Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups

When you are a small startup, strategy does not matter because there's not that much a strategy as about. Maybe later on you might be fruitful to think about strategy, but strategy kind of assumes that you can do multiple things at the same time, which small startups cannot.

Whenever someone wants to have a strategy conversation, it assumes that they don't understand their priorities. The priorities is always a list from top to bottom where there's one thing that's more important than the others.

The most important characteristics of those individuals are they're really determined to win and they don't give up when things are hard and they have an internal motivation that's just really infectious to people around them, which is how they end up building really good teams around them.

We made sure we hired people that were really excited to be there, right? They wanted to build Airbnb and they were really excited to work on Airbnb. That was the most important thing.

Office Hours are regular startup progress meetings with investors/advisors. "They" refers to the startup teams being evaluated.

One good indicator is if each new Office Hour there is really exciting new stuff, right? We're not talking about the same thing we talked about two weeks ago or four weeks ago. They've already done that stuff.

If you take the average customer group in the world, 90% are not early adopters. It doesn't matter if you have something new and cool, they're just not interested. Those 10 percents are the early adopters. They're The ones that you actually want to reach. But that means you have to reach 10 to find one.

We cannot figure out who's going to be the really successful company in the batch. That's not possible. What we're good at is knowing what failure looks like.

If you fail, please do it in some new exciting way. Not one that we've seen 100 times. Because we have seen people fail for a large number of reasons.

The best way for you to figure out what is the intensity of the problem is not to ask them but to watch them or to watch them solve the thing that they do.

What's holding you back from moving faster? We don't want to hear updates, we don't want to hear strategy questions. We want to understand what's slowing you down or what's holding you back from moving even faster.

A non-successful startup is if you think of starting a company as a career step. Well, it is not. Because if it's successful, it'll be your entire career. It'll be 10 years most likely. And if it's not successful, then it's not something that people generally aspire to start.

The worst thing that can happen to startup is not that people hate what you're doing, it's that they're completely indifferent to what you're doing.