YouSaid · the spoken record

Aaron Harris

lines on the record
25
first
2015-09-30
most recent
2015-09-30
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “I don't know that anything is particularly over. Maybe photo sharing might be a little overhyped. I don't think that's starting to die down a little bit or already emerged or are emerging.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Really excited about funding is an innovative or many innovative companies in the property and casualty insurance space. I think it's one of these things where there's just not nearly enough innovation happening except on the customer acquisition side. And I think that someone is going to build a great company there. And I would love to be involved.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “How about this? I will tell you that there are things happen. So I work a lot with fintech companies. And I'll tell you the thing that I want to fund right now.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Figuring out how to continue to fund great companies and find great founders as startups, again, infiltrate more and more industries. How do we make sure that we're finding the best companies and really helping them?”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “We're always experimenting with different ways to reach more founders and more companies on a more regular basis. And this kind of grew organically out of a conversation with the folks over at Sirius. We wanted to more regularly push out the kind of content we create at startup school. And that's just once a year. And you have all these great distribution mechanisms beyond physically bringing people to a conference now. And so we thought, hey, let's try doing a podcast and a radio show and see what happens. And so far, so good. We're really enjoying it.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I'd say my favorite book. Is the diving bell and the butterfly. Which is just an incredibly beautiful story about how someone, Jean-Dominique Baubi, who was the editor of French L, had a massive stroke and he suffered locked in syndrome, how he was still able to enjoy life and communicate with the world and find meaning even under the most severe physical limitations. It's a story about the power of the”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You know, I don't think about steps for YC in terms of us raising funding again. It's just not really how we think about what YC becomes. I think when we think about the future of YC, we think about what kind of companies we're funding and what we're doing for those companies and how we're helping those companies and how the wider community of YC and our alumni base is evolving and growing and getting better. And so I think that over the last year or two, we've expanded the kinds of companies we fund. We're doing aerospace companies and nuclear power companies and biotech. And I think we'll continue to expand that universe as sort of the cycles of software continue to eat more industries and work their way deeper into new industries.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, one of the things I tell people is make sure you're optimizing for the right things. And the right thing is not the highest price or the most money. The right thing is to get enough money to build a successful company and to build a growing company. And if you look at it from that perspective, you start to think about, okay, what do I actually need? And what's the best way for me to get there? Because fundraising is not the mission of a startup. Fundraising is one of the things a startup has to do in order to grow. And so The less time you can spend fundraising, the better off you are. Ideally, because it means that you don't have to take money, time away from building a company. The most limited resource that a startup has is time. It's really not money. And you can get more money, but you can't get more time.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I don't think we expressly think about, hey, we want to keep this valuation level or that valuation level. I think we just want to make sure that companies are setting the groundwork to build long-term businesses. And so we'll meet with companies and we'll talk to them about what their fundraising goals are. And then essentially it's a market. And so we can try to give them some thoughts about where we think the market might go or market might be. But it's when they start talking to investors that they find out what investors are thinking and they have to negotiate against that market.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, absolutely. There are startups that went through YC years ago that I'm still very much in touch with NC regularly. Now, again, as I mentioned before, there's kind of a spectrum of companies and sort of what they need during YC and even after YC. And some need to talk weekly or monthly for a little while after YC, and then they only need to talk to you every other month or every six months or maybe once a year to check in because they've grown to the point and gotten good enough that they should be giving me advice.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, yeah, the answer is that growth isn't the goal. And I think this is something that people sometimes get a little backwards. Growth is the result of having the right product and the right market, right? It's because you did the other things right that you get growth. You can't invent growth out of thin air. You can a little bit if you just start spamming people, but that's unsustainable. So when we talk about growth goals on a weekly basis, those are once you have a product that starts working. And that's how you know it's working. That's how you know it's growing at the pace that a startup needs to grow. If you think you have fit in your market and it's just growing 1% a week, you might have a great business on your hands, but it's probably not startup scale. And if you do want to start up, then you need to know what that looks like.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I don't think that those guys knew exactly what they had on their hands until it was as big as it was. I don't think that necessarily Zoc knew exactly what was on his hands before it grew as crazily large as it did. He did an incredible job building it and having the vision to sort of take it, but it grew so fast. And I've watched our attempts to invest in social products and I've watched my friends try to build social things and stuff that works. You never realize it's going to work until it really does. But when you're building a product that people are paying for, especially getting a small group of people to start paying for that thing initially and really learning what it is they want and how they interact with it, that's the most important thing in the world.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It depends on the stage of the company. A company needs to start out doing on scalable things, which means getting five, 10, 20, 100 users. And you might know them all personally, or you should know them personally by the time you're done with that phase of your business, because it's only from a small base that you're going to really learn what it is that your product is and what people want. And if you hit that perfectly, then it's going to expand fairly rapidly. And this is different in things like social products, maybe than it is in a SaaS product, where a social product, once it starts working, you might not even realize that you have the right thing when all of a sudden it starts growing like crazy. And then you just kind of got to hang on. You know, I think that you look at sort of the success of Instagram.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Over time. Those are the ones who end up forming great relationships with mentors because I think the mentors start to see progress and feel like they're doing something good.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You know, I think the only way to decide whether or not a mentor is good for you or not is to actually meet them and talk to them and spend some time with them. And the best way to do that is just to email people. I think people are consistently too intimidated by mentors or people they think are going to be mentors and just don't try. And you don't know until you try, right? Sending an email, what if it doesn't get responded to? Okay, your email didn't get responded to. What if someone says no? Okay, they don't say no. No is just a start of a conversation. I know that I have people I email with fairly regularly who I keep saying no to, but they keep asking questions and I keep answering the questions. Maybe I'm a sucker, but I try to answer everyone who emails me. Look, if someone is rude, then I probably won't respond. But I find that people who just keep asking good questions or who iterate and get better.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Try something and you're measuring it carefully and you're measuring the results you'll know pretty quickly whether or not that was the right thing to do and you can switch gears.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, I think mentorship is a really challenging thing, both to find and to decide how to work with best. And I think it's different in every case. But I think at the end of the day, advice is just advice, right? It's just someone who has some understanding of your company, your situation, offering their best guess at a solution or at a path forward. And from what I've seen, the best founders take that best guess and they integrate it with their own knowledge and they make their own decision. And so if you're, you know, if you're talking to a whole bunch of different people that have different opinions and different ideas of how to move forward, that's fine, as long as you don't get, you know, into the analysis paralysis thing where you say, oh my God, all these people are offering conflicting advice. I don't know what to do next. It's often better to try something than to sit there thinking for too long.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “You know, I think a lot of it is just trying to be objective about the issues they're facing and making sure that we're not getting ourselves too involved in Not involved, but making sure we know that it's their company. As soon as you start to think that, hey, this is my company and I know what's best, I think you start to run into problems. So it's very rare that I give very, very specific. You have to do this thing because that rarely happens that the answer is so black and white. It's more of, hey, have you thought about trying it this way? Or here's how I might think about this problem. And so getting the founders, I think, to think about some perspectives that they haven't thought of themselves I think ends up being incredibly, incredibly valuable. And then the three months of YC itself is such a great time for founders to be able to push off everything. It's this great excuse to focus. Anyone who wants to talk to you that isn't a customer who you need to talk to or a user you need to talk to, you can say, hey, you know, I'm doing this 30-month thing. I really need to focus right now and ship product. That's all I'm going to do.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “It's a closely guarded secret. It's a very specialized mine. No, you know, it's a really important question. It's a really interesting question. And it's probably one I think about a lot because it doesn't really necessarily make sense in a lot of ways in terms of how our process has worked as many times as it has. And I think part of the reason it works is because of the fact that it's fairly simple and it's not one size fits all, but it's more of a philosophy of having the companies figure out how to really focus on the thing that they are and what they could be. And see beyond sort of the day-to-day challenges of running a startup and the day-to-day ups and downs, which are crazy, right? It goes all over the place and really try to figure out what's the path forward to making a project.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “With a specific issue or closely related set of issues. And those are the main interaction mediums. And then we also have something called group office hours where two partners will sit down with a small group of companies and sort of work through some problems with them together so that they can kind of learn at the same time from each other because it turns out they can solve each other's problems quite often.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “You know, I think it's different startup by startup in terms of how much involvement we have, but there's a pretty basic framework for how we interact at Y Combinator, we have a pretty hands-off approach in a lot of ways to our companies. Our opinion and our perspective, I guess, is that the startups are adults. The founders are adults, it's their business, they have to run the company. But we want to be there as a resource. And so the way YC is structured is that during the course of the three-month program, every Tuesday night we have a dinner where we have a guest speaker and people like Mark Zuckerberg or Brian Chesky, really inspirational founders who have done really cool things and grown small startups and been successful. And so that's dinner. And that's pretty much the only required part of the calendar. And then we have office hours where companies will set up one-on-one office hours with a partner when they're having trouble.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It down I was talking to Paul Graham about some of the things I wanted to do next and he asked if I wanted to join YC full time and I said well that's a pretty cool offer. Yeah, that sounds like fun. And so that's how I ended up at YC.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Sort of trying to figure out what to do, and the cross section of my interests. I was really interested in education. I was interested in using networks to make systems more efficient. And I was talking to my friend Josh Abrams about some different ideas, and he had the original kernel of the idea that became Tudor Spree. And we started working on it in the summer of 2010. We met our co-founder, Ryan, just around then, the three of us applied to YC. We got into Y Combinator for the winter of 11, started building the business. We raised money from Sequoia, among others, and built a business for, I think, two and a half years until we ran Smack into an algorithm change at Google. And we were reliant on search engine optimization. And it sort of killed our vision of what the business could be. And as we showed”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Thank you. I probably lasted about six months. It took me five months to figure out how to get out. And then I actually went to work at a hedge fund where I spent three years because I really enjoy markets and I think there's a lot to learn from them and a lot of interesting puzzles basically sitting out there in public markets and learning how companies are put together. And I thought to myself that, hey, if I understand this stuff really well, I'll either be able to rise in the ranks here or I'll understand how companies are put together and be able to build one. But the thing that kept sort of jumping up in my head was that I really wanted to be doing something where I controlled more of my own destiny and actually built something for people and not just for LPs or what have you. And the thing that I thought about in my spare time was technology. And so I finally left that fund.”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, sure. When I left college, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to be. And that was eventually being the CEO of Citibank or something like that. And so I went into finance, actually, and I was a banker for all of 11 months. Yeah”

    2015-09-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 076: Y COMBINATOR WEEK: Aaron Harris, Partner @ YC · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source