I think extreme secrecy is a bad sign in all startups. Very few startups die because they tell you exactly how their technology works. On the long list of startup killers, that's pretty far down. Though on the list of entrepreneur fears, it's pretty high.
— Sam Altman
The thing about Y Combinator that's cool is that most companies won't happen if we don't fund them.
I get up late, have an espresso, and immediately start work. I try to get roughly caught up on email before I leave the house, then if I need to write anything or review a complex deal, I do that, and then I head to the office and work on my top few priorities for the day. I try to schedule my meetings in the afternoon.
For most of the early hires you make in a startup, experience doesn't matter very much, and you should go for aptitude.
Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.
Making money is often more fun than spending it, though I personally have never regretted money I've spent on friends, new experiences, saving time, travel, and causes I believe in.
There is a lot of stuff I like. I love backpacking. I love going to an island where I can just sit on the beach and read or scuba dive and sail. I do a lot of that. I still go backpacking around Europe in the summers and staying in hostels. I love that.
All the reasons that have made software so successful are beginning to happen with hardware. So much can be done so quickly, prototyped so rapidly, and the costs are so low.
If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it's not, investors are in control.
People always make the mistake of calling an idea small or stupid because they don't understand how it's going to evolve.
If you have the opportunity to go be an early employee at a company that's just going crazy, and you believe it's the next Facebook or Google, you should go join that company.
Don't hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.
Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large competitors.
People are incredible creatures of habit.
The reduction in compassion that happens when we're all behind computer screens is not good for the world.
All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.
The whole concept of rewarding customers is a big trend.
There's this famous observation that I totally believe: Great startup ideas are the ones that lie in the intersection of the Venn diagram of 'is a good idea' and 'looks like a bad idea.' So you want most people to think it's a bad idea and thus not compete with you until you get giant. But for it to secretly be good.
Loopt wouldn't have happened without Y Combinator.
I wouldn't call Loopt a failure. It didn't turn out like I wanted, for sure, but it was fun, I learned a lot, and I made enough money to start investing, which led me to my current job. I don't regret it at all.
If you compromise and hire someone mediocre, you will always regret it.
Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom, and that's a big deal. Also, lack of money is very stressful.
Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.
I have plenty of investments that I wish I'd never made. But the model is to lose money on a lot of investments and then make 1,000X or 10,000X on an investment.
I always tell my partners that our job is to fund all the companies we can that can be worth $10 billion or more. That's such a difficult constraint, we can't have any other constraints.
What is OK is to spend money for productivity. What is not OK is just to light money on fire.
AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.
I don't think people spend nearly enough time thinking about what they like and what they're good at.
Companies generally work better when they are smaller. It's always worth spending time to think about the least amount of projects/work you can feasibly do, and then having as small a team as possible to do it.
The correlation of quality of life and cost of energy is huge.
Set a clear, easy-to-understand vision for your company, and make it be a mission people believe in.
There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things. Founders are able to set the vision for their companies with an authority no one else can.
I don't often get involved with campaigns at all.
The market for local advertising is in the billions.
I think the mistake people make most often when they invest in other kinds of startups is they say, 'This is totally different.' And so the things that matter, like making a product that people desperately want, like talking to customers, they throw this out the window. That is a recipe for heartache and tears.
I believe whatever smart, ambitious people are working on will be the trend of the future. I do think that it's worth thinking critically about what the future will be.
The way to build billion dollar companies is to first build something people love. There isn't really a shortcut there.
One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.
Don't let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.
Maybe I am a bit unusual here, but I am less stressed if I have my phone with me. Because I can spend like an hour in the morning taking care of everything instead of I sit there and wonder what I missed or wonder what's happening. So it's way less stressful for me to just answer my phone.
The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.
The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.
Intelligence is usually easy to tell in a 10-minute conversation. Determination is harder.
If you have a startup that's keeping it up at night because you think it's so great, then you should do that.
I believe that sexism in tech is a real problem.
Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have.
I think that inexpensive sources of planet-friendly energy are one of the most important things for us to pursue.
If the Reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website, but it will never be a truly great community.
The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you're making sufficiently good.
If you wanted to build an Internet startup in 2005, you had to buy your own servers and hire someone to manage it. Now, that's unheard of.
