"How to Pitch Your Seed Stage Startup" with @ycombinator's Michael Seibel | SaaStr Annual

Inside every founder, there's this feeling like if you're stupid enough to do a startup, we should have each other's back. YC is trying to give its founders an unfair advantage. We have a grand, nefarious strategy of giving founders what we wish we had when we were founders. The YC batch is one of the most heavily scouted group of startups in the world. There's just never another opportunity to see so many different ideas. The people in your batch are people that you respect that you want to be in the same room with. You come to a dinner, you see a company taking off and you think to yourself, we got to get back to work. How do we make YC survive for over 100 years? We're trying to build an institution and there isn't a YC that came before us that we can copy. You don't start with all the answers. Sometimes all a founder needs to do is just believe for another day. We try to make that the environment of yc. Please welcome to the stage Michael Seibel, managing director and group partner at Y Combinator. All right, so I'm here to talk to you about something boring and horrible that every single founder hates. How do you. Wait a second. Oh, that's interesting. My title slide's incorrect. The actual thing I'm here to talk to you about is how to pitch your company. We just got through demo day, and helping over 200 companies pitch investors and pitching investors is basically the most painful thing that companies do. What I find fun is that any founder you talk to can remember every single investor who said no to them. And they hold a special kind of. I don't use the word hatred, but they hold a special something for those people and they desire to prove them wrong. And so what I wanted to do today is give you all the tips that we give YC companies to be much more successful at fundraising when you are pre product market fit. And that's really important. This is not for raising Series A's. I assume most of you here are pre product market fit. And so what I hope to do is get you to unlearn some of the fundraising advice that you've learned so far, which is probably wrong. That's my goal. So, number one, you stand out by being concise and easy to understand. I've done, I think it's over 2,000 YC interviews. And one of the things that founders don't understand is that if I don't know what your company does, I can't fund you. The number one barrier to not knowing what your company does is you. Not me, not the world that's oppressing you, not your users, not your advisors. It's literally you. A lot of people think that they need to bring a bunch of energy and pizzazz and sizzle and shark tankiness to a pitch. You don't. You actually stand out by being concise and easy to understand. And so a lot of what I'm going to do today is going to not sound fancy, because it isn't. It just works. There's a talk over there that tells you about all the fancy things that don't work. So if you want that talk, you can. I'm just joking. All right, so these are the common elements of a pitch. These are the things that you need to be able to talk about. What do you do? What does your company do? Who's on your team? What's your traction? What do you know that everyone else doesn't or would disagree with you about? Your unique insights? What's your market size and what are you asking for? This is a pitch. That's it. So let's start with what do you do? You need to be able to say what your company does in two sentences, and you need to be able to give a specific example. So let's use Airbnb as an example. Right? So Airbnb lets any home or apartment owner rent out their apartment online. Sentence 1. They collect the payment online and take a, let's call it, 15% fee for every booking. Sentence two. That's it. A lot of the magic comes in the example. And I'll give you a real world example. Imagine that you're a waiter who lives in Washington, D.C. and it's 2009 and the Obama inauguration is happening in town and every hotel room is booked. You can make 2, 3, $4,000 by renting your apartment out. And that's the amount of money you need to pay your rent for the next two or three months. All you have to do is take some photos of your place and put a listing on Airbnb. An Airbnb will handle the payments. We'll get you a great guest, you give them a great experience, and you've got your rent paid. What's interesting about that example is it's specific. You can imagine a waiter. You can imagine them being in D.C. i don't know how old you all are, but you probably remember the Obama inauguration or the fact that Obama was president. You can imagine the hotel rooms being sold out, and you can imagine somebody being able to rent their Place out for a lot of money and pay their rent for a lot of months. That is a great example. What I didn't do was I didn't give a vague example. So let's talk about where people go wrong. One, they pitch something or they explain what they do in a way a customer would understand, but an investor would not. For most of you, investors are not your users. You use jargon with your users. You assume a lot of common experience with your users. If your investor is not your user, they don't have that experience. You have to use simple language that they will understand, not complicated language that makes you sound smart. So one thing we tell YC companies is you need two different answers to what do you do? One that you give investors and another one you give customers and they're different. The words on the front page of your website are for customers. If you're using that for investors, more often than not you're doing it wrong. Number two, they try to be 100% accurate. There are a lot of details I left out of Airbnb in that two sentence description with example, but it was clear and easy to understand. Your goal should be 80% accurate. 100% clear. Not 100% accurate, 50% clear. I talked about an example that's too general. What I could have said about Airbnb is, for example, if you are in a place that has a big event and you need to pay your rent, you can rent your place out and then you can pay your rent. Same basic story, none of the little facts that make it stick in your memory and make you understand. Next up in their example, they don't illustrate the problem and solution. Right. I talked about that waiter. Inherent in that is that waiter doesn't make very much money and they need to pay their rent and Airbnb helps them pay their rent. So instead of having a complicated problem solution slide, I just told you what the problem and the solution was right up front. And then last but not least, and this is one that I think a lot of founders screw up. You do not want to leave the first slide of your presentation without investors knowing what you do. So many founders have the first slide of the presentation with a nice logo on it and they say like, and then they move on. And investors are sitting there saying, I have no fucking idea what this company does. And now I'm looking at graphs and charts and shit and I don't have no idea what's going on. Don't do that. One thing you can actually do is just ask, hey, so now that I've explained what we do, do you understand or would another example be helpful? You can do that. It's really simple. Next, your team. People screw up the team slide all the time. The the purpose of team is really just to talk about who's on your team, what do they do, what their impressive accomplishments and credentials are, and if possible, how they've personally experienced the problem. If we go back to Airbnb, they could literally talk about how they were starving startup founders who couldn't pay their rent. And the first time they did this, they set up a website for a design conference, hosted three guests so they could pay their rent. If you can weave how you've experienced the problem into the team slide, suddenly I think of you as an expert. Now, what do people screw up? No titles. I don't know what the roles are. I don't know who the CEO is. If I'm an early stage investor, I'm trusting the CEO with money. If I don't know who they are, who am I trusting? Number two, who writes code number three? Telling long stories. The team site is not the opportunity to tell your life story. Here's a hint. There is no opportunity in your pitch to tell your life story unless the investor asks explicitly for your life story and you should double confirm. They want to hear your life story. No life stories. And then the one I always love missing specific accomplishments. There's one company in this batch that literally worked on the Mars Rover. The founder was like, worked at JPL and like built software to make the Mars Rover project actually happen. Didn't talk about it. I didn't even know when we accepted him. I'm in office hours with him a month, two months into the branch. And I'm like, what was what'd you do at jpl? And he's like, oh, have you heard of the Mars Rover? I'm like, yeah, I'm not a fucking idiot. And yeah, I did that. And I'm like, can we talk about that, please? If you've done something cool, say it without the life story. Just say that you did the software for the Mars Rover. It'll be impressive. Next, Traction. Everyone's got this Traction concept a little mixed up. For Traction, you do a clear explanation of what you've accomplished since you started working on your company and only use a graph if the graph is up to the right. What people screw up with Traction all the time is that you can have Traction if you're pre launch, you can have Traction if you don't have a great Graph. All traction is communicating is what you've done since you've started and why that's impressive. If You've built an iOS app and it's now in test flight in the hands of 100 users in one month, that's impressive. Even if they're not using it. A ton. Even if you're not launched publicly. On the flip side, if you're building an iOS app and it's been two years and it's in test flight with 100 users, that's not impressive. So taking too much time and not getting anything done is the opposite. Here what investors are looking for is momentum. They're looking do you get things done quickly? They're not necessarily looking for do you have a ton of revenue or a ton of users. If they're investing in early stage company, they know that you might not have those things and they'll still invest. If you communicate, you get things done quickly. And the only way you communicate you get things done quickly is if your traction slide includes how much time you've been spending.

Right?

The biggest mistake YC founders make here is they say this list of things and they didn't tell me, do they do it in a month or four months or a year or two years without the time? I'm not impressed. Next, they put fake work advisors surveys, like fake work work that's not really furthering their company. And then last, and here's a tricky one, you don't need a traction slide if you don't have any traction. Putting a bad traction slide is worse than having no traction slide at all. If this is week two of your startup, you probably don't have any fucking traction. Putting a bunch of fake stuff on that slide just makes you look like an idiot. Just don't include it. They're obviously funding the team. Just talk about the team. So fake is worthless. Next, unique insights. What are the non obvious things you've learned about the problem, the customer or the potential solution? This, I think is the most intellectually interesting part of a pitch. But you only get the right to do this if I know what your company does and if I'm impressed with your team. A lot of founders try to skip to this point and if I don't know what your company does, I can't tell whether your insight's good or not. So when you think about unique insights, I love using Airbnb as an example. Airbnb had one that was very unique. All of the other products that came before it that let people do timeshare and list their spaces online, didn't process payments, and as a result, processing payments in a low trust environment where you have never met the host and the host has never met you is scary. And it prevents hosts from hosting and it prevents guests from booking. Whereas if a third party stands in the middle and processes payments, both parties can trust that third party more than they trust each other and it facilitates the marketplace working. That's an important unique insight. But if I had said that shit and not mentioned what Airbnb does, you'd have no idea what I was talking about. Common mistakes. Your insight's not unique. If you were to survey, 50% of the people in this room or greater would agree with the thing that you're saying when you say it. It's not unique. Number two, not being specific with your examples, this is another place where vagary comes in. Like, you can tell a story here about your unique insight. You can tell a story about how you learned it. If Brian was up here, he would talk about. He learned this insight when he went to south by Southwest on his platform when it didn't do payments and forgot to bring money and had a super awkward experience with his host who thought he was trying to rip them off. Right? Bam. That's a real good learning. And then last but not least, not using numbers and facts. Especially if you're talking about unique insights you've learned from your users. Quote numbers, quote facts. It makes it feel more real. It makes it real. Next up, market size. Everyone screws this up. Everyone thinks that the number is what's important. How big the market is is most important. The reality is how you calculate the number is what's important. As an investor, I don't know how many potential users you might be able to get. You have to educate me about that. You should do that research. I don't know how much you're going to charge the users, and I don't know why you're going to charge them that much money. I don't know if there are other products that they're buying that cost this much money. I don't know how much value you're creating for them. Showing me this bottoms up calculation of how many users and how much you can charge them and why teaches me a lot. If you teach me in a pitch, I think of you as an expert and I want to fund experts. So how do people screw up? They quote some report. JP Morgan said that the online e commerce market is 120 trillion and growing. 20%. But it's like, who the Fuck care. You're not teaching me anything. Number two, not showing the math. Show the math. There are this number of users, we charge them this much. Show me the math. And then three, not talking about comparable products. So if we're gonna replace Figma and you're pricing competitive with Figma, tell me that. Tell me Figma charges this much and we're gonna charge this much. Hell, tell me you're gonna charge more because you're gonna create more value than Figma. But throw in a comparative so I understand why that price is that price. All right, next up is the Ask. This is, I think, the really interesting one. And I can kind of share some personal stories about this. In your pitch, you actually have to ask for money. You would be shocked at how many pitches people do and they don't ask for money. I think that it's on the order of 70% where the pitch is done. The founder asks if there are any questions. Investor says no. The meeting ends. No money was ever asked for. Now, I want to put you into the mindset of an investor for a second. I've been an angel investor for, I don't know, seven years. There are three mindsets I have when I'm listening to a pitch. Mindset one is, I will never fund this company. Most common will never fund this company. Mindset two is I will definitely fund this company. Least common, extremely rare. Most angel investors are rich. Like, they don't really understand why what you're doing, why your customer needs it. They just met you. Least comment. I'm excited to find this company. Category three that people don't talk about. If they ask me, it will be uncomfortable for me to say no. So I will write them a check. I'll tell you that in my experience, this is up to 10% of the time. I am hoping the founder doesn't ask me for money because I largely suspect that instead of saying no, I'll say yes. Because the pain of saying no is way worse than writing a $25,000 check. How fucked is that? And the only way you tap into that is you ask. You gotta ask. Put them on the fire. And this is especially true for angels. This is especially true for angels. Gotta ask, so what are the common errors? This is pretty simple. Not asking, right? Not talking about social proof. Here are the people who've invested. Here's how much we raised. Talking about who you will hire on the ask slide. Nobody cares who you will hire. They care what you're going to do with the money and more specifically, what revenue milestones you're going to hit or what usage milestones you're going to hit with the money. Hiring is a means to an end. The end is revenue and usage of your product. So your ask slide needs to be. We're raising this much money, we want to accomplish this milestone within the next 18 months or 24 months or whatever it is. I think what's interesting is that if you don't have that goal of where you want to be 18, 24 months from now, you're not going to be good at this Ask slide. So make the fucking goal and make it something that people would be excited by and then ask for money. All right, so we've gone through the individual elements. Here are the mistakes that people make overall. They don't order their points from most to least impressive. The format that I gave you, you can mess around with. After. What do you do? Which should be at the beginning. That's pretty fucking clear. And the ask, which should be at the end, that's pretty clear. The elements in the middle need to be ordered by which is most impressive. If you got a ton of traction, great traction should come right after your team slide. I'm sorry, right after your. What you do slide. You've got an amazing team. Great teams should come right after. I think what a lot of people screw up with these decks is they think there's some super standard format they can't leave and they don't realize that, like there is flexibility to make your most important points early. A lot of people think that an investor is going to sit down for a 30 minute meeting and give them 30 minutes of their time. It's not true. Especially on zoom. It's very not true. You earn every two minutes of that meeting. If the last two minutes sucked, that investor's checking their email. So don't leave the good stuff till late. That's dumb. After I know what you do. Put the best stuff you have right afterwards. Earn that next two minutes. Earn that next two minutes. Earn that next two minutes. Next is treating your pitch like you're delivering a book report in front of a class. Your pitch should be nothing like what we're doing here right now. It shouldn't be. You are delivering and they are waiting and listening. Ideally, your pitch should be a way that you can draw them into conversation. Now, doing this is hard. Like, this is actually a very hard skill. It's a lot easier just to deliver the pitch and then ask for the grade. But what most people don't realize about investors is that you're not really convincing an investor to invest, they're convincing themselves to invest. The more they can talk, the more they can talk themselves into giving you money. And if any of you have done sales, you know that like a common sales coaching technique is to look at a call recording and figure out how much time was the customer talking versus salesperson talking. If the customer is talking 50% or more of the time, it's much more likely that they're going to buy. If the investor is talking 50% more of the time, it's much more likely they're going to buy. So one of the best techniques is anytime you see a peak of interest in any part of your presentation, run with it. Oh, you looked interested in that. Did you have a common experience? Oh, I see you funded X, Y and Z. I think they had to deal with something similar. Da da da da. Like get there them talking. If the investor is like, oh, you know, I'm really interested in this da da da thing, and it's the third or fourth side in your deck, just skip to that fucking slide. Don't say, oh, let's wait, like I'm gonna get to that. Don't get me out of my order. Like, it's like, fuck you. Like, get them talking. Because the more that they're contributing ideas, the more that they're making their own connections in their head about why this thing's gonna work, the more they're gonna convince themselves to get give you money. So I can't tell you enough. This isn't a book report, it's not a paper, Right? What's weird is that you don't really have this experience with any teachers in your life. It's not really taught in educational environment. Get them talking. Next. Not paying attention to the investor. A lot of pitches nowadays are on zoom. You got a close up of that person's face and if you actually look at it, you can tell whether they are interested in what you're saying or not. If you look, I'm a really crappy poker player, but I tried this once playing poker. Like spending most of the time looking at the faces of the people around the poker table and not like looking at the hand that I was about to lose money on. And I learned a lot. Investors have a ton of tells. They're not trained. They're not trained poker players who like hide their towels, put sunglasses on and like headphones and shit, right? Their face is an open book. You can tell whether they're interested or not if you're looking. And last but not least is distracting slides. I hope you notice these slides are the most boring, basic bullshit design slides in the universe. Right? And there's a reason I want you to look at me and not look at the cool background image on the fucking slide. If your slides are visually interesting, that means I'm not focused on you, the person I want to give money to or not. I'm focused on some designers work. If you need a designer to build a slide deck, you're doing it wrong. And here's an even deeper most important point. Your designer has no idea what the most interesting and important points of your pitch are. So if you hand them your pitch to design, they will emphasize the wrong things and it's not their fault. It's your business, you understand the most important things, not someone else. So designer is going to try to create something visually interesting. Counterintuitively, you want something visually boring. Visually boring. Remember, clear and concise, not sexy and sizzle. So no distracting slides. All right, so I'm gonna try to do this live. Let me see if I can pitch yC. I'm gonna be tricky. All right, so what do we do? We're a startup accelerator. We fund early stage startups with $500,000 standard deal. And we've invested in some of the best technology startups in the last year, 18 years, including stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Coinbase, Instacart, Doordash, et cetera. That's two sentences. Example, when I did yc, I started a company called Twitch, it was called Justin TV at the time. We were 23 and 22 years old. We filled out an application online, we got an interview, and after a 10 minute interview, we were funded. We participate in a three month program with other founders where we encouraged to build and launch our product quickly. At the end of that process, we raised money at demo day and within three months we had money, we had a new friend group that encouraged us and we had reached a new top speed of productivity. And those are the things that YC provided us. That's the example. Really simple traction. What's a good traction stat for YC? YC has funded somewhere around 75 companies that generate over $100 million in revenue. That's pretty good traction. Slide team, right now, as group partners of YC are people who have started, funded, hired, fired and done everything that you are going to do as a startup founder. And they've also participated in yc. So not only the best to give you advice about your startup, they're the best to give you Advice on how to get the most out of yc. Most investors have never been in your shoes. Every YC partner has been. Unique insights. There are three unique insights for yc. They're really basic. One, filling out an application and not needing a warm introduction gives us access to better deal flow than any other investor in the world. Two, funding people in a batch means that batch supports one another and helps one another and gives each other advantages that competition don't have. And three, running a demo day means that you're running a fundraising auction and everyone knows you're trying to get the highest price for any product good or service you want to run an auction. So YC companies tend to raise at a higher valuation and dilute less than people don't do. IC those are three unique insights. Market size since YC started, there are about 40 plus tech, IPOs, VC backed per year. Generate about $10 billion in returns per year and ask apply. That's the YC pitch. Not much sizzle. Clear, concise. That's the game. All right, we have some time for questions. Let's do them.

This is working.

Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah.

Hi Michael, thank you for the valuable insights you share with us. I work at a Brazilian startup accelerator called Wall. I've been working in the startup accelerator since 2013 for 10 years and YC is the major benchmark for us. We'd also invest in pre product market fit Brazilian startups. And I want your piece of the advice for a guy who has been working in this industry for 10 years and wants to help the startups to achieve product market fit and fundraise. Thank you very much.

I'm not really good at giving investors advice. I would say that there's two pieces of advice that comes from founders that I see a lot. The first is do no harm. Like I am constantly shocked by how often I have to not help. I'm constantly shocked by how often I have to say I might know the answer, but I'm not sure I know the answer. And giving a wrong answer is often worse than just asking the founder to talk to their users. And so that's the first one. And then the second one I would say to investors is just your product is your process. If taking money from you is painful, that's very bad. Good luck.

Thank you very much.

All right, go ahead.

Hi Michael. Congratulations for excellent work being done by YC for the startup founders and for the entire ecosystem. My question is regarding the cohort which is little less represented by nyse maybe.

Yes.

So the question is say it's industry veteran who has 15, 20 years of experience and they really have genuine problems which not much of startups are able to solve, but they are not contemplating or even entering into Y Combinator as such. What is your advice for such kind of industry veterans who are still contemplating and not gone into it? Thanks.

So I used to think my job was to convince people to do startups, and I spend a number of years trying to do that and I no longer think it's my job. I think doing a startup is kind of dumb, it's ridiculously painful, and the opportunity to get a lot of returns is pretty low. So what I've started to come to is this realization that startup founders are a little bit broken in the head. And the reason why they do startups is because like, no offense, and I was broken this way too. The reason why they do startups is because, like, living in the real world is kind of painful for them, right? So if you were to describe a job at Google as like, you work 20 hours a week, you get deliver the fuck you want to, you barely have to do anything. You get free everything and well paid. 99.9% of people are like, that sounds great, sign me up. And then 0.1% of the broken people are like, ah, I could never do that. And so I have found that my job is to just say, hey, if all of these really good things sound horrible to you, like, welcome. Like, here's a community of crazy people who will help you. If those normally good things sound normally good to you, go get them. They are good. Like objectively, they're good. And what's fun working with YC founders is like, they, it's painful, right? They know the startup journey is painful, but they would rather be doing this than anything else. So I realized my job was just to try to find those people and not try to convince people to become one of those people. Yeah, go ahead.

Hi Michael. Thank you so much for your presentation. My name is Zoya. We run after work. We make corporate events easy to plan. My question today is how do you, when you're talking about having a conversation with an investor, do you even recommend using a deck or kind of free pitching, kind of like what you did today?

So I'll tell you what I tell YC founders. It depends on your level of experience. So I saw my co founder Justin Kahn pitch atrium and did not need a deck. He could talk for an hour about legal startup stuff and it was great. You know, when he did that, he was like, I don't know, 37 years old, 36 years old and been pretty experienced. When I talk to first time founders in yc, they don't have that skill. They can't run a conversation where they're making sure that they're hitting their best points. They can't bring a conversation back to those core points. And a deck is just like a way to kind of visually do that. So I'd say there isn't a better. It's what it's like what you're capable of and like the less skill you have, the more a deck is really helpful. Let's be clear, like being a skillful pitcher is not the number one skill you need to be a successful founder. And so like use the tools you need to get the job done is what I would say. Y Cheers. Hi Michael, simple question. Isn't the competition important to mention? So thank you for asking that. There are a lot of questions you might get from investors and as I said before, getting engagement from investors is great. What I would say is that that's what an appendix is for. If you're Getting a question 3, 4, 5, 6 different times and you think a slide would help you answer it, have an appendix. What a lot of founders believe is that investors are a class of people who think the same. And as a result if one person asks a question, it should be in the presentation. There are a bunch of different unique people who have different unique questions. And so what I try to do with this is covered the things that you almost kind of have to know in order to make an investment decision, but leave a bunch of room open for the things that an investor might want to know. And appendix slides are perfect for that. What I will say though is that when I'm reading a YC application, who their competitors are rarely is a thing that I care about. One thing I am trying to get a sense for though, which might be counterintuitive is like, is there a massive incumbent? Counterintuitively, the existence of a massive incumbent makes me far more likely to fund a company because taking market share from a shitty incumbent counterintuitively is easier than creating a market from nothing. And most of the best products, most of the products you use all the time, they didn't invent their markets at all. Airbnb didn't invent its market. Stripe didn't invent its market. Uber didn't invent its market. Like none of these folks invented the markets. They just came in and they killed the incumbents. If there are no incumbents, I'm trying to figure out why. Maybe the market's spoken. Maybe the market's killed all the incumbents. Maybe that means there's no opportunity. So what I'm never really focused on is like what are the 25 startup logos who are competing with you, who are probably all gonna die? I just don't care about that at all. But some others might. So if you get that question a bunch, have a slide, put those logos up, do one of those fucking graph things or whatever, but put in the appendix so that everyone doesn't have to sit through that bullshit. All right, Good luck.

Hey Michael, glad to meet you. We are building a platform to make infrastructure operations simple. My question is Hashicorp Elastic. So many companies change from open source licenses.

Yes.

And then given that in this market economy for DevOps or any Dev tools, what key metrics or traction to focus on revenue or like open source community, which metrics?

Okay, thank you for asking this question. I'm going to answer it slightly differently than you intend. A lot of founders look at what incumbents are doing today and think that's an important signal for them. Oh, like Hashicorp is changing its go to market today. What does that mean for me? I actually think it's far more useful to think about how these incumbents got their first million and 10 million in revenue. And I think it's far more useful to copy the incumbents when they were your size than to copy their go to market strategies now. Oftentimes when incumbents are big, they have to change their go to market strategies. They've exploited one strategy or they've opened the door to strategies that are only available when you're larger, bigger and more reputation. So I really wish that a lot of founders spent much more time studying their big incumbents when they were small. And so I would come back and ask you, what did Hashicorp do on the path to 10 million in revenue and should you copy it or not? I think that'll give you a much better answer. And I don't think they made a lot of revenue early. Right. So maybe you don't have to. By the way, that's also a great, this is a fun one because it also helps you when you're pitching. Right? Like if some investor comes to you and is like, well, why aren't you doing YETI yet a Hashicorp, blah blah blah blah, your comeback is, well, actually on their path to a million in revenue, their first million in revenue. This is what Hashicorp did. And so we're copying that Strategy, Bam. You taught the investor something. You sound smart. It's great.

Thank you.

All right, good luck.

Hi Michael. So I'm actually 23 years old, around the same age you were when you started Justin tv. And I am starting my entrepreneurial journey, starting my own company. Not sugarcoating it. I don't have much experience, you know, in, in the field I want to work in. I don't have a technical background but I have an idea that I want to use to help people. So what would be something you wish you could tell your 23 year old self when he was starting his journey?

Ah, I'll say this, the startup journey was really hard and I started with three technical co founders. I started with a co founder who had a problem that we didn't really realize but it was definitely a problem. Justin, he wanted to be a celebrity, but this was before the influencer world. I started with funding from YC and it was still really hard. Sometimes the way I think about startups, it's like going to battle. Like everyone let's say is going to bring enthusiasm. What kind of guns do you have? And sometimes I think founders like me, like people where it's worked out. Don't talk enough about the advantages that we had when we started and I might argue my best advice for you would be go get some of those advantages because like this is really, really hard. Even with those advantages, without those advantages, it's not obvious to me why you should do it. So you know, that would be my advice, is go get some of those advantages and it's okay if it's going to take you two years to do it. Hell, it's okay if it's going to take you three years to do it. You'd much rather go to battle with guns than not. That's what I would say.

Thank you.

Yep.

Hi Michael, I'm Devinder. We are building an instant meetup platform around me.

Go.

And my question is like there are lots of questions coming in terms of policies and legal compliances while building this product. We are in the pre launch stage, launching in September, last week. So should we focus on building the product or like should I also be concerned about all these compliances that I'm unaware of?

Probably the first one, yeah. I tend to be concerned with things that actual customers are complaining about and not concerned with anything else in the early days.

Yeah, follow up question, like when will I be, you know, focusing on these questions then?

Usually when your customers are right. So like for example, if you're doing something you're trying to sell to a business, and they have an IT team that requires, you know, SOC2. Like, they'll bring it up. And so let's be clear. This doesn't apply to, like, you know, you should be incorporated. You should be, like, you should be doing the basic legal stuff. Correct. But in terms of, like, more complicated things, wait till your customers complain.

Thank you.

All right, last question.

Hi there. My name is Leroy Lawrence. It's very short. I'm 6 5. It's not for me. I'm from London. I'm the founder of Pidgey. The homing pigeon sends travel shopping home from anywhere in the world. We're the first people to do that.

It sends what? Sorry?

It sends travel shopping home from anywhere in the world.

Travel shopping home. What does that mean?

So you walk into a shop anywhere, could be Bali. You see an item you like, you would buy it, but it's too.

Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. All right.

Directly from the shop.

The example helps.

So my question is, when you meet a founder, aside from the big logos University, what are the telltale signs that you believe that founder could execute that plan?

So. I think that if I put aside all credentials. One of the things I mentioned in my presentation around Traction, I like to see founders where. When they tell me what they've been doing over the past month. Month. I'm shocked that they could accomplish that in a month. And consistently, what separates the best YC teams is not where they went to school. It's not even that they can write code. It's that, like, they get more things done per month than their peers. And tangible, real things. Not. I pitched 100 investors or I ran a survey. Like, if your business is about getting sales, like, how many sales did you get in the last month? But more importantly, how'd you get them? And, like, maybe you flew to 15 different countries. Maybe you onboarded a hundred different stores. If you can tell me something you did in the last month where I think I could never do it, that impresses the hell out of me. Whereas if you tell me what you did in the last month and I'm like, oh, God, that sounds like a week's worth of work, that's the opposite. All right, thanks very much, everyone. Great chatting.