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Biggest update I’ve ever shared… Bloom (YC X25) raised $3.4M to unlock the creator economy for software. Let’s be honest: web apps are easy, but building and sharing mobile apps sucks - XCode builds, Apple Developer reviews, TestFlight invites… all make going from idea to an app on users’...

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David Alonso

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41,464 просмотров • 11 месяцев назад •via X (Twitter)

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Evan Spiegel on the lesson that killed his first startup and led to Snapchat: "We focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. We worked for like eighteen months to build this perfect full-featured product, which was in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things. Build a prototype, build an MVP, get it in front of people, learn as quickly as possible. But we had spent all this time building this perfect piece of software and we hadn't thought enough about distribution. While we built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time, Naviance, had secured distribution through all the different college counselors. What piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college? The one recommended by the college counselors or the one from two kids at Stanford? I think it's a pretty easy choice. So we saw very early that we had no distribution advantage. Even if we loved our software, people weren't going to use it because we didn't have a scalable way to get it in people's hands. Around that time when we saw the emergence of the App Store on iPhone, it was very clear that was a distribution channel we could really use and benefit from. But we also needed to build things we could build quickly, things we really were going to use together with our friends so we could be the first early customers. Ultimately Peekaboo and Snapchat represented that." This is exactly the asymmetry Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One: superior distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. Thiel puts an even finer point on it: most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. Estée Lauder said: it's not enough to have the most wonderful product in the world. You must be able to sell it. Many founders over-index on product perfection and under-invest in distribution. The world is full of great products nobody knows about, and mediocre products with massive distribution that dominate markets. Evan Spiegel lived it. He built the better product, watched it lose, and then built something he could actually distribute.
1:27

Evan Spiegel on the lesson that killed his first startup and led to Snapchat: "We focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. We worked for like eighteen months to build this perfect full-featured product, which was in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things. Build a prototype, build an MVP, get it in front of people, learn as quickly as possible. But we had spent all this time building this perfect piece of software and we hadn't thought enough about distribution. While we built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time, Naviance, had secured distribution through all the different college counselors. What piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college? The one recommended by the college counselors or the one from two kids at Stanford? I think it's a pretty easy choice. So we saw very early that we had no distribution advantage. Even if we loved our software, people weren't going to use it because we didn't have a scalable way to get it in people's hands. Around that time when we saw the emergence of the App Store on iPhone, it was very clear that was a distribution channel we could really use and benefit from. But we also needed to build things we could build quickly, things we really were going to use together with our friends so we could be the first early customers. Ultimately Peekaboo and Snapchat represented that." This is exactly the asymmetry Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One: superior distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. Thiel puts an even finer point on it: most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. Estée Lauder said: it's not enough to have the most wonderful product in the world. You must be able to sell it. Many founders over-index on product perfection and under-invest in distribution. The world is full of great products nobody knows about, and mediocre products with massive distribution that dominate markets. Evan Spiegel lived it. He built the better product, watched it lose, and then built something he could actually distribute.

David Senra

27,043 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад

Announcing that Willow has raised $4.2 million to build voice-first interfaces. We started Willow after dropping out of Stanford freshman year to build a healthcare startup. It failed. We pivoted over 10 times, spent a year in the trenches, and learned how to build the hard way. But we discovered something huge. Voice scribes were giving doctors their lives back. They were able to focus on helping patients rather than wasting nights and weekends on paperwork. That's when it hit us. If voice could transform healthcare, why not every knowledge worker? Why are a billion professionals still hammering away at keyboards to communicate with humans (email, Slack, writing) and AI (ChatGPT, Cursor)? Today, thousands of professionals at companies like Canva, GitHub, and Webflow use Willow to work 5x faster. We're building Willow to unlock voice as the universal interface where you can control any device, any app, any workflow simply by speaking. – This $4.2M round was led by Boxgroup, with participation from Goodwater Capital, Burst Capital, and Liquid 2 Ventures. We’re also backed by an Avengers-level group of investors, including: Max Mullen (Founder, Instacart) (COO, Shopify) dharmesh (CTO/Founder, HubSpot) Tomer London (CPO/Founder, Gusto) Geoff Donaker (COO, Yelp) Ankur Nagpal (Founder, Teachable) Steven (CEO/Founder, Moov) Daniel Cahn (CEO/Founder, Slingshot AI) John Andrew Entwistle (CEO/Founder, Wander) Mercedes Bent (Venture Partner, Lightspeed J.J. Fliegelman (CTO/Founder, Wayup) Special thanks to our earliest believers: Adam Guild (CEO/Founder, Owner), Cory Levy (Founder, ZFellows), and Nicolas Dessaigne (Partner, YC). And most importantly, thank you to the best co-founder and CTO Lawrence Liu. – We're hiring for founding engineer, designer, and ML roles who want to redefine how humans work. Join a world-class team building technology that transforms lives daily with top-tier compensation and equity. Comment "Join Willow" to be fast-tracked. The next decade will be defined by voice-first computing. The question isn't whether this transformation will happen. It's whether you'll be part of building it.
2:46

Announcing that Willow has raised $4.2 million to build voice-first interfaces. We started Willow after dropping out of Stanford freshman year to build a healthcare startup. It failed. We pivoted over 10 times, spent a year in the trenches, and learned how to build the hard way. But we discovered something huge. Voice scribes were giving doctors their lives back. They were able to focus on helping patients rather than wasting nights and weekends on paperwork. That's when it hit us. If voice could transform healthcare, why not every knowledge worker? Why are a billion professionals still hammering away at keyboards to communicate with humans (email, Slack, writing) and AI (ChatGPT, Cursor)? Today, thousands of professionals at companies like Canva, GitHub, and Webflow use Willow to work 5x faster. We're building Willow to unlock voice as the universal interface where you can control any device, any app, any workflow simply by speaking. – This $4.2M round was led by Boxgroup, with participation from Goodwater Capital, Burst Capital, and Liquid 2 Ventures. We’re also backed by an Avengers-level group of investors, including: Max Mullen (Founder, Instacart) (COO, Shopify) dharmesh (CTO/Founder, HubSpot) Tomer London (CPO/Founder, Gusto) Geoff Donaker (COO, Yelp) Ankur Nagpal (Founder, Teachable) Steven (CEO/Founder, Moov) Daniel Cahn (CEO/Founder, Slingshot AI) John Andrew Entwistle (CEO/Founder, Wander) Mercedes Bent (Venture Partner, Lightspeed J.J. Fliegelman (CTO/Founder, Wayup) Special thanks to our earliest believers: Adam Guild (CEO/Founder, Owner), Cory Levy (Founder, ZFellows), and Nicolas Dessaigne (Partner, YC). And most importantly, thank you to the best co-founder and CTO Lawrence Liu. – We're hiring for founding engineer, designer, and ML roles who want to redefine how humans work. Join a world-class team building technology that transforms lives daily with top-tier compensation and equity. Comment "Join Willow" to be fast-tracked. The next decade will be defined by voice-first computing. The question isn't whether this transformation will happen. It's whether you'll be part of building it.

Allan Guo

499,059 просмотров • 1 год назад

We live in the solo founder era. That's for sure and building with AI has accelerated. I am building software to use for myself and replace the expensive tools I used to use. And partially thanks to AI we can build faster, but not dramatically faster if you want to build a commercial grade product. Before I was using a live chat and customer support tool that costed around 50-100$ a month. This helped me to interact with the customers of my agency or prospects. But I decided a few months ago to build my own and stop paying for these more expensive solutions. I did and turned into a product for everyone to use. The build was not 1-2 hours of work using AI, but it was a several-month process on and off as I needed it. Finally, it has turned into a commercial grade product. I have built several of these and this is when we will see more and more solutions like these. Let's start bootstrapping before showing MRR figures.
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We live in the solo founder era. That's for sure and building with AI has accelerated. I am building software to use for myself and replace the expensive tools I used to use. And partially thanks to AI we can build faster, but not dramatically faster if you want to build a commercial grade product. Before I was using a live chat and customer support tool that costed around 50-100$ a month. This helped me to interact with the customers of my agency or prospects. But I decided a few months ago to build my own and stop paying for these more expensive solutions. I did and turned into a product for everyone to use. The build was not 1-2 hours of work using AI, but it was a several-month process on and off as I needed it. Finally, it has turned into a commercial grade product. I have built several of these and this is when we will see more and more solutions like these. Let's start bootstrapping before showing MRR figures.

andrei saioc

14,422 просмотров • 1 год назад

AI legal startups are a thing in 2024. But as Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig puts it, “nobody was trying to buy an AI legal assistant back in 2015.” Ironclad has one of the most interesting and underexplored stories out there IMO. As we were developing First Round's PMF Method, we learned so much from their journey — super grateful Jason took the time to share his insights for other builders. 🙏 Here were a few of my takeaways: 🔬 Zoom in to find focus “It was actually fairly easy to sign up early customers — what was difficult was finding a product that could address that market. That took us several years of iteration. We had to try to figure out what pieces we could peel off into a repeatable, discrete software product. We quickly realized the really interesting part of the problem was in repeatable business transactions — sales agreements, employment agreements, NDAs licensing agreements, partnership agreements. A lot of our competitors tried to do everything that corporate legal teams do. But we were only doing the contract part.” 📣 Expand an existing category (with an existing buying cycle) But the initial AI legal assistant positioning wasn’t resonating. I’ve talked to 100s of founders about PMF and the story of how Ironclad got unstuck is one of the wildest ones I’ve heard. “100% of the time I had to explain what an AI legal assistant was. We had a hello@ironclad.ai email on our site. One day I got a one-liner message that said, ‘Hello, are you a CLM?’ I was so close to hitting archive, but it was from someone at a publicly traded company. But what was a CLM? Turns out it’s a Contract Lifecycle Management platform that helps enterprise companies create and manage their legal contracts. By that definition, we were. So of course I wrote back, ‘Yes, we are definitely a CLM, we would love to come demo our CLM for you.’ But while we were really great at creating contracts with our AI legal assistant product, we hadn't put a lot of thought into how you deal with contracts afterwards, with a feature called a repository. And so we had set up this demo with the legal team from this publicly traded company, and I turned to my co-founder Cai, and said, ‘By the way, we have 3 hours to build a repository.’ We took the train from SF to San Jose and he built the first version of a repository, which we demoed live at the end of the train ride. This customer was in a CLM evaluation cycle that had 12 other solutions in it, but they loved the demo. So we went and actually built the full product, and we won. And after that, of course, we changed our messaging. We got serious about building CLM functionality and that's our flagship product to this day. There were lots of people out there trying to buy a CLM so we just got to participate in a lot of buying cycles, but with the AI legal assistant buying cycle, we had to create every one of those.” 👥 Artificially constrain the buyer and build community early “One of the things that we did which was really helpful in hindsight was we artificially constrained the buyer we were going after. Once we decided to make the shift to enterprise, instead of trying to address the whole US market or the whole global market, we decided we only cared about being the number one CLM in SoMa. We got a list of every company that could use the CLM in SoMa and got intros to them — it just provided a ton of focus for us. It's how we also stumbled into doing community. We would host these community dinners and if you were a general counsel of a company based in SoMa, you probably knew other people that were coming to them. We just started to get this buzz of ‘Are you going to the Ironclad thing tonight?’ There's a ton of value if you can discover a part of the organization that no one cares about, and connect that part of the organization to a larger business problem.” 📚 Founder-led sales is learnable I was impressed to learn that Jason still sends cold outreach himself to this day. But founder-led sales didn’t come naturally. “A misconception I had about early-stage startups was that the cartoon character salesperson who's slapping everyone on the back and is a total extrovert is the best salesperson. And it's actually the person who's almost like an engineer in their mindset — super methodical, sends great follow ups, could be very shy. It's a very learnable skill.”
7:07

AI legal startups are a thing in 2024. But as Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig puts it, “nobody was trying to buy an AI legal assistant back in 2015.” Ironclad has one of the most interesting and underexplored stories out there IMO. As we were developing First Round's PMF Method, we learned so much from their journey — super grateful Jason took the time to share his insights for other builders. 🙏 Here were a few of my takeaways: 🔬 Zoom in to find focus “It was actually fairly easy to sign up early customers — what was difficult was finding a product that could address that market. That took us several years of iteration. We had to try to figure out what pieces we could peel off into a repeatable, discrete software product. We quickly realized the really interesting part of the problem was in repeatable business transactions — sales agreements, employment agreements, NDAs licensing agreements, partnership agreements. A lot of our competitors tried to do everything that corporate legal teams do. But we were only doing the contract part.” 📣 Expand an existing category (with an existing buying cycle) But the initial AI legal assistant positioning wasn’t resonating. I’ve talked to 100s of founders about PMF and the story of how Ironclad got unstuck is one of the wildest ones I’ve heard. “100% of the time I had to explain what an AI legal assistant was. We had a [email protected] email on our site. One day I got a one-liner message that said, ‘Hello, are you a CLM?’ I was so close to hitting archive, but it was from someone at a publicly traded company. But what was a CLM? Turns out it’s a Contract Lifecycle Management platform that helps enterprise companies create and manage their legal contracts. By that definition, we were. So of course I wrote back, ‘Yes, we are definitely a CLM, we would love to come demo our CLM for you.’ But while we were really great at creating contracts with our AI legal assistant product, we hadn't put a lot of thought into how you deal with contracts afterwards, with a feature called a repository. And so we had set up this demo with the legal team from this publicly traded company, and I turned to my co-founder Cai, and said, ‘By the way, we have 3 hours to build a repository.’ We took the train from SF to San Jose and he built the first version of a repository, which we demoed live at the end of the train ride. This customer was in a CLM evaluation cycle that had 12 other solutions in it, but they loved the demo. So we went and actually built the full product, and we won. And after that, of course, we changed our messaging. We got serious about building CLM functionality and that's our flagship product to this day. There were lots of people out there trying to buy a CLM so we just got to participate in a lot of buying cycles, but with the AI legal assistant buying cycle, we had to create every one of those.” 👥 Artificially constrain the buyer and build community early “One of the things that we did which was really helpful in hindsight was we artificially constrained the buyer we were going after. Once we decided to make the shift to enterprise, instead of trying to address the whole US market or the whole global market, we decided we only cared about being the number one CLM in SoMa. We got a list of every company that could use the CLM in SoMa and got intros to them — it just provided a ton of focus for us. It's how we also stumbled into doing community. We would host these community dinners and if you were a general counsel of a company based in SoMa, you probably knew other people that were coming to them. We just started to get this buzz of ‘Are you going to the Ironclad thing tonight?’ There's a ton of value if you can discover a part of the organization that no one cares about, and connect that part of the organization to a larger business problem.” 📚 Founder-led sales is learnable I was impressed to learn that Jason still sends cold outreach himself to this day. But founder-led sales didn’t come naturally. “A misconception I had about early-stage startups was that the cartoon character salesperson who's slapping everyone on the back and is a total extrovert is the best salesperson. And it's actually the person who's almost like an engineer in their mindset — super methodical, sends great follow ups, could be very shy. It's a very learnable skill.”

Todd Jackson

50,683 просмотров • 2 лет назад

Brian Armstrong (Brian Armstrong ) on why founder-led companies are special: Brian: We thought maybe 50% of the company would resign. David: What would've happened if 50% of the company resigned? Brian: We would've built it all back. This is actually a very important point because I think there's a big difference between a founder and a presider of a company. I know that I could build it back because I started it when it was just me on a laptop. And I was there when it was 10 people and 100 people and 1,000 people. And if we need to go from 2000 to 1000 that's not a big deal to me. I could go back to being on my laptop again if I had to. There's this great Lee Kuan Yew [founder of Singapore] speech that he gave when he was dealing with a strike that was happening. He says in this speech, and it gives me chills every time, he says I sat across the table from them and said get back to work. I will not allow you to bring this country down. And if you don’t do it, I’m prepared to rebuild it all from scratch again. And he said anyone who rules Singapore has to have iron in their veins. I will rebuild it all from scratch. I was watching videos like that and was like this is what I need to do as a leader. It was very inspiring. There are moments like that. You have to stand up and say: We're going in this direction and if you're not on board with it, that’s okay, you can leave. But we're going this way. That's leadership.
1:49

Brian Armstrong (Brian Armstrong ) on why founder-led companies are special: Brian: We thought maybe 50% of the company would resign. David: What would've happened if 50% of the company resigned? Brian: We would've built it all back. This is actually a very important point because I think there's a big difference between a founder and a presider of a company. I know that I could build it back because I started it when it was just me on a laptop. And I was there when it was 10 people and 100 people and 1,000 people. And if we need to go from 2000 to 1000 that's not a big deal to me. I could go back to being on my laptop again if I had to. There's this great Lee Kuan Yew [founder of Singapore] speech that he gave when he was dealing with a strike that was happening. He says in this speech, and it gives me chills every time, he says I sat across the table from them and said get back to work. I will not allow you to bring this country down. And if you don’t do it, I’m prepared to rebuild it all from scratch again. And he said anyone who rules Singapore has to have iron in their veins. I will rebuild it all from scratch. I was watching videos like that and was like this is what I need to do as a leader. It was very inspiring. There are moments like that. You have to stand up and say: We're going in this direction and if you're not on board with it, that’s okay, you can leave. But we're going this way. That's leadership.

David Senra

100,936 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад

Don’t start with the product. Start with distribution. I give this advice to entrepreneurs all the time because distribution is the hardest part of building a company. “Build it and they will come” almost never works. And even if you expect distribution to be hard—it’ll be 10× harder. HotelTonight started with a distribution insight. In 2009, we saw that the App Store about to become a massive channel. Billion-dollar companies would be built there, and early movers could earn free distribution before the competition showed up. From that insight, we worked backwards to the product: - A use case uniquely suited to mobile: last-minute hotel booking - Designed to win App Store ranking and retention: beautiful UI, lightning-fast 8-second bookings - Clear, curated choices and amazing deals that fit the mobile moment That combo—a unique distribution edge + a product tailored to it—powered our growth. As you think about your next company, begin with your edge in distribution. Maybe you are an expert at selling into a specific vertical. Maybe you're great at creating authentic content. Maybe you’ve spotted an emerging channel before anyone else. Only then decide what to build—the product that best amplifies your distribution advantage. At speedrun, we’re seeing teams win with GEO, founder-led content, and high-intent launch videos. So I’ll leave you with a prompt: What’s your unique approach to distribution—and what product could you build that maximizes it? If you’re working on this, I’d love to hear from you. Apply to a16z speedrun 🧊 at sr [dot] a16z [dot] com.
1:54

Don’t start with the product. Start with distribution. I give this advice to entrepreneurs all the time because distribution is the hardest part of building a company. “Build it and they will come” almost never works. And even if you expect distribution to be hard—it’ll be 10× harder. HotelTonight started with a distribution insight. In 2009, we saw that the App Store about to become a massive channel. Billion-dollar companies would be built there, and early movers could earn free distribution before the competition showed up. From that insight, we worked backwards to the product: - A use case uniquely suited to mobile: last-minute hotel booking - Designed to win App Store ranking and retention: beautiful UI, lightning-fast 8-second bookings - Clear, curated choices and amazing deals that fit the mobile moment That combo—a unique distribution edge + a product tailored to it—powered our growth. As you think about your next company, begin with your edge in distribution. Maybe you are an expert at selling into a specific vertical. Maybe you're great at creating authentic content. Maybe you’ve spotted an emerging channel before anyone else. Only then decide what to build—the product that best amplifies your distribution advantage. At speedrun, we’re seeing teams win with GEO, founder-led content, and high-intent launch videos. So I’ll leave you with a prompt: What’s your unique approach to distribution—and what product could you build that maximizes it? If you’re working on this, I’d love to hear from you. Apply to a16z speedrun 🧊 at sr [dot] a16z [dot] com.

Sam Shank

328,277 просмотров • 10 месяцев назад

"This company (Vapi) is on fire right now." – Gustaf Alströmer, Partner at Y Combinator. Two years ago, if you’d told me that Gustaf would be sharing Vapi’s success story on the YC podcast, I wouldn’t have believed you. At the time, things weren’t going our way. We were two years post-YC, but the idea we raised our seed round on—a button to make joining online meetings—had settled into a lifestyle business. We were back in Canada, working 9-5, and feeling like we weren’t reaching our full potential as founders. Then, we had that pivotal conversation with Michael Seibel. His advice? Move back to SF and start fresh. It was a massive leap of faith, but we did it. We made a bold pivot, built Vapi from the ground up, and today, we couldn’t be more excited to see everything finally clicking into place. Fun fact: When we launched our first product, Gustaf was our very first customer—paying $20 to use our button. He’s been a huge supporter from day one. Thank you, Gustaf!
1:50

"This company (Vapi) is on fire right now." – Gustaf Alströmer, Partner at Y Combinator. Two years ago, if you’d told me that Gustaf would be sharing Vapi’s success story on the YC podcast, I wouldn’t have believed you. At the time, things weren’t going our way. We were two years post-YC, but the idea we raised our seed round on—a button to make joining online meetings—had settled into a lifestyle business. We were back in Canada, working 9-5, and feeling like we weren’t reaching our full potential as founders. Then, we had that pivotal conversation with Michael Seibel. His advice? Move back to SF and start fresh. It was a massive leap of faith, but we did it. We made a bold pivot, built Vapi from the ground up, and today, we couldn’t be more excited to see everything finally clicking into place. Fun fact: When we launched our first product, Gustaf was our very first customer—paying $20 to use our button. He’s been a huge supporter from day one. Thank you, Gustaf!

Jordan Dearsley

40,696 просмотров • 1 год назад

James Currier on how he grew a photo sharing site to 47 million users in 6 months “Most product people start by saying, ‘There’s a problem and we’re going to build a product that’s going to solve that problem. Then we’re going to market it,” NFX founder James Currier observes. Of the 45 companies James has spoken to in the last 18 months, at least 40 of them have said some version of this. “I was also taught this back in the 1990s,” James says. “But through experimentation, I’ve realized that this is actually the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it — if you want to grow your business — is to ask, ‘What is the language? How am I going to market this?’ . . . Figure out what the language is and then build the product to fit what the language is.” James gives the example of a photo sharing site he launched years ago: “It said ‘Store your Photos’ on the homepage, and we were not growing. So one day, we literally just changed the homepage to say ‘Share your Photos.’ The team that was working on it said, ‘Our site doesn’t actually share photos. It just stores the photos.’ I said, ‘Well, fix that.’ What ended up happening was they started building features that allowed people to share their photos, and we registered 47 million people in 6 months. And that was back when the Internet was 250 million people.” He continues: “What we realized was that by changing the language, you change how the users are interacting with your site. And you also change your thinking about the product so that the features and subsequent language in the product actually fits with the main value proposition.” James gives another example: “We had a matchmaking site, and the promise there was ‘Find a date.’ It wasn’t growing and we had to buy all this traffic from Google and elsewhere to keep the whole thing going. So what we did was we changed the language and the value proposition to say, ‘Help people find a date.’ When we did that, we registered 28 million people in about 9 months, virally with no cost to us. We changed the language, and then we changed the product subsequently.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2016)
2:32

James Currier on how he grew a photo sharing site to 47 million users in 6 months “Most product people start by saying, ‘There’s a problem and we’re going to build a product that’s going to solve that problem. Then we’re going to market it,” NFX founder James Currier observes. Of the 45 companies James has spoken to in the last 18 months, at least 40 of them have said some version of this. “I was also taught this back in the 1990s,” James says. “But through experimentation, I’ve realized that this is actually the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it — if you want to grow your business — is to ask, ‘What is the language? How am I going to market this?’ . . . Figure out what the language is and then build the product to fit what the language is.” James gives the example of a photo sharing site he launched years ago: “It said ‘Store your Photos’ on the homepage, and we were not growing. So one day, we literally just changed the homepage to say ‘Share your Photos.’ The team that was working on it said, ‘Our site doesn’t actually share photos. It just stores the photos.’ I said, ‘Well, fix that.’ What ended up happening was they started building features that allowed people to share their photos, and we registered 47 million people in 6 months. And that was back when the Internet was 250 million people.” He continues: “What we realized was that by changing the language, you change how the users are interacting with your site. And you also change your thinking about the product so that the features and subsequent language in the product actually fits with the main value proposition.” James gives another example: “We had a matchmaking site, and the promise there was ‘Find a date.’ It wasn’t growing and we had to buy all this traffic from Google and elsewhere to keep the whole thing going. So what we did was we changed the language and the value proposition to say, ‘Help people find a date.’ When we did that, we registered 28 million people in about 9 months, virally with no cost to us. We changed the language, and then we changed the product subsequently.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2016)

Startup Archive

18,388 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад

Dylan Field on his biggest learnings from Figma’s 0 to 1 phase Figma’s 0 to 1 phase was notoriously long. The company was founded in 2012, but it took four years before they publicly launched their product in 2016. Figma co-founder Dylan Field reflects on what he learned from this period: “From August 2012 to June of 2013, that was a period where we were pivoting constantly trying lots of things. But then we had a thesis, felt like there was an opportunity, and started to build it out more. Then it was like, ‘Okay, this is going to take a while.’ In retrospect, we were lucky to have raised money and have resources, but I should have hired faster once we started to get signal from the market that we had product/market fit.” Dylan recalls going to a user study with a friend who was a designer at Coursera. The following day, his friend sent over a 12-page document listing all of the stuff he wanted Dylan to build into Figma. “I should’ve taken something like that and gone, ‘Okay, this is clear product/market pull.’ The market was pulling the product out of us. I should’ve then gone and hired faster. But instead I was still very cautious. And so that’s something where I wish — if I could go back in time — we would’ve gone a little faster there.” Sam Altman gives similar advice: “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” Video source: Y Combinator (2025)
2:19

Dylan Field on his biggest learnings from Figma’s 0 to 1 phase Figma’s 0 to 1 phase was notoriously long. The company was founded in 2012, but it took four years before they publicly launched their product in 2016. Figma co-founder Dylan Field reflects on what he learned from this period: “From August 2012 to June of 2013, that was a period where we were pivoting constantly trying lots of things. But then we had a thesis, felt like there was an opportunity, and started to build it out more. Then it was like, ‘Okay, this is going to take a while.’ In retrospect, we were lucky to have raised money and have resources, but I should have hired faster once we started to get signal from the market that we had product/market fit.” Dylan recalls going to a user study with a friend who was a designer at Coursera. The following day, his friend sent over a 12-page document listing all of the stuff he wanted Dylan to build into Figma. “I should’ve taken something like that and gone, ‘Okay, this is clear product/market pull.’ The market was pulling the product out of us. I should’ve then gone and hired faster. But instead I was still very cautious. And so that’s something where I wish — if I could go back in time — we would’ve gone a little faster there.” Sam Altman gives similar advice: “In the early days, when you’re experimenting and zig zagging, you’re like a fast little speed boat and want to be able to turn the whole company on a dime. You can’t do that if you’re a big company—cash burn aside, which is another problem. The flexibility of the company basically decreases with the square of the number of employees, so you want to stay really small until you’re sure things are working. Once things are working, then you can get really big.” Video source: Y Combinator (2025)

Startup Archive

39,718 просмотров • 1 год назад

Anduril Founder Palmer Luckey Tells the Story of Anduril’s First Ever Product: “The Anduril Sentry Tank. It was a tracked firefighting vehicle the size of a tank… and it could protect critical infrastructure from wildfires.” “We built two full working prototypes, we were on the cover of Popular Mechanics and it said: ‘The Future of Firefighting’.” “I really believed that it was… then it turned out there were some political problems.” “There were some really strong unions that didn’t want robots to automate their jobs… the Governor was told that if they procured it, the unions would oppose him in the upcoming elections.” “There were people who told us this was going to be a problem, but back then I was more naive and optimistic.” “I said: ‘No, if you build it they will come.’ And I was wrong.” “We have two prototypes that sit underneath a tarp in a warehouse, waiting for the world to change.”
1:03

Anduril Founder Palmer Luckey Tells the Story of Anduril’s First Ever Product: “The Anduril Sentry Tank. It was a tracked firefighting vehicle the size of a tank… and it could protect critical infrastructure from wildfires.” “We built two full working prototypes, we were on the cover of Popular Mechanics and it said: ‘The Future of Firefighting’.” “I really believed that it was… then it turned out there were some political problems.” “There were some really strong unions that didn’t want robots to automate their jobs… the Governor was told that if they procured it, the unions would oppose him in the upcoming elections.” “There were people who told us this was going to be a problem, but back then I was more naive and optimistic.” “I said: ‘No, if you build it they will come.’ And I was wrong.” “We have two prototypes that sit underneath a tarp in a warehouse, waiting for the world to change.”

Anduril Appreciator

90,727 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад

Here’s the truth: I didn’t know how to code when I started Goodspeed I didn’t even have a technical co-founder. But I had ideas I wanted to launch. I wanted to make older adults entrepreneurs - because they have knowledge, skills, and value that often go untapped. Then I found Bubble. That moment shifted everything. 4 years on - I run Goodspeed - an AI-powered agency. We’ve built a SaaS tool for magicians. We’ve built a marketplace for care homes. We’ve helped enterprises launch internal tools. If you have an idea, you can bring it to life. The tools exist. I'm Harish - CEO of Goodspeed, an AI-powered software agency that builds with Bubble We help teams go from idea → product → scale, faster than ever. Want to build with us? Send me a DM.
1:09

Here’s the truth: I didn’t know how to code when I started Goodspeed I didn’t even have a technical co-founder. But I had ideas I wanted to launch. I wanted to make older adults entrepreneurs - because they have knowledge, skills, and value that often go untapped. Then I found Bubble. That moment shifted everything. 4 years on - I run Goodspeed - an AI-powered agency. We’ve built a SaaS tool for magicians. We’ve built a marketplace for care homes. We’ve helped enterprises launch internal tools. If you have an idea, you can bring it to life. The tools exist. I'm Harish - CEO of Goodspeed, an AI-powered software agency that builds with Bubble We help teams go from idea → product → scale, faster than ever. Want to build with us? Send me a DM.

Harish Malhi

16,188 просмотров • 8 месяцев назад

From Creator to Founder: The Rollercoaster Journey of Building Chatter Social Man, what a journey it’s been so far. Four years ago, I was just another creator, spending late nights on Clubhouse during the height of the pandemic. Like so many others, I was searching for connection, for community, for something meaningful. But what I found there wasn’t just connection—it was purpose. Alongside my brother, Jonathan Bing, we built a nightly show that reached over 5 million people. Imagine that: 5 million lives touched by conversations that felt real and unfiltered, all on a platform that at its peak had 10 million monthly active users. Clubhouse was magic. But then the decline began. Watching the platform struggle, I couldn’t help but reflect: what made it great? What went wrong? And what could the future look like if we did things differently? The Spark of Chatter As a content creator, I understood the needs of both creators and users. I knew what excited people, what kept them engaged, and what made them leave. Clubhouse had tapped into something special, but it had missed the mark on scalability and sustainability. By September 2023, I couldn’t stop thinking about the potential for something new—something that brought back the magic of real-time interaction but made it scalable, engaging, and sticky. And so, I set out to build Chatter Social. But I wasn’t a tech founder. I didn’t have a background in software development or a network of Silicon Valley insiders. What I did have was determination and the belief that if I could bring the right people together, we could build something extraordinary. Building the Team The journey to build Chatter started with assembling a team. Through my network from my days on Clubhouse, I found Samir, my first CTO. He believed in the vision and was instrumental in getting the project off the ground. Shortly after, I connected with Tyler, our Head of Design, whose creativity brought life to our ideas. A developer joined us soon after, and we were off to the races. By the end of 2023, Samir had to step away due to other commitments, and we promoted the developer to CTO. At the same time, I brought on Banko, a Sony music executive, as our CMO. Banko’s connections led to one of our biggest early wins: landing Davido, a global superstar, as an owner-ambassador. To this day, I still marvel at the fact that Davido believed in our vision when all we had were Tyler’s Figma designs. From Dream to Reality Early 2024 was a whirlwind. We hired Yurii and Vasyl, two developers from Ukraine who brought incredible skill and dedication to the team. Vasyl, in particular, stood out as a leader and has since earned an equity position in the company. But despite these wins, we were facing growing pains. Our new CTO struggled to meet deadlines, and as a result, I found myself constantly pushing back the launch date. What started as a January release turned into February, then March, then April, then May. By then, people on Twitter Spaces—where I had been hyping up the platform—started doubting if we even had a product. Launch and Lessons June 1, 2024, marked a turning point. It was the day my son Noah was born and the day we launched Chatter in private beta. We started with just 40 users, but by the end of the month, we had grown to 1,000. The engagement was unbelievable. Users loved it, even though we had launched with just one feature: live rooms. This represented less than 20% of what we had planned, but it was enough to show that we were onto something big. In July, we launched our public beta on the App Store as an invite-only platform. Within 48 hours, Chatter ranked as a top 30 social app in over 30 countries. But our invite system throttled access, and most users couldn’t get in. While engagement metrics soared for those inside, our AWS costs exploded. In August, our AWS bill hit $10,000. By September, it had climbed to $15,000, and we were drowning in bugs and glitches. The breaking point came when our CTO became unresponsive, often disappearing during critical moments. Users were dropping off, frustrated by the issues, developers were confused and the team was also growing increasingly frustrated, I made the tough decision to let him go. A New Beginning Enter Horane, a long-time user of Chatter who had been with us since private beta. He was the first to discover some of the most innovative use cases for the platform and had a deep passion for its potential. After meeting him in person at a Chatter event, I knew he was the right person to step into the CTO role. When Horane took over, we discovered just how bad the situation was. Key areas of the codebase were locked, and there were no separate environments for development and production. Every fix seemed to break something else. But through sheer determination and countless 18-hour days, Horane stabilized the platform. Today, Chatter is far from perfect, but it’s stable. The bugs that plagued us have been reduced to moderate issues, and our core users—those who stuck with us through the chaos—are still engaged on the platform. Looking Ahead: Chatter V2 While the platform is stable now, we’ve shifted our focus to Chatter V2. This is where the magic really begins. V2 isn’t just an improvement; it’s a complete reimagining of the platform. It includes all the features we couldn’t release in V1 because we were too busy putting out fires. Imagine this: Chatter V1, with only one live feature, was incredibly sticky. Now think about what happens when we release a fully loaded platform with all the innovative features we’ve been working on behind the scenes. The possibilities are endless. V2 is slated to hit TestFlight by the end of December, with a public release in January 2025. And this time, we’re ready—not just with the product but with the lessons we’ve learned. The Hard Lessons This journey has taught me more than I ever thought possible: 1) Your Team is Everything: The right people can make or break your vision. Finding people who believe in your mission is just as important as finding people with the right skills. 2) Adaptability is Key: As a non-technical founder, I had to learn about development, DevOps, and product management on the fly. Challenges will push you to grow, whether you’re ready or not. 3) Trust the Process: Every setback, every delay, every bug—it all taught us something. Without those lessons, we wouldn’t be building the incredible V2 product we are today. 4) Resilience is Non-Negotiable: From technical disasters to predatory investors who tried to exploit my desperation, I’ve had to fight for this vision every step of the way. What’s Next December is shaping up to be an exciting month. We have some amazing events planned on the platform to close out the year, bringing our core community together as we prepare for the V2 launch. When V2 drops, it will mark a new era for Chatter. This isn’t just a social audio platform or a social audiovisual platform. Chatter is all about interactive experiences—making social media social again in ways that are truly unique. The public launch is slated for February 2025, and for the first time, we’ll have the marketing dollars to tell the world about Chatter. Our core community has been our biggest cheerleaders, and I can’t wait to see how the world reacts when they experience what we’ve built. Final Thoughts This has been the hardest year of my life, but also the most rewarding. To other founders, or anyone thinking about starting a company: know this—it will test you in ways you can’t imagine. You’ll face betrayal, doubt, and moments where you feel like giving up. But if you believe in your vision and refuse to quit, you’ll find a way forward. Thank you to everyone who has supported me, my team, and Chatter. We’re just getting started. Let’s talk about it. 🚀 If this story inspired you, please like and share it so others can learn from my experiences. The journey is far from over, but I’m more excited than ever for what’s to come.
0:25

From Creator to Founder: The Rollercoaster Journey of Building Chatter Social Man, what a journey it’s been so far. Four years ago, I was just another creator, spending late nights on Clubhouse during the height of the pandemic. Like so many others, I was searching for connection, for community, for something meaningful. But what I found there wasn’t just connection—it was purpose. Alongside my brother, Jonathan Bing, we built a nightly show that reached over 5 million people. Imagine that: 5 million lives touched by conversations that felt real and unfiltered, all on a platform that at its peak had 10 million monthly active users. Clubhouse was magic. But then the decline began. Watching the platform struggle, I couldn’t help but reflect: what made it great? What went wrong? And what could the future look like if we did things differently? The Spark of Chatter As a content creator, I understood the needs of both creators and users. I knew what excited people, what kept them engaged, and what made them leave. Clubhouse had tapped into something special, but it had missed the mark on scalability and sustainability. By September 2023, I couldn’t stop thinking about the potential for something new—something that brought back the magic of real-time interaction but made it scalable, engaging, and sticky. And so, I set out to build Chatter Social. But I wasn’t a tech founder. I didn’t have a background in software development or a network of Silicon Valley insiders. What I did have was determination and the belief that if I could bring the right people together, we could build something extraordinary. Building the Team The journey to build Chatter started with assembling a team. Through my network from my days on Clubhouse, I found Samir, my first CTO. He believed in the vision and was instrumental in getting the project off the ground. Shortly after, I connected with Tyler, our Head of Design, whose creativity brought life to our ideas. A developer joined us soon after, and we were off to the races. By the end of 2023, Samir had to step away due to other commitments, and we promoted the developer to CTO. At the same time, I brought on Banko, a Sony music executive, as our CMO. Banko’s connections led to one of our biggest early wins: landing Davido, a global superstar, as an owner-ambassador. To this day, I still marvel at the fact that Davido believed in our vision when all we had were Tyler’s Figma designs. From Dream to Reality Early 2024 was a whirlwind. We hired Yurii and Vasyl, two developers from Ukraine who brought incredible skill and dedication to the team. Vasyl, in particular, stood out as a leader and has since earned an equity position in the company. But despite these wins, we were facing growing pains. Our new CTO struggled to meet deadlines, and as a result, I found myself constantly pushing back the launch date. What started as a January release turned into February, then March, then April, then May. By then, people on Twitter Spaces—where I had been hyping up the platform—started doubting if we even had a product. Launch and Lessons June 1, 2024, marked a turning point. It was the day my son Noah was born and the day we launched Chatter in private beta. We started with just 40 users, but by the end of the month, we had grown to 1,000. The engagement was unbelievable. Users loved it, even though we had launched with just one feature: live rooms. This represented less than 20% of what we had planned, but it was enough to show that we were onto something big. In July, we launched our public beta on the App Store as an invite-only platform. Within 48 hours, Chatter ranked as a top 30 social app in over 30 countries. But our invite system throttled access, and most users couldn’t get in. While engagement metrics soared for those inside, our AWS costs exploded. In August, our AWS bill hit $10,000. By September, it had climbed to $15,000, and we were drowning in bugs and glitches. The breaking point came when our CTO became unresponsive, often disappearing during critical moments. Users were dropping off, frustrated by the issues, developers were confused and the team was also growing increasingly frustrated, I made the tough decision to let him go. A New Beginning Enter Horane, a long-time user of Chatter who had been with us since private beta. He was the first to discover some of the most innovative use cases for the platform and had a deep passion for its potential. After meeting him in person at a Chatter event, I knew he was the right person to step into the CTO role. When Horane took over, we discovered just how bad the situation was. Key areas of the codebase were locked, and there were no separate environments for development and production. Every fix seemed to break something else. But through sheer determination and countless 18-hour days, Horane stabilized the platform. Today, Chatter is far from perfect, but it’s stable. The bugs that plagued us have been reduced to moderate issues, and our core users—those who stuck with us through the chaos—are still engaged on the platform. Looking Ahead: Chatter V2 While the platform is stable now, we’ve shifted our focus to Chatter V2. This is where the magic really begins. V2 isn’t just an improvement; it’s a complete reimagining of the platform. It includes all the features we couldn’t release in V1 because we were too busy putting out fires. Imagine this: Chatter V1, with only one live feature, was incredibly sticky. Now think about what happens when we release a fully loaded platform with all the innovative features we’ve been working on behind the scenes. The possibilities are endless. V2 is slated to hit TestFlight by the end of December, with a public release in January 2025. And this time, we’re ready—not just with the product but with the lessons we’ve learned. The Hard Lessons This journey has taught me more than I ever thought possible: 1) Your Team is Everything: The right people can make or break your vision. Finding people who believe in your mission is just as important as finding people with the right skills. 2) Adaptability is Key: As a non-technical founder, I had to learn about development, DevOps, and product management on the fly. Challenges will push you to grow, whether you’re ready or not. 3) Trust the Process: Every setback, every delay, every bug—it all taught us something. Without those lessons, we wouldn’t be building the incredible V2 product we are today. 4) Resilience is Non-Negotiable: From technical disasters to predatory investors who tried to exploit my desperation, I’ve had to fight for this vision every step of the way. What’s Next December is shaping up to be an exciting month. We have some amazing events planned on the platform to close out the year, bringing our core community together as we prepare for the V2 launch. When V2 drops, it will mark a new era for Chatter. This isn’t just a social audio platform or a social audiovisual platform. Chatter is all about interactive experiences—making social media social again in ways that are truly unique. The public launch is slated for February 2025, and for the first time, we’ll have the marketing dollars to tell the world about Chatter. Our core community has been our biggest cheerleaders, and I can’t wait to see how the world reacts when they experience what we’ve built. Final Thoughts This has been the hardest year of my life, but also the most rewarding. To other founders, or anyone thinking about starting a company: know this—it will test you in ways you can’t imagine. You’ll face betrayal, doubt, and moments where you feel like giving up. But if you believe in your vision and refuse to quit, you’ll find a way forward. Thank you to everyone who has supported me, my team, and Chatter. We’re just getting started. Let’s talk about it. 🚀 If this story inspired you, please like and share it so others can learn from my experiences. The journey is far from over, but I’m more excited than ever for what’s to come.

Nelson Epega

43,340 просмотров • 1 год назад

Spencer Rascoff: "I will never invest in a consumer startup with paid marketing” Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff explains how the $10B+ company got its initial traffic: “Very deliberately—and this is the advice I would give to any founder—we did no advertising. The philosophy for the first three years of the company was: any money that we might spend on SEM, Google, Facebook, whatever… Let’s invest that in product and try to build something viral.” He continues: “Most of the great companies and services that we use today—from Uber to Snapchat to Facebook to Instagram—followed the same philosophy.” After three or four years, you do start seeing ads for these companies. But in the early days of those services, it’s all about product and not about advertising. “The reason you do that is to build innovation and product development bonafides. When I do angel investing for example, I will never invest in anything B2C with paid marketing.” Zillow launched with just consumer PR and a product that people liked. Mark Zuckerberg echoed Spencer’s view in a previous Startup Archive answer: “The traditional approach to growing and marketing is you have a communications group or marketing team and you buy ads. Sometimes there’s a place for that.. But if you’re actually trying to grow a product, the best levers for doing that are often within the product itself.”
1:57

Spencer Rascoff: "I will never invest in a consumer startup with paid marketing” Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff explains how the $10B+ company got its initial traffic: “Very deliberately—and this is the advice I would give to any founder—we did no advertising. The philosophy for the first three years of the company was: any money that we might spend on SEM, Google, Facebook, whatever… Let’s invest that in product and try to build something viral.” He continues: “Most of the great companies and services that we use today—from Uber to Snapchat to Facebook to Instagram—followed the same philosophy.” After three or four years, you do start seeing ads for these companies. But in the early days of those services, it’s all about product and not about advertising. “The reason you do that is to build innovation and product development bonafides. When I do angel investing for example, I will never invest in anything B2C with paid marketing.” Zillow launched with just consumer PR and a product that people liked. Mark Zuckerberg echoed Spencer’s view in a previous Startup Archive answer: “The traditional approach to growing and marketing is you have a communications group or marketing team and you buy ads. Sometimes there’s a place for that.. But if you’re actually trying to grow a product, the best levers for doing that are often within the product itself.”

Startup Archive

26,529 просмотров • 1 год назад

Greg Brockman talks about when OpenAI first realized that AGI can't be achieved with "Non-Profit" status and the decided to abandon its Non-Profit roots. "In 2017, we started to think very hard about, first of all, how do we really achieve the mission? How do we actually build an AGI? What will that look like? And we started to do the math on compute. You start to realize that it is going to take a big computer. We came across a company called Cerebras, which was building a unique piece of computing hardware. The kind of computer that they were promising, we realized, was going to be far advanced from where our compute calculations looked. As you start to realize, if we could buy a lot of those computers, we could actually probably succeed at building an AGI. If we could get exclusive access to Cerebras, that could give us an overwhelming advantage. If we could buy very large data centers, that could be something unique as well. The thing about nonprofit fundraising is that I think there is essentially a cap to what is possible there. And so Elon, Sam, Ilya, and I all agreed that the only path forward for OpenAI, and the only path to achieve the mission, was to create a for-profit entity associated with OpenAI in some form. And so, we were committed to that direction. That is something that we knew was the only way to achieve the mission." --- From "The Knowledge Project Podcast" YT Channel (link in comment)
0:55

Greg Brockman talks about when OpenAI first realized that AGI can't be achieved with "Non-Profit" status and the decided to abandon its Non-Profit roots. "In 2017, we started to think very hard about, first of all, how do we really achieve the mission? How do we actually build an AGI? What will that look like? And we started to do the math on compute. You start to realize that it is going to take a big computer. We came across a company called Cerebras, which was building a unique piece of computing hardware. The kind of computer that they were promising, we realized, was going to be far advanced from where our compute calculations looked. As you start to realize, if we could buy a lot of those computers, we could actually probably succeed at building an AGI. If we could get exclusive access to Cerebras, that could give us an overwhelming advantage. If we could buy very large data centers, that could be something unique as well. The thing about nonprofit fundraising is that I think there is essentially a cap to what is possible there. And so Elon, Sam, Ilya, and I all agreed that the only path forward for OpenAI, and the only path to achieve the mission, was to create a for-profit entity associated with OpenAI in some form. And so, we were committed to that direction. That is something that we knew was the only way to achieve the mission." --- From "The Knowledge Project Podcast" YT Channel (link in comment)

Rohan Paul

10,311 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

Never told this story publicly, but here you go: Last year, Jump n Pass (Techstars '23) ran out of funds. Was largely deceived by this African VC, and was stupidly depending on their promised funds. Anyways, market timing and building a product that was way ahead of its time in Africa made it difficult to raise. In a bid to save my company I used the last funds in the account and started selling meat. Yes, you read right. I convinced my co-founder Rex Quadry and together we went to the Kara cow market, bought cows and started a cow sharing business. We were killing cows in our building and selling it for parts. Lol. Toni owned the marketing of our meat. 2 months after, we won the Zenith bank hackathon, and 2 days after, I jumped on a plane to San Francisco to rebuild our business for another market. 1 week after arriving the US, we got into Founders Inc and got funded. Our story is still being written, but today, when VCs ask, “what’s your moat.” I almost want to say: “I am the moat.” lol We don’t give up over here.
0:03

Never told this story publicly, but here you go: Last year, Jump n Pass (Techstars '23) ran out of funds. Was largely deceived by this African VC, and was stupidly depending on their promised funds. Anyways, market timing and building a product that was way ahead of its time in Africa made it difficult to raise. In a bid to save my company I used the last funds in the account and started selling meat. Yes, you read right. I convinced my co-founder Rex Quadry and together we went to the Kara cow market, bought cows and started a cow sharing business. We were killing cows in our building and selling it for parts. Lol. Toni owned the marketing of our meat. 2 months after, we won the Zenith bank hackathon, and 2 days after, I jumped on a plane to San Francisco to rebuild our business for another market. 1 week after arriving the US, we got into Founders Inc and got funded. Our story is still being written, but today, when VCs ask, “what’s your moat.” I almost want to say: “I am the moat.” lol We don’t give up over here.

Tunde Ademuyiwa

12,492 просмотров • 10 месяцев назад

With Y Combinator demo day coming up this weekend, I wanted to reflect on what I learned from YC W14, 10 years on + another company in: 1. The 7 minute espresso rule. Our first meeting with Sam Altman lasted just 7 minutes. The batch hadn’t even officially started yet and my cofounder Ryan Rowe and I drove down from Mountain View to the tiny SF YC outpost to meet him. Sam was making an espresso when we walked in. He opened with – “have you launched”? We said no, too many bugs. Our product Kimono Labs made it easy to just point and click to build a web scraper. Our promise was to get you an API in 60 seconds, without code. But it only worked on a handful of sites at the time. Sam pushed us to launched in 2 weeks. We debated. The espresso finished brewing, he picked it up, looked at us and said, “well, you better get going then and fix those bugs”. We left, launched in 2 weeks and learned one of the most important lessons that day - speed matters. Ship something you’re embarrassed by. 2. There are no experts. Ryan and I were not prepared for the rapid influx of user on launch day. It got tons of traffic on day 1 and we didn’t sleep in the next 48 hours bc servers and database kept crashing. We realized we weren’t the experts and needed to hire one. We went over to Michael Seibel for advice who smiled and told us that in the early days at SocialCam (Twitch) experts thought the streaming video problem was impossible. The answer wasn’t hiring an expert, but hiring someone young, capable and naïve enough to give it an earnest try. So we opted to just figure it out ourselves. 3. Messages in Pizza Boxes. Startups win through incredible customer service, then through product, not the other way around. Seibel told us how SocialCam’s streaming infrastructure went down while a key teammate was unreachable off-grid in a Tahoe cabin for the weekend. Normal people would have waited until Monday. Not Michael. He called a local pizza delivery place and asked the delivery person to send a large pizza with an urgent message in the box to the cabin. Their infrastructure was back up in hours. 4. The Twinkle can matter more than the TAM. Ambition matters just as much as practicality. Before demo day, we were struggling with the end of our pitch. We knew the value of our product, and had a fanatical and fast-growing user base, but the market size we calculated either seemed so ridiculously big that it was not plausible, or so narrow that it was equally silly. Paul Graham and Geoff Ralston sat with us and showed that us that if we can really pull it off at scale, it would be bigger than Google. PG suggested not talking about market size, but just making sure people could see the twinkle in our eyes when we talked about what you might be able to do with a structured copy of the internet that’s larger than Google’s. 5. You’re always at the Origin. Our demo day was successful beyond our wildest beliefs. Afterwards, Geoff drew a chart for us on a whiteboard. It was a hockey stick. He asked us where we thought we were. It was a rhetorical question. He said we were at the origin. Sam doubled down. When he invested in Kimono, he gave us a Zimbabwean Trillion dollar note (the result of extreme hyperinflation in Zimbabwe), as a cautionary reminder that the fundraising and valuation mean nothing. We have channeled this into our culture Arena with our ritual around neon shoelaces and a pair of neon track spikes hanging on the wall to remind us that we’re at the Olympic starting line, but we don’t have any medals yet. 6. High bandwidth discussions with users don’t happen over email. The “Collison installation” is part of YC lore. John Collison told us that talking to users live was essential because email and chat conversations were just not enough. We did 100s of Skype conversations with Kimono users + one power user Alex Chung, who I met this way, has become a close friend and even attended my wedding in India last year!
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With Y Combinator demo day coming up this weekend, I wanted to reflect on what I learned from YC W14, 10 years on + another company in: 1. The 7 minute espresso rule. Our first meeting with Sam Altman lasted just 7 minutes. The batch hadn’t even officially started yet and my cofounder Ryan Rowe and I drove down from Mountain View to the tiny SF YC outpost to meet him. Sam was making an espresso when we walked in. He opened with – “have you launched”? We said no, too many bugs. Our product Kimono Labs made it easy to just point and click to build a web scraper. Our promise was to get you an API in 60 seconds, without code. But it only worked on a handful of sites at the time. Sam pushed us to launched in 2 weeks. We debated. The espresso finished brewing, he picked it up, looked at us and said, “well, you better get going then and fix those bugs”. We left, launched in 2 weeks and learned one of the most important lessons that day - speed matters. Ship something you’re embarrassed by. 2. There are no experts. Ryan and I were not prepared for the rapid influx of user on launch day. It got tons of traffic on day 1 and we didn’t sleep in the next 48 hours bc servers and database kept crashing. We realized we weren’t the experts and needed to hire one. We went over to Michael Seibel for advice who smiled and told us that in the early days at SocialCam (Twitch) experts thought the streaming video problem was impossible. The answer wasn’t hiring an expert, but hiring someone young, capable and naïve enough to give it an earnest try. So we opted to just figure it out ourselves. 3. Messages in Pizza Boxes. Startups win through incredible customer service, then through product, not the other way around. Seibel told us how SocialCam’s streaming infrastructure went down while a key teammate was unreachable off-grid in a Tahoe cabin for the weekend. Normal people would have waited until Monday. Not Michael. He called a local pizza delivery place and asked the delivery person to send a large pizza with an urgent message in the box to the cabin. Their infrastructure was back up in hours. 4. The Twinkle can matter more than the TAM. Ambition matters just as much as practicality. Before demo day, we were struggling with the end of our pitch. We knew the value of our product, and had a fanatical and fast-growing user base, but the market size we calculated either seemed so ridiculously big that it was not plausible, or so narrow that it was equally silly. Paul Graham and Geoff Ralston sat with us and showed that us that if we can really pull it off at scale, it would be bigger than Google. PG suggested not talking about market size, but just making sure people could see the twinkle in our eyes when we talked about what you might be able to do with a structured copy of the internet that’s larger than Google’s. 5. You’re always at the Origin. Our demo day was successful beyond our wildest beliefs. Afterwards, Geoff drew a chart for us on a whiteboard. It was a hockey stick. He asked us where we thought we were. It was a rhetorical question. He said we were at the origin. Sam doubled down. When he invested in Kimono, he gave us a Zimbabwean Trillion dollar note (the result of extreme hyperinflation in Zimbabwe), as a cautionary reminder that the fundraising and valuation mean nothing. We have channeled this into our culture Arena with our ritual around neon shoelaces and a pair of neon track spikes hanging on the wall to remind us that we’re at the Olympic starting line, but we don’t have any medals yet. 6. High bandwidth discussions with users don’t happen over email. The “Collison installation” is part of YC lore. John Collison told us that talking to users live was essential because email and chat conversations were just not enough. We did 100s of Skype conversations with Kimono users + one power user Alex Chung, who I met this way, has become a close friend and even attended my wedding in India last year!

Pratap Ranade

142,909 просмотров • 2 лет назад