Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more

I think growth and growth hacking and doing all this analytics, A/B testing stuff, is a total waste of time for very early startups.

A good pivot is like going home. It's warmer, it's closer to something that you're an expert at.

If it's not going well and you're out of ideas, that is usually a good time to pivot. But when you have half a dozen or a dozen really good growth ideas that you haven't tried yet, try them.

The weird aspect of what we call a tarpit idea is an idea that a lot of people come up with and then it seems like an unsolved problem and you get lots of positive feedback for.

One of my mantras is just don't die. Just keep your startup going. Just keep going.

The underlying theme is that rationally the founder should have given up at some point. And so again, let's talk about Airbnb, obviously something you know a lot about. They probably should have shut down three or four times before they got into YC.

The thing that I would argue folks that build really big companies have in common is they just really want it and they really believe in themselves and they really believe they can make it work.

Try to go more off the beaten path either from your personal experience... Go deeper in your own personal interests or experience to find something that just your exact peer wouldn't come up with in exactly the same way.