Lessons from YC
For those who don’t know (and if you don’t know, you should book a meeting), Y Combinator is the world’s number one startup accelerator. I was CTO and co-founder of KidPass, a marketplace for kids activities, which was accepted into Y Combinator in the Winter of 2017. We raised a Series A from Javelin Venture Partners after Demo Day. It was an intense three months with hyper growth in terms of my own understanding of how to operate an early stage startup. The lessons I learned then continued to be effective throughout KidPass’ life. The list below highlights some of the most important learnings:
Do Things That Don't Scale
Embrace manual, labor-intensive processes in the early stages to deeply understand your customers and refine your product.
Once you’ve gotten enough learnings from your manual processes, automate or productize those processes.
Get To Ramen Profitability
Focus on reaching a state where the company's earnings are enough to sustain the living expenses of the founding team (enough to buy a packet of ramen), prioritizing financial independence and extending runway.
Once you are profitable, you have control of your destiny. At this stage, you don’t need VC funding if you don’t want it. And if you do seek VC funding, you have the upper hand at the negotiating table.
Talk to Users and Write Code
Prioritize direct engagement with users to garner feedback and iterate quickly while focusing on coding to build and refine the product.
Micro-Manage Teams Initially
In the early stages, closely manage team activities to set a strong foundation for velocity and culture, gradually transitioning to more autonomy as the team grows.
Find a Small Group of Users That Really Love Your Product
Identify and focus on a niche group of users who are passionate about your product. Their enthusiasm and feedback can drive iterative improvement and help refine your value proposition.
Understand Business Operations (for the CTO)
Early on, the CTO should have a deep understanding of all operations within the company. This broad oversight allows the CTO to identify areas where technology can streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and support business operations beyond just the product development.
As the company scales, operational issues become amplified, and become more complex to solve for.
Hire Olympic Animals
Adopt Brian Chesky's philosophy of hiring "Olympic Animals," meaning you should aim to recruit individuals who are the best in their field, highly motivated, and deeply passionate about what they do. Such team members can drive innovation, elevate team performance, and contribute significantly to the company's success.
Avoid Unnecessary Engineering Work
Stay focused on work that directly contributes to user value or business goals. Avoid overengineering or diverting resources to features or projects that don't align with current priorities or have a clear impact on the product's success.
It may be counter-productive to start out with microservices instead of monolith applications if you are prioritizing product velocity.
Don't Die
Ensure that every decision and activity undertaken by the team is aimed at the survival and growth of the company. Reminding ourselves of not dying helped us decide what things we should not be doing.
If you survive long enough, lucky things start happening to you.
Simplify Complex Decisions with a Binary Question
When confronted with complex decisions, attempt to distill the dilemma into a binary question. This practice can facilitate clearer and more decisive action by reducing the complexity of the decision to a simpler, more straightforward choice. I credit Dalton Caldwell with this learning, and I’ve used it quite often in my professional and personal life.
Avoid Averaging Out Ideas
Resist the urge to dilute strong, potentially game-changing ideas by averaging them out in an attempt to reach consensus. This often leads to subpar decisions and innovations. Instead, encourage bold ideas and be willing to take calculated risks for potentially greater rewards.
Founders will need enough conviction in their own ideas to pursue them and also do the work to rally the team around these ideas.
