founders

Want to start a startup?  Get funded by
Y Combinator.

October 2010

(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something
about the qualities we look for in founders.  In print they had to cut
the last item because they didn't have room.)1. DeterminationThis has turned out to be the most important quality in startup
founders.  We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most
important quality would be intelligence.  That's the myth in the
Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid.  But
as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what
matters most is determination.  You're going to hit a lot of
obstacles.  You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized
easily.Bill Clerico and Rich Aberman of WePay
are a good example.  They're
doing a finance startup, which means endless negotiations with big,
bureaucratic companies.  When you're starting a startup that depends
on deals with big companies to exist, it often feels like they're
trying to ignore you out of existence.  But when Bill Clerico starts
calling you, you may as well do what he asks, because he is not
going away.
2. FlexibilityYou do not however want the sort of determination implied by phrases
like "don't give up on your dreams."  The world of startups is so
unpredictable that you need to be able to modify your dreams on the
fly.  The best metaphor I've found for the combination of determination
and flexibility you need is a running back.
He's determined to get
downfield, but at any given moment he may need to go sideways or
even backwards to get there.The current record holder for flexibility may be Daniel Gross of
Greplin.  He applied to YC with
some bad ecommerce idea.  We told
him we'd fund him if he did something else.  He thought for a second,
and said ok.  He then went through two more ideas before settling
on Greplin.  He'd only been working on it for a couple days when
he presented to investors at Demo Day, but he got a lot of interest.
He always seems to land on his feet.
3. ImaginationIntelligence does matter a lot of course.  It seems like the type
that matters most is imagination.  It's not so important to be able
to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to come up with
surprising new ideas.  In the startup world, most good ideas
seem
bad initially.  If they were obviously good, someone would already
be doing them.  So you need the kind of intelligence that produces
ideas with just the right level of craziness.Airbnb is that kind of idea.
In fact, when we funded Airbnb, we
thought it was too crazy.  We couldn't believe large numbers of
people would want to stay in other people's places.  We funded them
because we liked the founders so much.  As soon as we heard they'd
been supporting themselves by selling Obama and McCain branded
breakfast cereal, they were in.  And it turned out the idea was on
the right side of crazy after all.
4. NaughtinessThough the most successful founders are usually good people, they
tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye.  They're not Goody
Two-Shoes type good.  Morally, they care about getting the big
questions right, but not about observing proprieties.  That's why
I'd use the word naughty rather than evil.  They delight in
breaking
rules, but not rules that matter.  This quality may be redundant
though; it may be implied by imagination.Sam Altman of Loopt
is one of the most successful alumni, so we
asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application
that would help us discover more people like him.  He said to ask
about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into
computers.  It has become one of the questions we pay most attention
to when judging applications.
5. FriendshipEmpirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just
one
founder.  Most of the big successes have two or three.  And the
relationship between the founders has to be strong.  They must
genuinely like one another, and work well together.  Startups do
to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock:
if it can be pulled apart, it will be.Emmett Shear and Justin Kan of Justin.tv
are a good example of close
friends who work well together.  They've known each other since
second grade.  They can practically read one another's minds.  I'm
sure they argue, like all founders, but I have never once sensed
any unresolved tension between them.Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Chris Steiner for reading drafts of this.


vw

January 2012A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998
I took a snapshot of Viaweb's
site.  I thought it might be interesting to look at one day.The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are.  Screens
were a lot smaller in 1998.  If I remember correctly, our frontpage
used to just fit in the size window people typically used then.Browsers then (IE 6 was still 3 years in the future) had few fonts
and they weren't antialiased.  If you wanted to make pages that
looked good, you had to render display text as images.You may notice a certain similarity between the Viaweb and Y Combinator logos.  We did that
as an inside joke when we started YC.  Considering how basic a red
circle is, it seemed surprising to me when we started Viaweb how
few other companies used one as their logo.  A bit later I realized
why.On the Company
page you'll notice a mysterious individual called John McArtyem.
Robert Morris (aka Rtm) was so publicity averse after the
Worm that he
didn't want his name on the site.  I managed to get him to agree
to a compromise: we could use his bio but not his name.  He has
since relaxed a bit
on that point.Trevor graduated at about the same time the acquisition closed, so in the
course of 4 days he went from impecunious grad student to millionaire
PhD.  The culmination of my career as a writer of press releases
was one celebrating
his graduation, illustrated with a drawing I did of him during
a meeting.(Trevor also appears as Trevino
Bagwell in our directory of web designers merchants could hire
to build stores for them.  We inserted him as a ringer in case some
competitor tried to spam our web designers.   We assumed his logo
would deter any actual customers, but it did not.)Back in the 90s, to get users you had to get mentioned in magazines
and newspapers.  There were not the same ways to get found online
that there are today.  So we used to pay a PR
firm $16,000 a month to get us mentioned in the press.  Fortunately
reporters liked
us.In our advice about
getting traffic from search engines (I don't think the term SEO
had been coined yet), we say there are only 7 that matter: Yahoo,
AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Lycos, and HotBot.  Notice
anything missing?  Google was incorporated that September.We supported online transactions via a company called
Cybercash,
since if we lacked that feature we'd have gotten beaten up in product
comparisons.  But Cybercash was so bad and most stores' order volumes
were so low that it was better if merchants processed orders like phone orders.  We had a page in our site trying to talk merchants
out of doing real time authorizations.The whole site was organized like a funnel, directing people to the
test drive.
It was a novel thing to be able to try out software online.  We put
cgi-bin in our dynamic urls to fool competitors about how our
software worked.We had some well
known users.  Needless to say, Frederick's of Hollywood got the
most traffic.  We charged a flat fee of $300/month for big stores,
so it was a little alarming to have users who got lots of traffic.
I once calculated how much Frederick's was costing us in bandwidth,
and it was about $300/month.Since we hosted all the stores, which together were getting just
over 10 million page views per month in June 1998, we consumed what
at the time seemed a lot of bandwidth.  We had 2 T1s (3 Mb/sec)
coming into our offices.  In those days there was no AWS.  Even
colocating servers seemed too risky, considering how often things
went wrong with them.  So we had our servers in our offices.  Or
more precisely, in Trevor's office.  In return for the unique
privilege of sharing his office with no other humans, he had to
share it with 6 shrieking tower servers.  His office was nicknamed
the Hot Tub on account of the heat they generated.  Most days his
stack of window air conditioners could keep up.For describing pages, we had a template language called RTML, which
supposedly stood for something, but which in fact I named after
Rtm.  RTML was Common Lisp augmented by some macros and libraries,
and concealed under a structure editor that made it look like it
had syntax.Since we did continuous releases, our software didn't actually have
versions.  But in those days the trade press expected versions, so
we made them up.  If we wanted to get lots of attention, we made
the version number an
integer.  That "version 4.0" icon was generated by our own
button generator, incidentally.  The whole Viaweb site was made
with our software, even though it wasn't an online store, because
we wanted to experience what our users did.At the end of 1997, we released a general purpose shopping search
engine called Shopfind.  It
was pretty advanced for the time.  It had a programmable crawler
that could crawl most of the different stores online and pick out
the products.


want

November 2022Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction
between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and
the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted. At the
time I had a self-interested motive for exploring the question. At
that age (like most succeeding ages) I was always in trouble with
the authorities, and it seemed to me that there might possibly be
some way to get out of trouble by arguing that I wasn't responsible
for my actions. I gradually lost hope of that, but the puzzle
remained: How do you reconcile being a machine made of matter with
the feeling that you're free to choose what you do?
[1]The best way to explain the answer may be to start with a slightly
wrong version, and then fix it. The wrong version is: You can do
what you want, but you can't want what you want. Yes, you can control
what you do, but you'll do what you want, and you can't control
that.The reason this is mistaken is that people do sometimes change what
they want. People who don't want to want something — drug addicts,
for example — can sometimes make themselves stop wanting it. And
people who want to want something — who want to like classical
music, or broccoli — sometimes succeed.So we modify our initial statement: You can do what you want, but
you can't want to want what you want.That's still not quite true. It's possible to change what you want
to want. I can imagine someone saying "I decided to stop wanting
to like classical music." But we're getting closer to the truth.
It's rare for people to change what they want to want, and the more
"want to"s we add, the rarer it gets.We can get arbitrarily close to a true statement by adding more "want
to"s in much the same way we can get arbitrarily close to 1 by adding
more 9s to a string of 9s following a decimal point. In practice
three or four "want to"s must surely be enough. It's hard even to
envision what it would mean to change what you want to want to want
to want, let alone actually do it.So one way to express the correct answer is to use a regular
expression. You can do what you want, but there's some statement
of the form "you can't (want to)* want what you want" that's true.
Ultimately you get back to a want that you don't control.
[2]
Notes[1]
I didn't know when I was 9 that matter might behave randomly,
but I don't think it affects the problem much. Randomness destroys
the ghost in the machine as effectively as determinism.[2]
If you don't like using an expression, you can make the same
point using higher-order desires: There is some n such that you
don't control your nth-order desires.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell,
Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and
Michael Nielsen for reading drafts of this.