Kat Manalac's Whale AMA

We usually let the startups in each batch decide when they want to launch. Um, so most of the startups in the winter '17 batch haven't announced yet. But, um, there is one female founder who has announced her company. Um, it's called Simple Habit. It is an app that lets you meditate, and you subscribe. They have five-minute meditations that you can do every day, for all different contexts.

In the last batch, there were a lot of awesome female founders. There was, um, Flex. Um, Flex is basically a, um, like a tampon replacement. It lets you have mess-free period sex. Um, it's flexfit.com, and the founders are really active in the kind of women's health space. Um, they're fantastic. There's also Deborah Cleaver of vote.org. Um, her goal is to get to 100% voter turnout. Um, and there's so many more that I can't even fit in a one-minute quick video.

I technically read this book in 2017, but it came out in 2016, and I think it's the best book that I've read in the past couple of years. It's a novel called Homegoing. Um, it is about two half-sisters born in Africa: one that was married to a British slave trader and one that was sent to the United States as a slave on a slave ship. Um, each subsequent chapter then goes through, um, another generation, um, from, you know, going down from those two sisters until it reaches present day. Um, and it is one of the most powerful and also interesting stories, um, I've read.

Um, I buy probably 90% of my books, um, on Kindle. Um, but, um, I try to support bookstores as much as possible, so I'll buy, um, a hard copy every now and then. I also am a huge fan of audio. What's the best part of the YC network? Um, so when I started at YC, I think I was most surprised, uh, not by how smart everyone is, because it's like going to a wonderful, you know, one of the top universities in the world. Everyone's very smart and ambitious, but what I didn't expect was how helpful everyone is.

You can email pretty much any alumni, and they're happy to help you. Um, we have an internal software called Bookface, um, that's sort of like our internal Quora meets LinkedIn meets Facebook. And it's really interesting to see, you know, every day there are tens of questions that founders throw out there and a whole network of people who are experts in, um, their own spaces that are willing to jump in with advice or help or connections. Um, and so that I think has been the best thing: people truly pay it forward, um, after they go through the program and are willing to help, um, the founders that come after them.

If we could only impart one piece of advice to YC founders, I think it would be to talk to your users. We get a lot of people who are great at building product, and they want to make the product perfect before they get it into the hands of real people. But the best feedback you're going to get is from real users, ideally paying customers. And so if you spend too much time, you know, thinking about things and building and building and not getting it in front of real people and watching real people use it, you won't know if it's truly something that people want, truly something that people need, and will keep coming back to.

So how does time travel help me at Y Combinator? So when we're reading applications, um, I do this thought experiment where I think forward in time and think through what the world will look like if hundreds of thousands or millions of people were to use this product or service. It really helps to imagine what the world will look like if you believe, um, that world can exist. Um, and that really helps me as we're figuring out, um, you know, here is something that's at V1 today, um, and what does this product or the world look like when, you know, V5, um, in 10 years, um, or more exists.

Yes, we funded a few great Australian founders. Um, one founder, Dennis Mars, actually worked with us at YC on the admissions team for a little while. Um, he went through YC twice, most recently in the summer of 2016 with a company called Proxy. They're proxy.com, and, uh, key cards for the office, so they make it really easy to get into your office with just your phone. Um, a couple, uh, maybe a year, year and a half ago, we, um, invested in Go1, which, um, you know, was based in Australia before coming to YC. Um, and they are the largest marketplace with, you know, I think they're the largest U marketplace of, um, training videos and compliance and accreditation content, um, for your employees. Um, so if you need a platform, um, with video content to train your employees it's the place to go. But lots of great Australian companies, and would love to see more.

This is a good question and a hard one. Um, I think most eras before now would be pretty shitty for a non-white woman. Um, but assuming, um, that we're ignoring that, I think ancient Egypt would be really awesome. Um, I think the language would be really hard to figure out. Um, Renaissance Europe, um, or maybe a little more recently, um, the founding of the United States, seeing the founding fathers, um, kind of with the Constitution, and, uh, seeing the birth of the United States would be pretty awesome.

Yes, a bad co-founder relationship is infinitely worse than being a solo founder. Co-founder disputes are one of the things that we see kill the most promising early-stage companies at YC. Um, so when we're looking at applications, one of the major things that we look at is how do the founders know each other? Do they have some history together other than just wanting to start a company? Um, Have they worked together for a little while? Um, you know, what have they built together before, whether it was class projects or worked at a previous job or even just side projects? Um, we think it's important, um, for the, you know, founders to have a strong relationship.

And all co-founding teams fight, but the important thing is knowing how you will respond and react to each other when you do have those fights. Um, so, so yes, uh, the co-founder relationship is just as important, I think, um, as, you know, a, you know, long-term romantic relationship. Um, you're going to be spending a lot of time with this person.