment means
making your work into a life mission in
ways that inspire other people. It means
giving it your all. People see this and they
respect it and they follow it. So how do you
get good at this? Well, my simple advice on
this one is to try to hold yourself
accountable to the transparency test,
which means ask yourself if all of your
private communications and behavior
towards others, et cetera, if all that were to
be transparent to everyone at the
company, if everyone saw everything you
said and did, would you be embarrassed
by any of it? We obviously all make mistakes,
but patterns of mistakes are bad. And
mistakes that sort of damage the integrity that
you have or damage the perception of
integrity are the worst of all. So that is I think a
very important characteristic in leaders. The
best way to measure great leaders is in
terms of the amount of trust they're able to
engender in the people who work with
them.
Try to optimize for trust as leaders.
Try to view every challenge as an
opportunity to increase the trust that
people have in you as a leader.

The
happiest
cohort was
actually
people who
were in
teams, and
Startup School 2019 by the Numbers
The best thing you can do is when
you talk about your startup, there's a
question on the applications that
says, "What are you making?" That
is to be very clear.
So you think your biggest problem is
one thing, but the thing that would
actually help you the most are very
different. A lot of it concerning product
and things dealing with the users.
We asked you to talk to your users
and tell us what did you learn from
them, and these are the top things
that people got. Not surprisingly,
they're focused on product. Basically
the best thing you can do is make
something people want.
Technical startups are happier. You're just
able to get more done.
this is actually one of the main reasons YC always say that they
want companies that try to have co-founders.It is so hard to do
a startup on your own, and usually morale is the thing that kills
a lot of companies and founders.

How Pitching Investors is Different Than Pitching Customers

Parting Advice
It's so easy to be distracted by what's happening with
other startups. It's a great thing to be part of a community
of startups and this is the one thing you have to be careful
about and to remember is that every startup, every
single one has a different path.
Hire incredible people. Surround yourself with the
best of the best, and that will give you the best
chance to build an epic company and don't give up.
Things go
disastrously wrong
at a startup and
the founders get
sad and sad this
leads to inaction.
It leads to apathy.
It leads to
depression.
Things will go wrong with your
startup. They always do. It's
almost the beauty of startups
and you guys are the problem
solvers in chief. The times
remember the most are when
things went wrong and we
found solutions.
Eat well. Exercise, stay in control of yourself and your sanity
because startups are hard, really hard. One of the main reasons
that companies fail is because co-founder relationships
break down and founding teams break up.
Choose a culture and
values that are positive.
Make your company a
happy, exciting place to
work. You can always feel
that vibe if you go into a
successful company, go
into a company with a
hundred people where
they are moving and they
are going forward and
they are creating
something special and you
can feel it and of course be
good to your customers.
What do you do when you're facing a problem?
The best course of
action is action. So
default to it, default to
action. Inaction in a
startup is the death
of the startup.

Article
Q&A
Q: You typically advice not to buy
advertising at first. Just to speak with
customers and try to get those
customers. Talking to them. When is
the right time to start really an
advertising campaign for a startup?
A: Okay, we at YC do not advocate
you doing any kind of paid marketing
like buying ads. And so the question
is obviously there is at some point
there's a right time for this and one
is the right time. So for us what we
say is the right time is usually when
you have product market fit and
you're ready to scale and you've
already done the experiments
necessary to show that your CAC is
reasonable for whatever the revenue
is coming during the per user basis.
Usually what we see, when we say
don't do paid advertising, what we
really, really, really mean is what
we... The mistake that people make
is to get the first hundred users or
the first, even first 10 users they got
the go buy a lot of ads and I think
it's a reflection of bad, usually a bad
founder market fit if you don't know
where to find those first 10 users,
especially if it's a consumer
company. But even for a B2B type
enterprise company, hopefully you
have talked to at least all those
kinds of users and you are building,
you've built something in which
someone has at least committed to
using the product and paying for the
product.
team weekly stamps are great.
And so even if you are making
progress, it's hard to see it like in
one day chunks. But for sure one
week stand ups are great. And
reviewing this with everybody and
getting everyone on the same
page. Getting everyone on the
same page in your company, by
the way, on the definition of your
primary KPI is super important.
You'll be surprised how many
companies where team members
just have varying levels of
definition. And then once you get
that set, then having everyone
understand what the goals of the
company are and then what are
the tasks we should be working on.
Recommendations
Q&A: So should we follow
up with our team to make
sure we're all on track? Let’s say
you are four or five, six person

Summary Y Combinator Startup School 2019

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