garry

I've actually funded 9 unicorns in the past 8 years and work with startups at the earliest possible stage, writing checks of $1M to $5M. And I give this advice away for free, because I find those "get rich quick" guides to be totally misleading.

I'm doing YouTube mainly to directly get the things I think work for founders out to people, just to help. So, I'm with you— but you have to understand my intention for the videos is to be something very different than those millionaire books.

If you looked at the user experiences of the two sites, they couldn't be more different.

User experience and design matters a lot.

Hm, I think it's pretty well known why Facebook won. Far deeper networks, far better engagement. Look up the work the Facebook Growth team did.

Oh you are super right about customer acquisition. That matters a ton! You should see some of my other videos that touch on that.

But I do think picking an idea from direct experience seems to work extra well, having funded hundreds of startups and seen what works and what doesn't.

I think most local newspapers have about as good as one as any. Facebook Events also has largely filled this.

As a Y Combinator partner for five years, it never failed that some hundreds of applications every single time were for local events startups.

I made this video and agree with this comment! Not everyone needs to make a billion dollar startup.

Oh man thanks! I don't do anything particularly special. I do have a dynamic mic (Electrovoice RE20) with a good compressor (dbx 286s) and that does give a good "radio effect."

Yes, keep in mind this is seven years of working hardcore on one problem.

For me, all I'm really trying to do is lift up stories and experiences that I think are superlative and noteworthy, with the hope that it helps more of those things exist.

This is helpful feedback for me in that if this feels too much like advertising, I'm not doing a good enough job there. Sorry about that.

Oh yes, low bar for sure. The challenge is to get it to be a high ceiling.

I think this is one of the fundamental quandaries of many services that sell to developers. There's always a way to roll it yourself such that the cost in money is low but the cost in time is high.

For me, I just don't have enough time in the day (parenthood + day job as an investor) so when I do code, I am looking for a lot of leverage, and I'm willing to trade off a monthly fee for it since it's like licensing software that lets me get something done a lot faster.

Most cloud services are like this: You could do it yourself, but when you compare it to hiring more people on your team, you should use a cloud service.

The upside to this is that a lot of startups are going to be able to get a lot more leverage through building on top of services like Algolia. I mean, this is really the AWS strategy in a nutshell, isn't it?

Maybe an over-enthusiastic customer here, but obviously I am also an investor. That's helpful feedback for me, so I appreciate it.

Trying to be helpful. If there are things you would rather see, happy to try to throw that on my YouTube channel too!

Full transparency, I worked with Algolia when I was a YC partner years ago. I also invested from my fund.

But I've been meaning to do a sit-down discussion with this team for a while. We've funded a lot of API-first developer-focused businesses in the past: Easypost, Lob, Apollo GraphQL, and developer focused stuff like LogDNA and so some of this is wanting to point to things that work well.

Interactivity in particular is really important to nail in first time experience.

I'm also a customer of Algolia— I use it in all my software projects including Posthaven and Bookface at YC. I had to implement Lucene at Palantir and I used both Lucene and Thinking Sphinx when I ran engineering (and devops too) for my top 200 site Posterous. (In retrospect I should have hired a devops team... but that's another story.) And the contrast between running your own search at scale and having something work out of box with code that's ready to rock... I genuinely believe it's pretty magical.

I invested in Ikaria and feel like someone should speak up here.

I was early investor with Chrys Bader previously on his startup Secret. He was a YC batchmate of mine from 2008. I watched him build an initial prototype that had the chance to be a real social network that had very high long term retention, but in the end the company didn't invest deeply enough into moderation and the long term retention cohorts went down steeply past 6 months of use.

Chrys is a great designer and product manager who caught lightning in a bottle previously, and lost it. Founders often catch lightning in a bottle and then fail to keep it because scaling operations like moderation, or sometimes even just keeping the servers online, through hyper scale, is hard.

Many founders never find lightning in a bottle even once. Even in my experience I felt like we caught lightning in a bottle with Posterous and failed to properly bring it to the scale I wish we could have.

I realize I am going out on a limb to defend him here, but founders going back into the arena deserve at least a little bit of defense because it's hard enough to take the chance to make anything ever.

You'll hear more about how Ikaria really works, and I realize the post is light on details, but don't write this startup off before you actually try the software itself.

The director of my product unit took me out for coffee and basically said as much. Congrats on the move, and if you ever want to come back, email me directly.

It was one of the classiest things that ever happened to me in my business career.

I guess I was one of those middle class scholarship kids. There were lots of them around and they were my friends. The private school kids honestly tended to keep to themselves. It's a part of my Stanford experience I found most jarring.

Sorry about that. Lots of other companies are going to make money, and that's a good thing.

It's certainly a bad thing for large tech firms to take out increasingly large portions of global profits. It also might be a secular trend without end.

Yeah, I know. I had this problem too. I had $40K in credit card debt and $40K in student loans, when I got that offer. I probably should have mentioned that too. Having debt is a huge crushing weight and definitely prevents you from taking the risks needed to capitalize on opportunity given you.

It really did, for me, as well.

I generally recommend people think about it as two things: Learning or Earning.

If you are learning, you are getting something out of the situation even if it's not well paid. Don't stay there forever, or stay until you stop learning.

Then when it's time to earn: go work at a tech giant if you must, but also consider starting one yourself. Or if you can tell a startup is a rocket ship and have a chance to join, don't ask about whether you have a window seat, just do it, because those are often the best risk-adjusted returns you can get. Post-product-market-fit is an amazing time. (The trick is it is hard to tell if it's a rocket ship, of course.)

In the learn phase, I don't think it has to be about the money (though of course people have their individual needs). But in the earn phase, it is definitely about capturing the value you create.

If you look at our portfolio we do try to find people who are not necessarily that classic "moonshot" type. Things that turn out to be moonshots often look like niche businesses.

We try to put what you say to practice, but it's an inexact art, far from a science.

I still look for two things: a/ great engineers/designers/product folks with deep empathy for problems people have, and b/ a real problem to solve.

From my experience as a YC partner it seemed clear to me most of VC-dom uses the wrong criteria: buzzwords (like Realtime or AI), and resumes (ex-Google ex-Facebook Stanford Stanford Stanford etc). Better to use first principles and try to find that which is signified, than just use of credentials that are just dumb signifiers.

But in order to do that, you kind of have to be an engineer/designer/product/marketer yourself, and that's why I think our approach can work. Ask me in another 10 years.

You're absolutely right that VC makes this problem worse. I'm sorry for the industry, but we are trying to do better.

There are lots of startups that aren't doing it right. The best thing someone working at one of those startups can do is probably quit and go someplace else.

I think systemically one thing we need to do is help people make better decisions about where they spend their time. Especially for people who are good builders, they happen to also be the best people who can decide for themselves whether something is actually going to work.

I wrote that other article and agree with what the original author here has written. Startups need to do a lot more to a/ solve the real problems of their customers and users, and b/ treat their employees and ecosystem better.

I was a software engineer who learned to start a company right off the pages of the site you're looking at right now, Hacker News. It was here where I learned to start a startup.

I later worked for Y Combinator as a partner helping founders make products and services. The best ones made something that touches millions of people now.

While there is a lot of zero sum thinking in startupland and finance/capitalism in general, you have to remember that this is probably the most GROWTH mindset industry in the world. Where else can you, with just your hands and a laptop on the Internet, create something a billion people use?

I'm not saying that is the norm. But when it works, it's still remarkable.

And it can start with you, and everyone reading this.

I often encourage founders to be more generous with equity for recruits and early employee refresh grants. Care and feeding of the org also involves being thankful to the people who build the value.

This is a great reminder. I was impressed by the recent documentary "General Magic" by how much smart people seem to congregate around new ideas. The old Mac team was the same one trying to create the smartphone 10 years before it was possible, and it was that core of folks who ended up doing it at Apple and Android later anyway.

I grew up poor as the child of refugee immigrants. I was food insecure. My dad was an alcoholic. Being obsessed with computers was literally the thing that changed my life.

That's just my experience, YMMV.

Hm, is it truly totally non-generalizable? There are a lot of people who are very capable for whom the real risk is not taking risk at all. I meet them regularly.

It's not the norm, but just because it applies to a set of the very skilled doesn't mean it is not generalizable. It just isn't applicable to all people. I admit that.

You're right, they don't. It's my hope that more people do, though.

I threw it in at the end but honestly your point is valid. I should have expanded that part and will do so in the future.