Fireside chat
Graham talks with Cloudant’s Miller about the new role developers play in society:
Programmers are becoming more powerful. It used to be that programmers had their tools chosen for them by managers. Now increasingly the can pick their tools and the managers have no choice but to go on with it. Everybody knows this phrase BYOD –Bring Your Own Device. But there’s another phenomenon happening, where you bring your own tools — BYOT.
Conway at Startup School 2014
Graham interviews Conway for the Y Combinator event. He says founders must have a dedicated work ethic, get along with their co-founder, and not be afraid to make changes like laying off people who aren’t performing. Conway:
You can’t learn to be ambitious and driven.
Bloomberg interview
Graham and Livingston are interviewed together for the first time. They talk about the selection process for Y Combinator companies, how the best founder teams are genuine friends rather than people who are just working together, and why Graham stepped down. Graham on how to initiate a startup:
The best way to start is not to start. Don’t even start a startup. Start a project.
Livingston on whether the firm would consider follow-on investments in successful projects:
We never say never, but the problem is that is that there’s a signaling thing. Follow-ons would hurt the founders who are probably a great investment but that we just didn’t choose to do a follow-on with.
Charlie Rose interview
Rose interviews Graham at Disrupt about how to pick successful founders, what Y Combinator does and how it got started, and whether a startup is easier to create now than it was in the past. Graham:
It used to be that what cost money was getting a computer, now everybody has a computer, you needed money for a fast internet connection but now everyone has one
He says the mechanisms for providing funding from investors to startups have also become much smoother.
Airbnb interview
Blecharczyk talks with Graham about his advice for growth for Airbnb as it grew:
It was a piece of advice that he gave us that was our turning point in starting to grow our marketplace. He told us that it is ok to do things that don’t scale. Prior to that we’d been working on Airbnb for a year and, despite everything we did, we couldn’t earn more than $200/week. He gave us this piece of advice, we really took it to heart. We went to New York. Photographed people’s properties and met every single user. Invited them for a beer. Told them our story, and really built evangelists out of them. And that was the beginning of how Airbnb grew, first in New York and then cross-pollinated globally.
Graham:
Cockroaches mean founders whose are unkillable. Their startup is unkillable because they can survive on nothing. Cockroaches survive nuclear winters. Cockroaches survive everything. You guys were coackroaches at the time.
Launch Festival interview
Graham is interviewed by Calacanis at Launch Festival 2014, and talks about his decision to hand over the running of the accelerator to Sam Altman.
Y Combinator’s gonna have to grow. We grow as the number of startups grows and the number of startups has been growing. You saw how it started up – it was in my kitchen. Now it’s got 10 full-time partners…maybe 20 people. 632 startups we funded. It’s turned into this giant thing. I’m no good at running this giant thing. Sam, however, is going to be good at running a giant thing.
TheInformation interview
Graham is interviewed for TheInformation.com and talks about women in technology, how working at startups makes people tougher, and what he says is resentment from investors towards Y Combinator:
You could say, if you think we’re actually good, then envy. If you think we’re not actually good, then it’s because they think we don’t deserve all the deal flow we get. That’s what investors all want. They want deal flow.
GMIC 2013 interview
Graham is interviewed on stage at the conference about emerging trends in technology. Asked whether he thinks there will be a ‘year of the wearables’ where gadgets like Google Glass take off, he advises ignoring individual trends and looking at commercial uses for wearables:
Never mind these fads…Just think about all the industrial applications, all the people who can’t carry a computer in their hands, mechanics who are climbing around in airplanes, or emergency workers, it’s going to be so useful to just display all the information.
He says there probably won’t be a point where wearables suddenly become widely used:
It will probably be this gradually rising curve.
Startup School interviews
Graham and Altman host a chat with three Y Combinator startups: George Saines and Nick Winter of Code Combat, a way to learn code though gaming; Karen Cheng and Finbarr Taylor, of giveit100.com, a site where users share their progress at different skills, and Ryan Petersen of Flexport, a digitized customs brokerage.
Startup School 2013
Graham interviews Conway about what has changed in tech. Conway:
What’s not changed…is you have to have determination, and conviction. You have to be a leader.
He says that in the Altos days, workplaces were less formal, for instance the employees would drink to motivate themselves to stay until 9 p.m.
I think the startups today know how to segment a little better
His assessment is that software companies have to deliver:
What’s not changed is the fact that you have to focus on growth. Back in the hardware days you didn’t have to focus on product or consumer satisfaction as much…Customers were happy just to get it
Zuckerberg Startup School interview
Zuckerberg discusses writing the first code for Facebook, and says his experience writing games and a music player for himself while young helped.
If you want to be able to connect with the people around you you have to start building software that other people want to use as well.
At Harvard, he wrote a scraper to extract information from the course cataloge and ran the site from a laptop in the dorm room. He says he met Chan at a going away party after Harvard threatened to kick him out. People involved in Facebook focused on developing it for fellow students, and talked about how someone else like Microsoft would likely build the service for everyone to use:
We thought, we’re just college students, what do we know about building software that hundreds of millions of people are going to use?
Inc. interview
Graham talks about why startups fail, $1 billion valuations, and how Y Combinator weeds out candidates. On whether the accelerator is underselling the challenges of entrepreneurship:
I’ve written a lot about what a bitch the start-up world is. So, maybe the other incubators are underselling, but we’re not. That being said, everyone is surprised by how difficult it turns out to be, because it’s not the kind of difficulty people have experienced before… Start-ups are hard but doable, in the way that running a five-minute mile is hard but doable.
VCs should take less equity
In an interview with Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch, Graham discusses the value of the YC investments, how the accelerator dealt with too many companies in a previous batch, and why venture capitalists should move quickly:
Well VCs have financial models for how much they need to invest, and what percentage of the company they need to buy for it, in order to get positive returns. And they’re really nervous, somewhat justifiably so, because if you’re going to lose money as a VC firm you wont know it til about six to eight years later. So these models, they become sort of religious about them. But, they really feel like they can’t buy less than 20% of the company in the Series A round…and in a competitive deal since that number can’t move, then the only number that can move is the valuation.. That means that the amount invested increases, arbitrarily. These companies would like to sell half as much stock for half as much money, but that’s not one of the options. If there was a VC that broke ranks and said they would give companies the money they actually need instead of it being determined by random external forces, they would get all the good startups.
New York Times feature
The newspaper profiles the firm’s Demo Day, speaking with Graham, Altman, and Livingston about the company’s strategy for picking startups to support. Graham:
Imagine an assembly line where Facebooks and Googles come along every few years. You can either pick that cookie off the assembly line or not. If you pick it off, it’s market price, which varies. But if you don’t pick it off, you’re out of the game.
Zuckerberg at Startup School 2012
Graham interviews Zuckerberg about the flexibility that being in college allows, and he says that remaining flexible can help a career:
You’re going to change what you do.
Inc. interview
Ohanian tells the magazine about his conversation with Graham after Y Combinator rejected his initial pitch:
The next morning, on the train back to Virginia, hung over, somewhere in the middle of Connecticut, I get a call from Paul. He says, “I’m sorry, we made a mistake. We don’t like your idea, but we like you guys.” We got off the train, and I was able to sweet-talk the Amtrak lady into not charging us to turn around. In our conversation, Paul said, “You guys need to build the front page of the Internet.” That was all Paul, and that became Reddit. We built Reddit in three weeks.
The buyout also happened partly by chance:
The acquisition by Condé Nast basically started with a Halloween party, where we met a reporter who introduced me to a freelancer for Wired who told her boss about us. That editor’s husband was the biz-dev guy at Condé Nast. He worked on a licensing deal with us, and everything worked great. So we started talking money. Founders are supposed to be not at all interested in selling. But there is a price at which a founder can’t help being interested.
Tech Crunch interview
Graham says Y Combinator is now focusing more on people than ideas, as a team of founders who have been friends for some time will keep what seems like a difficult idea alive in order to not let each other down:
At the stage we’re funding people, at the beginning, the founder is more important than the idea…We’re looking for people who have been friends for a while and worked together on things…Almost every startup has some point where it seems like the startup is doomed, the startup is worthless
Founders now have more power
Graham talks to Tech Crunch about how demographic shifts mean founders have more power:
That means basically investors have to do things the way the founders want
Asked if that is good for business:
Probably.
He adds it is more socially acceptable to start a startup, and costs less money, shifting more power to founders and away from investors.
Startup School
Graham interviews Andreessen about Netscape and how the tech industry has changed. Andreessen:
All of us who were lucky enough to be involved back then were completely unaware of what was going to happen
Office Hours speech
Graham sits down with aspiring founders at the Y Combinator event, and talks them through their business ideas. He talks about how Wozniak and Gates both got their ideas from solving problems that they faced:
A lot of people decide, I want to start a startup, I need to think of an idea for a startup…The best startup ideas don’t come from people trying to think of startup ideas, they come from people trying to solve problems…All the biggest startups, they tend to come from problems that the founders themselves have.
