Having scanned through these lectures, one thing really jumps out at me. There is a serious lack of diversity here. That may seem trivial, but these guys seem to fit a very narrow range of experiences. Even their accents are nearly identical. I would suggest trying to learn from people of a wider background. There are plenty of great startups on this planet not founded by t-shirt-clad brogramers.
The one exception to this pattern is lecture 18, legal and accounting. Watch that lecture. Note the accent change. Note the change of pacing, the polite pauses and lack of a constant train of thought. Legal and accounting are professional fields. These are people from a different background than the other lecturers. Aggressive modes of speech may be cool in founder land, but they do not fly in established professions. If you want to separate yourself from the crowd, if you want to be taken seriously by a wider audience, learn to speak and present as these women.
Yesterday my co-founder and I attended YC’s Open Office Hours. Fortunately we had watched the “How to Start a Startup” series, so we knew in advance how to concisely introduce our company and also set an appropriate goal for the meeting. Every second counts in a 20 minute meeting with a YC-partner.
In under 1 minute we defined the product, market size, and traction to date.
In under 1 minute we introduced the team. It takes discipline to not promote your past successes and the degrees you earned. Instead we just stated all the founders are highly technical with a good sense for design, and we have known each other for years.
We then simply proposed 3 or 4 opportunities and then kept quiet. Our target talk-to-listen ratio was 1:5. We kept the single minded goal to obtain advice on strategy and direction.
At the very least this series is a kernel that should eventually produce your company’s unique culture. I hope it resonates with you as it did with our team.
We expected to receive the canonical advice to focus on one opportunity. But the YC-partner felt that it was still early enough for us to explore multiple opportunities simultaneously even though they lacked synergy. Also he leaned most heavily towards an enterprise idea that we were going to exclude from our list. Furthermore, we were surprised to learn that some companies are so large that even YC can’t help much in establishing a relationship. This was really helpful to know that we should not waste resources chasing certain accounts and that just because you get into YC don’t expect everyone will suddenly return your phone call.
It is worth mentioning our past 30 days revenue was flat (no growth). If a new founder isn’t careful their mood is directly related to their sales. Our sales were flat, so my personality was flat. It’s tough to break out of this and we wish we had been a little more enthusiastic during the meeting. The OP lecture series will remind you that a winning team keeps winning, so don’t stop focusing on growth and you’ll always project enthusiasm. Barring that, focus on the upside of all the opportunity.
Be warned, the legal stuff there is a very high level overview. I personally would hesitate to give such a lecture for fear of people walking away with too much confidence. I've seen too many think they can get away with downloaded contracts and advice from lawyers they saw at conferences. Remember that the people giving you money have their own lawyers, good ones, to protect their interests.
Like others I also really enjoyed the legal and accounting lecture. It was outside of the scope of the usual startup advice you hear (technology, sales, marketing, etc.).
There's an app that goes perfect with this course called: Visions - An Idea Log Based on Y Combinator. It's based directly on a project from this course. Check it out: http://www.getvisionsapp.com
At the moment, there is no cloud support so all of your ideas are saved locally on your device. If you want to export your ideas out of the app, you can do that.
Is there a feature you would really like in this app? Is it iCloud backup?
The one exception to this pattern is lecture 18, legal and accounting. Watch that lecture. Note the accent change. Note the change of pacing, the polite pauses and lack of a constant train of thought. Legal and accounting are professional fields. These are people from a different background than the other lecturers. Aggressive modes of speech may be cool in founder land, but they do not fly in established professions. If you want to separate yourself from the crowd, if you want to be taken seriously by a wider audience, learn to speak and present as these women.