YC

STARTUP
SCHOOL
 Introduction

Hello!

My name is Lynn Hoang. I am a founder & CEO of OpenTalk.fm.

I believe that every founder should learn from the worlds best
incubator!So,I created A Summary Guide to YC Startup School
to accelerate my own learning and yours right with it!

Heres what the e-book is all about:

I watched all the videos from YC Startup School and I write

down what lessons I think they are important.

You get to digest the key points of each video in 5 minutes or

less.

Thats it! Plain and simple.

I hope the e-book will help you become smarter, fitter, better
and everything you aspire to be ;)

Thank you!

Lynn Hoang
 AboutOpenTalk.fm

Debaters, Have Fun, and Get Rewarded!

We believe forgood ideas and true innovation, we need human

interaction, conflict, argument, debate. Thus, we created
OpenTalk.fm, the home for the worlds serious and fun
debaters.

By doing so, we want tofoster a culture of open discussion

and sharpen the global citizens of today as well as create the
intellectual leaders of tomorrow.

We also aim to educate young people about critical thinking,

communication, collaboration, creativity, civic awareness and
engagement.
 About Y Combinator Startup School

We believe the barrier to entry for people to start a startup is

still too high. We want to make it easier for people to start a
company, regardless of who or where you are, so we're starting
by sharing what we've learned, through Startup School.

Throughout the 10 weeks, we aim to accomplish the following:

1. Encourage and inspire people to consider starting a

company as a way to positively impact the world

2. Teach people about how to start a startup, and equip them

with the resources and tools to help prepare them now and in
the future

3. Build a community of entrepreneurs who can encourage and

teach each other
Content

Week 1:
How and Why to Start A Startup By Sam Altman (YC), Dustin
Moskovitz (Asana)
Startup Mechanics By Kirsty Nathoo (YC)

Week 2:
How to Get Ideas and How to Measure By Stewart Butterfield
(Slack) and Adam DAngelo (Quora)

Week 3:
How to Build a Great Product I By Emmett Shear (Twitch) Steve
Huffman (Reddit), Michael Seibel (YC)
How to Build a Great Product II By Aaron Levie (Box)

Week 4:
How to Build a Great Product III By Tracy Young (PlanGrid),
Jason Lemkin (SaaStr), Harry Zhang (Lob), Solomon Hykes
(Docker)
How to Build a Great Product IV By Jan Koum (WhatsApp)

Week 5:
How to Get Users and Grow By Alex Schultz (Facebook)
 Content

Week 6:
How to Invent the Future I & II By Alan Kay

Week 7:
How to Find Product Market Fit By Peter Reinhardt (Segment)
How to Think About PR By Sharon Pope (YC)

Week 8:
Diversity + Inclusion at Early Stage Startups By Kat Manalac
(YC)

Week 9:
How to Build and Manage Teams By Vinod Khosla (Khosla
Ventures)

Week 10:
How to Raise Money, and How to Succeed Long-Term By Ali
Rowghani (YC) Jess Lee (Sequoia), Aaron Harris (YC)
 Week 1

How and Why to Start A Startup

By Sam Altman (YC), Dustin Moskovitz
(Asana)
 Why to Start A Startup?

Two roots: The first is passion.The second part of this is that

you're the right person to make this happen by starting a
company.

You are starting a company because it felt like really the only
thing that you could do next. That's it. Short and Sweet!

Dustin recommended Ben Horowitz's book: "The Hard Thing

About Hard Things"
 How to Start A Startup?

Idea first, Startup second. The way to get good ideas is to start
noticing problems in your own life. It's also easier to start a hard
company than an easy company.

Determination is the most important value in a co-founder. Bad

co-founder is way worse than no co-founder.

Values first, aptitudes second, and specific skills third - Tips for
finding a perfect co-founder.

It is more important to have a small number of users that love

your product, than a lot of users that like your product.

Relentless execution; Clear mission.

Not neglect your health, your well-being, your life, your personal
relationships...while starting a start-up. This is like a 10 year
marathon.

The team you build is the company you build.

Stay lean until everything is working really well.

Sam mentioned Bill Walsh's book: "The Hard Thing About Hard
Things" The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of
Leadership."
 Week 1

Startup Mechanics
By Kirsty Nathoo (YC)
 Startup Mechanics

Formation:
Prefer C-Corp, formed in Delaware, USA
Prefer SV lawyers or Clerky.com

Equity:
When you're thinking about allocating equity, think about
everything that's ahead of you, not everything that you've just
done. Keep it fair.
Vesting - 4 years with 1 year cliff

Fundraising:
Prefer SAFEs - Simple Agreement for Future Equity

More:
Payroll provider - Gusto.com
Accept payments - Stripe Atlas, Stripe.com
Formation, hiring, fundraising platform: Clerky.com
YC SAFEs: https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/
 Week 2
How to Get Ideas and How to Measure
By Stewart Butterfield (Slack) and Adam
DAngelo (Quora)
 How to Get Ideas

Good entrepreneurs are resilient. When everyone else thinks

it's a bad idea, it's probably a really good idea.

I would definitely look at my own experiences as a consumer,

generally, because it's really easy for me to see things that are
frustrating.

If you're really good at execution then the core of the idea can
make it through all those steps. I absolutely favor execution, but
you can execute a lot on a terrible idea and then not get
anywhere. So you kind of need both.

Stewart mentioned Daniel Kahneman's book: "Thinking, Fast

and Slow"
 How toMeasure

You don't have to make a product that's going to appeal to

everyone immediately, but you need to make a product that is
going to appeal to some people more than anything else. You
want to find some way to differentiate.

As a startup, you really need to focus, so the core concept I

would try to focus on is users that are getting value today.

If you have a two-sided market or anything like that, then you

want to measure transactions or transaction values. Measuring
transactions is a way to unify them (sellers and buyers) and
align your work on things that are going to benefit both sides.

Pokemon Go is another example, got really big, lots of users,

but it just kind of faded away. So, you don't want to build a fad.
You want to build something that's going to last, so you need to
make sure the existing users keep using the product.

You also need to make sure that you're going to grow. And by
far the most powerful way to grow is through exponential
growth.
 Week 3

How to Build a Great Product I

By Emmett Shear (Twitch) Steve Huffman
(Reddit), Michael Seibel (YC)

How to Build a Great Product II

By Aaron Levie (Box)
 How to Build a Great Product I

Emotional users, angry users, often will become your most loyal
users if you can flip them around.

You don't talk to users to validate your product ideas. You talk
to users to have your product ideas.

Don't avoid conflict. Talk about it, argue about it, but then, you
have someone who just gets to make the call, because anything
else leads to ... Just decision-making that's far too slow for a
startup.

If the data's really good, well, check the data. If the data's really
bad, check the data.

You don't have to talk to your users every week. It's totally
unnecessary. You do need to look at your numbers every
week.
 How to Build a Great Product II

You're going to be successful by nailing one use case that just

happens to be a use case that everybody has a massive
problem with.

Spend time, a lot of time, with your futuristic customers, but don't
exactly just build what they're asking for. Because when you just
build what a customer asks for, essentially you become this sort
of amalgamation of feature request from every single one of
your customers.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how can we connect the

dots between multiple requests or multiple ideas to build the
solution that people didn't really even think about previously.

Aaron's four favorite books on building B2B stuff are:

1. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech

Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore

2. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause

Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen

3. Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com

Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an
Industry by Marc Benioff (Author), Carlye Adler

4. Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create

Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
by W. Chan Kim and Rene Mauborgne
 Week 4

How to Build a Great Product III

By Tracy Young (PlanGrid), Jason Lemkin
(SaaStr), Harry Zhang (Lob), Solomon
Hykes (Docker)

How to Build a Great Product IV By Jan

By Koum (WhatsApp)
 How to Build a Great Product III

If there's a ton of the big customers asking us for the same thing,
it's easy to prioritize that, but we have never built a feature out
for just one customer.

I think the biggest challenge is, once you grow into a fullfledged
company, you grow outside of you zone of comfort. If you're in
the technical and product side, then you have to hire business
people. If you're on the business side, you have to hire more
technical and product leadership.

You never stop selling you're butts of about your mission, your
vision as a company, and so being able to deliver that message
of what you're trying to do, and also, showing the traction,
showing the growth, when you see that graph, everyone wants
to be a part of it.

You want people who have already done it once before,

because even though you may trust somebody and they're
awesome at what they do, it's hard to discount the value of
experience.

Most of our new customers comes from just word of mouth,

organic growth. We don't know what sparks it, but we know that
if we make our clients happy and we build great product for them
that that does continue to happen year after year.
 How to Build a Great Product IV
The credit really goes to not necessarily us having some brilliant
idea. I think the credit goes to also being in the right time, at the
right place, and building a product that people wanted.

How do you determine if an app has a potential or is a good

idea? It has to solve a really basic problem, and it has to do it in
a simple and efficient way.

If you can have money in your bank account, you should have
money in your bank account, because you never know if you
need to buy a building, or if you need to buy some office space,
because when you start growing too quickly, and you don't want
to negotiate and raise money when it's too late.

Why did we partner with Sequoia? "We're here to help you

financially. We're not here to help you with management. We're
not here to help you write code. We're not here to help you build
features. We're here just to help you grow and to help your
financial, and if you need any help outside of that, come knock
on our door and we'll try to help." - Sequoia

How did we scout into different countries? We focused early on

localization. We would hire somebody who is perfect in all these
languages where our apps were starting to grow so we could
build a really good, localized experience. When you download
WhatsApp in Brazil, it's not in English, it's in Portuguese. I think
that is what helped us grow in all these countries.
 Week 5

How to Get Users and Grow

By Alex Schultz (Facebook)
 How to Get Users and Grow
The single most important thing to growth is retention. I care a
lot about using monthly active, not daily active, not weekly
active.

Network effects are really matter. When all your friends get on
Facebook, you're more likely to use Facebook, WhatsApp,
Messenger, whichever social service you're talking about.

You need to look for the magic moment of your product by

talking to users, and then try and validate that with correlations.

The most important thing is pick a goal, your team's product is a

goal, focus on that goal, align the company around that goal,
and then you are going to operate correctly for growth.

First, ask your friends first for your first hundred customers.
Second, research and then reach out to who you'd like to have
as your users. Third, social media and PR. PR is non scalable
but it can give you amazing bumps, amazing bumps. And finally,
buy ads.

Don't just auto-generate emails or you'll definitely get caught in

a spam filter. But send personal emails, get introductions. See
which friend you have in common.

You need to have product market fit to drive growth, you need
retention to drive growth, otherwise every growth tactic, every
acquisition tactic you could possibly run doesn't matter.

Think about your channel first, your targeting second. If you

have creative though, you should put it in context, you should
personalize it, you should give it a call to action
 Week 6

How to Invent the Future I & II

By Alan Kay
 How to Invent the Future I & II

Basically, I think people are here because they're, they want to

do start-ups and make money, I just want to point out that if you
want to make money, don't bother with a startup, create an
industry. Because then you get trillions instead of billions. So it's
about a factor of a 1000 between doing invention over
innovation.

Forget about your egos, and I really meant it, doesn't matter
who you are, how smart you are, how smart you think you are,
there's only one that counts here, is making progress. And we
make progress through synergy.

So instead of innovating out from the present, what you want to

do is invent the future from the future. Go out and live in the
future and bring the future back.

We can sum that up by saying knowledge is silver, context is

gold, and IQ is just lead. It's a lead weight on you.

If you happen to be in a room that had the 100 smartest people

in the world and you were the smartest person in that room,
you're still not as smart as the 99 working together.

You need to find out that it can be better. That is your job. Your
job is not to agree with me. Your job is to wake up, find ways of
criticizing the stuff that seems normal.
 Week 7
How to Find Product Market Fit
By Peter Reinhardt (Segment)

How to Think About PR

By Sharon Pope (YC)
 How to Find Product Market Fit

It's not about how you wish the world was but it's actually about
what customers want.

Most start ups actually build something that looks vaguely

futuristic but is not in fact a real problem that people have today.
It'll kill the company every time. The market always wins.

It's very important, pre product market fit to save as much cash
as possible, spend as little as possible and extend your
runways as long as possible.

What it comes down to is building a platform where it's not just

a product that you're selling but where the data inside of your
product is actually useful for other business to build their
business on top of yours.

I actually think that the bigger problem is not necessarily having

the ideas. I think everyone has lots of interesting ideas. I think
the bigger problem is not killing the bad ideas fast enough.

You don't know how much value you're delivering until you start
asking for money. I think if I had to do it over again, I'd start
asking for money earlier and I'd be a lot more comfortable with
it like if you're solving a real business problem, people are going
to be happy to pay for it.
 How to Think About PR

Your number one job as a founder is to focus on your product.

You're not going to escape that. So even if PR is interesting,
without product innovation, PR is not going to be an option for
you.

Being able to define your business in a clear and concise way is

going to pay back in every aspect of your business.

I'll tell you no credible reporter would ever write a story because
they went to drinks with someone. They'll write a story because
it's a good story, right, so a story always trumps a relationship.

Being able to describe your customer, so how does your product

live through your customer, through the lens of their customer.
People like stories about people, so this is a great one for PR.

What problem are you solving, and how are you measuring how
you're growing, and how are you growing? Who are your
competitors, and why are you better than your competitors?
What are your plans for next year? And I think one of the more
important ones for PR as well is why you? Why did you start this
company? Why are you uniquely qualified to bring this product to
the world? And that can range from stories of something you
overcame that caused you to explore this field and to conquer
this technology and this innovation, or it could be that you came
from a company that has done this kind of, and you broke off
and are doing it better.
 How to Think About PR

These are two tools that are used in the PR world to brief a
reporter in advance of a news date, so that they can have a full
story ready to go on the day of the news. You can't use them
both together. I'm going to talk about them individually. An
exclusive is I'm going to talk to you, you one reporter, just me
and you, you're getting the full story and that's it. You're the only
one I'm talking to about this until after you post your story. And
then if someone calls me, I can talk to them, but they're not
going to have the story ready to go, it's yours. That's an
exclusive.

An embargo is if you have bigger news that you think multiple

reporters might cover, which is common, especially for a mid-
sized startup that has people who are kind of following their
news. You can reach out and say to each of the reporters, "I
have some news. I'd like to pre-brief you on it. The news is
going out on June 15th at 8:00 AM Pacific. Would you like the
news? Will you agree to the embargo?" And they say yes,
they're basically saying, "Give me the news. If I write a story, I
will not publish it until that specific time that you told me."

* Sharon also referred the site: https://www.helpareporter.com/

 Week8

Diversity + Inclusion at Early Stage Startups

By Kat Manalac (YC)
Diversity + Inclusion at Early Stage Startups

You end up creating an ecosystem with its own rules, its own
structure, and its own culture.

We want to talk about how to build a culture that embraces hard

conversations. Diversity and inclusion even for me as a woman
and as a person of color can feel like really scary and awkward
topics.

Diversity as being invited to the party whereas inclusion is being

asked to dance. Diversity in this context I think will relate to
finding and hiring people from a range of backgrounds. What
diversity is not is a code word for gender or race. Diversity I
think can mean a lot of things. It can mean different academic
backgrounds. It can mean different ages, national origins,
religions, work experiences, perspectives.

You can do the work to recruit talent but if your culture is

garbage they're probably not going to stay for very long.

Inclusion is really about building a culture where everyone can

feel safe and where people don't have to shy away from having
these like really tough and awkward sometimes conversations.
We'll talk about some of those ways that companies are tackling
that challenge on the panel, but first, let's talk really briefly about
why you might even want to start thinking about this right now.

The more diverse backgrounds you have represented, the more

associations you get, the more ways that you can, you have
more pathways to solving problems.
 Week 9

How to Build and Manage Teams

By Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures)
 How to Build and Manage Teams
A company becomes the people it hires not the plan it makes.
The team you build ends up making all day to day decisions
about where you're going to end up.

When you're younger when you can afford to take the risks.

You can fire the original team, and it's gene DNA stays in the
company. That's why it's so important, and why the people you
hire determine the company becomes.

There's a huge difference between a zero million dollar

company, and a zero billion dollar company. The difference is
attitude and ambition and mostly the kind of team you build,
which will reinforce certain directions for you especially who else
you end up hiring.

Every time you hire somebody increase your burn, you're taking
on financial risk, but you're reducing some other risk, maybe it's
product risk, or development risk, or feature risk.

Big names and titles in big companies are really, really

dangerous and misleading for start-ups. In start-ups you need
people with good iteration and good adaptation. Those are very,
very, different skills because in start-ups you invent 90% of
stuff. In big companies, 90% of what you do this year will be
what was done last year. There's very little innovation.
 How to Build and Manage Teams

It depends on the domain. You don't always need the gurus.

You want experience, but you don't want experience to guide

you into doing what others have already done in that same
business and not innovate. That is the result of too much
experience. Mixing the right experience where you can identify
the problems with first principles thinking from fresh new ideas,
people who've never worked in the domain, or people who
actually are just fresh graduates, and have no idea, but can ask
fundamental questions, those are the best kind of founders.

If you can hire the people, you should generally be able to hire
the people who can do any given job better than you can.

Elon with no car experience by asking a lot of questions, and

adapting rapidly as he screwed up, he got to a place where
Tesla is a much more interesting company than GM today.

If you want four people on your team, hire six. Even make up a
title you don't need. Hiring is a long process.

If you can increase the probability of success by hiring great

people, by asking a lot of questions, by finding your risks early,
by having people surface problems, you're going to increase
your probability of success.

* Vinod recommended the book Start with Why: How Great

Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek
 Week 10

How to Raise Money, and How to

Succeed Long-Term
By Ali Rowghani (YC) Jess Lee (Sequoia),
Aaron Harris (YC)
 How to Raise Money, and How to
Succeed Long-Term

You need to have a lot of grit. You are really understanding of
the problem you're trying to solve. You're working in a really,
really big market where there's line of sight to like billions of
dollars of market caps. So those are some of the things that we
look for.

Seeds are now being done at prices that are significantly higher
than A's were done even three years ago.

It's a two way street, like your interview, you're evaluating your
investors just as much as they're evaluating you.

What we've found what we've seen again and again is the best
founders can communicate clearly, and can adjust their
explanation for whoever they're talking to such that it is
meaningful.

If it's a space that they won't understand, you really have to take
more time to explain the problem you're solving, the customer
you're solving for, and then from there you can explain your
solution.

There's no single personality type for great leaders. There's

really no single model.

You have to be authentic. You can't try to be someone else or

copy someone else's personality or style and hope to be a great
leader
 How to Raise Money, and How to
Succeed Long-Term

The first is that great leaders think and communicate clearly. As
a leader, you have to paint a compelling vision for the future that
other people can understand and follow.

Example from Jeff Bezos of Amazon. He once said that in

Amazon's retail business, only three things mattered. First, low
prices. Second, broad selection, and third, fast delivery.

You should force yourself to take as little as an hour a day, or

an hour every other day at the beginning, and try to grow that
amount of time on your calendar that you're devoted just to
thinking.

Second thing all great leaders do is they show great judgment

about people. When you grow your startup, you have to have
great judgment, not only about the people you hire into sort of
individual contributor roles, but even more so, the people to
whom you decide to give authority and power.

Last insight, great leaders have exceptional personal integrity

and commitment. Integrity means having a mission to
accomplish that is much greater than your own personal wealth
or fame. Commitment means making your work, making your
startup into a life mission in a way that inspires other people.

I think the most important success metric for a leader is trustThe

job of every leader is to building trust in employees, in investors,
in customers, in users, and building trust is both an art and a
science.
 WE WOULD LIKE TO SAY THANK YOU TO
SAM, STEVEN, SPEAKERS, ADVISORS, AND
EVERYONE THAT PUT TIME AND EFFORT
INTO MAKING STARTUP SCHOOL.
THE COURSE IS AMAZING AND WE HAVE
LEARNT SO MUCH!

From OpenTalk.fm,
Group 16

YC STARTUP SCHOOL
CLASS 2017