Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan’s advice for startups: “When you’re small, act small”

A lot of founders try to be as big as possible. They like try to emulate the Microsoft product homepage and use the same terminology and look as big as possible. Don't do that when you're starting something new. The whole advantage is that you're a real human being. We are so starved for real authentic connection that if you can just go talk to people and say, hey, I'm the CEO, what do you need? Being small means that you can have super extreme, fanatical customer support. You know, we're always talking about product market fit. How do you figure out what people want? They're just going to come tell you and you've got to listen. The reason why people don't do this is they sort of think of starting startups as like building this incredibly complex machinery, that it's like building a car. But I encourage you to think about it in a different way, which is it's more like throwing a really, really amazing party. Like what is a great party? Like you go there, you see a friend, they say, hey, welcome, let me take your coat, let me introduce you to your friends. For posterous we were able to answer every single email that we got. And in fact later when we had a seven person team, the first thing we did was we split up the days of the week and each one of us would take the inbox all day and we would aim to reply to every single email within 10 minutes of receiving it. And if there was a bug, we'd fix it on the spot. And that helped a lot, actually being as authentic as possible, like, I'm a real person, I'm here, I'm here to solve your problem. I'm the CEO that actually helps someone so much. One of the earliest studies on Internet behavior was actually on Usenet. If someone posted and did not get a reply, only 16% of people would come back to that forum. But if you got even one reply, 26% would come back. The 10% difference in retention is actually the difference between a startup that's flatlining and one that's actually working. The compounding of this is really, really massive. Most people would look at this and say, oh, this only applies to consumer. But these days when you're working on say a B2B software thing for developers, like there are only 30 million developers. Developer tools are basically a consumer go to market now, but with 30 million consumers instead of a billion. And so this absolutely applies. Be small, be human and get in there.