This is a hopefully entertaining story about how I learned to not be an idiot CEO. We started Justin.tv in October of 2006 with 4 co-founders. 3 engineers (Emmett Sheer, Justin Kan, Kyle Vogt) and 1 business guy (me). Average age 23. Emmett, Justin, and I were sitting around in the apartment...

As YC grows, founders are wondering how it’s improved over time. This is a valid line of questioning – clearly much has changed about YC over 13 years. We have new leadership, much larger batch sizes, we invest more money, we have a growth fund, a series A program, a massive MOOC, and an internal...

The hardest conversation I have to have with a founder is when they’ve spent their 1-2 million dollar angel round but haven’t found product market fit. Unfortunately, I have to ask them a very unforgiving question: why does your company deserve more money? Raising millions of dollars from great...

More often than not, when I talk to a talented technical person who’s thinking about becoming a founder, their number one blocker is that they don’t have an idea. At some point during their formative years they learned that every great startup started with a great idea and if the idea isn’t...

When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I’m leaving out investor because the best path to being an investor that I’ve seen starts with being successful (or failing) at one of these...

A lot of the advice we give startups is tactical; meant to be helpful on a day to day or week to week basis. But some advice is more fundamental. We’ve collected here what we at YC consider the most important, most transformative advice for startups. Whether common sense or counter-intuitive, the...

A lot of people ask themselves this question. They often mull over one or more of the following facts: 1. The vast majority of startups are not successful 2. For talented technical people, it’s relatively easy to get a job and make a large salary 3. Large companies offer opportunities to work...

When meeting with founders for the first time I sometimes hear, “We’re a Series A company.” Meanwhile, YC alumni I talk to tell me that their angel investors regularly ask them, “When are you going to raise a Series A?”. I’d like to make the point that success isn’t the same as raising a round...

When people discuss startups they tend to talk about inspiration and creativity. This leads founders to believe they can imagineer a solution to any problem they’re trying to solve. In reality, executing a startup is a balance between creativity/intuition/instinct and the scientific method:...

The best press advice I ever got was from Mike Arrington and M.G. Siegler while they were speaking at an SV Angel CEO conference. They said:     Treat PR like biz dev. Once I heard that, everything clicked. Before then I’d wasted mental energy thinking there were special rules for talking to...

When you’re just getting started, many startups will take every user they can get. They have a strong idea of a problem and they want to attract as many users with that problem as possible. Unfortunately, when you open up the barn doors you get all sorts of people with all sorts of problems. Some...

Before Justin.tv grew into Twitch and Socialcam we spent years with a broken understanding of how to build product. We had meandering product meetings where we didn’t write down our decisions. We didn’t carefully spec new products so team members often had slightly different ideas about what we...

It is much easier to talk to an investor if they understand what your company does. As a founder you’ll have to pitch your startup countless times. To be effective, your pitch has to be clear and concise. In this post I’ve condensed the pitch creation process to answering seven questions. If...

As an early stage investor I want to help startups succeed. Whether or not YC invests in the company, I still want to offer any helpful advice or introductions that I can. If you email me - or anyone, really - your job is to succinctly communicate your situation and how I can help. My...

I often talk to founders who believe they’ve found product/market fit when they haven’t. This is a huge problem because they start hiring people, increasing burn, and optimizing their product before they’ve actually discovered what needs to be built. I’m writing this post to help you understand...