AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.
Sam Altman
All throughout my life I have been deeply immersed in startups, either because I was running one or investing in them or helping them.
Anonymity breeds meanness.
Everyone is looking for the hack, the secret to success without hard work.
Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large competitors.
The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.
Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley. Most people don't want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.
Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom, and that's a big deal. Also, lack of money is very stressful.
Sometimes people think Y Combinator has big ideas about themes. But really, we just fund the best startups.
The market for local advertising is in the billions.
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.
One of the things we urge Y-Combinator companies to do is to have profitability in grasp. If you need to get profitable before your A round of money, you ought to be able to do that.
People are incredible creatures of habit.
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.
Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.
Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.
The crowd's a really powerful force on the Internet, and people finally understand how to harness that.
Traditional local advertising is not what retailers want. They want not just for you to see an ad - they want you to come into the store, to be a repeat customer and to spread the word.
If you go to a paintball subreddit, paintball companies can advertise to you.
That culture of frugality and discipline is really important for the Y Combinator mindset.
Very ambitious startups often take a long time to work - or sometimes they take a very long time to look ambitious.
The Loopt mobile app is all about giving you the latest local deals and insider tips.
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.
Communication services need interoperability to succeed - and Loopt is the first such service since SMS that is available across all major U.S. wireless carriers.
The only way to generate sustained exponential growth is to make whatever you're making sufficiently good.
Many of the companies in the mobile location space are trying to figure out different ways to tie what they're doing to commerce.
I think you can say a lot of evil behavior by companies is short-term optimization.
Tech companies tend to do tech best.
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.
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 biggest part of Loopt is about discovering the world around you, never replacing a social experience - only adding to it.
Don't hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.
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.
The thing about Y Combinator that's cool is that most companies won't happen if we don't fund them.
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.
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.
All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.
If you look at people who have an iPhone or Android and are under 40 and are dissatisfied with their bank, it's actually quite a large market.
Generally, you want to raise capital either when you have to or when it's really easy. If the company desperately needs money, and they can't figure out any other way, then they need to raise money. Or if someone's offering you easy money on good terms, you should take it because you can use it for good things.
Startups on the inside are always badly broken.
Set a clear, easy-to-understand vision for your company, and make it be a mission people believe in.
If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it's not, investors are in control.
If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, 'Oh it's great. We're totally crushing it,' and that's almost never true.
Cofounder relationships are among the most important in the entire company.
People appreciate when you make an effort to speak their language.
It's so important for startups to get their culture right at the start. They need to feel unique and that they are on their own important mission in the world.
Check-ins are cool, but kind of a pain.
Do I think every culture will embrace location technology? Yes.
Ideas are cheap and easy, and there are a lot of them.
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.
