The incredible adventures of aliens in Y Combinator

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

We have just arrived from snowy Norway in sunny Silicon Valley as the first Norwegian company to join Y Combinator. We were all encouraged at home.

Konsus joined the Y Combinator this spring as part of the W16. We applied from Norway, where we launched our company a few months earlier and had a good growth path 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. Get down to business right away.

First day at Y Combinator.
Our first group hours were a meeting with companies in our group, plus two partners Y Combinator. In our case, they were 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 happened when I was suddenly asked to speak. 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?”
[Sip. Fortunately, I already rehearsed our line.]
I: “Companies send tasks to our office, and we immediately send 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 there are a lot of words, then you lose the attention of people. ”
Me: "Have I lost your attention?"
Sam: "I started falling asleep."
Me: “Oh. How should this be? ”
Sam:“ It could be something like an On-demand temp-agency.

And we have accepted it. Well, almost .

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

Second day at 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 Freelancers on Demand.

Our first working hours were with Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator. When you recognize celebrities, you realize that they are all on one face. Sam Altman is not like that. Among his rare abilities: he does not speak much, but when he speaks - every word really, really matters. His presence was significant, and it felt like he had a mental portal to the future that made his strategic advice incredibly valuable. It's like someone is reading 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 heavily paraphrased version of this conversation.

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

The meeting ended in about 7 minutes 24 seconds. In the end, he added something that left us with smiles on our faces: “You guys are doing well. I think you’ll build a multi-billion dollar 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 double-checked all these transactions, which we could fix in our company, trying to do everything right. Having received the green light, allowed some things to go their own way, we released our attention and focused on two really important things in the early stages: to do something that people want and grow.
This sharpening of our focus was perhaps the only big observable change in the way we spent our time before and after Y Combinator.

Making an evolutionary analogy: start-ups in the early stages in some way partially possess, like new forms of life, attempts to flourish in a certain environment. And the only way to optimize is to know your environment (talk with your users) and change yourself (create your own product).

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

Seventh day at Y Combinator.
Our second Tuesday dinner. While working with Y Combinator, we gathered every Tuesday night to listen to conversations + questions and answers from representatives of Y Combinator - Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe - or other impressive founders.

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

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

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

Do not be arrogant or pathos / arrogant.
Especially don’t mention that you are the “founder of Y Combinator.”

Be honest.
Especially with you. Y Combinator requires a report from everyone.

Be tech 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 SAFEand 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 yourself fit.
(In an evolutionary sense, not like a sport). Your ideas make sense only if you are able to implement them. You are measured by your results. Paul Graham calls it - be tirelessly 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 provide you with a place to work, because they want the culture of your company to create on its own.

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

The opposite of Y Combinator can be called a seller of used cars in an expensive suit that brings grandmother a broken car.

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

For us, the foreign founders, the biggest fail is not understanding what it means to be a “visionary”. In our own countries, this usually means being unstable and uncertain. And that, not what you need.

It’s not easy to put it briefly, but I’ll try to show that it’s not cool.

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

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

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

4. Your idea is something that most people see as “good to have”
3D-printed food for cats.
Meanwhile, do something that you know for sure that some people really, really want.

At the other end of the spectrum, 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 will have to 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. This can ensure that 1000x
Y Combinator is at great risk to get a thousandfold return, and is ready to take the risk of doing something that sounds strange.

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, calm, closed estate, filled with incredibly smart 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). Therefore, if you simply come here as a foreign founder, you may leave here without having been here.

Therefore, 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.

(Advice. How to introduce people to each other. First, get to know each, 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” here. Silicon Valley has the same problem as I think you will find in Hollywood. Many people want to speak with very few. It is impossible to calculate mathematically, so the solution to this fundamental problem is to filter through dating.

I tell you all this, because Y Combinator - this is the very cherished idea. For foreign founders without connections and a Stanford degree in computer science, your resume is priceless.

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

Translation: Natalya Zarutskaya
Translation support is Edison (which develops online gaming platforms and a software SMPP gateway ).