With @ycombinator #demoday kicking off, @atrium gathered advice from past YC founders.

1/ Silicon Valley has changed a lot over the past 13 years since I started my first company (an AJAX calendar called Kiko that was funded in the first batch of YC).

2/ Tech has gone from an industry no one cared about, to every random person I knew in college rushing to be part of it, to the evil industry destroying the fabric of society

3/ Starting a startup is easier than ever. Lots of resources: YC, more financing at the seed stage, much more information online. Starting a company is no longer a risky path.

4/ New businesses in every industry are now being built with methodologies that used to be just for tech startups (fast iteration, access to venture capital). Applies to D2C companies like Allbirds, full stack companies like Atrium, etc.

5/ Personally, I’ve felt recently that the overall risk appetite of the people working in tech has changed. People used to want to join frontier companies building something fun / cool; now everyone seems to be optimizing for salary / career stability.

Just got a tip that Citadel reloaded their shorts before they told Robinhood to stop trading $GME.

If this is true, Ken Griffin and the Robinhood founders should be in jail.

This is class warfare.

@aoc there should be a congressional hearing

1/ Throughout my startup career, I’ve seen many founders have an aversion to sales. This is a mistake that can kill your startup.

2/ Sales is often viewed as either a saving grace or proof that the product isn’t good enough (because it should sell itself). Neither are ever true. Some common mistakes that result in...

3/ Mistake 1: Hire a sales rep before reaching product/market fit to get your initial batch of customers. This is a mistake because founders need to work through their MVP with early adopters to truly understand what it is they’re selling.

4/ Mistake 2: Reach product/market fit, need to scale, and rely entirely on self-serve. For enterprise products that require big commitments and internal shifts, almost no product is self-explanatory enough to sell itself.

5/ Mistake 3: Make a first sales hire who isn’t scrappy enough to help mold the sales process from scratch. Some salespeople are amazing at their jobs, but not cut out to establish the processes that others end up following. This skillset is what @rdedatta calls a “sales ninja”.

10 months ago we shut down Atrium after raising $75m in venture capital. Anyone hearing that knows I made tons of mistakes along the way. Someone asked me today what my biggest lessons learned were. Here they are:

Start with the mission
.

It is very hard to write the mission after the fact. You should start with a clear reason to exist and filter early hires for believers.

Start remote. SFBA is over for startups: the cost of housing and rent gives you much worse operating leverage. Many talented people choose jobs they want to be flexible re: location. Remote is better at this time in the market.

I wrote that before COVID, now it's extra true.

There is no skipping of the R&D phase of a company - if you try to skip this you miss the part where you are forced to develop something differentiated. Very hard to solve this with money.

Don’t build a services company. It’s more work to manage everyone and the reward isn’t there at the end of the day.

1/ The first 18 months of starting a company is often life or death. I must've made 5 different companies that each failed within 9 mo. 😭 Each time the company failed I figured out what I could do better. Eventually startup #6 got to $40K/mo by month 18. Here’s what I learned...

2/ Stay focused! Ignore things that are a waste of time: meetups & conferences, meetings with no clear agenda, fundraising if you're not fundraising, reading lots of tech media articles, etc. Every week should feel like significant progress in the first year.

3/ Your first 5 hires will be the difference between life or death. Choose carefully. Be picky. Many of the things we do at the company still are a result of those early hires' legacy. Have fun as a tight knit team. It will change & evolve as you get bigger so enjoy this moment.

4/ Growth may be flat for the first 9 months. It's gonna be okay. Almost every company has experienced this: Airbnb had to sell cereal in-between, Slack failed as a gaming company first, Tesla sold only 147 cars after 6 years! You probably won't be an overnight success either.

5/ In the beginning, do customer support yourself. You will learn a lot about why your product sucks. I did 5,000+ support tickets when it was the two of us. Delight customers & fix things fast while you learn. It will help you build an amazing intuition about your customers.

Starting a startup is hard. This thread will contain some key advice I think are particularly noteworthy:

1. “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” - @paulg The first version of my product was not great, but hey, it worked.

2. Don't build in a vacuum. You should build your product out in the open for the world to see. You will gain valuable feedback from users if you build publicly, and provide insights which ensure you are building a product users truly want. cc @rrhoover @sama

3. As a young founder, a massive weakness is age and the lack of credibility. Developing partnerships, trying to acquire customers. etc have all taken so much longer. In fact, when I mentioned my age, a few investors just walked away. cc @Jason

4. Work on what makes you feel excited. Working on something that you don't believe in will cause you to make rash product decisions, resulting in loss of user loyalty. @fredwilson

5. Take care of yourself. While doing the occasional code sprint can be incredibly useful, working 24/7 and disregarding your health just to build a great product is not a wise choice.

Advice to a friend dealing with their chaotic startup...

Startups are inherently chaotic. No chaos = no opportunity. Startups exist because there is uncertainty, and new things to learn. (1/7) #startup

During a period of rapid growth, all things (structures, processes, etc.) eventually break. Some chaos is self-inflicted, and too much chaos can cause collapse / chronic harm (2/7) #startup

Agility is solving today’s problem, while not limiting your ability to solve tomorrow’s problem. There’s always a temptation to solve tomorrow’s problems.

There are good ideas everywhere, and opportunities everywhere. So focus is hard (3/7) #startup

Startups require an almost supernatural level of focus. You have to focus, while knowing full well many things are broken, and need work. Nothing is truly repeatable or efficient at this point, even when we want it to be (4/7) #startup

And that’s hard...so we tend to load up on the good ideas.

Pursuing all the good ideas will leave you (and others) burnt out. Self-inflicted chaos (5/7) #startup

A potential danger to America I didn't consider till now. The Bay Area seems to be less attractive to founders. What if this makes America as a country less attractive to immigrant founders? What if instead of going to another US city, they don't go to the US at all?

I know founders don't feel the same need to move to the US that they used to. The question is how much of this is due to the change in their opinion of the Bay Area specifically, rather than e.g. greater optimism about remote work, or decreased interest in the US overall.

If folks aren’t already buying what you’re thinking of selling, don’t start that business!

There should be be evidence that folks are already spending money in the space you’re thinking of entering.

Before AirBnB, folks paid money to stay at hotels, B&Bs, cottages, vacation homes, and hostels.

Annually, people spend $570 BILLION on travel accommodation.

Entrepreneurs need to follow the money:

“Where is it already being spent, and how can I get a piece of it?”

Don’t look for “problems that need solving.”

Look for categories where people/businesses are already spending money.

From an entrepreneur’s POV, if folks are willing to spend money on it, it’s a problem worth solving.

Apple has consistently followed this approach.

They didn’t make the first:

- PC
- Laptop
- MP3 player
- Smart phone

They saw the existing demand, and built on it.