The Secrets to YC's Essential Startup Advice with Y Combinator with Michael Seibel

All right, thank you for having me. So I thought would be most useful for everyone is to go through some of YC's essential startup advice, but actually try to dig deeper into exactly why we give this advice and how we see founders going wrong. And then to leave a lot of time for questions. And so I'm going to be using the Zoom Q&A feature. If you've got questions, feel free to queue them up now. And either I'll incorporate them in the presentation, or I will answer them by the end. Let's get rolling. Okay, so this is a common piece of advice that people hear over and over and over again: launch now. And what I find interesting is that there is now this counter piece of advice that I think a lot of founders are trying to adopt, which is like, oh, wait, You can't launch something too quickly because users are going to not like it, and then you will never be able to get them to come back. One of the things I noticed about founders is that they tend to default to the newer/cooler/more controversial advice versus the older advice. Reason being, I have no idea, maybe that's kind of how they think technology works or something. I'm not sure. And of course, with any piece of startup advice, you can find exceptions to any rule. However, to be honest, time and time again, where I see YC founders failing is not launching soon enough. And here's what's going on. Here's what's really happening. You have a set of assumptions that you make when you start a company. And I call that a very useful lie. It's a useful lie, because it's the lie that you use to get started, to actually get you to start building product. It's the lie that basically says, I know what my customers want. And I know how to build it. So I love that lie. But once you actually get started building product, the same lie that was extremely useful to you can now be extremely deadly. And the reason why is because all of the assumptions you have about what your customers need are just that— assumptions. And if you don't put your product in front of customers quickly, often you can run with your worst assumptions for a long time. What happens when you have strongly held assumptions that turn out your customers don't like, is you lose confidence. The more time you spend building without getting validation for your customers, if you don't get that validation, the more confidence you lose. And in some ways, confidence is the hidden fuel behind doing a startup. So it's much better to use that, oh, I know what my customers want lie to get started, and then very, very quickly shift to a mode of, when I'm making a product assumption, I make that assumption by putting my product in front of customers and learning, is that a real assumption? Or is that perhaps mistaken? So that's the reason why we encourage people to launch now. Second, building something people want. Hey, this seems like the most simple piece of advice in the universe, yet time and time again, I see founders screwing this one up. Your product must actually serve your customers' needs. You're building a business, not an art form. So when I talk to founders about this, oftentimes I talk about what I call the fake Steve Jobs versus the real Steve Jobs. A lot of press and media built up this idea that Steve Jobs was a product genius. And as a result, Whenever he thought up a product, he would build it and people would love it. And it's a very simple narrative to provide, right? Product genius versus maybe they would call Bill Gates an execution genius or a business genius. However, it's completely not true, as most oversimplified stories are. So first, right, Steve Jobs did not come up with all the ideas of the best products at Apple. But second and more importantly, the V1 of many Apple products weren't great. If you remember all the way back to when the first iPhone launched in 2008, remember, it didn't have 3G. It didn't have an App Store, had horrible battery life, and the screen broke easily. Now, those are things that aren't talked about nowadays, you know, it's over a decade later. But being in the tech world, and I was, most people didn't adopt the iPhone until the third iteration. That's when great internet, video, the App Store came into its own. That's when the product actually got good. So even the great Steve Jobs iterated product over time by interacting with users, instead of just magically knowing what users wanted. So you have to be really careful about looking at your startup and asking yourself, am I being an artist? Am I just trying to put the thing in my head out there because I assume I know what people want? Or am I running a business that serves someone else? In which case I need to put their interests, their problems, their concerns above my own. I think this is something that is very hard for founders to understand, but it's essential. Your business is in many ways in service of your customers. Alright, the next one is doing things that don't scale. Oftentimes founders will come to me and say, oh, investors are asking for like, what's going to be the scalable solution. And so therefore, they think about everything in terms of scalable solutions. I think about things a little differently. At YC, one of the interesting things that we've learned is that every one of our startups is competing against some larger incumbent, and you cannot beat them by playing their game. Oftentimes when I talk to YC founders, I cast this in terms of the American Revolutionary War. If you're George Washington and you're trying to beat the British, you do not march your soldiers in the middle of the field against the number one professional army in the world at the time. You will lose. You will lose. You don't take the British on head to head. You fight something that looks a lot closer to a guerrilla war. Doing things that don't scale is another way of saying do things that big companies cannot or will not do. That's where you get an advantage over these larger incumbents. So counterintuitively, when you're looking to get your first 10 customers, when you're looking to figure out exactly what they want, You should be thinking about how you can talk to them directly, how you can have a relationship with them. Oftentimes, you put them in a WhatsApp group together. These are things that absolutely don't scale. But it's the things that the big incumbent cannot do, which means you're learning 10 times faster than they are. You're iterating 10 times faster than they are, you're solving your customers' problems, and you're growing. So doing things that don't scale is essential. And too many founders are trying to copy the organizations and the tactics of the large companies they're competing against. You will never beat a large company by trying to attack them head to head. They will always have more money and more people. So figure out how you can play your guerrilla war against the large incumbent. And usually that means doing things that doesn't scale. Alright, so finding the 90/10 solution. This is something that Paul Buchheit, a YC founder, I'm sorry, YC partner came up with, which has been one of the most valuable pieces of advice that I've used personally in my startup. The very simple question you should ask yourself anytime you come up with a feature idea is, how do I get 90% of what I want with only 10% of the work? Unfortunately, in the startup world, founders are way too professional— sorry, are way too looking for something perfect, perfectionist. And this is what is killing their speed. It's killing their speed. And the faster that you iterate, the faster you learn from your customers and the better your product gets. So every time you think about speccing a technical project, ask yourself this question: How do I get 90% of what I want for 10% of the work? Because if it turns out that the thing that I want to build is what the customers want, I can always build v2 and be v3, and I can always iterate it and make it better. But if it turns out I'm working on something the customers don't want, how much time do I want to waste building that thing before I figure it out? So this 90/10 solution can be applied to almost every technical problem that you're attacking. And I find it's an amazing conversation to have after you spec something out, after you write down this big spec with all these things, is then you can start crossing things out. And it's always motivating to a small team to be able to cross tasks out and only work on the things that are most important. All right, next. If you have raised money, you should remember that this is not your money. You should always remember to spend your company's money with full transparency and high ethics. I'm— I've encountered this problem only a couple times after working with thousands of founders. But what is painfully obvious is that if you do something unethical with your company's money, eventually you will be caught. Once you are caught, it will be very hard for you to ever work with ethical people in your industry ever again. So it's not worth it. It's not worth it. If you are not willing to expose your bank accounts to your co-founders, if you're not willing to walk through line-by-line spending with your angel investors, you should ask yourself, what are you spending money on that you shouldn't be? And you should stop. Now, that doesn't mean that you should be reviewing every line of your expenses with your investors every week. Let's be clear, they probably don't want that. But the real question is, If they asked, would you be afraid to? If you are, you're doing something wrong and need to stop. It's extremely important. No one in your company is going to be more ethical than you are. So as founders, you set the bar here. All right. Now in the world of massive valuations and very little progress that we're in right now, it bears repeating over and over again that a high valuation is not equal to success. What I've come to learn nowadays is that valuations are largely a function of the amount of capital in the startup ecosystem. They are not a function of how good a company is. This is one that I struggle with constantly. Because I think what founders don't understand is that They determine the validation, the worth of their company based on what an investor is willing to give them instead of determining the worth of their company based on how much customers are willing to spend using their products. I really wish that instead of companies describing themselves as a Series A or a Series B or a Series C or a unicorn, which is letting the investor define you, which is stupid because the investor almost never uses your products, doesn't know whether it's good or not. Why not describe yourself as a company with a million in revenue and annual revenue, or $10 million in annual revenue, or $100 million in annual revenue, or a billion in annual revenue? When you look at the unicorns that might be intimidating you, the competitors who've raised lots of money, instead of asking yourself how much money they raised or how big a valuation they got, Why not ask yourself, how many dollars worth of revenue do they have? And suddenly these massive unicorns might look a lot less intimidating. One of the things you have to understand as a founder is that you are downstream of a massive global economy that has decided to shift where it's investing money. And that massive global economy is trying to put more money into earlier stage companies and into technology companies, because, to be honest, they have finally realized that software is revolutionizing business. And they look at the public markets and see that software companies are doing very well. So there's a massive global capital inflow into the venture world. Now, what does that mean? Well, it means that if every venture capitalist from seed stage up to growth stage has more money, that basically means that there is much more competition between these investors in order to invest in the best companies. It also interestingly means that it's much less likely that 2 investors or 3 investors or 4 investors will want to work together. Participate in rounds together, especially in earlier stages, because they have more money to invest. If you see a great company and you have a large fund, why wouldn't you do the whole round? Why would you share it? So as a result, this increase— this increase of capital flow into venture, which is creating increased competition, is as a result creating increased valuations. Now unfortunately, non-sophisticated founders look at those valuations and they think to themselves, that means something. That means those companies are good. And they stop looking at what's driving the valuations. Now, for some companies, these valuations are absolutely credible. They've accomplished great work, their revenue is growing, they've got high retention, so on and so forth. For other companies, not so much. So this is a useful one for people who want to be employees and executives, in addition to people who want to be founders. Take a second to look beyond the valuation and figure out what are the core metrics of that business and how are those metrics improving over time? Revenue, retention, like look at the core metrics. Do not assume that valuation is a good proxy for the core metrics that make a business work. Alright, next up. This is one that is always frustrating to founders. Um, you will need to fire some of your customers. You are going to acquire some customers who are not the right fit. And that can mean a lot of different things. These can be customers who don't have the problem you're solving. These are customers who don't have the budget to spend. On solving the problem. These are customers who are trying to get you to solve a different problem. Customers who don't have the authority to make a purchasing decision. Customers who don't understand how important the problem that you solve is to their company. So in the process of selling software, early stage, a lot of founders default to the idea that they should try to sell any customer they meet. This is almost the exact opposite of what you should be trying to do. The reality is you should be trying to find the perfect set of customers. I'm defining perfect very specifically. The set of customers who have the problem you're trying to solve, and it is frustrating the shit out of them. The folks who are willing to spend money to solve the problem, the folks that can move quickly, the folks who are willing to endorse your product to whoever else inside of their company needs to believe in the product, in order to actually get a deal done. The folks who are willing to use early-stage software, right, a lot of people are not willing to be the first or second customer, they want to, they want to be late, they're the IBM buyers, right. So honestly, a lot of what your job is, as an early-stage founder doing sales, is filtering, is talking to a lot of customers and trying to find the customers who are in that zone, and then building a product for them. And what fust— founders find frustrating is oftentimes those groups of early adopters who can move quickly might not represent the entire market. But it's who you should start with. So the advice we always give to YC founders is start with the easy customers, easy as I defined, and be okay ignoring or saying no to the harder customers. Um, once you get the easy customers on board, you have learned so much more about the problem. You will have so many more useful case studies. You will be so much better at talking about the product that you make, that it's going to be a lot easier to sell the harder and harder customers. Put another way, the more resources you have, the harder of the customers you should be focused on. The more you can pivot from filtering to actually selling, trying to convince. But in the early days, it's all about filtering. Sales is all about finding the people who don't need to be convinced. The people who are excited to receive your email, the people who've been waiting to receive an email like yours. Filtering is the name of the game when it comes to early-stage startups. Next, there's been a lot of popularity around blitzscaling. And every founder who's been working on their company for some period of time is asking themselves, is it time to scale? Do we have product-market fit? Is it time to raise a big round? Is it time to hire. What I've come to learn is that scaling too late is harmful. But scaling too early is fatal. And you have to be very careful about bit scaling, bit scaling, because it's usually a one-way decision. If you're right, great. If you're wrong, you're dead. So what's going on here? Why are people scaling when they shouldn't be? I wish I could answer this question 100% accurately, because I will tell you that this is the biggest killer of YC companies. Basically, raising money on Demo Day, believing they have product-market fit, spending too much money, and too late realizing that they don't have product-market fit, but having expenses that are too high and too little burn to really fix the problem. So what do I think is going on here? I think there's a couple things that are going on here that are causing these companies to mess up. The first is they have bad expectations. They expect their product to succeed too quickly. One of the best pieces of advice I got as an early-stage founder was from a lawyer who told me that their average client took 7 to 10 years to exit. And I remember thinking as a 23-year-old founder, 7 to 10 years, that is an impossibly long period of time. I've never done anything for that period of time. That cannot be true. It turned out it was exactly true. We started Justin.tv in 2008, and it sold as Twitch in 2014. So if our expectations had been too far off, If our expectations had been, oh, well, it's been a year, we certainly must have product-market fit now. Now it's time to scale. Now it's time to put scale, we would have died. And I think that's the first thing that founders screw up is the idea that like, it might take you 6 months to find product-market fit, it might take you 4 years to find product-market fit. If you're working on a product that you don't want to spend that much time working on, if you don't— aren't going to find product-market fit quickly, Why don't you work on a problem that you really care about? So the expectation setting is number one. Number two is your peer group. This has been very challenging to learn, but what I've realized is that most people have peer groups that guide them well. So when you look at your peer group in university or in high school, most startup founders interact with put themselves amongst a smart group of people, and did something like what they did. They took the right tests, they applied to the right schools, so on and so forth. In college, similarly. Also in the working world, most people are trying to figure out how to get ahead. So they try to attach themselves to the peers that seem like they know what's going on. So they basically are very driven by peers. The problem with the startup world is that failure rates are way higher than in the education world or in the corporate world. It's much more likely that your peers are going to die. It's much more likely that if you just do what the people around you are doing, your company is going to die. In this world where chapped capital is a lot cheaper than it's ever been before, Founders are hiring way faster and starting to blitzscale way faster than they ever did, often when they don't have product-market fit. And if everyone around you is doing that, your natural instincts, the instincts that served you so well in school or so well in the corporate world, will fail you here. They are literally driving their startups off a cliff. Are you going to follow them? So be very, very careful about scaling too early. This is one that is deadly time and time and time again. Okay, this is a new one. One of the things that I've realized with YC founders is that while on one hand, they're confident that they're solving an important problem, they're building something with their customers want. On the other hand, almost every decision they make is based on fear at too high of a degree. So put another way, they know they're trying their startup— in their startup, they're trying to do something that's very hard to do, like borderline impossible. Yet instead of asking themselves, what will happen if things go right? Do I think that this will be a good decision if my company works? They almost always ask themselves, what will happen if things go wrong? And then plan for things going wrong. So where do we see this most specifically? Dilution. Dilution is the first place we see this most specifically. Founders should be thinking that if their company goes well, their early rounds of financing will be the most dilutive. So in that world, you have to ask yourself, how much money should I actually raise? Now, if I think my company, you know, if I'm afraid my company won't do well, I'm going to think to myself, I should raise more money early, it's going to give me more time to figure things out. And needless to say, investors will tell you that over and over and over again. It's like, you can't raise a million-dollar seed round, that's crazy. If you want to get a Series A, you need to raise $2-3 million or more. To me, that's not thinking about what would happen if things went right. To me, those arguments from investors are self-serving. They want to own more of your company. And therefore, they're going to try to convince you that taking more money is better. But the best YC founders, when they come back and tell us what do they wish we had told them during YC, Time and time again, they wish we told them to raise less money. They didn't realize that their startup would work. They didn't realize their startup would start generating revenue. They didn't realize they could start funding their company with that revenue. And they oversold their company early. Now, the average founder is competing with the size of the rounds, right? They're not competing from which revenue they're generating. The average founder dies, right? So they have founders competing around how much money they raised, what kind of valuation. The smart founders compete with how little dilution they take in the early days to accomplish the goals. Smart founders are betting on their startups working. And they realize that capital will be a lot cheaper post-product market fit than pre-product market fit. See, the game when you're pre-product market fit is how little can you spend? How much of your company can you own? To reach product-market fit. The second place where we see this screwing up time and time again is when companies make a model for how their post-seed round is going to be spent. They only model out costs, they never model out revenue. So they come back to us and they say, well, we have to raise more money because we want to hire these 3 engineers and we have to get this designer, we need this, it's going to cost all this money. And we always come back and we say, okay, well, during this entire time that you're spending this money, you know, you're spending your seed on, are you going to make any money? Are you gonna generate any revenue? Have you modeled how much revenue you're gonna generate? Have you thought about whether you should continue to hire people if you're not generating any revenue? So you're not generating revenue, doesn't that mean maybe you're not building something customers want? And if that's the case, is hiring your top priority? So the best founders spend time thinking about what will happen if things go right. They ask themselves, am I in an extremely capital-intensive business or am I not? If they're a capital-intensive business, they realize they probably have to take a bit of a hit of dilution. If they're not, they don't chase their peers. They don't give a shit whether their peers are raising more money or not. They compete for how much little dilution they can take pre-product-market fit. These founders are very formidable. It's very formidable to interact with a founder who's thinking, what if things go right? And, you know, let's be clear, not magical thinking, not fake Steve Jobs, but very much thinking, what if we can actually get these customers to pay? What if they're actually paying a market rate? What if we can reinvest that revenue into growth? The founders who think that way are extremely formidable. Counterintuitively, investors both like those founders because they're formidable and dislike those founders because oftentimes they can't get as large of an allocation in their rounds as they want to, or they can't get as much ownership, or there's too much competition for the rounds. As a founder, you have to understand that in many situations, you and your investor have different motivations. And your investor is not motivated to preserve your dilution, to have low— for you to have low dilution. You have to be motivated for that. Okay, next. There's a lot of talk about mental health and work-life balance in the startup world. And amongst founders, I want to be honest with you, there is no work-life balance. You— balance implies some level of equality. And I guarantee you— and some level of stability. And I guarantee you, your startup will ask more from you than you will plan. It will be harder than you plan. It will hurt more than you plan. That doesn't sound like balance. To me. As a result, is extremely stressful on your mental health. And failing at something for 2 years, which is extremely common in the startup world, is something that is extremely uncommon in the normal world. It's something that most founders have never experienced before. And so you need to think about what your plan will be for maintaining your mental health early. You've gotta figure out how you are going to take care of yourself because no one else will. It's no one else's responsibility to take care of your mental health. That's your game. And there's even more burden on you because not only is it your responsibility to take care of your mental health, it's your responsibility to be an example to your co-founders and your employees. So if you deal with stress by drinking, drinking will become part of the culture of your company, and you will hand that down to your co-founders and your employees. If you deal with stress by exercising, then health will become part of the culture of your company, and you will hand that habit down to your co-founders and employees. So the methods you use to take care of your mental health are your responsibility and your burden, because they will be greatly shared with the people around you. Take this seriously early, because the startup game is extremely long and hurts much more than most founders realize. All right, here's my last one. And this is the second one that I've come up with much more lately. Discipline beats intelligence most of the time. Most startups know what they have to do, and the best ones actually just do it. I think there's way too much talk in Silicon Valley and the kind of Silicon Valley ecosystem that's now global about intellect, about what school you went to, how smart you are, not even what school you went to, like how smart you are. And there's almost no talk about discipline. And I see founders almost embracing this by trying to communicate how well-read they are, or what schools they went to, and like all these other things to try to signal intelligence. Because the way that Silicon Valley kind of shows off its most successful people is by calling them the smartest, right? Elon Musk is the smartest, or Mark Zuckerberg is the smartest. I actually think this is another extremely gross mischaracterization about what's going on. Almost everyone who's watching this talk right now and who will watch in the future will have gotten almost every piece of advice I've given. They should take a second right now to ask themselves which of these pieces of advice they're not following and why. Um, one of the things that I did, um, in the beginning of COVID was start to ask myself, why don't I have better discipline in my life? Um, I was working extremely hard and I wasn't really enjoying my day-to-day life, and I was asking myself why not. And I came across this idea that like I wasn't being disciplined. I knew what I needed to do, but I wasn't doing it. I read this book named Atomic Habits and The whole thesis of this book is that you can set very, very, very small goals and you can get into the habit of accomplishing these small goals. I call that discipline. And those small goals can compound like interest over time to make massive changes in your life. So one of the core things that was described in that book that I loved was this idea that hard tasks are hard for everyone. Everyone finds things hard. The things that are on your to-do list that are giving you a stomachache, every one of your peers, everyone else who's better than you in business, that are all those things, they're going to find them hard. Effective people figure out how to get good at doing hard things. Effective people figure out how to get good at doing hard things. That beats intelligence almost every time. So my core thesis here is that advice is not what's killing startups. The real thing that's killing startups is when they know what they should do, when they know they're spending too much money on employees, when they know they're not talking to their customers enough, when they know they should be charging more, when they know they should be doing the hard things in their to-do list. They don't have the tools to figure out how to get themselves to do hard things. I think that's the last kind of core piece of advice that I want to leave everyone before questions. If you can develop a toolset on how to get yourself to do hard things, you have so much of an advantage on everyone else in our ecosystem. Right? I always like to think about my to-do list as kind of a set of tasks. And I kind of assign a stomachache rating to each task. Which of these tasks makes my stomachache more? That tends to mean they're harder or more stressful, I have to make sure I do them correctly, da da da da da. And in my experience, those stomachache tasks, that's where the power is. Most founders ignore those stomachache tasks, every day. Most founders are responding to kind of a normal natural feeling of running away from what hurts. The best founders run towards the stomachache tasks. The best founders, those are the things they do in the beginning of every morning. They figure out how to get better at doing hard things. And man, you have such an advantage if you pull this off. All right, so I've been talking to everyone for almost 40 minutes. I've got about 10 minutes left for questions. Thank you so much for listening. I'm going to start taking questions from the Zoom Q&A. So let's get rolling here. Um, what advice would I provide to people of color who are trying to raise seed rounds and/or do professional networking? Um, the best piece of advice that I would provide is a piece of advice that I would give to everyone. Um, here's how I think of the game that we're playing here. You can either try to win through relationships or try to win through results. One of the things that I find a lot of founders don't realize is that if they can do anything to get their first 10 customers, to get the first version of their product out, the amount of leverage they have to raise money is significantly higher. There's a kind of false false kind of idea out there in the world that the first step to creating a startup is to come up with an idea. And the second step is to build a deck. The third step is to raise money. And not only is that idea incorrect, but that idea limits people who don't have rich uncles or 10 friends who work at Google who can invest in their company or rich parents. It really that idea holds back a lot of the economically disadvantaged people globally. Whereas what's so interesting about software is that for the first time, it's ridiculously cheap to create a business. For the first time, you don't have to lay any bricks, you don't have to build anything physical, you don't have to go dig up the side of a mountain. Like, you can actually build and launch a product and generate revenue with a computer. The cost of creating a business is so low that we need to change people's idea around the— change people's kind of mental model that fundraising is essential. It's not, especially early, especially if you're technical, if you're a technical co-founder. So to me, the question I ask you is, if you're trying to get to the goal, of having a successful business. Instead of thinking that step 1 is networking or trying to meet with angel investors and raise money, I would think step 1 is getting the most basic version of your product in the hands of customers and having them pay. If you cross that step, you will look better than 90% of the founders out there who are pitching for investment right now. You'll look better than 90% of them. That's my best piece of advice there. The next question, how long should it be— how long should be launched a startup since you have the idea? I don't really— I don't really know that that's like a metric that I care much about. Like, so from coming up with the idea to launching the company, how long that is, I don't really know that that's something that we care about. I think when reading a YC application, the thing that we do really care about is from the time that you decided to start working on your company to today, are we impressed with what you've accomplished? That's the thing we really care about. Are we impressed with what you've accomplished during that period of time? And I think that a lot of founders, unfortunately, spend that period of time doing things that are a bit of a waste of time, like not building their product, or not getting their first customer. And so that's what I would focus on here, not when did you come up with the idea. Next up. When you hire a VP level of executive, how long does it take to understand whether or not they're a good fit for the company? Well, I'll answer this more generally. I think in most organizations, um, from startup on up to 100, 200, 500 people organizations, it should be obvious within 90 days. Whether any employee is, is making themselves essential to the company. And so what I often tell people when hiring is put a calendar invite 90 days out from the employee's first day and ask yourself, if they quit today, if they told you they had to leave today, how would you feel? Would you feel relieved? Indifferent, or broken, horribly sad? If you would feel relieved or indifferent, that's a really bad sign. That essentially means that perhaps you don't have a good hire. And you should start thinking that way. If you feel— if you think you'd feel horribly broken and sad, bam, I'm sure you have a great hire. So that's how I like to think about this. Is there a set of required or highly recommended reading that you recommend for entrepreneurs? I think that what is— I've defaulted to is reading a lot more online content than books. I think that it takes a lot of time to create a book. And as a result, you tend to get a lot more interesting content in blog posts. At YC, one of the things that we've tried to do to make this easy for early-stage founders, people who think about being founders, is we created this product called the YC Startup Library. And in that library, it has all of the blog posts from the people that we respect around every topic involving startups. And so that's where I would send people first and read, read, read. There's a lot of great content there. What's the best way that a non-code— that a non-technical co-founder can contribute while the tech folks code? There are so many jobs in a startup, ranging from making sure that people are well fed and in a nice environment to from talking to customers and figure out what they want, to interacting with the press, to planning product, to looking at analytics. There's so much work that can be done inside of a startup. So what I would do is I would basically look around and figure out where are we weak? Are we talking to enough customers? If not, great. I'm gonna be doing sales. Are we doing enough customer service? All right, great. Am I doing customer service? Are we going to where our customers are and, you know, making it more obvious that we exist? Okay, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do PR, I'm gonna do outreach. Everything is on the table. And if you find yourself twiddling your thumbs, that just means that you're not thinking hard enough about how you can be helping your company. How critical is revenue when you're attempting to raise investment versus customers or usage? This is extremely dependent on the type of business that you have. It is generally, when you think about kind of business models, they tend to be copied and not innovated on. And if we were to kind of split the world up very simply into two types of business models, we basically would say there's advertising-based business models and non-advertising-based business models. We're making the world very simple. Advertising-based business models are often 100% dependent on how much audience you have. So companies that are planning to raise money, I'm planning to monetize with advertising, they tend to wait to monetize. Everyone else, for the most part, tends to try to monetize early. They tend to try to charge for their customers as soon as possible. There's the kind of third category, which is like the category of hard tech and bio and so on and so forth, where like it takes years or a decade to even get a product to market. I'm gonna put that category aside. But if you're in an advertising business, it tends to be about usage. If you're in any other kind of business, it tends to be around money that you're making. You have to understand that money is how your customer communicates to you that they love your product. It's the ultimate way of communicating that you're adding value to them. All right, what's next here? Would you prefer to launch an MVP as quickly as possible or launch a polished version of the product? Well, You should look back at my presentation where I said launch now. And it's pretty obvious that launching now is better. So follow on, on the historically disadvantaged. Yeah. So I think that one of the things that I've been trying to think a lot about is how to make the tech world more accessible to people from every different type of background. And if you think about the traditional way of raising money in the tech world versus YC, you'll start to see how YC's founder Paul Graham was thinking about the same problem. And when YC started, he asked himself some questions. One, why are the people who are building products not the people who are getting funded? Why is it easier to get funded if you have an MBA than if you have a software engineering degree? When the companies are building software? Two, why do you have to network in order to meet a potential investor? That seems weird. And when you think about how YC was designed, it's very much designed with those ideas in heart. So one, you don't have to have an MBA or anything close to it. You don't have to know how to make a presentation. We have an application. Two, you don't network to raise money from us. You literally fill out the application. So I think that one of the things that we think about a lot are what are the networking or information barriers to getting startups started, and how do we defeat them? One of the reasons why we have the Startup Library, why we have Startup School, which is a free online MOOC, is so that we can put as much information about doing startups out in the world as possible. So it's never a disadvantage that you don't have the information that you need. So in my mind, what YC is trying to do every day is level this playing field, but we absolutely want to make sure we're being honest about is how hard this is. And this is an area that I think can never be said enough. This startup game is extremely hard. It's extremely stressful, and almost everyone loses. And so one thing that I refuse to do is hide those realities from founders. Because I think that's doing them a disservice. So how do we make this world accessible to people from every background, while being honest with them about how hard it is? That's kind of the core goal. All right, with that, I think I'm at time. Thank you so much for these great questions, and good luck in all of your startup pursuits. Thank you so much, Michael. Everyone, we have more sessions today, and we will see you there. Thanks so much.