Dalton Caldwell's Whale AMA

Right now I'm interested in things like food, transportation, housing—the stuff that every person spends a huge percentage of their paycheck on every month. Um, if you look at how much value has been unlocked by things like Uber and Airbnb, I think there are opportunities to build companies as large as those on other things we spend a lot of money on. One example is healthcare.

Um, obviously, if you're a consumer of healthcare, you may not have had great experiences, and if you've looked at the bills, you know a lot of money is getting spent. Um, I think there's an opportunity to build Uber and Airbnb scale businesses, attacking healthcare, for instance, as well as definitely in food.

My advice for people building content businesses—having built them before—is to have a clever plan on how to monetize. I think a lot of people think if they build it, people will come, and if they have millions of users, they will magically get rich, and it's not that simple. Um, CPMs are going down all the time, and you have to be working against that.

Um, so if you find interesting ways to monetize via, I don't know, native advertising or directly being supported by the fans, those are pretty interesting to me, and I think it's worth at least having a plan about that in the earliest days and not just assuming, you know, if you get a million dollars that VCs will pay for the whole thing. Um, maybe that worked a while ago, but I don't think that works anymore.

So, I'm the head of admissions at Y Combinator. Um, I can tell you a little bit about the process. The most important part about admissions at YC is filling out an application. Uh, sometimes people think they have to know us or network with us to get in, and that's not true. The vast, vast majority of people that get into YC are just founders that fill out an application.

Um, the top percentile of the folks that fill out an application are invited for an in-person interview with us, and that's where we get to know you a little bit more. Um, a lot of times people email us and almost like ask for permission before they decide to put an application in, and my advice to anybody that's interested in YC is just to do the application.

Um, so much of startups is just doing the thing you're thinking about doing and not looking for permission from people before doing it. So if you're interested, you should just apply.

I think the null hypothesis is that things won't change, and the music industry is just inherently going to be smaller forever. That the fact it was as big as it was was a fluke of history. Um, physical media was a very good business, and because we don't have physical media anymore, it may be that there's no way to replace the revenue that will make it the size that it once was.

And that's okay. I think there are several other industries that have gotten smaller with technology as they moved to pure digital, and it could just be that the size of opportunity in music will never recover, and that's okay.

Um, so I don't think we should assume that one day the time will be right, when that's the day to start starting music startups again. If I were on the team that was working on Whale, I think the biggest thing that I would be thinking about is less here are our metrics and here's how we're tracking them, and let's just grow x% week over week.

I'd be more looking at the data to figure out what it is and sort of existentially why do people want this, why do they want to use it, and make sure that this is a thing.

Um, like is this the next— is this a Quora competitor? Is this some kind of Q&A app for your friends? Is this for tech people? Is this for celebrities? I think I'd be looking at all of the early data and trying to get a sense of what my gut told me as a founder the future of the product is, and only then look at the metrics and make sure I'm growing in that specific vertical or use case.

Because if you're just blindly looking at growth and you don't have a vision for the product, you could get lost. I was a founder for a very long time— um, way longer than I've been working.