2021 YC Top Companies on Their Startup Journey

I'll start with the introduction.

"Why don't you introduce yourself and your company?"

"My name is Nikki Gulimas. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Nova Credit."

"My name is Olu Bengala. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Flora Weave."

"My name is Amir Nathu, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Outscore."

"And can you share one piece of advice you have for founders who are just starting today?"

"Starting a company, no matter how successful, what a rocket ship you look like from the outside, it's going to be longer and harder than you might imagine. I've often found that people pursue ideas because they have a solution looking for a problem or are just excited to get into the world of startups. But those businesses and those products aren't actually authentic to who they are.

There are going to be many deep, dark days, as like founders and entrepreneurs. If you do not truly wish to see this change, or if you do not truly believe in this thing that you're building, it's going to be far easier to give up than to keep persisting.

Start with some introspection. Understand why you personally really want to make this business work. Why this company? Why this idea? Why this market? Does that feel true to you? Does that feel authentic to who you are as a person?

So, just think about all the areas in your life that could be improved. There are so many things that take too long, don't work as well as you think they should, or are too expensive. Ultimately, as a founder, you're in the business of solving people's problems. It's easy to start with your own.

It's important to think: do you want to work on this problem for the next 10 years? A decade is the unit of time that you want to think about if you really want to build something meaningful. It's a round-the-clock job that requires your ultimate commitment.

It's probably going to be one of the hardest things you've ever done, and really keeps you going through the hard times when you have a personal connection and a really strong personal motivation to work on the area that you're working on. A lot of great companies were built through persistence, and the founders really wanted to see that in the world.

When you're building a company, the odds are stacked against you. You know, your competitors have more money, more people, more time, more resources. There's a tendency to want to do everything at once when you're a young startup. We were just building technology for local businesses like plumbers and car dealerships.

So, we quickly got distracted with thinking about how we could build AI into our product or build a chat bot so we can get on Tech Crunch. You get a little overwhelmed with: oh, but I want to be this, I want to be that. We got distracted momentarily on these things that just don't matter.

One thing I learned during my time at YC is the power of being focused. Focus, focus, focus. The best way you can set up your company for success is to focus in and only do the number one most important things.

Always focus on one or two metrics that are important for you and your company, and then, on a weekly basis, grow as much as possible. Really tracking your growth and learning what you can do to increase that growth.

The power of that over a period of time, over a period of a year, over a period of two years, becomes really, really powerful when you're improving something every day. Even if it's one person today, say: hey, okay, this is the phase of the company we're in. This is phase one. This is the milestone for phase one. This is what we're gonna execute on. When we hit that milestone, we move to the next milestone.

It's incremental progress. YC is great because for three months your entire team does nothing but work on your company, work on growing your numbers, and being so focused during that time period was extremely helpful for us as a company.

We've tried to keep that focus on our customers and on our business, even up until today. All of us are just focused on building a product, getting product market fit. But a lot of us tend to ignore building the right culture from day one.

Decide and define what your values are to make sure that you build out the right team aligned with the vision aligned with the mission for the long term.

I think one of our commitments is not just to succeed as a business but to build a world-class, paradigm-defining organization. We have one of the most talented, brilliant, and diverse teams in Silicon Valley.

We're 50% women, we're 40% non-white, we're 15% Black and Latinx, and that is a testament to us hiring the very best people and setting them up for success.

We are hiring at Ironclad. We're hiring at Go One, the moment all over the world. Outschool is hiring, Matamos is hiring. We are absolutely hiring, so please check us out.

We're here right now at Photo Wave. Gecko Robotics is hiring, we're hiring. Esquire, if you want to impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people in India, join us.

We're always very excited to talk with people who might be interested in joining our team. We're only getting started, and we'd love to have people join."