The Incredible Adventures of Aliens in Y Combinator

Sondre Rasch - co-founder of Konsus.com (W16).

We have just arrived from snowy Norway in the sunny Silicon Valley as the first Norwegian company adopted by Y Combinator. The houses all cheered us up.
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Konsus joined Y Combinator this spring as part of the W16. We submitted an application from Norway, where we launched our company a few months earlier and had a good growth trajectory of 10% weekly.

When we returned home after three months of intense, naturally, people asked: “How was it?”, “What did you learn?”. Therefore, everything is here. This is what Y Combinator likes and what we learned there.

Lesson 1: Use words that people understand to explain what you are doing. Immediately go to the point.

First day at Y Combinator.
Our first group work hours are a meeting with companies in our group, plus two Y Combinator partners. In our case, it was Sam Altman (president of Y Combinator) and Jeff Ralston (founder of what became Yahoo Mail).

We sat in a circle, only 8 companies. I sipped my coffee and absorbed everything that happens when I was suddenly asked to talk. This is, of course, confidential conversations, but this is a story about us and I do not mind sharing it:

Sam: "Konsus, tell me what are you doing?"
[A sip. Fortunately, I have already rehearsed our line.]
Me: “Companies send jobs to our office, and we immediately forward them to freelancers based on their skills and capabilities.”
[We were very pleased with this line, which we found very concise.]
Sam: "Well, it is very long. If a lot of words, then you lose the attention of people. "
I: "Did I lose your attention?"
Sam: "I started to fall asleep."
Me: "Oh. How should it be? ”
Sam: “Maybe something like“ Agency providing temporary workers upon request ”(On-demand temp-agency).

And we took it. Well, almost .

Lesson 2: Talk with users and create your product. (And nothing else).

Second day in Y Combinator.
Our first one-on-one business hours.

Working hours are 30-minute consultation sessions where founders can invite Y Combinator partners. We tried to reduce the description to four words. We agreed to “On-demand temp-agency” on-demand freelancers.

Our first working hours were with Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. When you recognize celebrities, you realize that they all look the same. Sam Altman is not like that. Among his rare abilities: he speaks not much, but when he speaks - every word really, really matters. His presence was significant, and it felt as if he had a mental portal to the future that made his strategic advice incredibly valuable. Like someone reading the next week’s lottery tickets. He has several personal traits that are very close to us, the Norwegians, for example, to say only what you think. Needless to say, we loved him very much. Here is a strongly rephrased version of this conversation.

We: "Rising prices?"
Sam: "I wouldn't worry about that."
We: "Automation?"
Sam: "It's still early for you guys."
We: "Anything else?"
Sam: “You guys are fine. Just focus on your product and keep growing. ”

The meeting ended in approximately 7 minutes 24 seconds. In the end, he added something that left us with smiles on his face: “You guys are doing fine. I think you will build a multi-billion company if you don’t ruin anything. ”

I can't tell you how much relief this meeting brought. You see, before this meeting, we constantly rechecked all these transactions that we could fix in our company, trying to do everything right. Having received the green light, allowed some things to go on their own, we freed our attention and focused on two really important things in the early stages: do something that people want and grow.
This sharpening of our focus was perhaps the only major change observed in how we spent our time before and after Y Combinator.

Making an evolutionary analogy: startups in the early stages in some way possess, like new life forms, attempts to blossom in a certain environment. And the only way to optimize is to know your environment (talk to your users) and change yourself (create your product).

Lesson 3: Be a sincere good person, but without excesses.

The seventh day in Y Combinator.
Our second tuesday dinner. While working with Y Combinator, we met every Tuesday night to listen to conversations + questions and answers from Y Combinator representatives - Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe - or other impressive founders.

When you listen to the conversation of these amazing founders, you begin to realize that people are different here. From the beginning I couldn’t pinpoint this, I just knew that there was the most beautiful meeting of people with whom I had ever met.

Looking back into the past, I realize that the Y Combinator has a cohesive culture with very different meanings. Many foreign founders do not have steep role models in their own countries.

In Y Combinator you meet a special type of entrepreneur with idealistic values, but who are at the same time quite effective. Think of someone like Ilon Musk. He is focused, not divorced from reality, inventive, but he also manages to be an idealist. This type of personality in the lighter versions of the Y Combinator is ideal.

Do not be arrogant or pretentious / arrogant.
Especially do not mention that you are the “founder of the Y Combinator”.

Be honest.
Especially with myself. Y Combinator requires a report from each.

Be technically savvy.
Even knowing how to make your product, teach or look for someone who can make it. Y Combinator appreciates hackers and creators.

Be transparent.
Use SAFE and a new simple method from Jeff Ralston to make the early stages of financing more transparent. Use really good metrics that show the real state of your business.

Keep fit.
(In an evolutionary sense, not as a sport). Your ideas make sense only if you are able to implement them. You are measured by your results. Paul Gram calls it - be relentlessly resourceful .

Self-confidence.
We have repeatedly said that Y Combinator "will tell you when you are going to make a really bad mistake," but they will still allow you to make mistakes. Also, they will not give you a place to work, because they want your company's culture to be created by itself.

A good example of the ideals of Y Combinator - the lack of pretentiousness and self-confidence - is the summer camp of Y Combinator. There are hundreds of founders who camped in a pine forest. Nothing special. You just sleep in a tent. There is a big campfire here, and you spend the whole day doing things like archery, hiking or just talking to each other. It was pretty good.

By contrast, the Y Combinator can be called a seller of used cars in an expensive suit who pushes a broken car to her grandmother.

Lesson 4: Do something that people want, that will be valuable for a long time and potentially calculated for many people.

For us, the foreign founders, the biggest file is a misunderstanding of what it means to be a “visionary”. In our own countries, it usually means being unstable and uncertain. And this is not what you want.

It is not easy to put it briefly, but I will try to show that it is not cool.

1. Your idea is a derivative
Uber for cats
(Although, you can still use the derived sentence to explain your idea.)

2. Your market is a marginal niche.
Rare cats shampoo
Instead, solve big problems for the future of a big market. (Not to be confused with the original pursuit of a small market sector that is smart.)

3. You offer this as a “startup idea” to get a “startup experience”
Application with workouts for fat cats
Meanwhile, work on the problem that you have, provided that you are sure that this problem really exists.

4. Your idea is something that most people regard as “good to have”
3D printed cat food
In the meantime, do something that you definitely know some people really, really want.

At the other end of the spectrum are things that make you feel like a life-giving force:

1. Live in the future
... and then look into the past and see things that are missing, something that will exist or should exist. (If you have no idea what the future will be, be at the forefront of a rapidly changing industry. There are many opportunities.

2. It can provide 1000x
Y Combinator takes a big risk to get a thousandfold returns, and is willing to take the risk of doing something that sounds weird.

Lesson 5: Y Combinator is the first step.

The funny thing about Silicon Valley is really not the place. When you come here, it looks like one place. It looks like a luxurious, quiet, closed estate, filled with incredibly intelligent and rich people who want to make the world a better place.

But the oddity is that it is not "here . " Silicon Valley in a very literary form exists in the network minds of the smartest people.

There is no actual place where you can really get to know Silicon Valley (with the possible exception of Ethereum meetups and Burning Man). So if you just come here as a foreign founder, you may leave here without having been here.

So how do you get "in"?

At first glance, people in Silicon Valley are very broad-minded. They are also super open to represent one person to another.

(Council. How to introduce people to each other. First meet each other, then send letters to each, indicating the reason why they can be useful to each other and put themselves in a copy.)

But there is a big "BUT". Silicon Valley has the same problem as I believe you will find in Hollywood. Many people want to talk to very few. Mathematically, it is impossible to calculate, so the solution to this fundamental problem is filtering through familiarity.

I tell you all this, because Y Combinator is that cherished performance. For foreign founders without ties and a Stanford degree in computer science in your resume is priceless.

Wherever I go, when it comes to the fact that we were in Y Combinator, we instantly became our own. We were no longer just foreign founders. We were the founders of Y Combinator.

Translation: Natalia Zarutskaya
Translation support - Edison (which develops online gambling sites and software SMPP gateway ).