Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (YC)

see everything people apply to YC with people who have the same idea one of these topics is simple pragmatic advice sell make money one of my mantras is just don't die get training and remember the fundamentals and the basics puts you in the mindset Right, you have this

ideas

tarpit concept that seems like an unsolved problem, you will get all this positive feedback from the world and people have been starting that startup since the 90s. Recently, you applied for

startups

. 20 categories of

ideas

that YC wants to fund we are trying to mix up some information on what kind of ideas people might be contemplating, they are currently a lot of people say you are the king of the pivot a good pivot is like coming home it's hotter it's hotter close to something you're an expert in, are there other patterns you find in

startups

that work well?

There are a lot of founders who are so close to it being over and completely just going to continue that way today. My guest is Dalton Caldwell Dalton is. CEO and group partner at y combinator, where he has worked for over 10 years across 21 different YC lots, including working closely in the early days of instacart retool brex deal door Dash webflow replay breadth whatnot razor pay and others 20 Unicorns Before I Combinator Dalton was the co-founder and CEO of imim, which was acquired by Myspace, and the co-founder and CEO of app.net, which was one of Twitter's first ad-free competitors, Dalton has seen and worked with

more

startups than almost any human being alive and in our conversation we get incredibly tactical and deep into the startup journey why it all comes down to simply not losing hope and not letting your startup die what to do when your startup is struggling and How to know when it's time to give up what constitutes a big pivot and signs It's Time to Pivot.

In fact, he had spoken to customers. Why every startup goes through a point where they feel like all hope is lost. Why investors say no to startups. Which most often leads to startups failing. that you should avoid and also 20 ideas that Dalton is looking to fund also so many great stories and

lessons

this episode is packed with action I bring you Dalton Caldwell after a few quick words from our sponsors and if you enjoy this podcast don't forget it. Subscribing and following on your favorite podcasting app or YouTube is the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously.

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Founders need to hear this advice, which is deceptively simple and obvious. Have you ever seen it in NBA basketball or college basketball where they have the coach with a microphone and it shows what they are really saying in the Huddle? Do you ever listen to what they really say? They're saying okay, we've got to really focus, get the ball and win this game, like you really listen to what the smartest, most successful athletes are talking about, like you listen to what Tiger Woods tells his caddy. it all sounds like pretty mundane stuff, it's not, it's not like what Tiger Tiger Woods is talking about with his caddie like some, you know, imp, it's possible to decipher the lingo, it's like, you really need to keep your head down on This, it's things like that and I think the reason why this is true is that even if you are the best in the world, getting trained and reminding yourself of the fundamentals and the basics is what puts you in the right mindset and that you know. everything correctly.

You're at the top of your game if you get to the elite levels of being a startup founder, you basically do anything that's really difficult, psychologically, and yeah, one of my mantras is just don't die, just continue with your startup, keep going. and I say it over and over again and honestly that's often what people tell me, it's the most shocking thing I've said, it's not that I said some Ninja 5D chess move that they would have never thought of before, it's just the constant statement to continue. Moving forward and putting in high-quality reps is the game.

I know. You give a talk called exactly that, how not to die, just to continue a little more in this thread. What's the general advice you share there for people? That doesn't want to die either. The way to summarize it is that if you look at all the startup stories we have at YC and all the companies we fund over all the years, the underlying theme is that rationally the founder should have given up at some point, and then again , let's talk about Airbnb, obviously, something you know a lot about, you know, when they probably should have closed like three or four times before I got into YC, objectively it wasn't working, they were basically ruining their lives, they were disappointing. to their parents, everything was wrong and it was a purely irrational act for the founders of Airbnb to continue working on their dumb startup and on and on, that's just one story if you look at the portfolio of YC and non-c companies there.

It has to be that irrational, you know, the intention to keep going even when the world tells you it's not working and you feel completely defeated and you probably have to go through this a lot and have these near-death experiences and then you're lucky. and then it seems like an overnight success, right, and that's the topic that, as a summary, I give you, you know a lot of facts and a lot of stories, but this is one of those things that the longer I had in this job, more I really really believe this to be true, what is your advice?

On the other hand, there are a lot of startups, especially these days, that are super struggling. His mental health challenges have been added for a while. They would really be very sad. if you had to close this, but often it's probably the right decision, what's your advice for people to decide okay, it actually makes sense to give up on this one? I think this is a nuanced question and it's hard for me to say anything about a podcast that will actually be useful to people, but here are a couple thoughts: One, are you still having fun?

Do you still enjoy doing what you are doing? Do you enjoy spending time with your co-founders? Know? Is this really fun? what you're doing and if the answer is yes, it would tend to support me in moving forward and then if it's more amazing, this is actually deeply affecting me in a negative way and my relationships with the people in my life and my team, you know. . I don't really want to work with my co-founder and stuff like that anymore, so I would lean on probably not doing it anymore, something that a lot of the people who flip it don't have in common, is that they actually do it. they love their customers and they love their product and again, yes in the history of Airbnb you know this very well, but they really liked Airbnb and they liked working with each other and they liked the first host they met and they knew all their names.

I know what I'm saying, like you actually loved your startup even though it was going badly and that's a sign to me to keep going: that you really love what you're doing and the people you're with. You're doing it and you love your customers and you love the problem versus when you're like, yeah, I don't care about that stuff at all. I'm just having a hard time, it's harder to cheer myself up in that situation, you know? and this is a situation that can be solved, you know, you can make it more like what you love, right?

Yes, this is actually very practical and great advice like this is something people can feel. Okay, am I really enjoying this? Do I want to continue doing it? This versus a man is such a burden that I have to continue running this startup. Is there anything you can say to people who say I can't stop because they'll feel like I've failed if it really goes wrong? in a really bad time, it's no big deal, no one will remember that you closed your business probably in 10 or 20 years, as long as you have integrity, as long as you're an honest person, as long as you handle yourself.

Well, in good times and bad, people remember you fondly and you know best that we have such a short life that there are only so many years for our careers to do something that makes you miserable and the only reason why What you do is to avoid losing face and knowing when your heart is not going to work. I don't know, that seems like a pretty big opportunity cost, literally, in your life. Yes, that's exactly what I tell Founders all the time. Life is short, there is no need. forcing you to work on this, yeah, and I really like your point of saying, is it still fun?

Do you like working with your founders? Follow this fight train thread a little more. One of the founders he worked with. You during YC uh his name is Danny Alberon, yeah, he shared a story about how during one of the YC batches someone one of the founders raised his hand and asked you what's wrong with our batch. Everyone is fighting. Nobody is doing well. What had we done? Have we done wrong and you shared a story about Brex that made everyone feel a little better? Can you do that with a bell, and if so, can you prove that that definitely happened?

And I think the story is the story of the winter batch of 17 and in the winter. 17 lots. I founded something like I don't know 35 40 companies in my group, so we subdivided them into groups so that they weren't too many companies and I knew I knew them all very well and founders can't help it. comparing yourself to other founders all the time about who is doing well and who is not, and there was a company in my group, this lot was called second, that was its name at the time and it was like one of these virtual reality devices, Hey.

Stanford dropped out and they basically show up at the group's office hours and we're embarrassed and they say our idea is horrible. You know, we may want to close our company. This is really embarrassing. I just had to beg them. Basically, not giving up and if you had asked the people in the group what the worst company was, I think they would have said this again, not because they were bad people, but because the founders themselves seemed despondent about how it was working and then, interestingly, This is also in history. There was another startup also in my group called Cashew, which was this PTP for the UK PTP, venmo, excuse me, in the UK, and it was also doing very poorly and not growing. so if you were to take this snapshot in time in the middle of the batch of people like who is definitely not doing well, it would clearly have beenthis vyond company in this cashew company and to catch the chase vond changed his idea and got very excited. and he changed the name to brex and this was brex, which is like a decacorn and a cashew, he changed his idea and changed the name to something called retool, so of my 35 companies, the ones that objectively seemed the worst in terms of that everything was going wrong, we In retrospect, they are by far the most successful companies of that group.

Wow, wait, so you're saying that brex was a VR boss, he said the company thought it was really high tech, they wanted to make a really high tech startup and that's why. It's like we were going to build a new virtual reality headset and you know, they were good programmers, but they just didn't know anything about optics or the things that you might want to be an expert in to build a headset. Wow, that's an amazing story, it's a great way to address another topic that came up when talking to founders about advice. that you've shared, a lot of people say, tell me you were the king of

pivoting

, helping people figure out how to pivot.

I'm curious, just what you've seen makes a good pivot, usually a successful pivot becomes warmer. from Colder based on what you are an expert and in some ways it builds on what you learned in the previous idea, so in the case of brex it was that they had worked at a fintech company in Brazil when they were younger, so what I'm like you need to work more on what you know everything and not on what you know nothing and that was what worked for them in the case of retool, it was the same as they had built similar internal tools both in their internships and As for to the cashew, they had all these dashboards that they built to power their competitor Venmo, so they knew a lot about what to build in the case of Post Hog,

pivoting

to their idea, they knew a lot about analytics and had strong opinions about it. so it was much closer to what the original idea is in the case of zip rul knows a lot about a lot of things and he knew a lot about the crazy image process at airpnp because he worked there and it was kind of a good pivot it's like going back to house, you know it's hotter, it's closer to something than you and it never occurred to you that this thing that you know everything about would be a good idea or maybe you're consciously like me not.

I want to work on this because I'm exhausted, like sometimes you have to someone has to overcome this barrier that they have about why they don't want to work on a certain idea. They are incredible. I like how modest you are. like, oh, here you have a great idea and then you just give very tactical elements to look for, so essentially it's a nice twist on your experiences, you're getting closer to something that you have real experience in and two, it's based on something that you've done. Basically, the core idea of ​​a pivot right where you are, like in the example of the segment, which is obviously a very successful company, they started with something to tell your teacher that you were confused in class, it was like a piece of software that they sold him. universities and then they ended up turning PIV into something like a mixed panel competitor after two years and it's because they didn't learn how analytics works by executing their first idea well and then no one wanted to adopt their mixed panel competitor and So they said we should create some JavaScript that you can embed in your website that can send events to multiple endpoints at the same time, so that people will be willing to try our competing mixer panel next to the mixer panel to prove it's better and then They said, oh yeah, no one really wants to just want this JavaScript to send events to different locations, so there's no way those Founders could have started with the final idea.

You know what I mean, there wasn't a Universe where they would do it. They came up with the idea of ​​Segment because they didn't know anything about how analytics worked, but because they worked for several years and became experts at these things, it's a side effect of their earlier ideas, I think they ended up with really unique insights. good. that's a really important point, you don't need to have that experience before you start, the company could come from trying to build a company, exactly one big question that people always ask is: should I pivot? Is this the time to pivot?

Should I continue trying this idea? What is your advice? Well, now you should go back to thinking about something else. This is one of those where I like to give very personalized nuanced advice on a case-by-case basis to the YC people, but again, just to give you a preview of how I would think about it, I would look at how many more ideas the founder has about how grow it, if it doesn't go well and you run out of ideas, that's usually a good time for Pivot, but when you know you have a half dozen or a dozen really good growing ideas that you haven't tried yet, he tests them well, like they tried again in Airbnb history. uh, all kinds of things, including cereal and conventions, like they have a bunch of crazy ideas about growth and they can't run out, so I think when I think when there's still gas in the tank, um, on an idea that might be a reason to point the direction and when, when, literally, the founder says, yeah, I don't know, I guess maybe we should pay influencers or something, when, that's the kind of ideas they come up with, that could be a better sign with Pivot, that's incredibly helpful.

Zipping back very quickly, they passed. I think six different pivots before we got to this idea that is now a billion dollar business. Is there anything about that specific trip that you found really interesting because they came in? so many different directions, like accounting markets, and yes, I think of the example of the founders of zip, they were both great experts and you know I knew Rul very well, he really worked with me in and I see as a visiting partner and so I was. I was very close to the role and I had done this Marketplace called Flight Car when I was younger, which was, you know, raising a B-movie, it didn't work out, but it was a really cool company and I was very confident in their competence.

About running a business and running it fast and just having great instincts, like he really knew the fundamentals, and the problem was that they weren't so clear about what market to go into, I'm still with me, so I suggested doing something in his case again. This is very personalized, but my suggestion was to start by looking at what publicly traded or private equity-owned companies that are big and also hated by their customers and intentionally try to find where there is great insight. The market with an existing um combined with the software is horrible and they did it like they basically figured out all this procurement software and what the state of the art was and that was the message again, maybe it told you.

This was basically the process that he did, he told me I love that example and that advice. I don't know why more people don't do this. Basically, find a big headline with a very low NPS and try to disrupt it. they are so simple, yes I'm serious, I can't promise it will work for everyone, but again, in the best situation with rul, it worked very well because he actually knew exactly once he focused on that message, oh man, did he? Was he a teacher? class, you know, how they did it, they did an A+ job, it was really good, also Lou, the co-founder of it, also credits him, of course, sorry, yeah, we have to congratulate Lou.

Lou did an amazing job. I just don't. I knew Lou before doing YC too, but you're right, we have to give Lou credit for seeing your talk with Michael Cyel talking about pivots and you or he uses this phrase of "you want to move into the mountains and the desert to find" . the gold of a new startup idea compared to downtown, you're unlikely to find gold in the middle of San Francisco, is there anything along those lines you can share? Yeah, I think maybe this relates to what we see in applications and interviews, which is where I sit watching everything that people apply to YC and what they interview with and all that, um, people don't have the Same idea, like basically imagine this, imagine your information consumption where you're listening. same podcast wink wink um you're reading the same people on Twitter you're reading the same blog post you basically have the same information diet as all these other Founders and you're friends with the same people seems surprising then? that everyone would end up with similar startup ideas or similar philosophies about what constitutes a good startup idea, of course they would, so this is the cities metaphor: if you just follow the same principles and the same information flows into your brain You're going to come up with the same ideas as everyone else, so the message here is to try to go further outside the box, whether it's from your personal experience, like with brex and retool or whatever, you know there was no nobody. otherwise, try creating markets for Funko Pops, you know, dig deeper into your own personal interest or experience to find something that your exact person wouldn't think of in exactly the same way and again, the zip example, I don't think. other people were trying to create dodgy procurement software, but that wasn't an idea we saw a lot, so again the message to people is try to mix up what your information diet is or what areas of expertise you have and M that.

Well, instead of just having the same thoughts as everyone else, so again let me give you one more example. A few years ago, trucking related startups were super new and fresh because no one was doing them and they did really well and then it became completely mainstream. Wisdom to do as Trucking related startups, yes I'm not trying to put anyone down but you will see things catch on very quickly because someone found success in this unfashionable space and then it catches on. This is a nice segue into something I definitely want. spend time where you have this concept of tarpit ideas which are essentially ideas that people gravitate towards and get stuck and spin and then they can't get out or try to get out and essentially it's like consistently bad startup ideas that people keep trying. start, can you just talk about this and then what are some examples of bad startup ideas that people should stop trying to start for people who are familiar with this terminology for us, sometimes they get defensive and don't give what they we were saying, so let me, by definition, that it's just a canvas if it seems like it's not like it's just a normal idea, that it's difficult, that it's not a canvas, the strange aspect of what we call an idea of tarpit is an idea that a lot of people come up with and it seems like an unsolved problem and you get a lot of positive feedback about it being right and you have a really good set of arguments that it's a really good startup idea and that's different.

That's a bad idea to start with, you know what I'm trying to say? A bad startup idea is like you don't know something that is obviously bad or something that you just can't get any positive feedback on, but some of the most common goal is something like creating an app to coordinate with your friends and decide where to go out at night or where to meet people. What is it really? It comes from a good place. It's a good idea yes. You ask your friend, hey, would you like an app so we can coordinate to spend more time so we can be friends?

They say, yeah, I'd love to, so you'll get all this positive feedback from the The world and people have been starting that company since the '90s, so you can validate it as part of being a real tarpit, is that you can get good initial validation. , you get what I mean and anyway, and honestly, I worked on tarpet. ideas for me as a founder, which is Music Discovery, this is something I did in my first startup and it was you know, music startups are difficult, and trying to say, oh, let's fix the music, Discovery is those classic things that you can get. a lot of positive feedback and even getting users to work on those things, but there are aspects that make it a very difficult idea, so that absolutely makes sense.

I'm guilty of this too. I had this startup called local mind that uh I've let you talk to people registered at various places around town on Square and Koala in the past and ask them how they're doing and everyone, when they've used it, they're like saints, this is the most amazing thing ever. I have ever seen it. I got to see what's happening at this bar I'm about to go to and then they never use it again. Remember when everyone worked on four clones for two years and told us what they told us was what Square was going to be?

Own this, there's no way that this idea of ​​your building being your own thing and now yeah, Square is a B2B business, yeah, and the four Square clones, if they didn't stop doing what they're doing, they wouldn't work. . Anyway, that's a tarp is something that's super attractive and a lot of people do it and you can get validation and that's why it's a tarp, it draws you in and you get stuck because it seems like it's like a good idea and you get all this positive feedback in this regard. I have beentalking to a founder recently and she asked me what causes an investor to say no when you try to raise money from them and I know.

Every investor has a very different perspective on what turns them off about a startup, but is there anything you find like here? If you do these things, investors will say no, maybe my best advice here is for founders to put themselves in the shoes. of investors and imagine what their life is like and how if you were in their shoes you would make decisions and given this framework, many investors just don't make as many investments and to what we talked about before, life is short. and there are a lot of things that an investor who deep down thinks is pretty good and says, "I like this person and I like his proposition, but I'm only going to make a few investments and even though I really like him," a lot about this I'm going to to say no and then I often think that Founders think there is a secret truth being hidden from them about why someone says no or that they know they want more feedback.

I need comments. Wow, the answer is we didn't want to invest and it's really just that, so I guess if you put yourself and him in the shoes of an investor, hey, I can only do a few of these. year I have a very limited budget, they're really just trying to choose the things that they're personally most excited about or the things that they think can be really phenomenal in some way or, you know, I know you make investments too, so it's , is that as an investor you only have a limited number of opportunities, so anything that doesn't look like this is what I want to do is a no and that's why they actually say no to this.

Did you know you had a bad Zoom setup or something you know? Oh no, we didn't like the color of your shirt. We said no. I don't think that's the case. I don't think that's how it really works. I know I think that's good advice - it's not necessarily that they don't believe in what you're doing, but that they have better options and are waiting for something that reaches a higher level simply because they have a lot of options. Yeah, because again, and if you ask anyone, put yourself in the investors' shoes, wouldn't you be making decisions the same way?

Typically, founders say, yeah, they like, if you do that exercise, a lot of this starts generating a lot more. It makes sense specifically when you're evaluating startups. I wasn't going to get into this, but I think the size of Mark Market might be interesting. How do you think about the importance of a large Tam as an investor? YC. I think it really depends on what stage you are investing in and it is absolutely critical, in the later stage you get it right if you are going to invest at a very high valuation, it is really important, the earlier you go the less it matters and some of the most phenomenally good startups if you were really sad about it, the Tam would be as small as the The Tam from uber would be nothing, like um The Tam from Airbnb would have been nothing The Tam from I was uh, I financed the payment from Razer, which is, I believe the processor largest payments platform in India and the Tam of that was Tiny because no one was using credit cards in 2015 in India, so you had to believe that the size of the credit card industry in India would be 100 times bigger , guess what happened, do you know what I?

What I'm saying is that I'm not saying that having a large market one day won't matter, of course it eventually will, but trying to be super pedantic about market size when it comes to a preed company or someone applying getting into YC is No, you know, it's just not something I've thought about much. You get all that, oh, what's the Tam of the Funko Pop collectible industry? I don't know, I don't think he's that great man. I don't know if you did that. now when you invested, but you know, I think it's pretty small, but I wasn't worried about that, it was the last thing I was worried about, it makes a lot of sense that at YC you don't think about it as much because you said a lot of startups pivot anyway, so if you like the team, but I'm not saying it's not, it's just not and the things that concern me are like, hey, how do you get users?, hey, how do you cultivate things like that?

Are you doing something that people want? Those are the things I'm really worried about instead of, oh, I ran an Excel model and I'm worried that this isn't a big enough T. That's not at the top of my list. I think it is. It's important to recognize that while many investors are a lot like YC, I think it's unique in many ways: you invest very early and help people on this journey. Many investors are very focused on Tam, so you may find that you are getting rejected because they don't believe there is a big enough market for you to build a big business, yes, or because you are asking them to believe in a crazy leap of faith that again they can say, well, it's theoretically possible that I can. outsell Funko pops and I understand that's your argument, but I have other opportunities that are less risky.

You know what I'm saying, it's not because many Founders argue that the Tam is great. and you can say wow, that's a really interesting argument and I don't, I don't have, you know, I'm not going to argue with you about that, but no, I'm not going to, so again it's hard to get anyone involved in it. a debate on Tam, even if you know, even if you have some proof points, ultimately a lot of investors just don't like that risk, it's fair enough to go in a slightly different direction, so someone else who worked with you, another Lenny, uh, Lenny boganov, who founded a company called milk and then was head of growth at open a for a while, asked me to ask him about things that product leaders and startups should keep in mind. specific office hours, but I understand the question and of course I remember Lenny.

I think the advice you're referring to here is how important it is not to delegate too much and for founders to stay close to things, as well as being aware of the pitfalls of hiring high-level people with fancy resumes very early in a startup. . I think that's what he refers to over and over again. This is definitely one of those very basic things that we find ourselves repeating a lot, where they're like, yeah, yeah. understand it like don't delegate too much we hire an adult and then two years later they say wow we delegated too much we have to go clean that up so that's probably the best advice about the product and the people who are really great at the product, the founders that are there are always deeply into the product and they still care a lot and they keep talking to customers no matter how late the stage comes.

I'm sure you've experienced this in Airbnb culture, but you know. You can't delegate the care of your users and you can't delegate the care that the product is excellent, that is so critical to make this even more real. What do you see them doing? They hire a PM too early. They hire a. senior salesperson up early what are the yeses? I think it's I think you're often pressured by investors to hire executives or scale the team or we need you to know we need you to raise all this money that you have to spend that you know we have You have to show that you're serious about growing and building. from a world-class organization, whatever that is, and so you end up with super nice people with super shiny resumes from big tech companies.

Oh wow, they did something amazing at Google. and then you hire them and then you wake up one day and say oh wow, everything went wrong, it's not really anyone's fault, it's just that you, you, you, you took your eye off the ball and this is what happens to the first. time, a lot of founders, how do you as a founder have time to do all these things? Is there some guy I give it to? Don't delegate too much, don't hire too much, but you also need to. You have 24 hours a day. Just find the time to prioritize or there are more things.

I think if you just care a lot about your customers and you care a lot about the product, your instincts are pretty good about what to spend your time on, and for example, spending tons and tons of time like hanging out with investors and networking, you probably won't. whatever I'd probably be cutting, you know what I'm saying, it's what we talked about before, if you really love what you're doing, no one needs it. to tell you how to prioritize your time, your intuition will be right about what you should spend all your time on, which is being obsessed with the product.

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Head to coda.io Lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit. That's coda.io. Lenny to register and get $1,000 in credit. coda.io Lenny, it's okay. So one of your former colleagues, current colleagues, not former colleagues, Gustaf was on the podcast before. His episode is. I think it's currently the fourth most popular episode of all time, so there's no pressure. Great, I don't know, I can do it. I think you can, so I asked him what is often the most common reason why a startup fails and his answer was: they don't talk to customers, they don't find product market fit, nothing else matters if they can't do that, and that's why his advice. is talking to customers more often, so two questions here and first of all, is there anything else you would add about why startups fail?

I know we already talked about some of these, but what comes to mind there I completely agree with what Gustoff said. but to look at this from a different framework, I think founders lose hope and when you and your heart say, yeah, we're failing, like one time I can see it when I meet with the founder when they quit. themselves that are failing versus when we have one more move in us we have one more try as you can see in their eyes when they feel like there's more ideas or there's one last Hillary thing um it doesn't always work but it's almost like you don't have You have to accept that you are going to fail and as long as you don't accept that that is going to happen, there are usually many more moves you can try to save the company and perhaps become profitable. maybe it's to do some other quirky thing, maybe it's that you know how to launch a new product, um, so it's pretty weird.

I would say the cause of death is that they had a lot of firepower and were feeling very positive and they just ran out. of money which is actually rarer than the Founders think, um, it's much more common for them to still have some money left. I'm not saying much, but some money and they just say, yeah, I'm done, I'm out of ideas. I don't want to do this over and over again, it's only fair, you know? But do you understand what I'm saying? I think the Founders are afraid of running out of money and that's why they shut down GNA and it's much more common that they like their idea doesn't work and they have a big fight with their co-founder and then they can't agree on what to work on. and then they're just like, "I don't want to do this." more and they close, that's the most common cause of death, it's something that sounds like that story that's so interesting and again, this goes back to your vivice cable, don't die, just don't die, we already talked about this. sometimes it's actually okay to die and I guess just to refresh that lesson is that if you're not having fun anymore maybe yeah, you're out of ideas, you're like it's just over, like you know in your heart, you're done , you don't have to keep doing the paperwork, no one benefits from that right and you have also seen enough cases, now you have shared some of these where they potentially lost all hope, but they moved on and then became a great success story and I think most people don't see those examples.

I guess there's something you can share, like how often does that happen, how often do you see that change? I would say that if we define it is that the company had a near-death experience where it was going badly and the founders seriously wondered if everything was going to be more100% of the time that people spend, you know where they are, like yeah, I guess we're done. I guess we should call it quits and at least you feel that way at some point in your startup journey. I, we all went through that and again there are graduation people who really got themselves into very, very difficult situations.

It's still a high percentage, maybe 50. I mean, you can ask Founders, there are a lot of Founders who are so close to it all being over and they'll just continue like this, you know, that's really empowering. I imagine for many Founders who hear this to simply get to know each one of them. The founder has a good time. I think it's actually over, yeah, following this very quick tip that he shared with me, which is about talking to customers. I'm going to keep trying to get the wisdom out of your head. Do you have any advice on how to do it? talk effectively to customers, we always hear talking to customers building things they want, it's easier said than done, you get a lot of questions, you get a customer asking for a lot of things, there's a big company that wants to build this, we'll buy it from you. pay a million dollars, you just have general guidance on what to pay attention to and what to build versus avoid, yeah, I think what I talked to aspiring Founders about this a lot of times they say, yeah, yeah, talk to customers, we understand it well and I.

I'm great, well how many customers do you talk to and they get really quiet? So I think this is one of those things like, hey, you should have a healthy diet and exercise every day or whatever where people know it and that doesn't mean they do it, so I think you have to get out there to start with. to the world and talk to people in person and you can't just hide behind your keyboard and call that talking to customers properly and I think a lot of people like to, you know, create a landing page and buy some Instagram ads and trying to get people to sign up for something and again, maybe I, maybe that's something, but I think a big part of the reason why people do that.

Are they just shy and don't want to put themselves out there because it's a little awkward to go talk to people and you have to get up the nerve to go out into the physical world and get people together? you get them to take you seriously, show them a product that you're creating and, again, to be very tactical, here you can do a self-assessment in the last month. How many physical in-person meetings have I had with potential clients? Maybe you've I've done a lot I don't know, listener, maybe maybe you've done it, but you know it's shocking how many companies I talk to.

They say we're focused on raising our pre-round before we talk to clients like that kind of thing. Again, I think the core thing, the core thing that's happening is just social anxiety and looking stupid and I think you have to get over that, you know you have to start doing it until you don't feel bad anymore, but you know. Think about how stupid the Airbnb FS must have felt. They said, hey, you should run out of your house and I'm GNA, come sleep at your house and here's a B hair like this is all a little awkward, right?

I gained power through the discomfort of talking to people, and once you start doing it, it's actually fun, so once you get used to overcoming this discomfort, I think people do much better talking to people. customers when someone does this themselves. -evaluation there is a heris that tells you this is enough what are you looking for there is a number like how many per week how many per month yes I don't know if I know a good number I think it is to look at your calendar and You should know 20 or 30% of your time that the calendar says something like meeting with a client, client call, like meeting with lunch, meeting with this person and when the calendar is not that or it is all you know again, what you are really doing is just buying ads to try to validate your idea that no, I don't think that's talking to customers, you know, I think that's another thing that's amazing, so about a fifth of your time should at least be talking to customers, yeah, another one. time.

It depends on the idea space you're working in, some are more, some are less, so yes, it should be a good amount of time and nothing replaces a real conversation instead of just looking at analytics dashboards makes a lot of sense, so airb B is a classic example of they went to New York and talked to their host and stuff like that. Is there another startup that comes to mind that did this very well? I found a really cool way and I was quick to talk to customers well again if some of the companies that we talked about, I mean for brecks, they were just talking to other people in their group and that worked extremely well.

Same with retool, they just sold it within YC Network. I think that with zip they were beasts at achieving it. companies were calling them to ask them about acquisitions and I think they had a lot more than 20% of their time, like when you looked at their calendars, oh man, I think they were doing it, they were talking to customers a lot to create their first product. and they kind of pre-sold it before they built it anyway with postt talk. I guess it's a different market launch. To begin with, they launched this open source thing and it was their calendars that were full of people who were trying to implement the first open source.

The source version of Post Hog was very excited about it and the people at Hacker News were excited about it and like they had a huge influx of people who were excited that Post Hog existed and they had a lot of comments and web reports like it wasn't . Always positive, but never short of people who wanted to talk to them once they launched that, which was very helpful in zip. In fact, I have a lot of their story in one of my series about building a B2B startup and what they actually did. As you know, they just called up the DMD people on LinkedIn and asked them for advice.

Hi, we're trying to understand how you enjoy your current acquisition products and then you ended up being the first beta testers. I think they did and I. I think they made hundreds like hundreds of these that they just had, oh yeah, no, it was a numbers game, they were just working on this and yeah, that was really cool. The other classic YC story is the cison collision, I think it's called. or the cison installation oh cison installation Well, where can you tell that story briefly? The Collinson facility is. What often happens with customers is that they say yes, I want to buy your product and then they don't implement it, they just stay silent. like there's no implementation and this is very bad if you're selling software to someone, if they never implement it, they'll abandon it and you don't know that you basically failed on the one yard line, okay?

I developed this tactic to say, "well, you know I'm in the neighborhood, you know, I'll stop by your office to help you implement stripe and sort of create again, it was a little awkward like we talked about before, but you'd say yes." , I'm, I'm in, I'm in the neighborhood, how about I stop by and then they show up and say, cool, cool, would you like to open up your text editor? Oh yeah, cool okay, um, hey, can you, can I, can I drive, can I have the keyboard and would they just like to install Stripe on the client's website, you know, smiling being like Charming, lovely guys and they say, oh, that's good, that's good, well, can you? can we like implement the website now and they basically wouldn't go away until you finished the stripe implementation and like again, it was really helpful because they were doing all this white glove service to implement it, that was very effective and I think The conclusion of that story is that even when you get a yes, you're not really done with sales, you have to finish the last mile to implement it and they were very good at that.

It's an amazing story and now they're like I don't know a hundred billion dollars in business and that's how it all starts, yeah I was one of the first customers of my startup and yeah Patrick would like to use Google Talk at that time, Patrick would send me messages like on a weekly basis, like checking in, and again, it's funny how successful these people are, but yeah, Patrick was very hands-on with all of his clients and extremely available, like I, I can say that because I was one of them, yeah, and I'm sure he had social anxiety going through all that, that wasn't a comfortable thing to do, just keep pushing people to install your software and implement it, oh, surely not, it's just that you have to do the same thing if you want your startup to work, this is just what you have to do, you know, it comes with the territory, this is just going to be a very broad question and I don't know if you'll have an answer, but are there any other patterns that you find? in the new companies that do well? maybe the 64th million dollar question is just the founders and what they do that ends up leading them to success.

I don't think personality types matter that much. I've seen very quiet people, very outgoing people, you know, whatever. I have seen them all. types of personality types, so for me personally I don't think there's a right or I don't think there's a personality type that people should copy and be like I need to be like this person, you know, I need to be like Steve Jobs. I need to be like Elon, you know, I don't really believe in that because there's so much variation like Tony from Door, Dash is very different from a lot of people and Reel is very different and Grant from all that, they're all very, very different people.

Patrick is a different type of person, Ryan from Flexport, like these. These are very different personality types, but what I would say that people who build really great companies have in common is that they really want it and they really believe in themselves and they really believe that they can make it work and that somehow they can do it. Deep in your inner psyche there is something that is like I am the one and I will not accept it, I will not accept that this does not work and although OB objectively everything is there, all this data is coming.

This is not working, this is bad, you know, my employees want to quit, my executives want to quit, you know, whatever it is, somewhere deep down, they say, oh yeah, I'm going to make this work, this is this. company. They are great and they just believe and it is almost as if that internal gravitational force within them is so great that it warps the world to bend to that will and people begin to believe it because they believe it so much and they convince their employees believe it. and they convince everyone around them that this will happen to them and again, this is not a personality trait.

What I'm arguing is that it's a very interesting core belief and one that connects a lot to what we. I've been talking just don't die, don't give up hope on what you're working on. A Founder hearing this may seem like a man. I don't know if I'm so convinced this will work in your experience. How much of this is internal? They are so confident and convinced versus externally, they need to show this confidence. Well, I think it's internally. They are convinced. Again, I'm not sure it's external, but this is the big butt. Nobody has this. in the early stages, when they don't have a good idea and they don't have customers and they like it's objectively not working, so again I know a lot of founders who like, well, I don't feel that way, oh no, maybe I do.

You know maybe I'm an impostor and I shouldn't do a startup. Well, of course, you don't feel that way if you haven't talked to any clients and haven't created a product like the one you know, but what usually happens? What happens is that you pivot to a good idea or you start with a good idea that you're interested in and the customers that you're interested in and you launch it and the better the product works, the more you become obsessed with your own company, as I think in the case of Stripe I don't want you to know to tell Patrick's story, but I remember him saying at one point, he wasn't so sure that Stripe was going to work until a year or two went by and then once it started working.

So he, you know, they really believed in it, but it wasn't like you wake up one day like a stripe is what it's going to be, it's going to work. I think you create conviction and you have this like. Virtual network effect. cycle in which you get more conviction the more clients reflect you and the data reflects that you are on the right path. This is exactly what Scott Bsky shared in our episode when I asked him when to pivot if you have more conviction. This is going to work or have less conviction over time, which is why I like that connection we just made.

Well, we've talked about all these ways startups fail. Bad ideas. I want to go to the other side and talk about good startup ideas. You recently put out an application for startups that are essentially 20 categories of ideas that you want to fund and that YC wants to fund. Can you share some of these ideas that you're excited about and that you're basically looking to fund and pursue? Founders to work with, yeah, um, and that's why we apply for startups just to inspire people to maybe apply with ideas that aren't the ones we always see, it's not prescriptive as we'll only fund ideas on that list. that's not at all just remembering what I talked about before with the information diet, we're tryingto mix in some of the information diet about what kind of ideas people might be currently contemplating and therefore a couple of the ones we have.

We put one of them up, I did one on erps, which is enterprise resource planning software, and I did it because I have very few apps on that and they're usually pretty good and I'd love to see more people see it. that and learning what erps are because it's very rare that people apply that and now I have a feeling that we're going to see a lot more applications working on that and it worked as intended, which is introducing this idea space. For founders who didn't even know what an Erp was, now they will learn about it.

Another thing is that we would like to fund open source companies and that is one of the rfs where you know if there are more people. applied to YC with open source ideas. I think we would be very excited about that and that could, oh, maybe FS didn't realize that would be something we would want to fund in the same way with space companies. Yes, we have had a lot of success with space. companies, you know, several of the people that are actually going to space right now that are not SpaceX are YC companies, so I think sometimes founders feel that those ideas are too bold and ambitious, but no, ya You know, I love that more people apply. with space companies and so think about it that way, we're just trying to publish, we're trying to plant seeds of idea spaces that maybe someone consciously leaked is what might be a good startup idea and hopefully that creates a new set of starter ideas for the person and we're going to link to this page in the show notes for people who want to explore.

I'll give you a couple more of a very quick way to kill cancer, no big deal. Space computing, new defense technology, which will bring manufacturing back to the United States. a lot of things like hard science, deep technology, which is maybe something new, I don't know, I know. I imagine you guys have invested in this in the past, but it looks like we're absolutely right, so these aren't like, oh, we. I've never invested in these before, it's more like, hey, it would be great if we saw more applications along these lines, it would be nice, because currently it feels a little bit under, you know, yeah, there could be more startups working on them. these things, yes, instead of tarpet ideas, uh, a couple more, very fast, better, business glue, yes, I like that idea, say more about that, how does it look?

The software to connect all these business systems is usually quite brittle in janky and there have been many good startups founded to solve this problem. I think there is still a lot more room for improvement and the LMS is likely to get better as we will probably be able to create better and better glue so that all kinds of software systems can communicate with each other, so again, very broad idea, but yes, I think we will see a lot of very successful companies where that is the core of the idea, they start with an amazing latest model, small and thin, as an alternative to the giant generics, yes, great, so we will send you I will include this link in the show notes and people can click on each of these and basically there's a lot more explanation than you're thinking.

Great, okay, just a couple more questions. Yes, one is just your experience. From what I read in the early 2000s, you were basically meeting some of the biggest success stories today, people like Zuck and Reed Hoffman Sam Alman Elon Sean Parker, this was before they really became something and They were very successful. I'm curious as to what, looking back, what you've noticed is consistent among these people who end up being very successful over time back in 2003, being in Silicon Valley and being interested in startups, it was just a really small space. There just weren't a lot of people interested in this stuff, so I remember cold emailing Reed Hoffman when LinkedIn had like 12 employees and he just responded and said, oh, let's have lunch, right? a guy and all the others that were doing, I guess you could call it social media, uh, with that was the people I knew, there were some conferences that you went to and there were like 30 people there, which reminds me of stories about the Homer Computer Club I'm not saying this is great, but when I read stories about what it was like when the Homer Computer Club existed, there were a very small number of people who knew each other and who were real, like strange strangers that they were. well, and that's what in the post.com boom bay area startup scene, that's legitimately what it feels like, so I didn't think much about the personality traits of these people, um, they all were again, They were all quite different. people, but what they had in common is that the people who are now the really big names had a lot of staying power, so when I met Sam, he had dropped out of Stanford to work at Loop, which is a hilarious way to find people. around you to hang out with an interesting topic here uh he was cool he was just a really young guy and um he just made it not huge and then he got into other things and ended up working at YC and ended up getting involved in hard technology and has now reinvented himself as the great mind behind AI, which is again incredible, but if I think about who he was in the past, yes, he was like a 23-year-old working. on something for basic phones to find friends in the neighborhood, his client was Boost Mobile.

I bet you could go look up the Loops commercials that Boost Mobile posted on YouTube. They're actually quite fun. Have you seen those commercials? No, but I'm going to go see them anyway, it's pretty funny, so yeah, that's the real story, um and then yeah, I remember I was downtown, friend Alto, at the time and, um , some of the people he was friends with were friends of Shawn Parker. and this is actually before Shawn Parker came on Facebook, he was part of Napster and so one of my friends was like, "Oh, we have to take my friend to the airport," so I ended up taking Sean Parker to the airport from Oakland and again.

I don't know, he basically he sat in the back seat talking on the phone the whole time, but again what I mean is, I didn't think, "Wow, these are going to be really successful people who will be important one day." in the world it just felt like a bunch of nerds who really liked the internet and computers doing things they were interested in and were just obsessed with like they didn't exist they weren't like GE should I move to New York or GE? Should I maybe should go to law school as if they were people who were very adamant about continuing to work at Internet companies and you'll see these people just reinvent themselves in various eras?

Well, okay, like Reed Hoffen, right, he worked at PayPal. right, and then he did LinkedIn and then it was like a VC and like he's had all these different eras where he's the same person but he's almost like a different figure, there's a lot of interesting

lessons

, one is that. Your career is long and you will have the opportunity to do many things and you can continue to change like in my example, this is my fourth career. I realized I was an engineer, then a founder, then a product manager, whatever this job is and I think that's very common.

I think the other point is personality type, which I didn't mention, but I think it's very important that you can be super introverted and be very successful. You can be super extroverted, be very successful and I think that's the key there. it's using your skills and strengths to achieve the same things, you don't have to be the amazing presenter on stage like Steve Jobs, you can do the same thing in a different way and then the other point is to come back to you, you just need to be really excited and enjoy the work that you're doing because that will propel you forward and make you successful, so I like that, I love that the story is kind of a summary of so many of the things that you've shared.

So far, two other fun stories, maybe pick one or the other: You sold your startup to Myspace and your job was basically to save my space, and then the other one is You're the reason Andre Horowitz missed Instagram, yeah, and he could. I didn't invest, so which one would you like to share? Well, it's more or less the same story. Okay, cool in the sense that it's the same story. It is my second company. I basically sold my first company on Myspace, it was the music company. which I worked at and they recruited a new CEO, um, who was previously the COO of Facebook, named Owen Vanada, so again, hilariously, I was part of the same small circle of people and Owen was like, “Okay , we have to fix Myspace." You know, Murdo has the juice. he wants me to fix it like we're going to turn, we're going to do it, so he comes up with some ideas and the best idea that came to me at that time was to do something related to the mobile photo. sharing something like Twitter, but for photos and I thought with the Myspace user base it would work pretty well, this was like 2010 so it was right as the App Store was getting big and had a lot of success in the App Store with imme was one of the most downloaded music apps so I thought wow the App Store was really good and I really liked that the apps were the most important thing and at this time Facebook was a little early, they were trying to do cross platform mobile apps if you remember and their apps were no good this was again ancient history and that was kind of my plan and then immediately uh vanado was fired and I didn't even join so I just like I left I think I worked in my space for like a month because the person who acquired my company was fired and I think they fired the entire word graph, so I don't even know, I didn't even know who to talk to.

It was really cool, it was a great experience, you know what I'm saying. I wasn't really sure who my point of contact was at the time. I don't think they knew it either. It was just a disaster, just Tom, just text Tom, no. no, it got serious a long time ago, I know you're joking, but no, I literally don't know who was left at that point. um, great, Tomas Longone, yeah, so I thought, well, I should do a new startup and I should work on something like what I was thinking about and I ended up, yeah, starting the company and I was quickly able to raise an angel because people remembered my company since the first and the main investor we had was Andre Horwitz, this is one of its first. board seat Investments like Mark Andreon were on my board and you know again I have my own set of stories about that, but it was an interesting experience and we launched it and I think we got half a million or a million users like you.

You can look up Tech Renal articles about it and we launched it on Android and iOS and there was mobile photo sharing and it was actually growing pretty well and then what happened is there was another portfolio company called Bourbon that was originally a four square clone that was built by these two guys and they decided to get out of that and into something that was pretty similar to mine, you know, it's true, that's how it works and they did something clever again, that's just me talking, I don't know. I know what their side of the story is, but I think what they did was smart: if you look at the paid app store charts, the number one app was modern and hypsta costs money and what do we know about what people want? which are free and cost money, so they basically built a pretty legit knockoff of trendy static filters by combining it with this social graph and they launched it and it quickly took off, so of course this is Instagram, so it really took off. quickly and like yeah, it was like a wild experience for me to be like oh, this looks familiar um and basically because Andran Horwitz had invested in my company he was on the board of directors even though they were investors uh in Instagram um that was like a came in conflicted, they and they didn't make the deal and then for some reason this became a big source of Silicon Valley like gossip, which was like, wow, I can't believe this happened, so it was a really strange experience for me as a Founder to be right in the middle of something that became so culturally important.

I imagine there's a target on your back from a16z for a while. Oh no, I actually don't think they care. I don't think they would last. It's against me, um, because what did I do wrong? It's true, I started a company, you know what I'm saying, obviously there was some frustration, but I was like I was a guy who had a company that they invested in. I don't know, I didn't feel like them, I didn't feel, I didn't feel much better for them, I guess that's how life works, yeah, I wonder if they'll change their conflict policies after that.

I don't think so, this H, I think this happened, I think this has happened many other times, but those are not my stories at all and by the way, I don't know if you mentioned the name of your startup, it's called pck pick, by the way favor. right yes it's called choose please yes great thenfor the final phase before reaching our exciting terrain L. I have these two recurring segments. I have fault corner and opposite corner, we can do both or we can choose one fault or the other. Corner shares a story of something at a time in your career where you failed and when you learned from that experience counter corner what is something you believe in that most people don't believe in yes I think for counter corner I know where would Start and I think it's relevant to your listener, I think this is relevant to this, um, and again, maybe and you could argue that this is not contrary, but this is what I think, I think I think it's growth. and growth hacking and doing all these AB analytical tests. stuff, um, it's a total waste of time for early-stage startups and one of the strange things about having a lot of startup advice on the internet again.

This is one of the reasons we started making videos on YC because a lot of the advice was taken care of. towards later stage companies like oh this is how you set up your dashboard and this is how you motivate your sales team like everything is aimed at series A, series B founders and not early stage founders, the problem was that early-stage founders would consume everything afterward. he presents advice and gets very confusing, so the ant pattern I see is that there are a lot of Founders who are very familiar with his amazing work, which, again, I really recommend.

I like it, but when you don't have clients and you're reading, you know the Lenny guys. about how to set up split testing and how you grew up on Airbnb, oh man, that's so dumb it's not that useful, so you see this inclination to not get a first client, get a client and talk to that person and instead, They have something like that. this whole really complex theory of growth hacking. I think this also happens if you work in a big tech where your product already has scale, so you know if you work at Facebook and your job is to release small new features, yes of course you have to make heavy use of analytics, AB testing, split testing and feature flags like yes, yes, yes, it makes sense, but when you don't have users, what are you doing?

Do you think that is contrary? Do you think I'm just trying to argue that this advice applied to a startup so early is not useful? I think it's contrary to a lot of people 100% I also 100% agree with this it makes me feel like I need it at the top of my post share here who is this for if you came before this ignore it if you came after this ignore it I want I mean, again, I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, but imagine if the OG Airbnb founders took all of their current advice and applied it when they had like four users and knew their names and were like trying to run complicated split-testing stuff. of Growth Hacking, yes, maybe just to clarify when growth hacking is talked about so obviously. when you're starting something, say a consumer app, you need to get a group of users somehow, what's your point, like when you say don't do this kind of thing, but okay, what kind of drops in those cubes?

I think it depends on the idea, um, I think for anything else, obviously it was a consumer app and they needed to get users, um, but they were very intellectually honest on the metrics of how to get a Marketplace off the ground and they didn't. . they just poured all their money into Instagram ads and like they really knew they needed to focus on buyers and the buy side and build momentum on the buy side, they really understood the markets and therefore for the Consumer , I think it's having a sophisticated vision of how you get the consumer company off the ground.

I think if you look at the history of Facebook, they're going to get 100% penetration on the Harvard campus first rather than launching it again overall. A good strategy would recommend that strategy to you, so again, the way to extrapolate is to know what your comps are for companies of your type and then look at what they did from zero to one and ignore what they do today. Don't pay attention to what Facebook is doing today if you're a new startup founder, pay attention. to Facebook when they were getting their first thousand users, what were those tactics?

I feel like this should be its own episode where we just look at how to get your first thousand users. I know there's a video that will actually link to the one Gustaf did with YC. tips on how to attract your users, did you want to visit the corner of failure or not, or should we move on? I failed at tons of things. um. I, as an investor, thought I made a lot of bad and good investments, I think in my startups. I went around a lot and a lot of things I did didn't work, so again I told you a specific story with P.

Please, you just heard a specific story there. I guess what I learned is that you just can. Don't let it get to you too much and you have to keep going and if you keep going no one really remembers them that much and that doesn't really define you and shouldn't you know that the fear of failure shouldn't take over everything. of your thoughts and instead you should use your energy and positivity to keep trying to do good work because in the past if I had said well, you know, I guess startups are not for me, I guess technology is not for me.

I wouldn't have had a career doing any of this. I wouldn't be working at YC. I wouldn't be advising companies well, so I always had to have a lot of optimism and energy in my life and use that energy. engine to keep me going and it served me very well, even if a lot of things I tried didn't work and continue to not work, you know again, obvious things, I know, but yeah, that doesn't mean it's not true, even though it's obvious. I feel like that's a recurring theme here and I love that it's another take on how not to die, it's like the startup itself shouldn't die and then there's your drive and motivation to keep going and try new things when things don't. . works and I love all the recurring themes and messages for the people here Dalton, is there anything else you want to leave with the listeners before we get to our exciting lightning round?

Yeah, I guess the final thought is, you know, if anyone wants to. doing a startup and you don't know where to start just to give you permission to talk to potential customers and try to pre-sell something before you write the code and have those conversations. I think a lot of people don't know where to start. to Startup and my tactical advice is to start validating the customer first instead of creating a PowerPoint deck instead of trying to raise money instead of all these other things. I think a lot of people don't use that strategy and basically if you find people. that they're really excited and you get clients, that's a big green light that it's time to make a good startup that can guide you down the road, so yeah, I guess that's my last piece of advice and then with that, when will the building arrive? in is build it while you talk build it before you basically depends on building it once you have some conviction that you're like oh I think I would have a customer I think at least one person would use this thing I want to build at least one.

I love it. I love the simplicity and pragmatism of all your advice. Dalton, welcome to this exciting lightning round. I have six questions for you. Are you ready? Let's do it. What are two or three books that you most recommend to other people. I think a lot of founders are afraid to do sales and they don't know how to do it and they think they need these really experienced sales trainers and they need all this training and I'm like, "okay." Go to Amazon and look for the best-selling books like Getting to Yes that everyone reads and just read them, and that will get you 80% of the way there.

You know what I'm saying, like they want to hire someone for millions. dollars to provide sales training. I say, "Well, have you read these really basic sales books?" the names and just read them and that's your crash course on how to be great at sales. There is also a book called Sales Foundation that I imagine you are familiar with. Pete Kazi was on the podcast talking about that and that's something that I always recommend because it's how founders can make sales, start there, start there, cool, we linked to that, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really you enjoyed?

This may be distorting what you're asking for, but I like to see it. A lot of old shows, so I keep rewatching them like The Sopranos and The Wire and it's always different for me every time and you know stuff like that. I think there is a silly answer here. I've really enjoyed watching old episodes of Columbo which was a TV show from the 70's and 80's I don't know why I don't even know if this is instructive but it is for some reason I really like that right now it's episodes very old cabbage, you are an old man.

Delta soul I guess I don't know, it just feels like a time machine, uh, in a different time when I see these things, definitely, maybe one of the more unique answers, but fair enough, Columbo, well, again I guess I'm not trying. to give you an answer where I sound super smart, I'm just telling you the real answer, so that's what I'm looking at, it actually sounds very sophisticated and smart, do you have a favorite interview question that you like? ask ask I guess founders in this context don't really believe in trick questions and I think I just start with hey so tell me what you're working on or what you've learned since you started, none of these are tricks. questions, but I think you can get the most honest and interesting answers by asking the simplest basic things and making that a blank slate for your answers to build on.

You know what I'm saying, so I like simpler prompts and let them take the conversation where they want to go. I know this is probably a very important question, but what are you looking for in their answer that will give you an idea that this is a good or bad answer for YC interviews, yes and and? I know this is like its own podcast episode. I think there's evidence that they've really thought about it, as PR said before, that they've done their research, that they have opinions, that they care, sometimes, when people answer questions. It's like you can tell it's really super superficial and they haven't put much care or soul into their answers.

You know, incredible. Do you have a favorite product that you recently discovered? They really like my ring and my Apple watch and everything. That good stuff, like I've been a fan, there's a YC competition called CCI Fox Siox that I just signed up for and they do at home blood tests and basically I'm trying to time that ad about at home blood tests with all my others. devices um I guess I don't know I really enjoy all the things that Apple and other startups are working on and that YC companies are working on around personal health so yeah those are products in which that I like scifox, okay and wait, then you like the needle. and stuff and you take your own blood, it's a little needle that doesn't hurt at all and it just takes a few drops of blood and you do it at home, you send it in the mail and then it has all these blood tests, it's actually really cool , yeah, and I just found out that it's one of those cases where I saw it, I saw it and then, then, I was like, oh wait, it's a YC company, I basically became a customer and I was pleasantly surprised that it's a YC Company and I think I found it is siox health.com yeah it really rolls off the tongue right um yeah that's the name very cool okay I see this little needle okay cool come on CCI Fox , uh, okay, two more questions, do you have? a favorite life motto that you often return to and find useful in work or life.

Share it with friends. Check in with yourself that you are having fun and that you enjoy what you are doing. If not, you probably should. make a change, whatever it is and again, if you're a founder, you're in control, you can change your own company, but I think a lot of people go through life and don't ask this question like I'm having fun. I'm enjoying? Do I value what I am spending my time on? And I think you can come back to this again and again. It's good advice on how to decide what to do with your It's easier said than done to change that in many cases, but it always starts with realizing that okay, this isn't really what it is, admit it to yourself, yeah, I'm not really enjoying this and then trying to say well how can I fix it having that? conversation with yourself, yeah, it reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote where you wake up day after day like it's okay to wake up some days thinking I don't want to do this, but if it's every day and it keeps happening, then that's a sign, you should change it exactly final question, you and Michael cybel have been doing this amazing podcast together if anyone would like to check out the podcast and dive into it.

Is there an episode that you like best that you think they could start with? It depends on some of the The episodes are more forpeople who already have a startup and are dealing with similar problems. I don't know some of the episodes about investors or things like that. It's very clear that the audience for them is today's startup founders and there are a lot of them that are just more life advice on how to make decisions and think and they've strangely become very popular and gotten a lot of opinions among founders who don't. They're startups, which is a nice surprise, so I would recommend them to people in the audience who aren't currently startup founders, I don't know, life advice, uh, from the top founders, I think they're the billionaires, yeah, yeah, I think it was pretty popular, so what I would be looking for is to diagnose, am I a The current founder and I have issues with the founder.

Where I'm just looking for general philosophy type questions and I really like those philosophy ones? We have one for high school students and it's aimed at the audience. Here are tips for high school students who are interested in startups. Here are some. advice that you should think about again in a pretty narrow target audience, but I love that episode because we're really trying to speak directly to that audience, and you know, I think that's pretty good advice, Dalton, you're wonderful, thanks for sharing . Lots of wisdom, this is action packed. I'm so excited for the Founders to hear this.

I think it's going to make a big dent in a lot of people's lives. Two final questions: Where can people find you online if they want to communicate and follow up? I'm aware of some of this and how listeners can be helpful. Me on Twitter x.com Dalton c um is my username and also my LinkedIn is pretty good, it's pretty popular. I don't know, just search my name on LinkedIn um. and uh yeah, I love seeing you all there and then how can people be helpful? I mean, honestly, it's great when people want to apply to YC and make a startup, so feel free to dive into other videos and apply to YC and something really special about my job is that I have the privilege of being able to fund companies that They already know me from the videos and are surprised that I am exactly the same and, indeed, they say: wow, it's you.

You're just that guy from the videos that I've been watching and it's cool that you're exactly like you see in the videos and basically yeah, if people like what I have to say and they like the videos and apply. I can see that. I would love to fund your companies. Dalton. Thank you very much for being here. Sure. Thank you so much. Lenny. I apreciate it. Goodbye everybody. Thank you very much for listening. If you find this valuable, you can subscribe. to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app, also consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

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