Three surprising lessons from Y Combinator
What I learned from the top startup accelerator
I just finished Y Combinator, and I have never learned so much in such a short period. Now that I have oodles of free time, I want to reflect on the most important lessons.
Quick context: YC is a startup accelerator, meaning it mentors a bunch of startups, pushes them to do better, and gives them access to a network of founders and investors. It runs two batches a year and has graduated some top-tier companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Reddit, and Twitch.
YC boasts that your time in the program is the most highly-leveraged period of your life. I found it to be true!
Here are three learnings I didn’t expect.
Real world problems > > > your ideas
My two cofounders and I got into YC with a totally different company from what we do now: financing for content creators. It was a sexy idea: fintech! Creator economy! Fun website design!
But it failed. We got basically zero traction. Why? Because none of us is a creator, we forced a solution into a space we didn’t understand. If we were creators, we would have known immediately why our product had limited potential, but instead it took us months to figure out.
We fell into an exceedingly common founder failure mode: “wouldn’t it be cool if [insert idea].”
Most successful startups are borne out of real problems, ideally faced by the founders themselves. On the flip side, many failed startups come from founders who force fit a circular solution into a square problem because they’re influenced by what they read on TechCrunch and Twitter (guilty).
The better the problem you’re solving, the more potential your startup has.
What makes a good startup problem:
It’s severe
It’s frequent
People are willing to pay lots of money to solve it
YC calls these “hair on fire” problems: if your hair is on fire, you don’t care about whether the solution has a snazzy UX or dark mode. You’ll happily take even a brick if it’ll help you put out the fire.
Solve real problems. Don’t force fit your solution.
Success = not dying
There’s a mindset I call the Straight Line Mythology that goes something like this: “Successful people set up a 5-year goals and walk directly towards those goals with daily measurable progress and next-to-zero variation from that Straight Line.”
This mythology is toxic. It makes you envy others’ success and hate yourself for every apparent detour or setback.
The vast majority of startups fail. YC is good at picking startups, yet conditional on being a YC company your chances of failure are still higher than your chances of success. In this field (and I suspect fields like it where chances of breakout success are tiny: art, music, film), you should optimize for survival. When the majority of your peers are dying, not dying = success.
You should think of yourself as a running back who needs to make it downfield. So long as you’re moving, the play isn’t over. Some running backs can run in a straight line to the end zone because they’re particularly fast or their team set them up perfectly. Some running backs will have to dodge tackle after tackle, move sideways and even backwards, to make it downfield. Both can score. Even if it takes him longer, in many ways the second running back is more impressive.
So let’s stop glamorizing the young breakout successes. In my experience young breakout successes aren’t particularly wise because they haven’t faced much failure and they’re usually pretty full of themselves. Who wants that? Instead, let’s respect the daily struggle to not die in a field where death is average. For founders, let’s accept the reality that success will usually feel like just barely not drowning.
Embrace the schlep.
Scale yourself
“Scaling yourself” is Silicon Valley-ese for personal development. It basically boils down to making sure you grow and pace yourself such that you don’t burn out, relevant for the success = not dying point above.
In my mind, there are two categories:
Self-care: eating well, going to the gym, sleeping, meditating, spending time with loved ones, reading sci-fi novels — whatever it takes to avoid physical or mental break points. This is maintenance.
Growth: learning how to do sales, improving your ability to speak & write well, taking online classes, building new friendships & connections — whatever it takes to get better at the things you care about. This is upgrading.
YC taught me to balance these two. We often feel pressed to choose one or the other, but these are complementary — not opposite — forces.
YC also taught me that practicing both is a matter of daily discipline. The accumulation of daily routines and marginal improvements will carry you much, much further than a feverish New Years’ Resolution-type sprint.
Finally, this advice is strategic: you lose more time recovering from burnout than you do by practicing this daily discipline.
If you’re wondering, for me maintenance looks like:
Sleeping 8 hours / day minimum
Working out every workday (lotsa yoga)
Daily walks, sometimes 2-3, to get sunshine and let my mind wander
Exploring new spots in LA with my girlfriend at least once every weekend
Reading sci-fi before bed
And upgrading looks like:
Taking an online course in data engineering
Writing down my daily learnings
Tweeting every day to clarify my thinking
Writing blogs again to clarify my thinking
The above probably does 80% of the work necessary to feel like I’m in a personal development flow state! It doesn’t take much.
Your work rises or falls to the level of your personal development.