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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“Yeah, I would say those are the attributes of successful things. To be a super successful company, there's something else to happen. And those things are not things you can put on a list because they're”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Respect or you have, you somewhere know that they're going to succeed, right? And that is what inspires you to be around them or be on their team.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enjoy the communication part, right? Enjoying communication is often correlated with enjoying doing fundraising, which is an important part of some companies, success, not all of them, but for some of them. And I would say communication and storytelling is part of the same arc, right? And those are part of the same thing that actually motivates people around you. If you can communicate why you're building, what you're building, and why it's important to the world, tell a story about that. That can motivate people around you to just want to follow you. And I think. It's rare that I've seen founders succeed where the founder isn't in some way an inspirational person or someone that is a good communicator. Like most of the time, you at least have”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I would say they figure out how to talk to users and move fast early on. So they don't wait for permission from their investors or from YC or from someone else to make progress. They're like every day or every week. There's continuous progress. And they're not doing this for someone else. They're doing this for the customers. There's no one else that's like actually the, they're not doing this for the investors. That's for sure. The investors are sort of like in the way more or less. And they're just naturally focusing on the customers. Finally, what I would say is the skill that's really attributed to great founders is excellent communication skills. So the ability to communicate really complicated ideas clearly.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the most common reason that I've seen founders succeed or companies succeed, it comes down to the founders and characteristics of those individuals. The most important characteristics of those individuals are they're really determined to win and they don't give up when things are hard and they have an internal motivation that's just really infectious to people around them, which is how they end up building really good teams around them. People actually going to want to go and work for them. And I have numerous examples of people like this, where they, the CEO or one of the founders are just like just really inspirational people. The second thing I would say is they are technical. So like that's kind of like they're technical enough and like if I would grade companies on the scale of like technical to less technical, more technical founders are more successful, are more likely to succeed, I would say.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's certainly the case that in some countries people have other jobs while they start the startups. So like the engineers, like in Ukraine, for example, in Eastern Europe, it's very common that if they start their own startup, they actually have a full-time job as a contractor while they start in the startup, because that's how you pay the bill. Because often you can't raise money. And that's fine too.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, I can't recall any specific ones where people have a contracting firm, but I recall founders where, let's say you're not talking to non- But they valued engineering and they had an ability to build a team of great people that were not co-founders. And they gave them equity and they become successful. The many examples of that, I would say, but I don't remember any specific examples where like you had a contracting team building the whole thing. And I think the reason for that is it takes more than just sort of like writing a spec to build a product. You can't actually spec yourself to a great product. You have to just like be part of the iterations yourself. And that's why I think someone being the engineer, having the idea of what the iteration looks like and just doing it is how you do things. And I think that the cases where I've seen non-technical founders make this work is that they have a really good engineering teams who feel like they're founding team. They might not be co-founders per YCC definition of having 10%, but they feel like they're the founding team.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For whatever reason, study something else that doesn't have to be a conscious or very precise reason that you had when you were 18 or 19. And then you're 25, you know, like, I wish I had a code. And then just learn how to code. And they learn how to code. Like it's not that more difficult than that.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people learn how to code themselves, right? So there are a lot of places online where you can learn the skill set that you take to build a prototype. You might not be the best engineers. And there are many successful start founders who are not the best engineers because they stop coding when they hired three or four engineers. That's fine. But you need to be sufficiently good that you understand the value of engineering and understand that the best way to solve most of the problem is with software. And there are a lot of founders who just”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just say no. I have a great job. I'm really happy. But some of them will have thought about starting a company for a while and was hoping that someone would come and ask them to do that. So you have to kind of like remove your fears and go and ask the best people. The reason you want to have a technical co-founder and not a hired engineer or not a hired contracting team is because so many of the decisions you're going to make are technical and so many of the iterations you're going to make relies on engineering. And if you don't understand that, you won't actually make the right decisions anyway. It's not like Sarbus, you have an idea of a product, you build a product, and you're done. There's infinite number of iterations in that process. And then finally, I would say”
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 first thing I would say is you need to learn how to value the engineering piece. And let me give you an example of how you don't do that. You apply to YC and you have 90% for yourself and 10% for the engineer. You're basically saying they're like, oh, the engineering part of this company is only worth one-tenth of me. I'm the non-technical person. So that to me is a signal that you're not really value engineering. Okay, so how do you go about find someone? Well, the truth is that there are a lot of technical co-founders. They also want to find business co-founders. They don't want to do other part. They don't want to do sales. And they actually don't really care that much about fundraising. They just want to solve the problem. And that's fine. And we built something called co-funded matching with those funders can meet. But if you don't, if you don't participate in that, you can just start by asking the best technical people that you know, are you interested in starting a company with me? You know, same thing with rejection. Many 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
“Yeah, I think the first thing is to understand the value of Technical Fund under some people who are in this trouble or in a situation where they have an idea of something they want to build and they don't have anyone to help building it at a friend Paul who gave this incredible quote. He said, I have an idea for a song. I just need a musician to help me make it. That's kind of similar to how it is with engineering. If you view output of engineering as like, I just have an idea for a song, I just need someone to actually make it for me. Then you're not valuing software engineering or mechanical engineering or any engineering skill set like deep enough, right? The truth is that the engineering part is the really hard part.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of EVI charging systems are just so shitty, and the apps are terrible. You just have to use them yourself to know how bad it is”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to automate things. So they will do the same thing in Excel a million times by just like tabbing because that's the only thing that they know. And they're not technical enough to write some kind of script to do it. And you just have to watch those people to just feel the pain. You can't actually ask them how difficult is it to do XYZ because they won't even know that it's that difficult to them. So the best thing I've learned about how to discover the pain is to watch people have them screen share, have them walk you through their daily workflow about the area where you're doing some discovery. That is the best thing. And like I'll give you another example, right? So there's a bunch of ways companies that are doing EV charging for electric cars. And they're like, what are the problems in EV charging? And I was like, you know, just rent an EV and go and charge at all the non-Tesla chargers and see what they say or see what you experience. And the truth is that it's just like garbage.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually recorded, I'm happy about these videos, but I recorded two videos on YouTube as part of YC Startup School last fall. And you cannot go watch them on YouTube right now. One of them is how to talk to users, and the other one is how you sell or how you do sales. And the one about talking to users, I think there's a difference in asking someone, do you have a problem with XYZ? Is this podcasting setup working for you? And people say, yeah, it's kind of working. But if you are in podcasting setup experts and you watch people use some other thing that's really shitty, they might also think that is pretty good. But you have to watch them do it. And the best way for you to figure out what is the intensity of the problem is not to ask them, but to watch them or to watch them solve the thing that they do. You know how like a lot of non-technical people don't know.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's where you have to start because you cannot build the whole thing right up front and make everybody loves you. That doesn't really work that way. Even Airbnb was like air mattresses or staying in someone's homes when they're home. Like that was not the complete solution of Airbnb. But there were early doctors who dug in and be like, yep, I like that. I like those two things. I want to have people stay in my living room on the mattress. But that's not what Airbnb is about today. And a lot of those things were unknown at the time. But I think people are just afraid of rejection. And you just need to overcome that fear and just learn that like, there's nothing that's really that bad that can happen when people don't use your service or sign up and don't care. Like it's not really that bad.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always gives you a second chance, and you really need to internalize that. People have busy lives, and if people don't actually use what you sign at, what you're building, that's And I think people just have this fear that if I get a lot of rejection, that means everything is bad. But the rejection should be put in context to the early adopter idea and that most people don't care are not early adopters, don't want to dig into new things, and that the more narrow of a solution you have to a specific problem, the fewer people actually want to dig in.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fear of that is basically the fear of rejection. So if I put my thing out there and most people won't use it, then they will tell all their friends how shitty this thing is, you should never even sign up for it. That's the fear people have. But the truth is that people sign up for it and be like, oh, I'm busy. I got something else to do. And they actually don't remember or care. So whenever you sign up for something that you sign up a year ago, think of yourself that is the common customer experience, which is that you just sign for a lot of stuff you don't even remember. You never have this like, I hate this thing reaction. You always have this like, I'm indifferent to this thing. I don't actually care to even complete the sign of flow or try it out, right? And I think that's the thing that people need to remember is that the worst thing that can happen to startup is not that people hate what you're doing. It's that they're completely indifferent to what you're doing. Sorry, not the worst thing, but the most common thing that happens is people just indifferent. But it doesn't give you a second chance.”
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 tell this story. I actually told this story yesterday. So remember when you sign up for a service, that's a cool service and you hear about on TechCrunch or something like that. And then you realized you already signed up a year ago. Right. And then you're like From the founder's perspective, you sent it to something you never used it. So the founders who build those services, their inclination to think is that everybody hates me because they sign up and they never use me. They never use the service.”
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 think that's the volume that people don't expect. Like, they think they might have to talk to five, but I think you have to talk to like 25 to 50. That means you have to reach out to a lot more to be able to get to people that are potentially early adopters. And those once you talk to are also the ones that become your customers. So like you're already doing most of the sales by just doing this work anyway.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's absolutely true. I think he wrote the article, Do Things That Don't Scale as a learning there was the AirB founders doing the trips to New York and learning about how to build Airbnb, which is a very counterintuitive idea, which is when you have to spend the most amount of time with your customers. And I think Airbnb is sort of like one of the best stories inside YC of doing this well.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have all these validators, right? So the people are validating that even if you don't talk to customers, why is the accepted you? This investor invested in you. This investor said you were great. Like blah, blah, blah, like all these different validations that you confuse with product market fit, right? Like we have to remind everyone on the first AYC, none of you have product market fit because you probably don't, right? Almost nobody has because people confuse this external validation with the thing that matters the most, which is talking to customers and learning what matters. And people just don't, it's just like a thing that just keeps coming back. Some get really good at it. And that is the source of successful startups is when you really get good at this.”
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 can go on and on and on and on for this one. But honestly, if I drill down, like what makes companies fail, it's quite simple. It's just like they don't talk to users, which means they don't find problem magnifit. And if they don't find proc market fit, like nothing else really matters. What mistakes do people make is like it's all about that? It's all about talking to customers and learning that you're building something that's actually useful. Why is this like headline is make things people want? And that's, it's still true. And it's always going to be true.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I think of more generally outside of YC, so these are two kind of things I experienced within YC. I think generally outside of YC, I would say the two most common problems, the same one is not talking to customers. The other one is not being technical and not knowing what it takes to build a successful technology company. And it means having technical founders and it means being able to build the first prototype. And this is something we screen for when we interview people in YC and aren't accepting a whole lot of team that don't know how to build or get their first prototype built themselves because we know it is like a super common value pattern.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then it's not interested. They are not incentivized to take risks in their job to try something new. They're just incentivized to not take risks and just continue what they're doing. And those 10% are the early adopters, are the ones that you actually want to reach. But that means you have to reach 10 to find one. And they have convinced that one person to get on the phone or a video call with you. And that takes work. And it takes a lot of work. And I think people don't really think of this. This is common knowledge, basic stuff for salespeople, but founders who have never done sales before just get surprised by the percentages and they sort of like what it means to do this.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After that, I would say one of the common mistakes in twice. I'm not talking about generally startups here, I'm talking about InsightYC. The second most common thing I see in SYC is people are just afraid to talk to customers. So once they're just not trying hard enough to get in front of customers. And I think this comes from technical people tend to think that software is just sort of a solution to everything. But really what you should need to do is to talk to someone over Zoom or over phone or in person even better. And people are just afraid of doing that. And they're afraid of being rejected. They're afraid of, these are common people that want to build good products are just really afraid of people saying no. The problem is, which anyone who hasn't done sales before that join YC, they realize this, is that if you take the average customer group in the world, 90% are not early adopters. It doesn't matter if you have something new in”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pushing and probing founders to be like, tell us about the conversations you've had with your customers. What did you learn? Can you show us the organizations or like all these questions? Like, what are the software they're using? What are they paying for? What problems do they have? How do they describing the intensity of that problem? So that's what we spent a lot of time early on on NYC.”
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 so many. I mean, like this is how I initially learned about startups by going searching for that on Google and landing on Paul Graham's articles because he kept. I think I've written many articles about this topic because it is so common. So this topic can go on forever. But if I take the most recent experience of had at NYC, I would say startups fail, one, because they don't talk to customers. If you don't talk to customers or users, you don't actually know what's important. And if you don't know what's important, it doesn't matter what you build. It doesn't matter kind of what ideas you have in your head. If you don't actually know what it is that you need to build and you don't validate it with customers, that's where a lot of the failure stems from. And a lot of early YC for us or early part of the program is us.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are your goals for next two weeks? And what were your goals for the last two weeks? And did you hit the goals? And if you didn't hit them, like, what came in the way of hitting the goals? It's very simple. And that can uncover lots of problems that other founders are having exactly in the same way. And just by talking about the things that held you back or the things that allowed you to hit your goals uncover something material for the other seven companies in that ring.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to schedule it and force it and put the laptops on the floor and the phones on the floor, and you just like sit there with pen and paper. That's how you have to do it. And we tried to mimic that as much as we could over Zoom. But honestly, the best experience of this was in person, in a ring in Mountain View, with no computers. And everyone just paying attention to everyone. That was the best experience. And yeah, that's what I remember is like one of the most meaningful parts of YC. I didn't have it myself when I did YC, but now everyone has it.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this group setting, where they ask the same kind of questions to each other, to hold themselves accountable, to learn from each other, and to just have someone else to lean on. And I think this was unknown. And somehow the world didn't know before that starting company is super lonely and you have all these anxiety. And by just talking to other people have the same problems is just like one of the best things you can do.”
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 second thing that group officers do well is accountability, right? We ask you what are your goals? And what were your goals for the last two weeks? Did you hit them? And then that gives founders accountability because they founders are competitive. They don't want to look bad. They want to come back after two weeks and say nothing worked or like, or at least like we didn't learn anything. They want to learn something and make progress, whether it's positive or negative. And group officers to me is the most magical moment because it really creates this very intense three or four month period. And founders often come back to us after I see and say, hey, we want to do that again. We want to have this really intense, like really productive period. And we don't have a program exactly like we see other programs, but we don't have anything exactly that mimics that experience. But we do encourage founders to continue with group officers after YC. And many of them do. And many of them ad hoc continue to meet for years.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Fonders have an infinite number of problems that they're thinking about all the time, which is why they're allergic to the question how are things going. But what YC started, we put all the founders in a group together in a room and they started learning that all founders, all companies are broken in some way, right? They're all having these massive problems and they're all feeling that anxiety when they hear the question, how are things going? And just hearing other founders explain their problems, perhaps solving their problems is a really good way for yourself to both feel motivated to do it yourself and see how problems get solved when other companies having similar problems. Nowadays, because of the scale OIC, we group companies together that have the same problems or the same area that they're operating in.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so emotional for him to ask that question because it's never going well, right? It's never like, oh, everything is going fantastic. Like they might say that, but everybody knows. All founders, when they look at each other's eyes, they know that's not the answer.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the group office hour is a little bit different. Group office hour holds a couple of different purposes. One of them is, if I think back on the Paul and Jessica's motivation start, YC, this is a surprise to them, but starting a company is incredibly lonely. You can't really lean on your employees and say, hey, I'm feeling really shitty as a founder today. Like everything is going to shit. Employees isn't going to tick that well. So you lean on perhaps your investors, but they're not really available. But what you can lean on is other founders because they're all in the same situation. And it's sort of like when you ask a founder the question, how are things going?”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we don't want to hear updates. We don't want to hear strategy questions. We want to understand what's slowing you down or what's holding you back from moving even faster. You generally have a specific goal. And I think that question, what's slowing you down or we're holding you back crystallizes like the priorities? There are only so many things you can do as a startup. And there are only so many things that matters at that stage. And we ask them that question so we can start digging into, okay, what's the goal? What are the things to drive towards that goal? What are the things that slowing you down towards that goal? And usually the founders don't know what's slowing it down, so the conversation and us probing questions actually leads to us or them discovering what it is to slowing them down.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I say we have two types of office hours, two of the common ones. We have regular office hours, which is usually a one-on-one, or basically the founders talking to me or me plus another partner. And they happen every week or every other week throughout the entire program. And they happen years after the program on the regular basis. Then we have group office hours, which is you and like six or seven other startups talking to us. And they have feel a little bit different purpose. So the goal of the regular office hour, I always ask the question, what's holding you back from moving faster?”
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 for a little bit, or finding that is really fun. So I think I discourage people to start startups. There are so many other things that are important in their life that are more So if there are financial constraints or family constraints or relationship constraints and they are going to trump this, then yeah, you should think a second time perhaps because startups are hard. They're much harder than a normal job. Like equally hard if they're successful or failure, right? They're not actually, there's no middle way where like, oh, my company is doing great so I can chill. It doesn't work that way either. Don't really discourage or encourage people. I just want them to have all the information.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question. I would say sometimes if someone doesn't have a motivation or don't know why they're doing this, they're doing this because they read that it would be a natural career step. So like a good reason to not start a company is if you think of starting a company as a career step. Well, it is not. Because if it's successful, it'll be your entire career. It'll be 10 years, most likely. And if it's not successful, then it's not something that people generally aspire to to start. So non-successful startups. So I think people as start companies, because this is sort of like something that want to put on their resume, they have not understood what startups are or why you should do them. Sometimes you can screen and kind of figure this out, but sometimes people don't even know why they're starting a company when they get started. And you kind of gets figured out along the way. And that's okay. So I don't want to discourage people who don't know exactly why this company to start a company. Like they might figure out along the way and find the true motivation sort of after doing.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually kind of hard for screen for motivation, I would say. Interviews because the purpose of this kind of office hour question is to highlight why someone is there and highlight the diversity of reasons people are there and sometimes even highlight from one founder to another co-founder why they are doing this. And they might have never talked about this. Actually surprisingly often founders have not talked about why they're doing this. And just knowing why someone is here really helps with conflict resolution, for example, really helps with sort of like understanding why someone is there on a certain day or something like that. So it's not something we screen for as much as I think we try to help founders discover this among themselves and really know this about themselves. And I've just accepted that the motivations to start companies is widely diverse.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there are many ideas that are quote unquote boring, but they just the idea of running the company becomes the motivation eventually.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them want to prove themselves in front of others or prove themselves towards themselves. Some have grand, really important motivations to change the world. And they will say things like, I want to give everyone water or I want to solve climate change or I want to democratize publishing. Like you can imagine any number of like really large ideas. And some people just want to start a big company and just want to like be successful. And it doesn't matter in my experience what your motivation is. I don't think either of these motivations, like it sounds like some of them would be better than others. In my experience, it's not the case. The motivation will change over time to just running this thing, right? Like when something becomes big, it's hard to think every day about like exactly why you got started because the motivation just like it can be fun work on boring things because it's fun to build something big. Everything doesn't have to be shiny and big and grandiose.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually, I haven't heard it before, but you know me. I'm an optimistic person. I think it probably reflects on my view of this question, but I would say desperation sounds like a negative place that you're starting at. I actually think that most people, the start companies start from a positive place. But the motivations, I agree with what he said can be very diverse for successful founders, right? So we actually asked this in one of the early group office hour sessions. We asked them, why are you doing this? And we don't want to hear an answer. It's like, I found this niche of the market. Like that's not the AI. The why is like, why will you come in and work late after four years when you have no money left and everything's going to shit? Then the niche market is not the answer. There's something deeper than that. And we've learned that it varies a lot for people's motivations to start companies. Some of them just want to make some solve some technical problem that they feel are passionate about solving.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recreate what you see inside Airbnb a couple of times with demo day and with sort of like new products completing isolated from the rest starting with doing things that don't scale and talking to customers. So I think that that experience had made a big impact on them. But it's hard to say just these two things go and apply these things. It's actually kind of hard to say, well, that will work at Sirbnb. I think that's a really, really tricky question to answer. The last thing I would say is Airbnb had an incredible business model, an incredible business from early on. And it was hard to fail. And what I mean by that is it's hard to fail with a company. You can fail with individual things inside the company, but a company was still going to succeed. And I think we all felt that. And a lot of companies don't have the ability to sort of like take risks like Airbnb did early on because they don't have something that's so obviously great.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to understand that true motivations of the people that were there, like Loa, why are you here? And we did something we call culture interviews that I think the founders have written about, or there's probably content online about this. We did a lot of culture interviews early on to try to figure out we got the people that were there that mapped our core values and were really excited to work on Airbnb. And I think finally, I don't know how this happened. Like we did pick people from diverse backgrounds. Most startups don't have most of the PMs being former founders. But I believe that was the case for the first 10 or 12 or 15 p.m. So there would be a lot of us performer founders. And I think that that made a big difference for how you make decisions and how you get started on things. And I think I actually see this a lot in the Airbnb founders. They really care about the time at YC and they try to”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a tricky one because, like, a Like I would like to say that all the things that we did were the cause of the outcome of this, but that's not really how the world works. First of all, we made sure we hired people that were really excited to be there, right? They wanted to build Airbnb and they were really excited to work on Airbnb. Like that was the most important thing Of course, people had other offers, but I think you can kind of figure out from those offers, are you excited to be here or not? So that was probably the first thing. The second thing I think is”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ask myself why this was the case. The best answer I have is probably we brought in a special type of people. We had very diverse backgrounds. A lot of us was former founders. Not many of us were Career people from the technology industry of the early days. Not many of us. And I think that bar that we set like the first, I believe when I joined, there was probably five or seven PMs and there was like 30 engineers or something. And you joined a little bit before me. Those people set the bar or set the standard of what we were looking for afterwards. And I think it took a long time to change that narrative. I mean, eventually you have to hire people that only had big corporations. But I don't remember we did that for a long time. And when I sent my, I actually read my goodbye note recently and I like that my words there still means a lot to me. And it means sort of like a trying to reflect on exactly these things of like building a great company that became successful and being part of this sort of family of really close friends.”
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 thought a lot about why that was the case, but I would say Airbnb did not feel like a normal job. It felt like more like a group of friends trying to just do something together. And we were friends and we weren't like, at least in the beginning, it did not feel like this was a job. It was sort of like an ongoing project and an assembly of amazing people. And I think in the end, we managed to build two things. Like a really successful company, thanks to Joe and Nate and Brian for starting this, like without them, there would be nothing to build. And we also, I think people don't like to use the word family, but I feel like that way because when I go and meet with AMB alumni from that team, we have a very special bond that reminds me of close social connections more than anything else. Does not remind me of co-workers.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's funny. Like, I think this year and a couple months, it'll be 10 years ago since the UNE started MB. Wow. It was 2012. And the reason I tweeted that was I asked everyone that I met after me because I had this experience of like this was the highlight of my career up until then, at least being in a team like that. And I asked everyone, have you found anything better? And like I haven't heard, besides maybe one or two people, I haven't heard anybody say that I found something better. And they all missed that dearly.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I drill down, what makes companies fail? It's quite simple. It just means they don't find progress. And if they don't find progress fit, like nothing else really matters. And what mistakes do people make is like it's all about that? It's all about talking to customers and learning that you're building something that's actually useful. Why is this headline is make things people want? And that's still true. And it's always going to be true.”
2023-03-02 · Lenny's Podcast · Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source