YouSaid · the spoken record

Gustaf Alströmer

lines on the record: 100
first: 2023-03-02
most recent: 2023-03-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And that's kind of what the application process is about. So feel free to reach out to us if you have questions, but don't feel like that's required to be a good YC applicant. It's actually the opposite. And that we read and treat all the applications equally. And thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I mean, it made me happy. You made all the way to the end.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tweet sometimes on twitter.com slash gustaff, the most useful things that I put out is probably on the YCS YouTube channel. So I record a couple videos on growth, on sales, on how to talk to customers. I actually send them to people all day long because it's like the Startup School videos that we made are like a lot of preparation went into it. And it answers most of the questions that people have. So watch those first, I would say. But yeah, sometimes I tweet other stuff that people can follow that's fine. How can people be useful to me? I love hearing feedback from founders, what they're working on. I want to hear kind of questions they have about their companies. But I want to also really emphasize that to apply to OAC, you don't need to know any of us. You don't need to reach out to us. It doesn't make any specific difference. The principles of OYC is that you should be able to become an insider in Silicon Valley without knowing anybody.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that a lot of the motivations of why suites are strange. One of them is we don't want to be indebted to someone else, right? So we never want to feel like, which is why you wouldn't, for example, if you go to a bar in Sweden, like you don't buy a round, you buy your own beer. Because maybe you have to figure out the money at the end of the day, things like that. And I think it's just actually quite individualistic society, but it's individualistic with heart, I would say. There's a warmth to it, but it will definitely be a peered strange to people they don't really understand this. They think people are cold and like they're just like, they don't understand that there's actually a heart behind this stuff.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely true. I actually gave an unconference talk about this topic. And a conference talk with all of the strange things the Swedish people do and why. And if I would summarize it, like, yes, we do that. I actually experienced that. I went to a friend's house and they had dinner and I waited and my friend's room while they had dinner. And that was just normal. And why did that happen? I think. There's a strong sense of individual responsibility in Sweden, which kind of like reaches over to unfriendliness or June from an American or foreign lens, because this is so crazy. But in Sweden, it's just like, well, you take care of your kids, not the care of my kids. And it's not really a question.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, you should have visited in the summer. It's a really good time to be there. It's a very different country in the winter and try to go outside of cities into the nature and then prepare yourself for Swedes not all being like Americans. They're a little bit more colder and have a little bit more distance to you. And they don't randomly talk to you like I've learned to do here in America. And I think you just have to. Go along with a little bit different of a vibe than you have here in the US. And most people actually love it. Most people are speaking to love it, but most of them go in the summer.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pro tip number one thing is go to YouTube and type in like, I think there's a video that we recorded, which is about how you succeed with your application with you. It's like an hour-long video that gives you all the pro tips on how to do it. We told people in advance. Once you've watched that video, then see if you know anybody who've done YC and then reach out to them and ask them, maybe ask them YC is right for you, but also ask them what's important for you to as you're kind of approaching applying to YC right in the application. During the interview, like, what were the things that mattered? Those are probably the two things I would do.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I would say when I stepped onto the hangar floor of Hart Airspace, and I can send you a photo, and I literally, I am looking at an airplane that's being made. And I'm like, like, there's no SaaS company's office you can walk into and you just like open your mouth and you're like, what the hell is this? And there are a few of those companies. There are space companies or aerospace companies or something like that where there's just a different, like it's just a different feeling that you fund them and like you can touch it. And I have a lot of appreciation for things like that now because they're much harder to do. But when you succeed, they're much more tangible and you can be like, I have a tiny little piece in this space rocket or this airplane that we funded or the satellite is above us. And I really think that that's in some way like a strong legacy compared to some other things.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What have you done since you applied to YC on your product? Like, what are specific things that you've accomplished since you applied? Because that usually is like a month or two months”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I watch so much. I don't know. I love Emily in Paris or Netflix. I think I just have TV serves a different purpose for me these days. It's just like it's just entertainment.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first one I recommend, I think I have it here. Yeah, this one is called 100% solution. This book is written by Solomon Goldstun Rose. It's for people who think climate change is a problem but don't know what to do about it. Or think that, or they're just kind of in despair or think that like, oh, maybe we're all going to die, right? And there are some books written where the outcome of the book is like we're all going to die. But the truth is that we're not all going to die. And this book is trying to cover the 100% of all the solutions. Like in detail, kind of like much more detailed version of the quest of sharp that we wrote. And it gets you freely optimistic. And I gave that to anybody who's cared about climate change because it really lays out this from a very optimistic way of looking at the world. And that's why I recommend that book more than almost anything else. That's probably my number one book.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not a thing where you can convince everybody to just like agree with you. And even if you did, people wouldn't know what to do. So you have to view this as an economical opportunity and say we can't convince everybody that this is going to be the thing that's going to happen. It doesn't actually matter if we convince everybody. Like what matters is that sufficient amount of corporations are convinced that they change their habits. And then you can sell the things you're building to them. As startup founder, just focus on your customers and focus on B2B. That's what most people I've recommended to do here because that's where most of the change is going to happen. And that's why I'm really optimistic about these startups and these founders. What they are doing is, in my opinion, more impactful than someone running a campaign trying to convince someone, some other people that this is a big problem. Even when people know that climate change is a problem, they don't know exactly what to do about it. But the startup founders, they know.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get access to capital that has some strings attached to some of these things, but they don't want to fall behind. And they don't want to be the Toyota to Tesla, right? Toyota said, we're not going to do battery electric. It's just like, I'm still saying that sometimes. And everybody else is like, Tesla is the one we got to copy because that's the one that's winning. And all these corporations are really afraid of being the Toyota, right? They're really afraid of being the last one who's not changing. And then the world will move past them. So I think the motivation here is like intrinsically survival and it's really about sort of like adopting this because this is where the world is going. I think these are the two best news. And the thing that we, I think, you also wrote about this in the request for startups.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second good news is corporations are now customers. So maybe three or four years ago you went to a Fortune Hunter company and be like, hey, do you want to buy my XYC decarbonization solution? Like what is like the software platform or EVs or whatever it might be? They're like, well, talk to this person on this floor, right? And maybe they can help you. And this person was not really empowered to make decisions. That has changed. Now they're like, actually, we promised our shareholders to reduce emissions by 2% every year. And we also promised the government and we promised whatever publicly to do that. So we got to do that. And like, where do we start? What's the first 2% that we got to decarbonize? Maybe that starts with energy. Oh, we'll change our energy providers. But they are now showing up as customers, not just with LOIs, but paying actual for contracts, right? Doing investments in these companies because they all see in the future. And they don't want to be behind there's financials motivations for this.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two specific things that went well in the last 12 or 24 months. First one was politics. So in the United States, we got the IRA, which is like, it's called the Inflation Reduction Act. It makes sense because it's shifting to green energy is going to actually reduce inflation because it is energy costs, but it's really a climate bill, right? It really is a bill that is focusing on onshoring a lot of supply chain for the green economy and incentivizing a lot of this change that we just talked about, where there's carbon removal or home energy or home heating, whatever it might be. Like this bill addresses all of it and is massive. So that's one really good news. And in politics, didn't have a lot of good news in the U.S. for a long time on this, maybe not never actually. The second good news, and it's such a good news that Europe is now trying to conquer, like they're now trying to counter the IRA with their bill because they're seeing some of the battery companies saying, well, I'm actually going to build the next factor in US, not Europe anymore. I changed my mind.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we're going to have as many gas stations as we have today in different networks. We're not going to have the same in EV charging. It's going to be a lot more consolidated around the use experience of the end user and the app they open to do this stuff. So I'm pretty convinced that there's real big opportunities for software entrepreneurs to figure this out. There's some companies in the current batch that are focused on this too. The final one I would mention is hard aerospace. We have hard airspace on the right electric and a few others focused on aviation. And aviation is another big difficult to kind of decarbonize. And heart and right are focusing on battery electric planes. So they're basically like basic making commercial airplanes that fly on batteries and flying electric motors. And it's incredible to see.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enode has been building. Another related company is called Static. Static is the Airbnb for EV charging in India. And the reason that you need something like that is you don't have Tesla charging. You don't really have public charging in general. And people don't have outlets in their garage and they don't have garages. So you need to build a new bottom-up EV charging system, a platform. And that's what Static has been doing. And they're actually building now public charging infrastructure as well. But they have their own app. So if you use a static app, they'll direct you to all the static chargers. And I believe that they're the biggest or the fastest growing EV charging network in India, which is the second biggest country, if not the biggest country in the world right now. So the potential of these ideas, even that they're doing well now, is just infinite, like such an enormous market. And if you succeed in one of these things,”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customer demand right now, right? So all the large companies of the world have either promised the government, promised their shareholders, promised the public, or maybe even the employees, they're going to decarbonize. And they don't always have an idea how to do it. And these software platforms is like the plug and play. This is how you do it. And then I'll give you two examples of things you can go into if you're not, if you don't have any specific domain expertise and just a good software engineer, there's a company called ENode. They are basically building PLAD for EV chargers and plaid for home energy system. So if you want to, if we imagine that the future of all homes or future of all charging of EVs is going to be a bunch of energy appliances that are run by small computers, right? They are. They're all Wi-Fi connected. You can connect to them and do things. Tell them to turn on, turn off, turn on when it's cheap, turn off when it's whatever, right? Like all these different things that are valuable for the energy grid, then you need a software plan for connect with all of them.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is almost no maintenance. It's cheaper to build. The batteries are more expensive. It's cleaner and it fits like the carbon calls you have. There's just a bunch of benefits there. But there has limitations. And usually the limitations on electrification has to do with batteries. It's like how far can you go? Another category is what I call the, which is a very important kind of critical one, which is the carbon accounting and sort of like the recommendation systems that help big company account for the carbon that they have. And they are giving some recommendations of what you do. I'll give you three examples. We funded Unravel Carbon, which is carbon counting software in Singapore focusing on Asia. And probably the leading one there. This company called Carbon Chain, which is focused specifically on supply chain and shipping and raw materials, stuff like that out of the UK. And then this Sinai here in the Bay Area. And who knows how this market is going to play out? But this market has, carbon accounting has...”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did the first one. And on the decarbonization side, there's an infinite number of categories of our society where we emit a lot of carbon, right? So I'll give you an example, shipping is a really big deal. Like a lot of carbon emissions come from freight ships around the world. That's not an obvious solution how you would solve that because the kind of oil that they run on is really cheap and it's a very low margin business. And they don't have a whole lot of incentives to change besides what is coming down regulatory. So it's not a natural solution where someone would be a cool, someone will build like a test off of ships and just work out. But the two companies to be funded in that area, one of them is sea bound, who is building carbon capture and removal for ships. And the other one is Fleet Zero, who build electrical ships. And electrification is on and again and again and again and again. Whenever it's being applied, turn out to be a more efficient way of doing whatever thing that you were previously doing with the combustion industry.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We wrote the list and we're highlighting companies in each of the categories. I don't know if I want to highlight any specific categories, but I can talk about some of the things that we've done in the past that has real legs. So here's how I think generally think about climate tech. So we have to decarbonize all the things we do that emits emissions. And that means we have to change a bunch of things in the world, change transportation, change energy, change homes, all of these things, or change how we heat and heat homes, for example. And then there's carbon removal. And carbon removal is sort of like, well, even if we do all of this stuff really well, it's probably not going to be enough. And because there's an opportunity and there's like some evidence to suggest that we can actually remove carbon from the atmosphere in some way or another, a lot of companies are also working on this at the same time. I would say we need to do both and they're not in conflict. And we probably are going to need to do both. Well, we certainly have to need it.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expertise depends really on the area you're in, but you're like someone like Pachama, like Diego and Thomas did not have expertise in forests besides the personal experience. He just had a willingness to solve the problem. And it really worked out for”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say if you were working on a software company and even some of the hardware companies, that's probably generally true. Absolutely. And it's much more valuable to have that background than to have the specific domain expertise background. Those are complementary, but as a PM, having the solid PM background is the more valuable piece, I would say. Being a competitive PM coming from a really good culture of product management, knowing what good looks like, that's invaluable to some of these companies because they haven't In the past, they weren't able to hire these people. So I agree with that 100%. In terms of founders, I've seen everything, right? I've seen people having some domain expertise starting a company and really succeeding. I've seen people who had no domain expertise and learned everything they need to know. Maybe they partnered up with someone who had domain expertise and then succeeded. I've seen all of it. And I actually think that you can succeed in either of these categories. You don't need the...”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All these people that come to us and say, I want to work on climateche, I don't have a good idea because I don't have any specific experience in this stuff. And then we're just like, Work on these three things, but go and work on any of these like 25 directions. And I already has generated a good response. I think it will generate more response. But I think it's important for YC to sort of like tell the world that we can fund these things. And that's always been the reasons we had Request for Startups is to let people know that these are things that we actually want to fund.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That happened. Now that turned on like upside down. Like the number of new investors that are investing in Climateche is as big of a trend as any other trend we've seen in the last decade or two decades. There's just enormous focus on the investing side. And most recently me and another guy, David Rusenko, wrote this request for startup and new updated very detailed list of, and I hope we can post it in the show notes, a very detailed list of ideas or areas where we think it might be worth looking if you want to start a company. Now, we don't know what good ideas look like. We don't know, but we can tell you where all the areas of opportunity exist. We should go and look for good ideas. And we wrote this in response to”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. I mean, sometimes I'd say that it matters to someone who has the credibility of OYC, start accepting these companies. It does matter. And people, like I remember when I spoke to Diego from Pachama in 2018 when he was starting Pachama, we were whiteboarding at YC. He was a YC alumni starting a different company. And the word climatic did not exist. And people were unsure if investors would fund companies like these. And pajamas raised $60 million to have, I don't know, lots of big customers, lots of employees, and it's clearly doing really well. But I think at the time of 2018, it was kind of unknown. And one of the reasons it was unknown is we had this previous bubble, clean tech bubble in like 2008, 2009, 2010, that didn't work out because of a number of specific reasons. And people, investors were just afraid of funding things because they had some scar tissue or scar and scars from like the previous.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company should I work for to fix climate change. And I've gone those emails for two or three years now. And this thing just attracts like really, really ambitious people. And it's not stopping. It's accelerating. And I feel lucky to work with so many of these great founders because they are like uniquely interesting people.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To things that don't. Like as the scale of this transition is not something we've seen recently. Like software is not that big in comparison. It actually is much smaller than this transition. I think if you look at something like Tesla, which now has a, I don't know, six, seven hundred billion dollar market cap, that's just one company that currently provides like a couple percent of all the cars in the United States, new cars sold. And that is already one of the biggest companies in the world and has now the biggest, the richest person in the world. We've only seen the beginning of this and the economical motivation behind the decisions that people are making are just as strong as I want to fix climate change because this is just a really good business. This change have attracted a large set of software founders, the people that you and me know that listen to this podcast that said my skills is relevant here. There are a lot of things that I can do. And if not, I can learn those things. But most importantly, the skills of working for startups is really, really critical to join this transition. And a lot of them have started companies or joining companies. And I used to get, I still get an email every week from some accomplished software engineer who asked me which software.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the trend line is that really ambitious people who want to start companies in this area. Some of them want to start the companies because the climatech is the number one problem. But they don't view this as a nonprofit. I want to really kind of make this as a distinction. People somehow think that like starting a climate tech company is doing good for the world, but it probably doesn't have a lot more than that. The truth is that the world have decided because climate is one of the biggest problems that we're facing, if not the biggest, we've decided that we're going to stop doing the things that we're doing. And we're going to change our entire energy system and change all the things that we do that emit carbon. And we have just decided, like governments have decided this. This is already, the question is how it's going to happen, but this decision has been made. And in that transition, we're talking about trillions of dollars of money moving from things that cause climate change.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First request for startup was actually Sam Altman and a few other folks that was kind of the one who drove that. The second one that we kind of wrote into our actual request for startup, I wrote that one. It was carbon removal specifically focused on. And then naturally, the people that apply with Climate Tech ideas get in my reading queue of applications and I read them and I interview them. Not all of them, but many of them. I think today we funded over 130 plus companies that are focused on climate tech in some way or another.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is really useful to have the growth mindset when something is working, right? Once you have thousands of people signing up for your thing every day, well, how do you get to 2,000? Well, that's actually something that looks more like this thing that the growth team would do or distribution team would do. And I would say everyone has different experiences of this based on their prior experience, right? So if you work for a company that was influentially successful, then you won't care so much about this. If you work for Google, you'll never even think about this because like distribution is just like the website. But if you work for a really small shitty product, then you think a lot about distribution because that's natural to you on how you succeed. So I think at the end of the day, talking to customers that matters the most, that is what it means to care about a product to me. And then distribution is something that you will definitely invest a lot in once something is working.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you get big, if you don't figure out a scalable distribution strategy, you won't succeed. And those are different for different companies, but they're not doing things that don't scale. Like doing things that don't scale is not a scalable strategy. Eventually, something specific will be the things that work for you. If you're lucky, people will talk about your product and you'll have organic growth. But in many cases, that sales, that is some kind of like consumer distribution strategy. And you can't start with that. I've seen a lot, and this is what I had to like reset my thinking coming from a growth team joining YC, is you can't start a startup with a growth team mindset because that is just scalable things all the time and really what you need to go back to is doing things that don't scale and unscale your way of thinking about customers.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of kind of assumptions built into that, I would say, because caring about the product to me is caring about the customers. And sometimes if I would say something like, oh, great funders care about the product, a lot of founders misinterpret that as in my personal perception of the product or my ideas of what the product is. And that's wrong. The right perception there is the expectations or the use of the product from the customers. So if you're meaning focus on the product or cares about the product in that sense that your customers care about, then absolutely, I think that's a really, really critical important thing to have early on. Like talking to users, doing things you don't scale.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything. So small startups agree on how they decide together. So, like, after that, everyone just followed the process. That's usually how things work out.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That could look different. Sometimes it's like everybody decides together on everything. And sometimes you say, I have my expertise and you have yours. And we split it up, the decision making. And either of those things are fine, I think. You just have to have a process so you don't rehash every decision after you made them like a million times. And I would say like the thing that matters the most at that point is to be willing to adhere to the process that you and your funding team have come up with. your individual nature could be different in a different role in different company. But for a startup to work out, you have to have like a specific process on how you make decisions. And those are on a very short sprints, like weekly or bi-weekly. And everyone needs to feel good about decisions after the fact. At least they feel good about the process. And I don't think that you can just decide. You can also be fully collaborative. Everyone gets to decide.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I have an answer that question because I think when you work at early stage, it might look different than when you work at late stage. And I don't spend a lot of time with founders to have thousands of employees and hearing how they are. When I talk to those founders, I talk to them 101 and I only hear from their perspective. So I don't actually know how they are appearing in a large corporate setting. But when you're a small company, you're three people or five people or ten people, you cannot be an autocratic decision maker. Like the founding team have a founding team decision making dynamic.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saddy also assumes that you have product market fit is you already have something that's working. If you don't have that, then getting to people wanting your product, that is your strategy. You don't have any other strategy.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you are a small startup, strategy does not matter because there's not that much of strategy I was about. Maybe later on it might be faultful to think about strategy, but strategy kind of assumes that you can do multiple things at the same time, which small subs cannot. They can just do one thing at the same time. So execution is the thing that matters for companies. And whenever someone wants to have a strategy conversation, it assumes that they don't understand their priorities. And the priorities is always a list from one, like from top to bottom where there's one thing that's more important than the others. And you can't really have a strategy session about the other things because there's only one thing to work on. So to me, there's a clear answer here is that good founders are execution oriented and they just continually have one priority of what they're trying to go for and then just hitting that priority all the time. And then new priorities will come up. And you don't really have time to have a discussion about company strategy.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this one actually I have a strong opinion about. I think that the reason that we talk about strategy a lot is because it goes back to business school. And business school, the origin of business school was to teach people to join the corporate world. And the corporate world strategy matters, right? So like when you join a big company, you're employee number 2010 something, then you probably might have a business school like job where thinking about corporate strategies is an important thing.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I want to spend time with you, which means they don't want to work for you or invest in you. So these are, again, you need both, but they serve different purposes when you get started.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Predicting that confidence to the people around you, I think it's critical. And a lot of people will have doubt around you. And if you're not predicting that confidence, there's not clear that anybody else will if you're the founder. Like you're the one who have to do it. And I think that you can predict that confidence while having a strong sense of humility towards the people around you. But I think when it comes to startups, learning to have that confidence is an important piece of the early days, right? And especially if you're building something that's very difficult, that takes a lot of work and a lot of money. Protecting the confidence that you will succeed is critical for everybody that's doubting you. And those doubting you is a lot of people around you, right? And you just need to like have an unnatural amount of confidence to prove them wrong. And I think that again, this is not on a spectrum with humility. In fact, the most successful founders are often the most like, you cannot inspire people around you if you don't have a strong sense of humility.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think that they're on a spectrum. I think that. Learning to predict confidence as a founder is critical going back to this communication piece of motivating people around you, right? I wouldn't want to join a company where the founder is completely not confident in their own idea, right? Because that is going to shine through. An investor isn't going to want to invest in someone who's completely not confident in that idea. So learning to first build your own confidence for what you're working on.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when people think about quality, they often think about what is my personal definition of quality. I have a bar of quality. But quality to me of a good product idea, a good startup idea, has more to do with the customer think is valuable. And if you move fast by talking to customers and having customer learnings and know the problems, then you will actually come up with something that's high quality. So they're not at a spectrum.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes founders ask us this question what should I focus on growth or retention? And the answer is they're asking us for permission to not do one or the other. The truth is to succeed you have to do both. I would argue that speed versus quality, there's different level of speed and different level of quality at different stages of the company. But the truth is that you always have to move fast and you have to understand what the meaning of quality is, right? So I think I actually don't see that as a spectrum, but I would say if you move fast with talking to customers, you'll build something that potential having quality because you know a lot about the problem.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a high potential team. If someone is on a good track for a decent idea, but they're still early, that's really good, good potential.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, sometimes it could be different reasons, but people are not making progress. But if you're making continuous progress, and I think Paul and Jessica said this, this was true early days in YC, if you are hitting your goals and you're making progress continuously. If that continues, that's a really strong correlation to some success. But again, going back to the question, can we predict who's going to be the best ones? No. And that's why we really focus on trying to meet people not to fail, especially good teams can't fail. If you have a really talented team who's really technical and not a build product, but they make some other basic mistakes, like not talking to customers or something like that, or trying to build everything all at once. I feel like it's our responsibility to make sure they don't make the basics mistakes that we've seen many times. We need to help them at least make some spectacular mistake that we haven't seen before.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One good indicator is if each new office hour there is real exciting new stuff, right? We're not talking about the same thing we talked about two weeks ago or four weeks ago. They've already done that stuff, right? Like, oh, I was trying to sell to these three customers. Well, they already bought it. I'm not actually talking to seven others. And now we are talking about a different price and different product because they're like, they want more of what we're doing, right? If I'm experiencing that, and that's like a consistent trend, then when people draw this revenue graph of like this like 10% weekly growth rate kind of situation, those are the companies that we attribute that to. It's like if you're able to make that progress on that short amount of timescale, you're on track to do something well. Now, a lot of other things have to go well for you to ultimately be able to succeed. But progress on this like weekly or bi-weekly timescale is a really good indicator of someone who succeeds. To me, much better indicator than I am in this market or I'm talking to this investor or something like that. But those are much worse indicators of someone succeeding than I'm making progress.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People really want these questions to be answered. People really want to believe that you can pick really great companies at the seed stage. But everything I've learned from the plus six hundred companies that I've worked with is that it's just not that easy and it's maybe not even possible and certainly not possible when you talk about like finding the outlier companies. I don't think it's that easy. And if it was easy, then we would accept a lot fewer companies. We just accept those ones. But it's just not that easy.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we have seen people fail for a large number of reasons. And the best way for us to sort of like not predict, but like the best way for us to make more companies succeed is to tell them how they might fail, right? Like be very direct and honest with them and say, Eudine, these three things, these things are likely going to lead that you won't succeed, right? And if we do our job well, most people get that feedback and they're on the track for succeeding. Now, which of those companies end up becoming the best? There are so many things that are uncorrelated to being the best. And it's the things that people don't like. I'm in a hot industry. I was written up on Tech Frunch. Like this investors are talking to me. Like, you'd be surprised how many of the things I just mentioned are uncorrelated to outlier success, right? And that's why it's so hard to actually do this. And I think”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the truth is that we're not very good at knowing what's going to succeed. Certainly, we cannot figure out who's going to be the really successful company in the batch. That's not possible. We're good at is knowing what failure looks like. And what we sometimes like to tell founders at the beginning of the badge.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are the outliers, right? Like if you look at it's like startups on a typical YC bash, there'll be a couple billion dollar companies. Those are the outliers. They'll almost certainly have all the things that we've talked about. And many other companies in the batch will have that too. But then what makes someone a true outlier is something that is unknown. That's why so many investors said no to Airbnb when they were not trying to raise money because that was an outlier idea. Like it was an idea that was not logical and did not make sense to most people. And those kind of ideas, like the ones that end up succeeding often don't make sense to people. And there's something, there's some reason that no one has done this before because they're just not natural next step of the world.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source