Q&A with YC at the Female Founders Conference 2016

Okay, so the first question that someone asked was: How does a company determine if they're right for YC? If they should apply? Well, every startup's right for Y Combinator. I mean, I think a lot of people say, like, "Oh, I'm too early" or "I'm too far along." There is no right company for Y Combinator. Apply to Y Combinator if you want help with your startup wherever you happen to be, whether you're just starting your idea or whether you've been around for a year and need to take it to the next level. I mean, I really do feel at this point, with all the different partners we have and all the different alumni, we can help pretty much anyone who applies.

Yeah, during the break, I had a lot of women come up to me and ask just that question. You know, what is too early? What is too late? And we have actually a new program that we started in the fall of last year called the Fellowship, which works with even earlier stage, like idea and prototype stage companies. So really, there is nothing; there’s no such thing as too early or too late. And there’s nothing to lose by filling out the application as well. You know, no matter what, just answering the questions on the application form is a useful exercise for any founder. So even if you do that and don't hit submit, you've probably learned something from it.

Yeah, I was just talking to a woman in the audience who said just that—that it was really helpful for her to go through the questions, and it helped her think about her business in a different way. And I've heard my YC let me say that as well; it just helps you distill your thoughts into a useful format.

So another question came up that also comes up a lot when I talk to potential applicants is: What does YC look for in a team? Like, is there an ideal kind of makeup of a team? I guess there’s no simple answer to that, except that we look for a team that shows determination, that shows that they can get things done, that shows that they can work together. But there are so many different ways that that can be presented to us. So, you know, there isn’t this sort of one-size-fits-all idea to it. But it’s really important you can get that across to us. And you've seen from the women presenting today how much determination and how much not giving up that takes, and that’s what we really want and what we look for.

Yeah, I look for founders who have known each other for a while or worked together for a while. I look for people who are solving a problem that they themselves have. Not to repeat myself, but you’ve got to be a domain expert to do a good job. I think for people who have built something before, even if it’s not their current idea, if they’ve built something in the past, it sort of shows that they can ship, that they're effective at building something. And I look for an idea that could be huge. And again, the idea—

Okay, Carolyn Levy, you know, a partner at Y Combinator, she’s our in-house counsel. And Carolyn was actually our lawyer, YC's lawyer, since going back to 2006. So we go way back. And so I'm still a little out of breath because it's actually kind of a hike from BART, as some of you may know. Just relax; I'm talking about what we look for. And I will say really quickly, I saw Jerry Brown relaxing on the stairs of one of the state buildings when I was walking by. It was so random!

But big ideas can always change, but I get super excited if I have like this great team, domain experts, and they’re working on like a really big idea that’s super broken, like high schools. I got all excited just talking to them, ’cause you know, there’s a lot of broken stuff out there that needs to be fixed.

So we can, this kind of leads into a question someone asked on Twitter that was: Why did YC invest in Gobble when other investors saw like the trough of sorrow? Like, what did we see in Oshima? Oh, I love Douche. I knew you should move for a couple of years before she finally applied to YC. And we really liked her; we thought she was very thoughtful and approached things well. She was in the trough of sorrow; I'm not gonna disagree with that. But we don't care if someone's in the trough of sorrow; that is our job to help you get out of the trough of sorrow. We've done it before; we'll continue to do it.

There are ways out, and not to take anything away from like so much work. I'm not saying we were responsible for that, but we don't get frightened off by that. We just basically funded it for her, and we knew there was something in this prepared food thing. You know, a lot of times startup ideas, it’s like you could be digging for a buried treasure and you might be digging right here, and the treasure's over here. You just need to adjust things a little bit, but we knew in the general vicinity of prepared food delivery, she was on to something.

I’ve been a Gobble user for a long time; it helps my family a lot. So I think, you know, Oshima was great, but also the idea was very appealing. I think about this: we don’t pretend to know what ideas are gonna hit. It begs, I’m sure, when you met Airbnb founders that sounded bananas. I wonder if we funded them, because I was so impressed by the fact that they like hand-glued their cereal. Guys are scrappy; they're stealing cereal. I mean, we had no idea they'd be as big as they are today; they didn't know either.

And so I think the only thing we can predict from the amount of years that we've been doing this is that, you know, great startups are founded by great founders. So are there kind of tells that, you know, when founders come in or in applications, that you look for? For like this is how a founder can show perseverance or determination that they're going to be cockroaches and, you know, make it through hard times?

Like, I think the fact that they've stuck to an idea for a long time—I mean, sometimes, you know, pivots and being flexible and changing your idea, none of that is bad. But when you talk about, you know, cockroaches and dedication, when you see someone who has been working on the same thing or just working on a startup for a really long time, you know that they've got perseverance because this is not an easy life. So if they can, and again, even if there’s a pivot, it’s, you know, if they can do this startup thing for a long time, that’s very impressive.

I think also, if you know, as Jessica was saying, if they’re a domain expert that’s solving something that they realized was a problem and had a solution to it, it shows that, you know, if you're passionate about it and you're wanting to do it, then you’re going to have that drive to follow it through. Whereas if it’s, you know, we get applications from people who are doing things because it’s the latest cool thing or because, whatever, and you can kind of tell that this is not something they’re going to spend the next ten years building a company around because it's more of a fad.

I love our question: "What do you understand that your competitors are overlooking?" ’Cause that really shows you’ve thought deeply about a problem. So I love that. And just in our interviews, even though they're 10 minutes long, you really can get a feeling for if someone has thought deeply about their problem and if they're sort of flexible-minded about things. And just in a conversation, you can kind of tell if they really understand what they’re doing or not.

Usually, usually that shows by being able to explain what they’re doing clearly and succinctly. Okay, and if we get through an interview and we still don’t really understand it, then it shows that the founder has not thought it through enough to be able to distill it down. We've had interviews where we've said, like, "We are five minutes into this interview and we still do not understand what you're doing. Please tell us what you do." And I don't make a joke out of it, but it's really important to be able to like clearly communicate what you’re doing.

You don't have to say everything you're doing, but just the high points so people can sort of hook their brain into it and then you can have a conversation. Yeah, and the answer to, you know, "What do you do?" should really be—you should be able to answer that in one sentence that, you know, your grandparents could understand, ’cause I think that’s important for any company. Some of the best companies they grow by word of mouth and it’s impossible to grow by word of mouth if no one understands what you’re doing.

So another question that came in was: What is the best growth strategy an early-stage startup can adopt? Or maybe the question should be framed as: What should early-stage companies focus on? How do you decide what to focus on? Building things, every startup, you know, you got to focus on getting more users. So what’s gonna get you more users? I don’t know the answer to that for every company. I think it’s probably easier to answer that question in the negative, which is what do startups wrongly focus on? And maybe it’s not what they do; they wrongly focus on, but what do they get distracted by?

I talked about that earlier, right? We’re done. So another question that came in, a couple from a couple of people was: Does YC fund solo founders? And how? What’s the best way to meet potential co-founders? Well, I will give the answer first that yes, we do fund solo founders. But startups are hard, and even if there’s a team of multiple co-founders, there is far more than a human can do in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And so if there's a solo founder, you know, if that founder is out selling, then they’re not building. If they're out fundraising, they’re not selling.

And so the bar—it’s just so much harder for a solo founder to make a success of it. But, you know, you’ve seen two solo founders on the stage today. There’s plenty of examples that it does work. Did you cover tacking on co-founders? No? Okay, my mind just because I happen to talk to a couple of people about this at office hours yesterday, which is that my—so yes, of course, you know, being a solo founder is super hard. But my personal opinion is that the worst thing to do is to go out and seek out a co-founder just because you don’t think you can do it alone because you think it can take a box for the YC application, and also because you think you have deficiencies and you want to go fill them with someone that you barely know.

Terrible idea. I mean, I think it’s such a better idea for founders to just try and if they don’t have a co-founder to just do it themselves. It will be very hard, but the damage that can be done by tacking on a co-founder that you haven’t worked with, that you don’t know very well, that you’re not completely sure shares your same vision and your same goals for the company—that damage is very, very destructive to a startup company.

So my advice is to try to do it on your own. If you don’t have someone in your friend group or you haven’t found a co-founder that you have sort of a more organic relationship with, or at least test it out for a month with no commitment, say, “We’re gonna work as a co-founder.” You can work as a contractor for a month. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the three of us sitting here equal the world’s like biggest expert on co-founders, just by all the knowledge I think so, is this between the three of us, between our experience.

Yeah, we have mediated a lot of founder breakups, and they look like they’re just—it’s heartbreaking a lot of the times, because you just can see the death spiral that results in this relationship breaking, and it has nothing to do with the business or the idea or the traction or anything. It's just about these two or three people who can’t make it work, and the company dies.

You know, I’m just gonna ask myself a question. Yeah, yeah. You know, for you, bring up like do we fund solo founders? Yes, we fund solo founders, like tons of them, every batch. And there’s a lot of misperceptions out there that exist. I was talking to a woman yesterday, and I said, "Oh, did you apply to YC? Because I like love the idea she was working on." And she said, "Well, I did, but I originally thought I was too old." She was 35, and I was like, "Oh, hang on, you are not too old."

And so I just want to like be clear to everyone in this room: there is no one we don’t fund. There are good and effective people solving a real problem. You can be 20, you can be 60, male, female, gay, whatever. We don’t—it's not your—there’s no one type of person we fund other than determined and working on a big problem.

So we are coming up against a hard stop, but we'll be around after at the reception if you have other questions. But I have just one more question for you, Jessica, since you are leaving us for a year. So you’ve been really, you know, YC’s heart since day one. What has surprised you most about YC, and where would you like to see female founders ten years from now?

Well, I’ll answer the second one first. Ten years from now, I’ve told you this, I want there to be like tons of female-founded unicorns. I want me, instead of during my talks, when I referenced Facebook and Google as like the canonical successful startups, I want to reference someone with women. That’s what I want, and this is totally possible in the next decade. I mean, I started Y Combinator 11 years ago, so a decade ago, and I can't even tell you how different the world looked back then.

I mean, you were— you were there. Basically, it was just a different place. So in 10 years, we’re gonna have just tons of unicorns with female-founded companies.

So what is the question about YC? What has surprised you most about YC? Oh gosh, there are so many things. Like you can’t make this up. What is surprising, though, if there’s a couple of things: one, how broken startups are—even the ones you read about that are successful in the press. And it’s hugely successful companies; they are often more broken than you’d ever really know.

And so that's sort of inspirational because, you know, we all have days where we’re feeling like our company’s not doing that well or whatever. To be honest, I’m— even though we had, you know, aspirations for Y Combinator to really help the world when Paul and I started it, you know, funding people with $12,000 to like help their idea, never in a million years did we think we’d be funding a thousand startups, which have been gone on—many of which have gone on to be super successful.

We never thought we’d have a company with all these wonderful partners who I love going to work with every single day, and it just makes me think, like, all of you—like most of you raised your hands that you had started something—just keep moving forward, keep growing, keep working, get through all of the obstacles. And like, I want you all to be successful, and I want you all to be sitting up on stage saying, "I never thought that we’d be here in ten, you know, ten years ago."

Awesome, thank you so much. And now we have the reception.

Yeah! So, um, really quick, I just wanted to throw out some thank-yous: a huge thank you to our director of events, Susan Hobbs, and thank you to all the speakers and everyone who, you know, did the Q&As, and thank you to our team—our software team is awesome—our ops team, who you met up front, Kevin Hale, who’s running one of our partners who’s running the slides backstage.

Yeah, and thank you to Style B, who did a lot of the makeup before. They’re a YC funded company with a female founder. And so, and also, most of all, thanks to you for coming, ’cause we do this for you, and it’s a huge pleasure to meet all the women who are here today upstairs.

So yes, we’re in the green room upstairs on the balcony level. And so one thing I wanted to note is that we have a photographer, um, who’s up there named Ari, and she’s putting— um, she’s doing portraits. And so if you’d like your portrait taken, she’s doing a kind of portrait series on female founders; she’ll send you your portrait for free. And so yes, so if you see her up there and want yours done, she’s—she’s happy to do it.

And so, also, simple. See you up there! Thank you.