visiting partner @ yc || founder at @doverhq @zincdotcom
Joined January 2013
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8h
one YC founder this batch went from $0 to $30K MRR in 2 months, entirely by showing up to his prospects' offices in person.
he'll sit w/ engineers until they fully set up his product
one company kicked him out after he went there 4 times in 1 week. but his close rate is >50%.
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a common mistake i see in investor pitches:
over-focusing on how cheap your product is.
instead, focus on how being cheaper changes customer behavior:
- can they use your product 10x more?
- use it in new areas?
- make better use of their existing team?
pitching growth is always better than pitching cost savings.
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Jun 12
a common question investors will ask you when you're fundraising is "what does this look like in 5 years?"
these days, the honest answer is often "nobody knows."
investors aren't grading you on prophecy. they're grading you on thoughtfulness.
show them you're at the frontier. they should leave the meeting thinking that if anyone is going to figure it out, it'll be you.
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Jun 11
one way to outcompete the AI labs:
bet on something they're betting against.
e.g. every lab is racing to remove humans from the coding loop. but one YC team i'm working with is betting companies will always want a human at the code review step.
the defensibility question becomes easy: labs can't copy them without abandoning their whole strategy.
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Jun 10
a pattern i keep seeing in this YC batch: paying customers asking to invest.
one customer literally bought a company's hardware, loved it, then asked for equity.
no better story for a lead investor than "everyone who uses this wants to own a piece."
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Jun 10
two important corollaries of this:
- be fun to talk to!
- don't be rude to investors!
Jun 10
when you're pitching a seed investor, remember: they're not just deciding whether to fund you.
they're deciding whether they want you in their life for a decade.
the founders who are genuinely enjoying the convo often outperform the ones trying not to say the wrong thing.
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Jun 10
PSA: claude cowork/chatgpt agent are now good enough to one-shot tasks like "cancel my hulu".
no more dealing with annoying cancellation flows!
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Jun 10
when you're pitching a seed investor, remember: they're not just deciding whether to fund you.
they're deciding whether they want you in their life for a decade.
the founders who are genuinely enjoying the convo often outperform the ones trying not to say the wrong thing.
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Jun 9
extremely common mistake in seed fundraising:
pitching abstractions when you have incredible specifics.
don't say "we think this is a huge problem" when you can say "our first customer wired us $20k before we built anything."
be up-front with your best evidence!
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Jun 9
one yc devtools company grew faster by shrinking their market on purpose.
they told traditional developers "this isn't for you" and built only for AI-native devs.
they immediately started seeing hockey-stick growth.
sometimes the move is to serve fewer people, harder.
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Jun 8
when fundraising, many founders want to skip the deck and just talk.
but a 5 minute deck gets your 4-5 strongest points out before the investor starts steering the conversation.
investors love the open Q&A part. the deck just makes sure they'll be asking the right questions.
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Jun 8
one of the most interesting patterns in this YC batch:
defense founders who think like consumer hardware founders.
minimize parts, ship fast, manufacture at massive scale.
the $1k drone, deployed by the thousands, is beating the $100M platform every time.
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Jun 7
one way to think about timing your startup launch:
- if your launch flops, the extra week of polish wouldn't have changed that. might as well learn it, iterate, and try again.
- if your launch lands, you'll wish you'd done it sooner.
there's no version where waiting wins.
Jun 7
"launch early" is probably the most well-known piece of YC advice.
and yet i still spend half my time convincing founders to actually do it.
the resistance is always the same: the video isn't ready, website needs tweaks, or they need to ship one more feature.
when they finally launch, the result is always the same too:
they get tons of customer interest and investor inbound they didn't expect.
and they always wish they had launched sooner.
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Jun 7
How to be a good investor:
Don't play games.
Be transparent.
Prepare before the meeting.
Make your decision quickly.
Give a clear yes/no.
Don't be an asshole.
Realize that there is a good chance you are wrong.
Understand that the founders are dedicating years of their life to this.
Huge bonus points if you are a fellow founder who understands what it's like to build a startup.
Jun 2
I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A.
12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30 minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going.
I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital.
You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious.
It's a dance.
And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious.
If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird.
No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there.
It is weird.
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Jun 7
"launch early" is probably the most well-known piece of YC advice.
and yet i still spend half my time convincing founders to actually do it.
the resistance is always the same: the video isn't ready, website needs tweaks, or they need to ship one more feature.
when they finally launch, the result is always the same too:
they get tons of customer interest and investor inbound they didn't expect.
and they always wish they had launched sooner.
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Jun 6
i've done 25 mock fundraising pitches at YC the past few days.
one common mistake: if you have a cool product, don't bury the demo!
an awesome demo buys you credibility for the rest of the pitch. every slide after it gets the benefit of the doubt.
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Jun 5
two YC teams i'm working with are pivoting.
one is out talking to customers all day. the other is brainstorming with claude. you can probably guess which one is making more progress.
the non-obvious ideas still come from being out in the world talking to real people.
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Jun 5
it's now easier to build things than to verifying they work.
e.g. 3 YC companies in my pod are validating agents on real production data and catching what breaks live. all are growing extremely fast.
the bottleneck has moved downstream, and founders are racing to fill it.
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Jun 4
turns out jevons paradox is not just for software engineering.
e.g. if an enterprise marketing campaign goes from taking 6 weeks -> 1 hour to deploy, teams deploy 10x more campaigns.
we're about to see this play out in every function of every company.
May 11
.@CharacterQuilt is AI infrastructure for marketing: a brain that learns your brand, and agents that operate your existing tools.
Campaigns that used to take 3 agencies, 10 tools and 6 weeks are now being designed and deployed from CQ in an hour.
Congrats on the launch, @bhairav_mehta & @clintvanburgess!
ycombinator.com/launches/QJf…
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