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David Israel

Sam Altman

Israel

Given Sam Altman’s background in entrepreneurship, venture capital, and his involvement in organizations like Y Combinator and OpenAI, it’s not surprising that he visits Israel to engage with the country’s tech scene, explore potential investments ...

ChatGPT Evades Many Questions on Eve of Sam Altman’s Visit to Israel

Jewish Press

Sam Altman has built his net worth by being at the heart of groundbreaking tech companies, including OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

https://www.bing.com/th?id=OVFT.1SbD9fE0oF9iPMf0lg5tsi&pid=News

Net worth

Chief Executive Officer

All about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s net worth and other investments

Prestige Online

Getae

He recently invested $10K in my startup @betterhalfai. Truly amazed by the entrepreneurial spirit everyone in Bangalore shows. Silicon Valley of India for a reason. #peakbengalurumoment pic.twitter.co

https://www.bing.com/th?id=OVFT.ybFAIIqB8QaVTPdWwyuX9i&pid=News

In A Peculiar Fundraise, Betterhalf.AI Gets $10K from Its Co-founder's Landlord

indianweb2.com

India

Dreams

Ecosystem

Backed by WestBridge Capital, Conquest defies the traditional bias towards IIT tags or consultant-led ventures, instead symbolizing a true democratization of entrepreneurship in India. It embraces and nurtures ideas from every corner of the nation, driving the Indian dream forward with steadfast conviction.

https://www.bing.com/th?id=OVFT.E_52ZD3umj5PBW510Y71Hy&pid=News

Democratizing Dreams: Conquest, BITS Pilani is Revolutionizing the Indian Startup Ecosystem

https://www.bing.com/th?id=ODF.2ECxkdLcZYNGvCihgSj95g&pid=news

The Telegraph

Bangalore

Pawan Gupta, the co-founder and CEO of Betterhalf.ai, revealed that his landlord invested $10,000 (Rs 8.2 lakh approximately) in his AI-driven matrimonial app.

https://www.bing.com/th?id=OVFT.A7exvKF16UEpqYoairKkKC&pid=News

Only in Bengaluru: Landlord invests Rs 8 lakh in tenant’s AI startup

https://www.bing.com/th?id=ODF.6cDpSqcPHtFVWBrthkD9pQ&pid=news

moneycontrol.com

Paul Graham

Boom

Missing

In a recent tweet, Graham said he believes all the good AI companies to invest in are still private, which leaves few options for the public markets

https://www.bing.com/th?id=OVFT.nGIyKflHPWVF06LdLlbhFS&pid=News

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham thinks stock market investors are missing out on the AI boom

https://www.bing.com/th?id=ODF.q-ZVWyz-qFnnPRsNgOLlfQ&pid=news

Business Insider

Three Principles

Gevorkyan

Video game

At the age of 5, Gregory Gevorkyan's parents handed him a computer. Almost instantly, he was taking it apart, understanding how it worked, and making his own modifications. To Greg, technology felt like a language that he quickly became fluent in.

https://www.bing.com/th?id=OVFT.-Pj_-voJefivfK0hYAWgbi&pid=News

From Video Games to Fintech, Gregory Gevorkyan's Inventions are Developed with the User in Mind

https://www.bing.com/th?id=ODF.2u8k6DPMmiNV3kL0MkuH6g&pid=news

International Business Times

Central European Highlands

ff Venture Capital

New York and Warsaw-based ff Venture Capital, a tech VC that invests in cybersecurity, AI, machine learning, drones, and cloud software, announced on Thursday, May 1, that it has launched a new €60M fund, ff Red & White, to support Central European startups.

ff Venture Capital launches €60M fund to back Central European enterprise startups: Know more

siliconcanals

Triangle

Economy

The Durham Convention Center was abuzz Thursday as members of the start-up ecosystem gathered. Area founders, investors, and the supporting community came together for the second annual Grep-a-palooza.

https://www.bing.com/th?id=OVFT.4gn8scvdLZUfSlaT0ncXOC&pid=News

Triangle has ‘come a long way:’ Grep-a-palooza spotlights region’s startup economy

https://www.bing.com/th?id=ODF.44K-61Z6GlAK_htcB9BZcA&pid=news

WRAL TechWire

Airbnb

Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk says entrepreneurs shouldn't shy away from their business ventures just because of an uncertain economic climate.

https://www.bing.com/th?id=OVFT.q37CKYhmB83wWLeYeNOLfy&pid=News

Airbnb co-founder says an uncertain economy creates opportunities for entrepreneurs

https://www.bing.com/th?id=ODF.GimbRbdxNxZt1GEL5O0AJg&pid=news

Fox Business

Get the most recent info and news about Y Combinator on HackerNoon, where 10k+ technologists publish stories for 4M+ monthly readers.

Anakin is a Y-Combinator backed technology company and a competitive pricing intelligence platform for brands and online stores. Anakin sends eCommerce stores and brands the pricing, products and trends data of other similar stores (their competitors) so they can adjust their prices accordingly, fast. We collect web data at scale so that you don’t have to. We track and categorize all this data using AI and machine learning.

Y Combinator

Founders at Work: 150+ YCombinator Founders’ Stories

Where is the next Facebook, Google or Postmates coming from and why you shouldn’t choose Y Combinator? A comparison of the world’s top 4 startup accelerators While many start-up accelerators and business incubators have paused accepting applications due to the pandemic, the world’s top four accelerators continue the search for what’s next. So, who are the top four, what they are, what are their terms and conditions, how they differentiate from each other — and most importantly, which one should you choose? Accelerators help talented entrepreneurs to grow quickly, find their market, get customers and so much more. Typically, they will take a small share of the business, or they may help at no cost at all. Sometimes, entrepreneurs are equipped with only the idea and a desire for a global scale. This is done through mentoring, to help support their current work, provide access and meetings with decision-makers of large corporations, as well as opening direct access to funding. What do the world’s top 4 accelerators look like? Accelerators are often judged by the success and valuation of companies that have been through their program. Many could become stars of IT on their own merits, however, statistics show that generally, these programs do help. For the calculations in the article, I use data from the accelerators’ own, as well as the data from well-known business media and venture resources: Inc, TechCrunch, Seed DB, CrunchBase, CB Insights, Forbes, and others. Y Combinator At least 21 unicorns (companies worth over $1 billion) grew out of companies that passed this program. This is 3.88% of firms with such a capitalization in the world. Alumni include Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Twitch, Instacart, and others. Y Combinator’s also includes 102 companies with valuations above $150 million. Investors in Y Combinator startups often include the most famous venture capital funds — Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia and Accel. all track record The total capitalization of companies that have passed the Y Combinator accelerator program is over $155 billion, up by almost 50% since the beginning of 2019. Jobs created from companies in the fund’s portfolio doubled to over 50K high-paying jobs to the economy in the same timeframe. nearly 500 Startups A mentoring session of Jordanian startups. Credit: 500 Startups With new managing partner Tony Wang coming in the last half of 2019, 500 Startups is stepping up their game and their portfolio, going from ten unicorns to 19. The most notable are: SendGrid’s email services, Twilio text message notifications, the graphic utility Canva, and the Ukrainian GitLab, where Y Combinator is also an investor. To date, the 500 Startups portfolio includes at least 85 companies with a valuation above $100 million. The strategic partners of 500 startups are the UAE-based SHUAA Capital (previously ADFG fund), in 2018. The total amount of the accelerator fund’s committed capital is $600 million according to 500 startups spokeswoman Zina Moukheiber. joined Techstars and AngelPad round out the top four in the world Techstars currently has at least 3 unicorns, including cloud service provider DigitalOcean, SendGrid and Twilio, as well as 37 “hundred millionaires” as of February 2019. The total valuation of companies in their portfolio is $29.1 billion as of September 2020 according to Techstars spokeswoman Ali Donnermeyer. The total Techstars funds available for investing in startups were $558 million as of July 2019. Until 2018, the AngelPad accelerator shared first place with Y Combinator in the MIT/Brown University Seed Accelerator several years in a row. That is the reason I added it here. The portfolio includes three unicorns  —  Postmates delivery service and co-investments in SendGrid and Twilio. In early March 2018, AngelPad raised $35 million to invest in startups to the SEC. ranking according A quick chart to compare the chances of becoming a company with a valuation of $100M Today, Y Combinator $125K for a 7% stake in the startup, down from the $150K offered in 2019. It is interesting to note that until 2013, Yuri Milner’s DST fund, together with SV Angel, automatically invested $150K in the accelerator’s graduates. The startups received an additional $15K-$20K from Y Combinator. After 2013, Milner was replaced by Khosla Ventures. offers 500 Startups young companies $150K for a 6% stake, and $37.5K is immediately deducted for participation in the educational program. The startup then receives the remaining $112.5K. give Techstars gets a 6% stake for providing graduates with a $100K convertible note. At the start of the program, the team is also given a $20K scholarship for living expenses. AngelPad offers $120K in exchange for a 7% stake in the $120K startup. Program features Techstars, 500 Startups, and AngelPad provide a physical location where startup founders, curators, and program mentors work side-by-side, claiming this as one of their advantages. With the advent of COVID-19, the programs were moved online, making this benefit null. Y Combinator already allowed teams to work from home so that nothing distracts from coding and user engagement. All acceleration programs might give their startups free credits to Amazon, DigitalOcean, and AdWords services, a value that can tally up to hundreds of thousands of dollars but is an often overlooked benefit. Acceleration program terms and conditions Dinner and office hours online at Y Combinator Y Combinator visits select universities during their YC Bio Tour. Credit: UCI The classic Y Combinator program consists of weekly lunches, office hours and a demo day. Alumni of past batches and founders of companies like Stripe or Airbnb are invited to lunches. They give motivating advice and share their experience in increasing sales, scaling the company, etc. During office hours, they discuss strategy and focus with successful graduates, employees and partners of the accelerator. This includes group meetings with colleagues and mentors to address urgent issues. Demo Day is the culmination of the program. It lasts from two to three days. Teams have one minute to get the audience interested in the results of their three months in the race. In the summer of 2019, over the course of two days, 450 investors viewed 174 alumni teams. This year’s Demo Day was held entirely online, and while 198 teams presented, the number of views and investor-participants was not shared. Beginning in winter 2020, participation in the batches and all programs fully to be online. shifted Techstars powerful mentorship programs At one of the Techstars events. Credit: Startup Weekend Blumenau At Techstars, unlike Y Combinator, the program is divided into several phases, where startups work with mentors: setting and execution of their goals, an educational program and a Demo Day. In the first month, startups receive the maximum product and market feedback from daily meetings with experts. They take part in short rounds of speed dating, meeting with numerous startups and mentors to choose the right partners and open conversations with their permanent mentors. Educational content includes lectures and masterclasses on market research, legal subtleties and other aspects related to the work of a young company. The second month is spent on product building and customer acquisition. The last month is preparation for Demo Day: presentations, raising money, growth and scaling. The audience for Demo Day is about 400 spectators, who are mostly private investors, funds, corporations, business angels. Around 30 and 50 startups are expected to take the stage and present. Since April 2020, Demo Days and other programs are virtually. held Educational programs at 500 Startups and a personal approach at AngelPad 500 Startups is structured similarly to Techstars and focuses on building up missing competencies and skills with over 200 hours of educational live content. The training is divided into weeks, each one devoted to lectures and workshops on an individual topic. AngelPad has an alternative approach. Instead of aggressively scaling the accelerator to other cities and overseas and working with hundreds of teams at the same time, the team works with a small group of up to 15 startups. AngelPad’s job is to help you individually with sales and product. Demo Day does classic show pitches — the participants immediately communicate face to face with those investors who, according to the organizers, are most suitable for each other. not include Investment volumes A comparison of the committed capital and the funding the accelerator's portfolio startups receive The number of companies invested in by Y Combinator, Techstars, 500 Startups and AngelPad is 2,000, 2,200, 2,400 and 150 companies respectively, according to the accelerators. Total funding per accelerator exceeds billion for Y Combinator, $10.4 billion for Techstars, $2.35 billion for 500 Startups and $2.2 billion for AngelPad. $38.66 Individual companies received an average of $17.9 million, $4.7 million, $3.4 million and $14 million in investments over the entire period of activity accordingly. These figures are approximate based on research on aforementioned venture capital sites such as Crunchbase and may not include undisclosed deals. The primary goal and result for a startup are to deliver revenue to investors, so it is important to include in this review the number of exits. Selling a startup to a large company or going public allows investors to sell a stake in it. Y Combinator made exits for approximately . According to public data, Techstars has exits for a total of approximately . For 500 Startups, the number of exits was , while AngelPad boasts 72 exits of its alums. 757 $6 billion 583 $4.75 billion 803 Funding after Demo Day Residents of AngelPad during their spare time. Credit: angelpad.com After Demo Day, startups at Y Combinator and 500 Startups raise an average of $1.5 million-$2 million, and for Techstars that number is about $1 million. No data is available for AngelPad. According to , co-investor of more than 60 Y Combinator alumni, 90–95% of the participants in each set of this accelerator receive investments. This proves that being accepted not only gives startups new connections, but also a boost in perception, serving as a positive indicator for investors that a young company has great potential. Terrence Yang What are the selection criteria and which program to choose? For the initial selection, you must have an excellent-to-fluent command of the English language. Your questionnaire should be specific, no a copy-paste answers here, of course, you need an idea and an understanding of its implementation. Citizenship and other parameters do not matter. These accelerators are also held by companies that have founders from all over the world. For example, Y Combinator alumni come from countries, and 500 Startups’ come from 75 countries. 53 focuses on fanatical geeks with a vision, self-learning on the fly, non-trivial problem solving, and acquiring and engaging users with the product or service. Y Combinator A strong benefit of is that they boost startups with access to a team of experts to build a viable idea, for companies that have a desire to conquer the American market and no experience setting up a company in the United States. 500 Startups For those whose business is concentrated outside of Silicon Valley, the regional programs are most suitable. If you’re looking for quality, focused work with a qualified mentor, AngelPad is your go-to. Techstars Statistics show that receives 4,000 applications annually. And according to unconfirmed reports, Y Combinator receives 27,000 applications, Techstars gets 12,000, and 500 Startups a total of 18,000 applications. Less than 1% of applicants are accepted into the programs. AngelPad These four startup programs don’t always make sense for everyone. Some accelerators provide free participation or do not require a share. Before embarking on a long journey, research what’s best for you and your idea by watching lectures from the founders of Y Combinator, the creator of Gmail and others, available on YouTube. All data is current as of September 20, 2020 unless otherwise indicated. #startups #accelerator #funding #fundraising #entrepreneurship #500startups #ycombinator #angelpad #techstars #yc #investment Also published at https://medium.com/@yuriy.yatsiv/where-is-the-next-facebook-google-or-postmates-coming-from-and-why-you-shouldnt-choose-y-7052bfed7f85

The Top 4 Startup Accelerators: Is Y Combinator Still the Best?

Tick tock, it’s the day the YC interview invitation is sent out. I remember anxiously waiting for my startup’s ( ) invite. Cotter I read from HN and Reddit that the invite was supposed to be sent out around 9 PM - 12 AM PT. We got ours at 9:16 PM and immediately booked a slot for the interview. If you got the invite, congratulations! But as Kobe said, “Job’s not finished”. So start preparing ASAP! Here’s how the Cotter team prepared. Perfect Your 1-Liner As expected, that was the first question that we got during our interview. To craft a good 1-liner, you need to be able to explain what your company does and who you are serving using plain English. If you can use existing companies to describe your business go for it. Here are a few examples: If you are replicating an existing business model for a different country go for "We are building Robinhood for Country X".If your product does something similar to an existing product go for "We are building Shopify for online schools". If you can't or you're building something entirely new, don't force it. Try to construct your 1-liner using this template "We are building X (what does your company do) for Y (who does your product serve)". After you construct your 1-liner, go ask YC founders for feedback. Feel free to DM me on Twitter @ . itsKevinChandra Educate Them YC partners aren't always knowledgable in what you do; you are the expert. The questions that they ask will revolve around them wanting to learn more from you. So, like your 1-liner, make sure that your answers are informative, concise, and short. Keep in mind that every YC interview is going to be different. It depends on your industry, what stage you are in, where you are doing business, and lots more! You will never be able to control what the partners ask. Some of the questions from templates like will appear. However, here's a more realistic expectation. this If you haven't launched your product then prepare to educate them about: 1. The barrier to entry and how you are uniquely positioned to break through that barrier. 2. What the market looks like and how your product uniquely solves a problem for that market. 3. Why your team is the winning team. If you have launched your product and it has traction then prepare your market insights like: 1. How did you get your users? Who are they? Where are they? 2. How are they using your product? Are they hacking your product to do more? 3. How much have you improved your users' lives? Why Your Team is the Chosen One Remember that the founders matter more than the idea and YC knows that. So explain to them why your team is the Chosen One. There are numerous YC success stories to back this such as the classic and most recently Segment. AirBnB story A lot of startups fail because of conflict between the co-founders, tell them why your team will stick together through thick and thin. Have you worked together previously? Tell them why each member is critical to the founding team. Why do you have 2/3/4/5 founders in the team? What are their roles? What makes your team uniquely positioned to win? Do you have relevant experience? Do you have patents? Do you hold a license in a regulated industry? Practice and Enjoy the Experience! I would really advise doing mock interviews with YC founders if you get the chance. To start, you can DM me @ . itsKevinChandra If not, compile a document comprised of questions that you think you will be asked and make sure you have informative, concise, and short answers. If you run out, answer . these questions To keep your mind at peace, they wouldn't ask questions that you shouldn't already know the answers to. Lastly, good luck from the Cotter team! Schedule a Mock Interview DM me @ itsKevinChandra #ShamelessPlug If you want to have a passwordless auth for your app come check out or have any questions about authentication reach out to us here: Cotter Email: team@cotter.app Twitter: @ cotterapp Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/askcotter/shared_invite/zt-dxzf311g-5Mp3~odZNB2DwYaxIJ1dJA

How to Prepare for your Y Combinator Interview

Back in September, we were iterating on many ideas. We had come up with a to make sure that we were not wasting too much time on bad ideas. 2-day invalidation process Finally, we had an idea that we couldn’t invalidate after 2 days. The idea was the following: that would be free (we would make our money through the interchange fees of our credit card). an integrated banking, accounting and tax service for the workers of the gig economy The market size was huge, with 57 million independent workers in the US. The issue we saw was that the market was scattered across a lot of verticals, and it would be hard to have consistent messaging across all of them. We decided to start with drivers (Uber, Lyft, Amazon, Postmates, etc.), as there was a big opportunity in tax cuts through the mileage deductions, and there are a LOT of drivers to address. Our first YC application After a full week of trying intentionally to disqualify the idea, we decided to apply to YC, as it was the end of September, and it was the deadline for YC application. We continued our invalidation process, taking some Ubers and Lyft rides to ask drivers about how they did things. At that point, we were offered a YC interview. We started talking with people from the industry, too, and one day we received 2 disheartening pieces of information from two different sources — an Uber insider and a Lyft insider — on the same day. Both were working on similar fintech products for their drivers and were planning to release them for free as well, with the exact same business model we had planned. With this information, we faced a decision whether to continue with this idea. We tried to find some other verticals that would have made as much sense, but couldn’t. So we decided to withdraw our YC application 3 days before our interview. Our second YC application At that point, we were back to square one. So we continued to iterate on our ideas, trying to invalidate them. One idea led to another. We finally had one idea that we couldn’t disqualify. We wanted to take on all the operational complexity involved in any data exchange between two parties. We were targeting dataset exchanges between a data provider and a data consumer. After three weeks, we decided to apply again; we got invited for the interview the next week and got accepted. Note that we got accepted into YC with a completely different idea than too :). Dataline Why would YC let you do that? YC calls companies that don’t have a product yet “pre-idea projects”. By that, they mean that there is a very high chance that your idea will evolve during YC. Essentially, you might pivot a few times during the three months of YC. We were definitely one of those who did. And there were many of us in the batch. Why would YC accept projects with a high chance of pivoting in their batches? Our understanding is that they don’t really care about the idea you apply with per se, but more about: the team (experience, ability to build the product in an autonomous way)how we think; if we tend to have uncommon insightshow we iterate and learn fast In our case, applying twice wasn’t actually a bad sign; we were showing our perseverance and our ability to iterate fast. Plus, in the second YC application, we wrote a few of the ideas we iterated upon. That’s actually why they ask this question in their application: “ If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we’ve been waiting for. Often when we fund people it’s to do something they list here and not in the main application”. If you’re very early stage, this is an important question. And it could show the velocity of your team. We’ve seen teams that were pivoting all along the batch — even in the first week, because their partners told them they thought that their team could do better in terms of project potential. So don’t despair about YC. You can get in with a three-week-old idea, but you need a good team that has the skills to implement the said idea and is convincing enough with their abilities that they will want to bet on them. Originally published at https://dataline.io on March 27, 2020.

How We Applied Twice for the Same YCombinator Batch

shouldn’t need any presentation, but just in case, let me give a quick intro. Y Combinator Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch over 2,000 companies including Stripe, Airbnb, Twitch, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, and Dropbox, to name a few. The combined valuation of the top was over $155 billion as of October, 2019. YC companies While nowadays Y Combinator includes mentors and coaches coming from the gotha of the startup elite, the mind behind the company is , a very well known tech-guru that I would credit for the contribution he made to language and for the launch of , among all his other achievements. Paul Graham Lisp Hacker News I was tracking down Y Combinator Startup School (YCSS) for a couple of years, and well, this time was the right one. The 8-week online course for startups is totally free, and from 2019 it’s held twice a year, so it’s not so hard to get a spot. All you need is to send some information about yourself and your project and grant some commitment. There aren’t specific milestones to pass, like exams or things like that but you need to attend a number of peer reviews to graduate. In the end, the value of this course it’s mostly up to yourself: if you’re willing to study the lectures, take parte in the forums and AMA sesh, interact with other students and attend the video lessons, it’s definitely worth your time. Otherwise, it’s no more useful than scrolling a  Reddit thread ( ). /r/startups The YCSS is structured in an eight-week time frame. Each week you have to submit your goals for the week and the main challenges you are facing. This is the base for the bi-weekly peer review. Then there are the lectures, videos and live sessions with the coaches. Y Combinator even created a dashboard where you can handle the totality of the course, with links to forums, special deals, Telegram group chat, video lessons, Q&A, and more. A video conference room is integrated as well, so you don't need any other tool than a laptop with an internet connection. I liked the YCSS pretty much, considering that it’s a free program. It also provides a good insight over Y Combinator method and the approach of their mentors. I was positively impressed by diversity within the classes: participants were from Indonesia, Thailand, India, North Africa, Russia, of course a lot were from the US West Coast (be ready to attend video confo at wee hours of the morning). And no matter what part of the world you come from, what background you have, what project you are working on: for better or worse we are all facing the same problems, with the same difficulties and constraints. As a side comment, I would not have minded to have a little bit of challenges here and there. A sort of final examination is something that is missing at the moment. But let’s jump back to the purpose of this post. What the hell did I learn during this process? I had many A-HA moments, but let me sum up my 10 most important takes. 1. Talk to your users: Talking to your users is essential. Perhaps the most important thing you should do. You would never ever make a product that nobody wants. Worst, to spend billions of marketing to push it down the customers’ throat. As you may know, having no market is still the first reason startups fail, accounting for more than 40% of the deaths. YCSS program is stressing a lot on that point, even asking you how many surveys you made and what feedback you got from your customers on a weekly basis. You have to become a problem seeker. You need to understand people's real problems. Don’t look for loonshot solutions addressing nobody issues. “Make something people want.” If this list would had to be a single bullet point, it would have been this one. 2. It’s not your customers’ job to give you solutions: A common mistake I see almost everyday it’s asking people what they want, instead of asking them which problems they have. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”, as Henry Ford said. It's not up to your users to tell you what they want, they just have to tell you their problems. Then it’s your job to find solutions for them. You are the product owner, not them. 3. No problem is too big to be a show-stopper: No problem is too big to have no workaround around it. During the peer reviews sessions, we discussed very different problems and issues each one of us was having at the time. And believe me, there were some hella big problems coming out. But the mood was always very good and positive. Bigger problems just need bigger workarounds. And that’s good. Let’s keep it going. 4. MVP everything: Don’t even think about spending half a year to develop a finite product. MVP, Minimum Viable Products, is your to-go word. Start small, test, develop, implement, repeat. Don’t waste away your money and your time to work on a product nobody wants or that would take so long to develop that, once it gets to the market, it would be already obsolete. 5. ABS - Always be Shipping Ship early, ship often, ship no-f*ckin-matter what. Design short product sprints, with frequent deploy. If it takes you six months to get to your first deployment in the production environment, your startup is probably going to be dead before you  get another chance to launch. 6. Forget about that “it doesn’t scale” thing: Y Combinator mentors told us this little story: it was rather common to find post-MBA folks who used to discard every single startup pitch they were evaluating by commenting “well, it doesn’t scale”. As a startup in its early stage, please, don’t deal with that. Ok your idea doesn't scale. Fine with that. It’s the starting point for everybody. First validate the concept, then worry about scaling your business. Some of the most valuable, and, well, scalable, startups on the market, started by doing things by hands or mimicking features they still had not. Who cares about that. In a world where the most ground-breaking tech is just next door, there's plenty of room to get your products to scale later on. 7. “Good product instincts” is a trap: Get rid of the  “I’m trusting my guts” BS asap. Nobody has it, and Steve Jobs is dead. Measure all your experiments and don’t rely on “instinct”, “guts”, or “good taste”. You may be surprised by the results, discovering that the ugly-looking template is converting way more than the polished, trendy one, because, well, the former has a better CTA. 8. Build a solid Company Culture: Company culture is often ignored by startups. The mood is like, “money first, culture later”. But well, there is no “later”. You have to set up culture in the very early stage of your company. It’s easy to share a culture statement among ten people, but then try to do it when the company grows to one hundred employees. Culture should work as a de-facto guideline: this is how we behave when there aren't further rules around. And culture should guide you in hiring your first employee, getting your first customer, dealing with product issues, and so on. Remember how much the simple “don’t be evil” quote meant to Google employees, driving their business and growth strategies for almost a decade. So don’t forget about culture and settle it down as soon as possible. 9. Leaders don't brag. You can’t say “I am a good leader”. That's something other people have to say. Do you want to find who’s a true leader? Ask the people around them, who they work with, but also their friends, the bartender where they have their coffee, their neighbors. Leadership is not something you turn on or off when you enter the office. And, by the same means, be careful when someone is claiming out loud their leadership skills. 10. Don’t get sad: This was from YC President Geoff Ralston’s parting advice, during the last lesson of the course. I loved that one. I never bought into the “creating startups is the coolest thing in the world” adage. Creating a biz from scratches is hard, it’s often painful. Things can go disastrously wrong in a startup and the founders feel sadder and sadder. And sadness leads to inaction. It leads to apathy. It leads to depression.  Don't do that. Don't get sad. Go, do, write code. Talk to users. Make your  product better. Always make forward progress in spite of sadness, anger, frustration. In the end it’s not the best that succeed, but the more resilient and prone to rise up failure after failure. And help others, too. If you see someone in trouble, another entrepreneur in distress, reach out to them. We live in an open ecosystem, let it thrive. End notes: "Keep it going" . Well, that’s it. Hopefully you found some inspiration and hint in my story. At least now you know a little bit better what this YCSS is about and around which pillars the course is built. If there’s something you’d like to discuss further, write me in the comments! Get back to work now. And don’t quit!

The 10 Things I’ve Learned Attending Y Combinator Startup School 2020

It is not a secret to anyone that YCombinator is the most successful accelerator in the world. They have made well over . 2,538 investments YCombinator runs two programs annually: during the summer and winter, named accordingly. The latest Summer 2019 batch of startups has graduated just under 2 weeks ago. YCombinator is also, not only the most well-known accelerator, but by far the most profitable one. According to the : 15 YC alumni's are valued at over $1B and over 70 YC alumni's are valued at over $100M. statistics back in 2018 Many YC alumni companies become trendsetters. They are known to form new product segments and dominate them. With my “live curious” attitude in life, I decided to dive deeper into the most recent S19 batch of the chosen ones. Interestingly, that 197 companies were accepted into the program, but only 166 made it to the demo day. By the way, here is a good short description of companies by TechCrunch: companies presented during and companies presented during . day one day two The level of variousness of the information on 166 different companies is quite high, so I started to look for a service or a tool that would give me the possibility to structure and view the statistics in a more detailed way. There are many great services which can help you to learn more about YC alumni. For instance: - has a very cool Top 100 company list features. YCBD - allows you to query on the companies for more information on the social media or current company status. Golden - tracks dead and flourishing companies. YClist The problem with all of them is that none of them has enough information on the latest batch. Besides, I was more interested in the trend analytics, rather than predicting the future of the startups. So I made some research on my own and tried to accumulate interesting and fun facts about all S19 YCombinator startups. The document is open and available to everyone. If you need this data for your research, please go ahead and use it. . Here is the doc You can make your own copy (if you'd like so). During my research on every of 166 companies, I started seeing clear trends. For instance, 4 companies clearly stood out, due to having no accessible information on their founders. None. Zero. Of course, you can always make an extra mile and inquire on the company incorporation documents, or even reach out to YCombinator itself. But to me, there are 4 antisocial companies on the list. 77 companies out of 166 were incorporated by first-time founders. It means that, 89 companies on the list have at least one of the founders with a prior founding experience. Out of 166 companies, only 55 have their domain extensions, which are not “.com”. So “.com” is still a go-ahead choice. 83 companies were founded in 2019. It means that exactly 50% of the companies are more than 1 year old. There are 31 companies with only 1 founder. 94 companies with 2 founders, 27 companies with 3 founders, and only 9 companies with 4 founders. In terms of the founders' origin. Of course, the US dominates with 102 companies, whose founders are from the States themselves. However, we can see that YCombinator is supporting diversity efforts. In S19 batch 27 countries were being presented by the founders. The most popular country after the US is Canada - with 9 companies being in the batch. 72% (119) companies claim that there are generating revenue now. The fun question is: what is the most trendy color scheme? Is there one? Well, 30% of the companies have more than 1 color in their color scheme. But corporate blue is still the most popular or safe choice, as 37 companies chose to use it. The least popular main color is yellow, with only two companies using it extensively. What can any of these statistics tell us? Besides the obvious thought: if they could do it, you can do it. I’d say just one: no one knows if a startup will be successful or not. Many factors can minimize the risk, but once again, nobody knows for sure. That is why Y Combinator experiments with the selection of best in their diversity and diversity of their founders experience.

Everything you need to know about YCombinator S19 startups

Late last year, my team participated in the much talked-about Y Combinator Startup School on behalf of our startup, Affine Finance. We were assigned a great mentor (former C-level executive at Zynga and a startup advisor at multiple other prominent accelerators). It was a 10-week program, with weekly live sessions conducted both in-person and online (since I was close to YC’s Mountain View offices, I ended up attending most of the sessions in-person). The live sessions touched upon a broad range of topics — everything from legal matters to design and product development. YC had grouped the startups that were a part of the program into teams of 10–15 companies. In order to “graduate”, the teams were required to: Do weekly mentor office hours (a 2-hour group call with our mentor with all startups in our group) Provide weekly company updates reporting our week-over-week growth for a self-selected metric We were incredibly lucky to be assigned a great mentor for our startup as well as a highly engaged peer group. We consistently heard stories of mentors going MIA, peers who had stopped participating etc. which took away from their overall program experience. In effect, ! while the program was well-designed by the YC team, the execution of it largely fell upon the mentors and the startups themselves The overall learnings from the program far exceeded my expectations. By the time we joined, we had been “hacking away” at our ideas for almost a year and I didn’t expect to learn anything new besides the conventional wisdom / talking points, but I was proven wrong by the YC folks very early on! The live sessions were great, but what made the program truly effective was combining them with the mentoring session, and the peer group community. For the latter, the internal YC forums were OK but the Slack groups (formed by the startups directly) were even better and provided great value. Case in point: the Bay Area group still organizes monthly BBQ meetups for the YC SS startups — few months after the official YC program ended! Below I have highlighted seven key takeaways for our team, which are largely based on our own experience of the program and the stage of our company when we went through it. I’m sure other founders would have had different takeaways based on their own experience. I. “Make something people want”: you need to live and breathe the YC motto Startups mostly fail because they work on building products that no one wants. Within the insanity of Silicon Valley, it’s often easy for founders to lose their way (which we were also guilty of at Affine) by prioritizing the wrong things — such as fundraising, over-building products/features, attacking “white spaces” without verifying the real market needs (working on ideas that only seem good on paper) — and not being laser focused on the end customers. : Do you have the right team? Right mix of expertise, camaraderie, experience, passion for the industry, passion for solving problems, passion for starting a company. Make Do they really want this? Continuous market validation, customer feedback, asking the right questions (“will you pay $x for this” vs “would you try this / like to use this”) to the right people. Something people want: II. Launch now!! Launching fast was something the YC team and the mentors stressed on a lot. The importance of launching early cannot be overstated — you cannot truly figure out what your customers want until you launch and get in front of them. But… my product is almost ready but I still need to add some features! …You should have launched a long time ago! Launch now and include those features in the next update! But… my product is not yet finished!! …Launch limited pilots with customers whose needs are so great that they are willing to work with a broken or incomplete product — this will help guide you on what to add/modify, and what features you can drop from your product roadmap. This could save you 100s of hours and potentially result in early revenue and other valuable customer feedback. But… I haven’t even started building my product yet!! …You have a lot of options here: Build a product outline or wireframes, and use those to get feedback from potential customers on specific needs / features; or try to get a potential customer to finance your product development with an “agency approach” where you build their solution but retain the IP; or try to pre-sell product licenses at a discount prior to building your product to test your customers’ ability to pay, and their urgency to solve the problem. While this advice may not be applicable to a very small number of startups, for most startups there is no excuse not to launch today. III. Product-Market Fit — the definition is in the eye of the beholder (or the investor!) A lot of the guest speakers were asked when they found “Product-Market Fit” (PMF) and everyone had their own variation of the answer (interestingly, none of them answered they haven’t found it yet IIRC). The answer to “How do I know when I have PMF?” is highly complicated and depends on each startup’s business model and unique circumstances. Many startups find PMF early on, and many never find it during their company life cycle (including the “successful startups” with successful exits). Some early-stage investors only invest in startups after they have found their PMF, some specifically claim to fund startups to help them find their PMF, with no consistent definition on what PMF really is. After listening to multiple definitions and views, our thoughts on PMF loosely reflect those of the YC team: you have found Product-Market Fit if i. you are making what people want (from takeaway #1 above; your customers would be VERY upset/miserable if your product didn’t exist), and ii. your demand is outstripping supply such that you can’t seem to hire/build/ship fast enough (you are struggling to keep up with customer demand), and iii. new customers are finding you organically and/or through referrals from existing customers Point (ii) is what really stood out to me personally. This is also the point where you may likely need additional capital to hire and meet customer demand — making it a great time to go fundraising at favorable terms during your potential “hockey stick” turning point. Again, this definition would depend from company to company, business model to business model. Right after launching, it’s worth spending time thinking about what it would mean for your startup to attain PMF — that is the point you’d strive to get to from then on. IV. Value of your time as an entrepreneur One of the best pieces of advice I got before cofounding Affine was from a friend who founded a digital health startup a few years ago — to do as much work as possible upfront as I’d have no time once I “officially start”. I didn’t fully appreciate that advice until after I “officially started” my own entrepreneurial journey. Think of everything on your plate as a founder: Forming your team, building your product, finding early customers (i.e. persistently following up with 1000s of potential customer leads just to get initial feedback and potentially a pilot), creating content, fundraising, strategizing, day-to-day project management — and all of these are just the basic requirements to launch something. And not to forget family time and personal time to exercise, eat and sleep. Do you really have time to attend that flashy startup conference? What will you really get out of it? Do you have the 4 hours (+ the recovery time) for that happy hour? Is it worth spending countless hours chasing investors before you have initial customer interest? Would it make sense for you to spend X hours on design / social media posts at this stage of your project? While only you can answer these questions and figure out your own priorities, consciously monitoring your time (and your team’s) at the early stages and appropriately allocating time could directly mean a much higher chance of success — with more time allocated to building your product and listening to customers instead of doing other pointless activities. One of the YC speakers highlighted that a good way to think about whether something is worth spending time on is by assigning a dollar value to your time. You’d assign an annual value to your time, and then break it down to your “hourly rate”. This is not your market earning rate — . For example, if your newly launched startup has 3 cofounders, and you expect your startup to be valued at $6m by the end of the year, each of the cofounders is adding $2m in annual value to the company. If you expect to work 100 hours per week for 52 weeks per year on your startup, you’d be working a total of 5,200 hours this year, and your hourly rate would be $400 ($2m / 5200; rounded up). this is the value you are adding to your startup So, if you want to attend TechCrunch Disrupt for 2 days for 6 hours/day, that would cost you 12 hours or $4,800 in time — which is in addition to the conference tickets and other direct expenses. V. Tracking weekly growth for one main performance metric We had to report our weekly growth metrics to the YC team; the growth of all startups in our team was also discussed on our weekly group office hours. YC has always placed heavy weight on tracking and improving weekly growth rates. The best metric to track would be net revenue — it’s the direct measure or your growth and performance. However, since many early stage startups are pre-revenue or don’t have significant revenue, they picked other relevant metrics such as number of users, weeks to launch (not a great metric!) etc. Startups can and often do change their core metrics regularly as they grow. We picked “booked revenue” to track our weekly growth — with a definition that was applicable to our business model. It was very humbling to see real growth rates typed out and discussed on a weekly basis — and really gave us a new sense of focus. . While I have read and heard arguments against this tracking methodology, living through it for 10 weeks during the program convinced us on the effectiveness and importance of it. There are numerous theories and concepts on tracking metrics / measuring what matters (OKRs) and we will likely dive into those if/when appropriate — for now, the simple practice of establishing and tracking one metric worked well for us, and is a great habit we took away from YC SS. After all the noise was stripped away, optimizing that single metric is all that mattered “A good growth rate during YC is 5–7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you’re doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it’s a sign you haven’t yet figured out what you’re doing.” — Paul Graham, Y Combinator Cofounder VI. Not all startups are venture backable, and not all will be / want to be unicorns Another thing I’d chalk up to Silicon Valley insanity is only considering “unicorn” ideas and disregarding everything else. Founders are generally sold on chasing investors early on in today’s environment, which may not often be in the best interest. You can make something people want, and still not be venture backable — if your market isn’t big enough, if your market isn’t growing fast enough, if you don’t have sufficient defensibility — you can still build a great business, but chasing investors may be a waste of time in that case. It is perfectly OK to build a “non-venture backable” business — you should worry about your customers and making something people want, not about being a VC target. This was surprising advice from a startup accelerator that is the top hunting ground for Silicon Valley funds. Exploring all sources of capital is crucial — even if you fall under the VC target market. VCs are in the business of investing, and hence incentivized on promoting the idea of venture funding to founders. While capital is a great tool to have to beat out your competition, you must determine if your company really needs that capital, what sources work best for you, and what partners (investors) work best for you. Fundraising too much too fast has led to the downfall of many companies, and while it may seem a “good problem to have”, your time is truly better spent building your company than chasing investors if you don’t need to. The good investors realize this too and are generally quick to commit when they are interested, and work in the best interest of founders and the companies. At a very high level, some questions to consider when you are determining if you are “VC backable”: - Is your target market large enough? (This must be a bottom-up number i.e. price of your product * total number of potential buyers). Your valuation will depend on your business model, among other things. If you are (a) a SaaS business, you may only need to have $150–200m in ARR to reach a $1bn valuation, but if you (b) sell one-time products, you may need $1bn in sales to reach a $1bn valuation (assuming growth and other factors are also favorable). Calculating backwards, if you estimate capturing 1% of your target market at exit, for (a) you’d need a target market of $15–20bn, but for (b) you’d need a target market of $100bn. - Is your target market growing meaningfully year over year? - What are the competitive dynamics in your target market? - What is your defensibility? Do you have significant IP or differentiation? VII. Prioritizing self-care to win in the long-term One of the best sessions of the program focused on self-care for founders. You can’t build a company if you are not mentally and physically in good shape. Establishing basic routines for sleeping, exercising and taking time off, along with good dietary habits, can go a long way in keeping your spirits up and maintaining your balance during the frequent lows during the entrepreneurial journey. While this concept may feel like common sense, . founders often fail to prioritize self-care, thereby doing a disservice to not only themselves but also their team and all their company’s stakeholders Aptly titled “How to Win”, the session by Daniel Gross was cited as the best session of the entire program by many participants (if I had to recommend watching just one YC SS video, I’d recommend this one): There were numerous other great takeaways on hiring, product design and more — but the above seven were the most meaningful for my team and me. You can watch all the 2018 Startup School session videos here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzVbFeiEbds&list=PLQ-uHSnFig5NVnJ_cLWM7dLuMQRDeekoX The next YC Startup School program will be held in July — you can join their waitlist here: https://www.startupschool.org

Seven Key Takeaways from Our Journey Through Y Combinator’s Startup School

, a free 10-week online course organized by , just graduated its second annual class. In my opinion, it’s the perfect program for early-stage startups. The lessons and accountability make the time investment well worth it. Startup School Y Combinator In this post, I’ll dive into exactly why I found the program so valuable, including my top takeaways. What is Startup School? Think of Startup School as “YC light.” In many ways, it’s like the full YC program, minus relocating to Silicon Valley and a $150,000 equity investment. What was included this year: Weekly group mentorship sessions Several per week video lectures A forum for mutual support and accountability Goal tracking Deals from service providers (e.g. Microsoft Azure and Stripe Atlas) An opportunity for 100 companies to a receive an equity-free $10,000 grant The video lectures—from some of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley—are to watch. available for anyone YC accidentally sent acceptance emails to more companies than it had allocated space for. They by deciding to accept all startups that applied (more than 15,000!) into the program. turned a mistake into an opportunity It’s great to see YC taking a taste of their own medicine and scaling their insights far beyond the startups they invest in. Before Startup School Before I get into my top insights from Startup School, I think it makes sense to put my startup journey into context. My company, SimpleBulb, is addressing the problem of unhealthy light. Our first product, , is a low-blue light bulb for healthy sleep. Bedtime Bulb is used in the evening to reduce sleep interruption from artificial light. Bedtime Bulb Our MVP, Bedtime Bulb The idea for Bedtime Bulb did not come out of left field. It was preceded by a lifelong obsession with light and multiple attempts to solve the issue of nighttime blue light. You can learn more about the backstory . in this post When Startup School began at the end of August, I had a product and a few dozen pre-orders in hand. Early users loved the product, which I am grateful for because it can be difficult and expensive to iterate on hardware. The metric I decided to track was the weekly number of units sold. I was planning a Kickstarter launch at the time, but I was daunted by the challenge. Historical data showed that most of the top campaigns were fully funded within the first two days and then “rode the wave” of media promotion and other follow-on effects. Because Kickstarter is not the best platform for organic discovery, I would have to drive massive amounts of traffic to the campaign—this can be incredibly costly and challenging. Just go sell! During the first group office hours session, I introduced my startup and what I planned to do during the program. Our group mentor, , a YC alum (Founder of testmunk, YC S12), was very kind but asked challenging questions. Just hearing myself explain the pre-order program and Kickstarter plan out loud made it sound really complicated, and I realized I had to do something much simpler. Martin Poschenrieder YC core tenet #1: launch early One of YC’s is that you should launch before you think you are ready, even if you are embarrassed about the product’s state. I had a product that worked well that early users loved—well beyond the stage of embarrassment—so what was I waiting for by delaying the official launch? core tenets The group convinced me to just go sell, and within two weeks the product was in stock . It turned out to be a great move, as we’ve sold hundreds of units to date with a weekly average growth rate of 28%. on Amazon The lesson to go sell was so simple and obvious, yet I had tried to overcomplicate it. By choosing to sell, I am able to get more customer feedback, prove demand, and iterate more quickly. The startup habit That first office hours session was so immensely valuable, I could have stopped there and been in an excellent position. It’s not to say the rest of the program wasn’t helpful—it was by far. But showing up for office hours with an open mind, tracking metrics, and watching lectures for 10 weeks helped me in a way that is perhaps a little less obvious. Some literature says that it takes , on average, to form a new habit. Startup School lasted 10 weeks, or approximately 70 days. Perhaps this is no coincidence. 66 days Coming out of Startup School, I feel so much more motivated to continue pushing for weekly growth. I know the roller coaster ride is far from over, but I feel I have more of an open mind to take whatever comes our way. I’ve created a startup habit. After Startup School Startup School is over, but I’m taking with me new friendships, new ideas, and a lot more motivation to work on my startup. Bedtime Bulb has now launched in the and . In ten weeks, we’ve scaled to the point that we might sell out before the next factory shipment arrives. We’re actively working on future offerings and refining our messaging. And we’re about to launch our seed fundraising round so that we can scale the product line, build a diverse team, and ultimately change the world through healthy light. U.S. Canada Different startups are bound to get something different than we got out of Startup School. But if you show up every week with an open mind, you are bound to have a positive experience and to form your own startup habit. Interested in what we’re up to with ? Check out or . Bedtime Bulb our blog reach out directly

My Top Takeaways from Y Combinator’s Startup School

Eric Migicovsky is a Partner at Y Combinator, one of the top of U.S. startup accelerators, and he was previously Founder and CEO at Pebble, the company that created the first commercially successful smartwatch. Last Friday, he was interviewed by Adora Cheung (another YC Partner) on being an entrepreneur at the intersection of hardware and software. Here you can read a summary of my five biggest takeaways. Fast iterations can save you a lot of money 7 out of the first 10 smartwatches built and shipped at Pebble ended up exploding (as in, broke into pieces), and the company learned a ton about what caused the issue. This early finding prevented them from making hundreds of devices with the same problem. “We screwed up everything you could possibly screw up.” Going from implementation to validation as fast as possible helps uncover issues that can be fatal if discovered in future iterations, when it might be impossible to recover due to lack of resources like time or money. Validating your product with real users is the ideal case, but you risk losing customers’ trust if a problem is not handled properly: if you ask your customers for their feedback, you better be ready to listen. Choose the right business model for your company is the first critical step for all startups, where they try to figure out if there are people out there who want their product. Eric argues that doing a is equally important since it will define how the well company understands its customers and how they want to interact with the product (i.e. one time purchase vs. a monthly subscription.) Product market fit business model company fit “Will our customers really want to spend $5 a month?” Forcing the wrong business model can create problems that might end up distracting you from building awesome products for your customers. I’d argue that , since it can serve as a lighthouse when you are trying to understand how new projects get funded or why certain business decisions are made. creating a clear mission statement can help you find the right business model Talk to real customers before you build your product You might think you have a great product, but how do you verify that people will actually want it? How do you find your first 10 or 100 customers? “Infiltrate the community of people who you think will want your product.” Go to conferences, hack events, Reddit, etc. For example, WhatsApp’s Founder since he thought frequent flyers would be interested in an app that allowed them to communicate without paying for overpriced SMS bills. Jan Koum posted about his idea on FlyerTalk.com Use an existing product as foundation for your prototype Creating a prototype when you are in the consumer hardware industry doesn’t need to be expensive. Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on an industrially designed prototype, buy an existing product off the shelf and hack it to do what you want. “Getting halfway there for $300 is so much better than weeks or months of prototyping just to get to the same level.” Eric used scooter sharing companies as an example: they didn’t start by making custom-designed scooters, they bought cheap scooters and glued a modem and a GPS receiver to them. Try to spend as little money as possible until you get to the point where you fully understand the product you need to build. Hire the right people, at the right time Hiring an amazing group of developers and designers before you even have product market fit is a mistake. Focusing too early on the team can drain the company’s resources. “Hire for trust, hire for reliability, not for a specific domain knowledge.” Even after market fit is ensured, the success of most startups is determined by the type of people hired during their early stages. People who are truly invested in the company’s mission will create an environment based on trust, and will build excitement around the product; their passion will become contagious, which will make growing talent in-house easier. Eric Migicovsky is an invaluable asset for Y Combinator given all the experience he obtained by leading Pebble until it was acquired by Fitbit. If you want to hear more about his entrepreneurial expertise in the hard tech space, you can see the full interview . here Did you like this article? Subscribe to get new posts by email. View all posts by Ivan Rodriguez Originally published at geekonrecord.com on October 18, 2018.

Tech startup lessons from Y Combinator’s Eric Migicovsky

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Y Combinator’s event. female founders For those of you how don’t know, was founded in 2005 and has invested in over 1,800 companies. Instead of investing a lot of money in a few companies, YC decided to invest a little in a lot of companies and help them along the way. This concept is what we now call an . Y Combinator accelerator “Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups.Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ( ) in a large number of startups.The startups move to Silicon Valley for 3 months, during which we work intensively with them to get the company into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors. Each cycle culminates in Demo Day, when the startups present their companies to a carefully selected, invite-only audience.But YC doesn’t end on Demo Day. We and the YC alumni network continue to help founders for the life of their company, and beyond.” $120k The event started off with speaking very candidly to the audience. She was one of the four founders of YC — the only one without a technical background, and the only female. She told us her hats she wore as a founder. One of her roles in founding YC was being a therapist to the teams of these small companies. When you are founding a company, you are putting your life on hold and focusing on turning a crazy idea you had into a company. Making this jump into uncertainty requires a hand to hold — Jessica was that hand for YC companies. Jessica also had a good judge of character. After companies would pitch to YC, the three male founders would all turn to Jessica at the end and ask if they should invest. She could read the personalities of the founders better than the men and made sure YC was sticking to their zero asshole policy(this policy no longer exists). Jessica Livingston Aside from sharing stories with the audience about the early days of YC, Jessica shared 9 points of advance. There is no one mold for a successful founder. Do what you’re genuinely interested in. Ignore mainstream opinion. Find a cofounder with complementary skills, same moral compass. Make something people want. Don’t let rejection distract you. Start small so you can be nimble. It’s ok not to have gone to an elite college Be intrepid All of these points are important, but there were three that really resonated with me. The first is that “there is no one mold for a successful founder”. I loved this point because I also think that there is no one mold for a successful person. Success looks different to everyone. I also believe that sometimes being so far off from the mold can work in one’s favor. The second is that “it’s ok not to have gone to an elite college”; I have free college in the state of Florida, and I chose free college over an elite college. Despite me consciously making this decision I am often self conscious that I am inferior to another person because of the name of their University. Having the idea reaffirmed that it’s what you do with your education, not where you go, was very comforting for me. The final point was to be intrepid, this means to be fearless and adventurous. I have many fears and intentionally make myself face them. I believe that in order to constantly be evolving as individuals we must seek change when we become comfortable. I will leave you with the a quote I live my life by. “Do one thing every day that scares you.” Eleanor Roosevelt

Y Combinator Female Founders Conference

During my own preparation for Winter 2018 class interviews, I’ve reviewed every public resource on the topic and did over 20 practice interviews with Y Combinator alums. Everything I’ve learned is summarized below. This guide is my personal take and doesn’t represent an official position of YC. Along with this guide, you can also read and reuse our YC interview answers . To get more help, join a chat community of startups applying to YC . Answers development The core of your preparation process is writing a document with all anticipated questions and your answers to them. Start with the items below, then expand by adding answers to new questions asked at your practice interviews. Answers document. Your first sentence in the interview is either a solution description or value proposition. It should be 4–8 words long and pass the “mom’s test”, i.e. your parents should be able to repeat it back to you. Opening description. Define 3 core strength points in advance. Steer conversation to hit them all, sometimes even regardless of questions.Types of strength: revenue/growth/traction, domain expertise/done this before, insight aka “a-ha moment”, market size.Consider repeating or rephrasing your top three points when you aren’t sure they landed well the first time.Test your strength points: Will someone be excited about your company if she/he only hears the one-line description and three strength points? Strength points. Those are anecdotes, quotes, or factoids that receive consistent “a-ha” and “hmm.. interesting” reactions during your practice runs. Insights. Know your 2–3 key weakness areas and prepare short, crisp answers to most common concerns.For every question that you don’t answer with a strength point or an insight, limit yourself to one sentence. You want to maximize the time for strength discussion, not secondary issues. If you use the second sentence, it should go back to strengths or insights. Defense. How to write strong answers Use a lot of factoids and numbers. Your answers document should have at least 20–30 answers with numbers. Whenever possible, eliminate verbs from answers. E.g. “What’s your go-to-market?” — “A, then B, then C”.Use simple words and examples, avoid buzzwords or abstract concepts. For questions on weakness areas, acknowledge or defend it in one sentence, then go back to strengths in the second. Use examples and facts over forward-looking plans. “In the past, we’ve solved it by X with results Y”.Explain implications: “if we achieve X (hard, but possible technical achievement), then we will get Y (major business win)”. Whenever possible, use primary data from customers instead of analogies. Generally, YCombinator doesn’t see analogy-based arguments as reliable or strong.Avoid top-down market sizing. Either do bottom-up or close comparables. “Sell your co-founder”, be ready to tell why your partner is great. Practice runs Schedule at least 10–20 practice runs. For mock interviews, ask investors and founders you already know, YC alums from your city / country / university, YC alums in your industry or with a similar business model, and YC alums who volunteer to do practice interviews on Twitter. You don’t need an intro. Ask early, at least 7–10 days before your interview day. Take notes and rewrite your answers after each practice run. Do a debrief with each mock interviewer. Ask which answers were clear and strong, and which ones were not. Discuss how to improve your individual answers. Iterate on your top strength points, unique insights/anecdotes, and defense answers. Additionally, watch YC’s public office hours (links below) to get a feel of YC interview format. Interview day Arrive early, identify your room and learn who is on your panel, research panel partners in the remaining time. Make new friends with fellow applicants. Have the demo ready on the laptop with all important screens in multiple tabs. Don’t rely on YC WiFi.Assume that YC partners have no prior knowledge. Review partner’s bios in advance, identify partners who can become supporters due to their personal interest in your space. From YC’s standpoint, the purpose of the interview is to extract as much info as possible in 10min. At least one of YC partners will look closely for body language and nonverbal signals. Expect 40–80 questions in 10 minutes, 8–12 seconds per question-and-answer round. Be ready for constant interruptions (even after the first 2–3 words of response). Be ready for unique questions outside of your list. Be ready for parallel interview with multiple co-founders (not very common). Be ready for a narrow and deep drill on a single question, most likely related to your biggest weakness. Logistics and expectations. Talk fast, but not super fast. Feel happy, high-energy, and excited to pursue the opportunity. Be casual and friendly, maintain eye contact. Be confident, yet humble. Confident and concise = formidable. A few weak answers are ok. A long weak answer is much worse than a short acknowledgment like “I don’t know” or “we plan to work on this”. Don’t be too defensive, show coachability. Consider repeating or rephrasing your top three points, if they weren’t well received the first time. Most answers should be one sentence, some can be two sentences. Limit yourself to only 2–3 longer replies throughout the interview. Don’t interrupt each other, don’t argue on unexpected questions. Instead, say “yes and …” or “and I’ll add to this…” to continue after your co-founder. When disagreeing with YC partner’s statement, either give counter-facts or accept it as a hypothesis to test. Don’t make straight deflections. Answer the question asked, before changing direction. When challenged on critical hypotheses for your business, be ready to push back with crisp defense and facts. When the conversation goes sideways, try to steer it back to strengths, e.g. “and I want to make sure you hear this…”. Interview time. Interesting problem. Ideally, unique or novel. Otherwise, a new insight or approach. Compelling value proposition. Clear and concise solution description. Clarity on how the hard parts of the solution work. Inspiring mission. Market size and dynamics. A small but rapidly growing market is always compelling. Insightful ideas for overcoming market-specific concerns. Activation of “spidey sense” i.e. “hmm… something interesting should happen in this space” feeling. Team with deep relevant expertise and domain knowledge. Strong communication skills: crisp, short, clear answers. Competitive landscape fluency. Proven rapid pace of making progress. Energy and resourcefulness, “get things done” attitude. Coachability, being good at taking feedback constructively. Determined, yet flexible. Original thinking and learning ability. Unconventional points of view and insights directly from customers. Positive team dynamics, no interruptions or arguing, alignment on vision. Low chance of founder conflict. Good English and easy-to-understand accent, no language barriers in communication. Ability to inspire and recruit star team. Make YC partners want to work for you. Can grow into “forces of nature”. Direct path to building momentum by the end of YC program aka “become a hot seed deal”. Direct path to hitting high revenue in 2–3 years aka “getting big”. Expected YC evaluation criteria. Y Combinator Interview Resources , , , , . Official resources: list of partners preparation advice preparation advice video old advice Michael Seibel’s 7 points , , , , , , , , , , , , . Advice from alums: Quora thread Kwindla Hultman Kramer Henrik Zillmer Tristan Zier Barak Ben Ezer Scott Wheeler David Rusenko Sumon Sadhu Robby Walker Natalie Bartlett Fabrizio Buzeto GetAccept Gareth MacLeod , , , , . Question collections: PG Simulator Aptible Brad Flora TechCrunch QZ , , , , , , , , , . Public office hours: SS 2011 SS 2013 SS 2014 SS 2014 NYC TNW 2014 SS 2016 SS 2016 SC17–1 SC17–2 SC17–3 Acknowledgments I am forever grateful to everyone who helped us through the process: Hrachik Adjamian, Daniel Ahmadizadeh, Andrew Arruda, Delian Asparouhov, Chas Ballew, Kirill Belov, Eva Breitenbach, Matt Brezina, Tom Broderick, Levon Brutyan, Jeremy Cai, Dan Carroll, Deepak Chhugani, Nick DeMonner, Dmitry Dumik, Evan Farrell, Herbie Fu, Jim Gibbs, Anton Gladkoborodov, Allan Grant, Vlad Gurgov, Chetan Jhaveri, Ryan Johnson, Dave Kim, Alexander Kim, Kwindla Hultman Kramer, Sam Lang, Clarence Leung, Bowen Lu, Max Musing, Ivan Novikov, Thomas Pun, Roberto Riccio, Wen Sang, Boris Silver, Preston Silverman, Zac Townsend, Brett Van Zuiden, James Vaughan, Praveen Venkatesan, Tracy Young, Diana Zink. Good luck! To get more help, join a . I am frequently there to help with any preparation questions you might have. chat community of startups applying to YCombinator

The Ultimate Guide to YCombinator Interview Preparation

Advice for First Time Founders, By Y Combinator

This is a story about the crazy shit you do when you want to fulfill your dreams as a startup 🙏🏼🌠 If you’ve watched the TV show Silicon Valley, you know that the startup scene is incredibly competitive. Sometimes, it feels like a constant race to “beat your competitors” and find “product market fit” and there’s a general feeling that the only way you can win is by getting accepted into a top-accelerator in the Bay Area. Y Combinator (YC) is the behemoth of accelerators in the real Silicon Valley. Twice a year, they invest in a large number of early stage startups. Being home to the likes of Dropbox and Instacart, YC has been dubbed “the world’s most powerful start-up incubator.” It’s sort of like winning the jackpot…If you get in, you’re SET 🚀. Everybody wants in! Last winter alone, 7,200 startups wanted in… and 100 got in. I want to tell you the 6 minute story of what happens when a startup thinks they’ve got a real once in a life time chance… Chapter 1: A sliver of hope Tuesday October 10, 2017. Our CEO James sent a really impressive application to YC. He has done a fair share of research on the process and let our team know that the YC partners who review applications give each company’s application about 😲**.** 15 seconds of their precious time But… a week after submitting our application, on Tuesday afternoon, James randomly got a message from “Michael” of YC: On your application, in the question asking if your coding is done externally, and who does your coding, you wrote “ ”. Please clarify. No Holy… F*^k. Someone from YC RESPONDED ! ! 🙀🙀🙀 Unable to contain ourselves💃🏼🕺🏻 James hastily google’d the name Michael. He is the CEO of YC. Through bouts of laughter and high fives all afternoon, we revelled in the fact that they know we exist… and they are interested enough to ensure they thoroughly understand our application! Keep in mind, these shrewd AF people pay attention to only the clearest and strongest applications (Note: The fortuitous mistake in our application occurred because of #NoSleep). In our world, we had a huge shot! James went an bought bottles of champagne, and our team celebrated🥂. This was the energy all of Tuesday afternoon after the initial email. I felt compelled to capture the genuine passion, excitement, fatigue, leadership and hope that James embodied! Chapter 2: Becoming attention grabbing A-holes. Following Tuesday’s excitement, the rest of the week entailed plenty of low key brainstorming of creative ideas that may get the attention of relevant people at YC, and/or the media. Should we plan a pickup soccer game in SF for all the companies at YC? Should we get quotes from YC alumni for a blog post about how sports/physical activity motivated them to stay active and prevent burnout during their term there? Maybe we can blockade the YC entrance with OpenSports users, Clif bars, and a ping pong table, and challenge everyone to a game against an OpenSports pro? Or we can start a cross country van tour visiting OpenSports communities. Maybe cycle there? …and dozens of more hilarious ideas! Finally, on Thursday night, between chatter about OpenSports icons or something, there was an idea that stuck… Let’s anonymously create a “startup roulette” website… My response: Followed by a quick midnight name brainstorm: …and then… the magic 🎩: The domain was purchased. This was happening. Chapter 3: Getting the team up to speed Friday at 2:30pm when we were all in, we called a team meeting and packed ourselves into a closed off whiteboard room. We had to plan this thing, design it, and build it in… an 18 hour sprint. Given the compressed time line, we had to work quick and flesh out . only the best of ideas The overall vision was to . The inspiration came because 99% of applicants don’t get in, and don’t receive any feedback about why, so we wanted to create a space where founders could receive feedback (and beer), and viewers could know whats going on in tech. create a webpage that would have a constant feed of the one minute application videos that founders sent to YC Ideas that made the cut: “Send a beer to your favourite startup” button 🍺 (not real beer, silly! Although, that was the original idea) Leave anonymous feedback in a comments text box (that get sent only to us, and we would subsequently send the feedback to the company) A nav bar with a drop down list of video categories An “About me” section (which would just be about the project, and not about OpenSports) Chapter 4: The Design and Development Sprint It took Orest less than an hour and a half to design the entire site — In our meeting, he already knew which “sexy” shade of red and what font he wanted to use. Kaylin, Ryan and I started watching hours of YC application videos (this was much more tedious and much less fun than one would think😪!) and categorizing them into categories like “E-commerce, Fintech, Sustainability, Basically Air b n b”, etc. By 5:32pm on Friday, the site was up. Damn, we’re fast: Chapter 5: The marketing strategy The marketing strategy was simple and hilarious: Spam the press and all the big tech news sites about WatchMeYC, pretending to be . Erlich Bachman from Silicon Valley We laughed our heads off as our designer and creative director Orest embodied Erlich. He needed to do his research via YouTube videos to make sure the banter was perfect👇 Watching videos of Erlich Bachman to fully get into character. James found a list of hundreds of tech reporters and on Monday, we sent them all an e-mail from the account of Erlich (erlich@watchmeyc.com), about our new website. The e-mails we sent to journalists and tech news sites like TechCrunch were hilarious! They went something like this: Hello, I know you look at me and see me as a guy who has it all figured out, and for the most part I do. When I sold Aviato, it gave me a home, cars, food; but there has always been a hole in my heart. I guess that hole is the “what if?” What If I don’t get into YC? I guess we’ll never know because I always do. But what about the 99% that don’t get in? Well that’s why I made watchmeyc.com. Why, you ask? Well, why not. Yours, The Silicon Valley King. Erlich. Chapter 6: The fall from grace Out of 220 emails sent on Monday October 23— Google blocking many of them — we got a response from one… ONE….REPORTER 🤢! FML. Needing a break from it all! Our posts on Reddit got taken down. Twitter did not allow us to have an Erlich Bachman account… nothing was going right 😩 But I still had hope! So much hope that I took a “pre-becoming-famous” video! Chapter 7: Decision day — Did we get an interview? Tuesday October 24th, One whole week after that initial message from “Michael”, was decision day with no indication of what time we would receive the much anticipated e-mail from YC. James predicted it would come between 9pm and 1am, given the 3 hour time difference between Toronto and San Francisco. Our team was fairly certain we would get the interview. I could see it in James’ eyes and his behaviour that he felt so strongly about it. The interview would mean we would fly to San Francisco the next week to meet the YC partners. Half of the teams who go for an interview actually get in to YC, so your chances are high when you’ve made it to the interview round. Then we would move to San Francisco from January to March, for three of the most intense months of our lives, a period when stress would eat us from the insides out, but we would learn and grow as a company a LOT. I couldn’t hang around all night to wait for the decision, so I just waited to hear from our team, who were having some pre-celebration drinks. And then at 1:34am came the message from James: …bla bla bla… Chapter 8: Coming together to ease the pain like a real #fam: On Wednesday morning, Orest and I went to a grocery store in our building to buy a cake, so that our team could celebrate “not getting into YC”! We decorated our own cake: Turning the lemons of tragic loss into some lovely profane lemonade 🍋 And shared a slice with everyone in our Toronto-based startup incubator 🍰. Chapter 9: Live and Learn After all of that, what happened? Nothing. But our team got to temporarily pull our minds away from the amazing project we work on 24/7, , and completely let our creative minds go wild. The amount of laughs we shared through the constant exchange of fun ideas was invaluable! OpenSports More than that, we can apply learnings from this project to future tasks. Here’s an example: During this whole period, we were certain that some of our new OpenSports users from the States were YC people spying on us and testing us out. Based on how thoughtful I was whenever I reached out to the people I was suspicious about, I created the motto “treat every new sports organizer like they’re a YC CEO.” It helped me think of new systems to ensure high quality engagement and retention on the app🤓. Chapter 10: The last shot Oh, and here’s the product demo we made in 🙏🏼, because we’ve got an amazing product. And an active, engaged community. And we build and iterate like crazy. And best of all, we ❤ and respect each other. I know our team is destined for greatness. 5 hours Will we apply again? F🐧🐦k ya. This hasn’t disarmed us, after all, as Mattan Griffel, a successful YC- accepted founder wrote in his blog about : How to get into Y Combinator …Y Combinator shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all. It’s still only a step on the way to success or failure for your company. If not getting into Y Combinator means your startup is going to give up, or won’t succeed, that’s already a very bad sign. That being said, Y Combinator is that benefits just about every startup. a very cool and valuable experience Chapter 11: Update: The Story Continues… So…. we ambushed Kat and Yuri (Partners at YC) in January at Pearson Airport in Toronto and it led to something pretty epic! Read about that :) here Thank you for reading :) We have many funny adventures and stories. If you want to hear more, e-mail me! alicia@opensports.ca ❤ Your sports fam, Alicia and the OpenSports team P.S. Want to watch our one minute founders’ application video that was also posted on ? I think James applied some kind of algorithm so that our video plays once every 10 videos, so you should find it there easily 🙊. You’ve gotta be creative 😈😇. watchmeyc.com

Read about this company’s hilarious hacks to get into Y Combinator

Craig Cannon is the Director of Marketing at Y Combinator . Before that he cofounded Comedy Hack Day and did head swaps at The Onion . Sometimes he writes about trips, like bike touring in Vietnam and hiking the John Muir Trail. 1.Good to meet you in Boulder this week. Really enjoyed talking about how startups get (and don’t get) their first customers. is possibly the top authority on how young companies grow fast, and Facebook is their most common channel for testing customer personas. So. Do you think Facebook will take over 50% of the digital marketing industry? Y Combinator : Cool meeting you as well! Craig So for those who don’t know, . Will FB’s share increase? I think so. In my experience they have the best targeting and if they dial in engagement across international markets they’ll be hard to stop. Tough to say how big a slice they’ll take but they’ve had a good run of acquisitions and seem quite willing to copy to get ahead. FB and Google dominate digital Now, it’s true that FB is a good place to test personas but I think if you’re building a product and don’t know who the customer is, you’re doing it wrong. You’ll waste money on ads that offer no explanation as to why someone doesn’t want your product and you’ll waste time in development because you don’t know what to prioritize. Of course you could switch markets over time or eventually use FB ads to find new types of customers, but you have to start out with an opinion. For technical people that are new to this stuff I’d suggest spending a little time implementing on your site. It’s super easy to do and can give you much better outcomes without spending the money on a dedicated marketing person. Facebook Pixels 2. You set a world record for . A lot can go through a person’s mind during great physical exertion… Do you recall the most sane and insane reasons you gave yourself for not stopping the bike sooner? climbing 95,623 feet in 48 hours Haha. To be honest, I never thought about stopping. I felt prepared physically and had a spreadsheet to track my progress alongside where I needed to be, which helped make the effort more bite-sized. That stuff is super important because you’re right, these silly endurance challenges are mostly psychological. I don’t identify with the whole culture of suffering around endurance events. I love this stuff! Obviously it’s not always sunshine and rainbows but for the most part you’re just in your head, pushing forward, man vs. himself. Doesn’t get any better :) 3. When I met up with you, I brought my daughter in a car seat. That’s the reality of my work life balance today. Startup life is notorious for burning people out. How have you seen first time founders balance becoming better business people with becoming better people beyond their business? Yeah, that’s a great question. First they take care of themselves physically and mentally. Then they what matters, which could mean shipping an update or making dinner with their partner. In other words, your relationships and health don’t remain constant just because you’re super excited about your company–you have to keep putting the work in, which usually means cutting some things out. prioritize and execute I suck at objectively ranking tasks in my head so I just write the input and potential output down as a sentence. Once I see them on paper, it’s usually pretty easy to separate what is and isn’t important work. If you’re still having trouble just look back on your past year and consider the 80/20 rule. What action provided the biggest gains? What took the most time and didn’t do anything for your business? Another thing I find helpful is recognizing when you’re most productive in the day. Before YC, when I worked for myself, I struggled initially because I thought I could always be doing just a little bit more to close a sale or complete a project. In reality I’m most productive in the morning and by about 2PM I’m antsy and kind of useless. Now I plan my day around that. I start working around 6AM, exercise around 2PM, and wrap up any extra work or socialize afterward. It’s funny, the people who I think of as successful are never so committed that they can’t make time for friends. They just don’t waste time on trivial stuff. Oh. One more thing. I recommend turning off notifications and badge numbers on every app. Notifications are the devil and the reason I will never own an Apple Watch. If the sky is falling someone will call you. Applications for the YC W18 batch are open . My email is Craig@YCombinator.com . Please email me with questions, especially if you’re an underrepresented person in tech! Tweet @CraigCannon & @YCombinator . 3QuestionsWith.Us is an original series by @AMI , profiling those who push, technology, and creation forward.

3 Questions With Y Combinator Marketing Director Craig Cannon

Interview with Khallil Mangaliji Life can be crazy sometimes. But that is often when you learn the most — during those unexpected, random moments where you do not really know what you are doing. Khallil’s career/life is definitely wild. He has seen/done/gone through some absolutely incredible things — all interesting to learn from. This interview is one to remember. Without further ado, here is the interview: Hey Khalil! Introduce yourself! Tell us about where you went to school, what you have done over the past few summers, and what you are up to nowadays. I’m did a CS degree at Waterloo, and a business degree at Laurier. I was in a co-op program, so summers were either spent in school, or at an internship. I interned at Facebook (twice), Apple, BitPesa, and Xtreme Labs. Khallil Mangaliji Nowadays, I’m working at a startup I co-founded called Fiix ( ). We send licensed mechanics to your house to Fiix your car. It’s like an Uber for Auto Repair. www.fiix.io I’m also working on a YouTube channel, you should check it out ( ) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkana7GS_UDflhBaZ4kvqQ What did you study in school? Have any classes been helpful in the real world? If not, where did you learn what has been most helpful at work? I studied business and computer science. I would say the CS courses are pretty applicable IRL because the skills are specific. Business school on the other hand was not as useful. I learnt more about business by launching Fiix, but I was more prepared to launch Fiix because of business school — so it was valuable in that sense. How did the co-op program work at Waterloo? Would you recommend doing something similar? It’s a lot less formal than you’d think. 4 months before a work term, you just have to find a job. It could be through the school’s platform, or on your own. I don’t think you ‘need’ a co-op program to get a summer job, but if the formality helps you do it, then for sure. My younger brother isn’t in a co-op program, and he got his first internship as a software engineer at Uber — no program needed, he just went out and got it. How did you find/get your internships at Facebook and Apple? Both are funny stories. At Apple, they were looking for a engineer that spoke French. Knowing that I barely knew any French, I applied because I really wanted a job at Apple. I managed to get by with my high school French education, and got the job. The entire summer I didn’t speak a word of French, turns out I didn’t need it. For Facebook, I got rejected because I couldn’t get passed the in-person code screen. The problem I had was I prefered building frontend interfaces, and all the questions were heavy algo questions. Facebook had no ‘frontend intern’ position for Waterloo, so I applied for a full time job, completed 2 rounds, and then told them I actually needed an internship. I got the job, and now there’s a ‘frontend intern’ position for Waterloo students wanting to work at FB because of it. What were you working on there and what were some of the really valuable things you learned there? At Apple I worked on some not-so-secret stuff that has to be secret because it’s Apple. At Facebook I worked on lookback, it was the first version of all those friend videos Facebook makes for you. At Facebook I learnt how to scale a startup’s culture. At Apple I learnt how to build a cohesive team that wants to spend time together. Were there any big differences between work and culture at Facebook and Apple? Facebook felt more like a startup, people were willing to ship things as fast as possible, even if they were on the cusp of being broken. Apple felt more refined, everything was quadruple checked for perfection. Interestingly, both companies felt a lot like their products. That’s why they’re both the best in their respective spaces. If you could go back to college, would you have thought about interning and careers any differently knowing what you know now? I would work at Fiix ( ). www.fiix.io Seriously. But if Fiix didn’t exist, then I probably wouldn’t change much. I think the ideal set of internships is a balance between large and small, in different areas of the world. My first internship was in Toronto, 2nd and 3rd in SF, 4th in Kenya, and 5th in London. I essentially got to travel the world, get 2 degrees, and work at some awesome places — all through internships. Extending that, now you are working on your own company, tell us about it! What have been some of the biggest differences between interning at big companies and doing your own thing? Here’s the blurb we send to press: Fiix sends licensed, expert mechanics to your home to fix your car within 3 hours. It’s like an Uber for Auto Repair. Fiix was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2017 batch, and the founders are ex-engineers from Google, Instagram, Facebook, Apple, Yelp, and Deloitte. They’ve repaired over 4,500 vehicles in the past year in just one city, have a $1.2M GMV run-rate, and have over 1,000 5-star reviews across Google, Yelp, and Facebook. Recently, they closed a $1.85m seed round and are based out of Toronto, Canada. — Compared to working somewhere, it’s night and day. There’s a lot less of people telling you what to do, and a lot more stressing over not doing enough. The secret is, if you can find a way to survive forever, you have a successful company. Most big companies have figured out the survival problem, most startups haven’t and the work difference comes down to exactly that. The part I miss most about big companies is mentorship. When I had a problem with Redux at Facebook, I would walk over to the guy that made redux and ask him how to fix it. When I have a problem with Redux at Fiix, I scour the internet for hours trying to solve it 😂. How did you get into YCombinator? What was the process like? When started accepting pitches for Y Combinator’s Fellowship via Snapchat, the internet was not amused. Snapchat was supposed to be a weird place where teenagers sent disappearing pictures they didn’t want backed up to iCloud. Suddenly, Y Combinator was in the game, and a sliver of snappers would turn to the friendly ghost for semi-choreographed, scrappy, and mildly hilarious startup pitches. Justin Kan Our startup, was one of those companies. When we applied to pitch, it was just for kicks, but when we got that golden “Fiix is going on Justin’s Snapchat” email, we were feeling like Charlie. Fiix The following week, Justin’s snapchat fans voted on whose pitch they liked best. A few days later we found ourselves in an interview for YC with Adora Cheung (CEO of Homejoy). We read all the , did the interview, and were offered a spot in the fellowship the next day. ‘ How to get into YC’ Medium posts After the fellowship, they put us in the full time program. How did you find your first customer? We made a post on Kijiji (Craigslist for Canada). How was YC for you and your team? What are the biggest misconceptions/surprises about the program? In the 4 months we spent with YC we got more done than we will in the next 2 years. YC does a great job getting you to focus on what’s important. I’ve been hearing a lot of people say “YC is getting too big” and it means they can’t focus on the companies now. That’s not true, firstly the more teams in your batch, the better networked you are with other future-potential-billionaires. Secondly, they do an excellent job breaking the batch up into smaller groups, so you still build an intimate relationship with the partners. You’ve hired lots of people now! What do you look for in employees/interns? What makes someone stand out? We look for people who actually want to do what they’re doing. We don’t care about where you went to school, but we do care about your experiences (in and out of work). The best proof of this is side projects, so do those :thumbs_up: For someone with no connections “in tech,” where would you advise starting out their career? Do some side projects to prove yourself, and then get an internship! A good place to start looking is the monthly “Who’s Hiring” post on Hacker News. But, I’m a connection in tech, so message me (m.me/km)! Where can people find you and what opportunities are you looking for? (Twitter, linkedin, personal site, medium, etc). YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkana7GS_UDflhBaZ4kvqQ Facebook: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkana7GS_UDflhBaZ4kvqQ Twitter: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkana7GS_UDflhBaZ4kvqQ LinkedIn: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkana7GS_UDflhBaZ4kvqQ Medium: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkana7GS_UDflhBaZ4kvqQ Personal Site: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkana7GS_UDflhBaZ4kvqQ But Khallil, those are all YouTube links. Yes, they are 😜 The student hustle team asked me for pictures of myself to add ‘colour’. Here’ are a few of me in a banana suit: Originally Posted on Student Hustle More: Elon Musk’s Framework

How to get into YCombinator (using Snapchat)

why y combinator made all the difference

I consider myself very lucky. After working on recommendation algorithms, a FinTech chatbot platform and starting the Budapest Bots Meetup group I’ve ended up in one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious incubators with . We are working on a human + AI hybrid solution for customer service. Bicycle AI These couple of months have made me sober up from the AI and chatbot hype. The Bay can be a tough place. They will tell you how it is, and you will be all the better for it. So here are the 3 most important lessons I learned working at a conversational AI startup in Silicon Valley. And just to put things into context, I have a psychology background. 1. Don’t call it AI if it is not So what is AI anyway? I come from a psychology background and we can’t really agree on this in the company either. When it comes to definitions: “AI is the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior” So is imitating intelligent human behavior? Is understanding a customer’s questions and suggesting accurate answers from a large data set what we call AI? We are still far away from an and the but what we can do with today’s AI s quite staggering. classification of potentially cancerous lesions in the lungs Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Technological Singularity What should we call AI then? Artificial Intelligence has indeed become a buzzword, this year at CES we saw the explosion of from toothbrushes to washing machines. Please don’t call this AI. I also wouldn’t call AI using one size fits all 3rd party algorithms like NLP engines and cloud vision APIs. Go for open source alternatives, tweak them, test them and make them work the best for your specific use case. shoehorning “AI” into every imaginable consumer electronics from api.ai So why do I say that out-of-the box solutions are not good enough to build your business? First and foremost, they are one-size-fits-all solutions, so a properly tuned proprietary model will always outperform them. This was the case for us as well. We started out with IBM’s Watson, then built our own solution, ran them side by side for a while, and once we performed better, we switched entirely. And you basically have zero control over what you get back. In the case of NLP APIs, you send a string and you get back a snippet, great, but not nearly enough in most use cases. And there is a reason these services are free or priced competitively for now, they need data, your data. I’d say it is fine to start out with 3rd party services, but build fast to replace them. And if your team doesn’t have the capability, hire someone who does and fast. When it comes to starting your own business in the AI space, I’d suggest you go over this before claiming you have one. Basically, none of the topics in that post should make you uncomfortable when a VC partner asks about them. And believe me, they will. Y Combinator blog post 2. Don’t do AI for AI’s sake AI is the latest buzzword, even though it has been around and enjoyed periodic hype cycles since the 50’s. eroding VC trust. Full stack AI companies solving real problems will thrive, others will ride the wave, get money, burn it and die, and with good reason. You can have the best AI algorithms in your arsenal, but if you can’t use it in a way that solves real problems, then what is the point? Great AI applied in a useful manner is the key, just with any other technological innovation to be honest. Just look at Google Photos, it uses Google’s powerful to great effect, yet you don’t see it touted at every turn. Some are calling AI the Cleantech of today Cloud Vision APIs I work with conversational AI and for many, AI means assistants, like Alexa or the Google Assistant. Today with chatbots on the Messenger Platform, it is easier than ever to throw together something that resembles a conversational AI agent. Yet is it worth building the 10th restaurant search chatbot even if it would have world class AI? Apply AI to fields where they can generate real value, like the already mentioned lung cancer diagnostics, you can also win a million dollars, which doesn’t hurt. 3. You will need humans This was my biggest learning. Unless you are an already gigantic company with a lot of data or are working on existing, publicly available data sets, you will need a lot of humans. And by humans I mean users, who generate the specialized data set that your algorithms can then work on. is a great example. They have built a wildly successful platform with 107 thousand doctors in the past 7 years that allowed them to access huge amounts of proprietary data. And yes, HealthTap they launched Dr. AI, their AI-powered personal physician late last year. Tesla’s autopilot program is another good example on how And self-driving AI is not the end goal, it is but the means to get to the stage where you don’t need to have your own Tesla to take advantage of the technology. With true self-driving capabilities Tesla can get into the transportation sharing business. A vertical where today Uber reigns supreme and is also working on self-driving technology, albeit with a different approach, you can use your existing user base to generate the data you need to get to the next stage. one that is in serious jeopardy. And then we haven’t even mentioned the human workforce teaching the algorithms. After all, even if you have lots of training data, you still need to supervise the learning process to fine tune the model. This is what and what you have to be prepared for as well if you go down the AI route, be it users, your own employees, or crowd sourced labor from the likes of Upwork and Crowdflower. Yes, the necessity of human supervision is bound to go down as your models progress, but depending on the field you chose, it can take years. which again, depending on your field can make or break your business. x.ai is doing And the lower your error rates are, the harder it is to improve Conclusions AI in Q1 2017 is just past the , with , and this year will be quite interesting for the hybrid approach we are working on. peak of inflated expectations Facebook cutting its ambitions Alexa marching ahead Apple reportedly lagging behind on AI, So how do these learning factor in with what I’m doing? Are we doing proper AI? Should we? And how do humans come into the picture? We here at use AI aim to solve a different kind of problem. Customer service is a very important aspect of any company and with (and a lot more offshore), it is one of the most labor intensive. And customer service is still slow. Departments measure their turnaround times in hours. And if you are a smaller company, scaling your CS team to meet fluctuating demand is next to impossible. Bicycle AI 2.6 million people working in this position in the US alone We here at provide a virtual customer service rep for our clients who solves Level 1 cases for them. Our virtual rep is powered by a combination of AI and human supervision. We work 24/7 for you and have blazing fast response rates. This way we deal with the majority of cases so our clients can focus on high value customers and complicated cases. Bicycle AI We do this by ingesting previous customer service conversations, knowledge bases, product docs and any other resources available. We use our proprietary NLU engine to understand incoming messages and based on this combined data set our AI provides suggested responses. We have our own experienced customer service agents to approve, personalize and send each response. With each interaction, our machine learning algorithms are teaching our AI to give even more relevant answers in the future.

3 things I learned working at an AI startup in Y Combinator

Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/?photo=xdpS4HDrhSk tl;dr: Our company, Daily.co , was part of the Y Combinator W16 batch. I’m always happy to give advice about YC applications and interviews. Below are some notes about how to prepare for an in-person interview. I’m always happy to be helpful to startup founders and people trying to break into tech, if I can be. Feel free to schedule a Daily.co video call with me, here . Over the past few months I’ve received a number of calls from friends of friends who are applying to Y Combinator. These conversations often cover similar ground, and, since YC interview acceptances just went out, I thought I’d write up my notes on preparing for the in-person YC interview. A few good posts to read I found a few posts particularly useful when we were practicing for Pluot’s interview. and have both posted short, numbered lists of things to keep in mind about the interview. If you only read two things, and only follow this advice, you’ll do fine! Jessica Livingston Michael Seibel Michael also wrote a blog post about , which is not specific to YC interviews but is very much worth reading and internalizing. how to pitch your company wrote a comprehensive and thoughtful overview of how to approach the interview. Danielle Morrill includes some excellent answers to the question “What is it like to interview with Y Combinator.” This Quora thread What does your company do? The interview is short — approximately ten minutes. It goes by fast. It’s in your interest to help your interviewers cover as much ground as possible. That means all of your answers should be concise. I’ll come back to how we practiced for our interview, below. But keep in mind, for everything you say in the interview, short is better than long. Simple is better than complicated. The first question will almost certainly be “what does your company do?” You need a great answer to this. Your answer should be completely free of jargon, acronyms, and buzzwords. And, again, your answer should be short. Thirty seconds at most. Use plain language. Include an example. “We make software that automatically re-configures corporate networks when denial of service attacks happen. For example, one of our test networks stayed up and running last week during the entire Mirai botnet attack, even though other, similar networks, had two days of downtime.” Team, market, and traction After “what does your company do,” the broad topics your interviewers will want to cover are team, market, and traction. Your job, in the interview, is to be clear, concise, honest, and positive — all at the same time — about how your company looks when viewed through the lens of “team, market, and traction.” Here’s how I think about those three elements of a startup’s story: everything always comes back to whether the team can innovate, execute, learn, iterate, and persist. These days you have to offer pretty solid evidence that your team is great in order to get accepted to Y Combinator. Traction is the single best way to provide evidence that you’ll succeed. Keep in mind, though, that your traction metric needs to be relevant and concrete to be convincing. Month-over-month revenue growth at a non-trivial scale is by far the best metric to talk about, if you can. But some other tangible, relevant metric can be useful, too: daily active users, number of Xs that people Y on your platform every day, etc. Alternatively, a well thought through approach to attacking a very large market, plus a great tech demo, plus the ability to think on your feet and communicate well, is another way to provide that evidence. See the relative “complexity” of those two paths? Traction — especially revenue traction — is its own story. If you’re applying to YC with, say, $150k/month of recurring revenue and revenue is growing 30% each month, your interview is probably going to go pretty well. :-) On the other hand, without traction, you are implicitly explaining, in the interview, why you don’t have traction yet. So, your story might be something like: “we started development nine months ago, signed up 10 beta customers (non-paying) six months ago, and over the last two months have converted four of those into paying customers. They’ve signed contracts to pay us $10k each for pilots. Another beta customer signed an LOI worth up to $5M if we can prove in a pilot that we reduce their downtime by 20%.” Basically, you’re saying, “we get things done fast, we’ve proven that we can deliver something customers are willing to have a conversation about paying for, and we have the beginnings of proof that customers are actually willing to pay, and how much.” My advice is to lead with traction, if you have it. If you don’t, think about how to frame your story as “we get things done fast — repeatedly.” By the way, that’s advice I give to early stage founders whether or not they’re applying to YC. is a really good organizing principle. A relentless focus on building something other people find useful How we practiced We practiced for our YC interview by assembling a list of about 100 interview questions. We wrote down answers to all of them, then refined each answer until it was two sentences long. Every answer needed to say something about what we thought our strengths were with respect to our team, the size of our market, or what we’d gotten done so far. (We didn’t have any traction when we applied to YC. We were pre-launch.) We wrote the questions and answers down on flash cards. Then practiced until we could answer every question verbatim, in any order. Then we practiced some more until we could answer them conversationally, but still sticking to the same core idea and just one or two sentences. We had a hardware demo. We practiced (and debugged) until we were confident we could do the demo on demand, piecemeal, while distracted, while answering questions, and that anyone we showed the demo to could pull out a phone or laptop and interact with our prototype. Finally, one last piece of advice. of basic accounting terms that are relevant to your startup: revenue, recurring revenue, gross merchandise volume, contract, LOI, margin, and profit. Know the definitions Open slots for practice interviews via video call Going through a YC batch is fun, useful, and a great opportunity. But on top of all that, YC is a community of founders who are all going through similar things and all love what they’re doing. That’s something that’s worth seeking out, whether you do it by applying to Y Combinator, or in another way. My favorite thing about startup communities is how supportive founders are of each other. Most of us are genuinely excited to learn about what other people are working on, and genuinely interested in being helpful. In that spirit, a bunch of us have carved out time on Monday and Wednesday next week to do video calls with people preparing for YC interviews. . We’ll do a mock interview for the first 10 minutes, then talk more generally for the second 10 minutes. Please feel free to sign up. We’d love to meet you. We have 20 minute slots available here at this Calendly link

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