Office Hours with Kevin & Qasar

All right, hi everyone. My name is Kevin Hail. I'm a partner at Y Combinator. I went through YC myself back in 2006, co-founded a company called WFU Online Form Builder. I ran that company for about 5 years, and it was acquired by SurveyMonkey back in 2011. My background is in product development, user experience design, and customer support.

My name is Caser. I'm also a partner at YC. A quick history is I went through YC in Winter '11, and we had a company called Talkman. Talkman lets consumers send messages to businesses and vice versa. We were acquired by Google coincidentally on the exact same day as WFU. So that's an interesting fact for me and Kevin. I've been a partner here; this is my first batch. I've been a partner a couple of times. My experience is actually similar to Kevin's. I would say product design is kind of what I'm good at.

All right, so time to do some office hours! Office hours are a big part of what YC is. There are kind of four different types of office hours. There are group office hours, in the sense that when you're a startup, you are sub-broken into many groups at YC, and Kevin and I have group office hours with small groups every Tuesday. This is the case with all the partners. The group office hours serve as a way to see what you as a startup are doing versus the other startups in terms of the tempo as you're going through YC, what you should be working on, and what problems you're facing.

You really realize, I think, as a founder in group office hours that your problems are actually not just unique to you; they're actually very similar to other companies. Then there's individual office hours. That's what we're going to try to emulate here. It's individual partners sitting down with companies. We do a lot of individual office hours every week—hundreds of them. That is really the heart of kind of office hours, and when people refer to office hours, that's usually what they're talking about.

There are two other types of office hours worth mentioning. One is investor office hours, so Alfred and I actually did office hours when we were going through Talkman. Investors come to YC; we pair them up and literally go through what the companies are doing in short meetings. Then there are what we call company office hours. So Amazon or Apple will come and tackle very tactical things like problems with the App Store, AWS, or whatever it might be: Rackspace, Heroku, etc.

Today, we're going to do individual office hours and give you guys a little bit of a peek of what happens at YC. These are obviously going to be a little bit different than actual office hours. The ones that we do at YC tend to be a lot longer. We only have 10 minutes with these startups, and we usually have a ton of context because we've been working with these startups over time. A lot of people might think that office hours, like the way you've probably seen them before, are like pitches, but that is not actually the way we run them.

We already have a lot of understanding of what the startups are working on, and so usually our office hours are very tactical, very focused on solving very specific problems with them. We might not get into that today, but just letting you know that's how things are going to be a little bit different. One thing is, we don’t have 800 people watching, so that changes the dynamic a little bit.

I want to talk a little bit about sort of like if you get a chance to do office hours either with YC partners or other notable investors. There are some things that I would highly recommend to you, both for the startups that we're about to meet with and also for you guys out there if you go talk to us later today or with other investors down the line.

Office hours tend to not be like pitches, right? One thing I would recommend is to focus on being concise and clear. In regular office hours, where you're having a relationship with an investor, what we want to know is very quickly what the problem at hand is.

So the first thing is, like, know your numbers. It's very frustrating to us that we're talking with a startup, and when we ask questions about sort of retention, their users and all this stuff, and they just don't know where they stand. It makes it very difficult for us to sort of diagnose their problems. The other thing is, come to office hours with a specific problem in mind.

We just don't really like sitting around and sort of shooting the sh*t, or at least not the good ones, right? So we like to be able to say that you have something specific, some problem that you want identified or solved, and then we'll brainstorm with you during that. We might have a connection that might be able to help solve that problem for you.

The last thing is, if you're having office hours with someone and it feels like déjà vu from the last time you talked to them, where you're repeating the same numbers over again, still working on the exact same problems, know that that is a problem to us.

Try to focus on when you have office hours that you've done a lot of things based on the feedback from beforehand, or you have reasons why those things didn’t work. Come to us with new sets of problems rather than hashing over the same things over and over again.

All right, with that, let's do the deal. The first company is Zifi, and I think we have Lauren. Let's give him a round of applause!

This is really turning into a variety show; you guys are going to have to do some tricks afterwards. All right, tell us what you do.

So we are Zifi. We profile high-growth, exciting small and medium-sized companies to leverage their company culture and employer brand as a competitive advantage. We build online profiles using photos of the office, videos of the employees, and understanding what it's like to work there.

To what end? To help them attract great talent, so talent can self-select a job site. Exactly. And why do you guys pick startups?

I mean, they tend to be companies that don't have a lot of money to recruit. Sure. So part of the problem was when we were at university, obviously, we're focused on the junior-level market, and the large corporates have such a big employer brand and suck in so many talented graduates.

But all of these small companies that need great people just don't have that employer brand to leverage. While they don’t have a huge improvement budget, they do have a great company culture, and they are an attractive place to work. For the average job seeker coming out of university, they don't know these companies exist.

So, I mean, one of the first things you would see when you look at a job board is, are there other companies on there that are relevant? How do you get kind of these early adopters to actually sign up? Because the first thing I'm looking at is, I don't want to waste my time posting across 15 different sites. So what's the incentive for that early-stage company to actually...?

Sure, so company culture is quite a popular topic at the moment with companies like Buffer showing how important it is to leverage the company culture. As an example, they profile their company culture quite widely themselves and on average get 400 applicants per job.

So the impact of showing your company culture is really valuable. Actually, when we go to chat with companies, that's something they understand quite well.

So from our perspective, it's just a great way for them to show that off. I sort of see it as a straight-up sort of marketplace play, and whenever we're dealing with startups that are creating marketplaces, usually they have one side of the marketplace sort of solved, right? With some kind of deep insight or they have something they figured out, right?

So they can focus all their time on the other side of the marketplace. So where are you guys at right now?

Sure, so I think we’re definitely more focused on the company side. I think so on the supply side. On the candidate side, our kind of strategies are leveraging the student societies on campuses.

I know, but which one do you feel like you have solved that you can focus on the other? I think it's the companies. Actually onboarding companies has been a lot more simple than candidates.

The misconceptions of startups and SMEs with junior-level talent are quite large in terms of what they think it would be like and what career progression is there. So actually solving that side is quite difficult, but the companies really understand why they want to show it off, what it's there for, and how they can attract talent.

The thing is, like for these types of businesses, signing up companies is usually not that difficult because the companies don’t pay you for the first or second or third posting. But if there's traction...

I think that would be... Yeah, so our companies do pay up front. Okay, and because you convince them that we will help highlight your culture. Exactly, yeah.

And as a student, why would I use this job board over any other one? It seems somewhat more limiting than the same thing, right? You don't want to post across multiple products. Sure.

So obviously, if you're a university graduate looking at jobs, usually you just get a standard job advert, and that doesn't tell you anything about what the company is like. So you can get two very similar job adverts, but actually, the companies behind them could be very, very different.

So what we do is, as Lauren said, with pictures of the office, video interviews with the current employees, information about... How many companies do you guys have on the site?

We have 12 at the moment. Okay, and how many students have you guys actively placed? Currently, that’s none. We’re still at the early stage. We've had candidates go through to interview.

How long have you guys been working on this? So about six months. We went live about a month ago with all our companies on there, so we've just been driving...

What do you think is going to be the biggest challenge in the next three months? I guess I'm a bit skeptical that students are just going to rush into signing up for a job site.

Yeah, exactly, and actually we've found quite high engagement. So we had a candidate go through to interview, and we haven't heard the results yet, but they looked through all the different jobs, and there were two companies that they had a background in user experience they were quite interested in that area. They compared both and came to us and said, "I didn't think I fit in this company, but I'm pretty sure I definitely fit in this one."

So for us, that's a great way to understand how they’re looking at it, their depth of information. And actually to give some context, you said you have 12 company profiles. You sort of made...

I feel like right now your only job is not to onboard any more companies but to place some employees. Obviously, the big thing is what are the students saying? How many students have you approached? How many students have actually gone in and filled out applications?

Sure, so at the moment, you know, our kind of vanity metric would be how many people are coming to the site but as you said our kind of focus is just to get those like a very small handful of very high-quality applicants and get them through.

I don’t think you need to be that selective. I think right now you're just trying to figure out what sticks, right? So like how are you finding even your students? How are they even knowing about you?

I feel like you want as many students to be aware of you. Well, yeah, currently we're just targeting our personal networks, so people are coming to us saying, "You know, we need a job. What kind of companies have you got?" and then we can show them the profiles and we’re at careers events at universities.

And the advantage as well is... How did you guys get the first 12 companies? So just through personal networks. Okay, and how do you want to get the next 100?

Well, the most recent two we've got through client recommendations, so they've said as part of their value is in marketing their companies as well, so raising their awareness, so getting their brand out there. That's what made them recommend us.

So that's part of what we're looking at as well. And then just building in options to share the companies and show that sort of viral loop. Beyond your original... you know, let’s go back to the actual applicants.

Beyond your friends and people at your uni, how are you going to kind of communicate this value proposition? Because I think saying like, "Oh, there's great culture in these companies" is...

...that's more of our pitch towards companies. For a lot of graduates, sorry, for students that are saying "looking at the profiles" and going, "Yeah, this looks like good culture."

Yeah, what's the ingredient to good culture, and how do you... if you have 12 companies that are all saying they have good culture? So it varies, I guess, that you're sort of looking for what makes people want to stay. What are the people like you're sitting next to?

So rather than just sort of company culture, which is the sort of overarching term we use, I guess a lot of what we're looking at is do you want to sit next to that person every day? What context are you...?

The thing I'm worried about right now is like you have done a really good job at building a company branding service, right? But like that job marketplace is sort of the trick, and I think right now you've got to talk to students about like are the pages actually effective at making the companies feel good about themselves?

So you're like well we look pretty lame before these guys came and made us look good with these sort of landing pages, right? But like...

So the punchline you don’t want these companies to be enthusiastic for you just because you came and shot their offices and you did individual sales and Founders do sales; they're very effective.

But as you go to that next 100 companies, there isn't... at least to me, in this short context, and this is strange because usually we would have talked for hours, it’s just... it’s strange to... it’s hard for me to identify a very clear differentiator.

And I think what Kevin is saying is talk to students because I think if a lot of students do it, companies will show up. So what you know, what is the kind of value? What's going to drive students, actually?

Another thing I'm worried about is like culture. It's one of those things that once people sort of experience the company firsthand, it's going to be authentic or not.

It doesn’t matter what you sort of say on the website; once they go in there for the job interview, the students are going to know whether that company is lame or... it's like saying, "I'm cool." You can say you're cool, but we know.

So you're relying on this, and so it's one of those things like maybe the culture is like these companies are too lame to make this marketplace sort of take off, and maybe the first companies that you really need to sort of help build out this other side of the marketplace is you've got to figure out how do I get the really coolest companies out there?

Whether it's offering them services for free to highlight their stuff and tell their story as early on as possible, because like the really good companies figure out how to do it for themselves.

The companies that have a hard time talking about how we're cool, like they were already going uphill to begin with. So like in a normal office hours, we would say, "Let's talk next week after you talk to X number of students," and we just validate that.

Or even in those conversations with students, you can figure out what is actually relevant to students. I think in this audience, we assume that culture is like a super critical thing, but maybe to students, that just isn’t, and it’s just a hypothesis that we have that isn’t really validated by the market.

I think it sounds great. I mean, first time you look at it, you're like, "Oh, this actually makes a lot of sense." But it's very intellectually seductive, and that's not a great thing because you actually don't know there isn't somebody who woke up today and said, "You know what? I'd really love a job site which highlights company culture so I can choose a company to work at."

And that's a big fear that you actually build something that people actually don't want even though it sounds like something that people would want. So, changing gears just a little bit, have you considered actually building this for just regular job seekers in general?

Well, I mean, I kind of... our focus was the junior job market purely because obviously that's the kind of market that we knew and that's how we experienced it firsthand.

My understanding of the junior job market would be like, why not do hourly employees like the Taco Bells of the world? They need a lot of help. Is there a reason that you specifically chose startups other than maybe your own interest?

Well, not even so much just startups. It’s very much the kind of high-growth, high-performing SMEs purely for the fact that graduates come out of university, and they just have no idea what else is out there apart from the large professional services firms.

They just don’t seem to want to explore that. So, you know, why? I think a lot of it is down to sort of pressure from parents.

That’s feeling like you're just guessing right now. So we’ve done some research on that. So we had like if they’re not actively searching out there, then the triggers for like getting them to come to your site are going to be difficult.

You have to figure out how do I change the natural behavior of, in the ideal scenario, like you already know there’s this lack in demand, and you're just going to put a hose on it and extract that value.

What Kevin means there is yeah, maybe actually students only want to go to professional firms or do something else. Maybe actually they don't want to work for startups, and they don’t want to work for high-growth SMEs.

We have evidence that’s not true. For example, we did an office crawl where we had a load of companies, and we took a group of students around to look inside.

We had a number of students who said, "I was only applying to the structured graduate schemes. I only want to look at these small companies. I didn’t even know these existed."

So you're saying the biggest problem is education right now? Are you guys educating students? How are you doing that?

So we've got non-financial partnerships with a lot of the societies, so the entrepreneur societies and things like that, the computer science societies, to give an understanding of what it's like to work in these companies.

We're running office crawls still. We are going to... how many students have you talked to through those?

I mean, it's kind of in the hundreds rather than the thousands at the moment, obviously just down to the two of us. We're trying to be as high touch as possible. I mean scaling that is probably going to be one of our biggest challenges.

Yeah, I mean I think you know if and you say you talked to students, I take that as to be truth; that means if students really do want these types of jobs, then it becomes really important for you obviously to communicate on the landing page which is kind of there.

We looked at the landing page before here. We would do a separate office hours on copy and UX on that. But the other thing is how do you make sure the companies that get in are not lame?

Because if the companies that get in are lame, students who are actually bought that call to action, whether they hear from another society, maybe they're in some professional society, actually might have ruined them for the other companies.

And they're like, "Well, this isn't exactly like what I envisioned." Yeah, that’s very true. That's why we're trying to almost have a kind of filtering process of the companies that we work with.

What have you... what are the kind of rough... like, you know, 15 to 250 employees, high growth, high performing, and kind of people-centric.

So they're, you know, they would... you turn away companies? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s exactly what you say. Our site is nothing without having quality, and we've been very conscious of making sure that's there, especially with the company's side.

And I know it doesn’t work if that’s not there. If they’re making up this company culture that doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t work for us.

Let’s say if I have a lame startup and I really want to be on your site, couldn't I fake some of this stuff? Like say I’m really high growth, say I’m really cool, have a cool icon and get on your site and then actually be lame?

I think yeah, like again, how do you actually test that the companies are not lame? Yeah, I think at the moment it’s very time intensive on my side, so I do a lot of the client-side sales.

It's sort of just understanding how they talk, what they discuss, looking at their social media accounts, looking at sort of how their previous employee have discussed their roles.

I mean, I think that's the right thing to do at this stage. Another kind of... we could do office stars again next week. The other thing I would say is, I’d love that, by the way, is the other thing I would say is, yeah, like it would be good to identify at this stage just the two or three different metrics that you do want to...

Ultimately you want to get to a state where you can say, "This company, we talk to them in 10 minutes; we can assess they should be on here or not.” And the reason is how to communicate to other companies that are not on there of why they’re not on there.

So they don’t say when students ask them why are you not on this job board to say, "Well, 'cause we’re lame and they told us so."

Yeah, exactly. So we are out of time, great.

Thank you very much. It is strange doing office hours. You know, on stage because when you're doing individual office hours, we can bring up the next company VY as we... you know, when we're doing individual office hours.

Aside from the thing that Kevin said, there's a lot of context. You can just think really get into the nitty-gritty. In this case, I was kind of dying to actually pull up the site to really talk about if a lot of these value props they're talking about actually show up on the site and are easily communicated because obviously the founders are not going to be pitching to startups and companies.

It's that site that has to make that clear. Okay, on to the next. Tell us your name and a little bit about your startup.

Sure. I'm Odo Moke, and I am the founder and CEO of a startup called VY. VY is essentially we're a platform trying to make the physical world an easier place to understand, and we do this specifically...

Does that mean literally? You just said a sentence, and I don’t know what that means.

All right, Lally, I'm a retailer. What does that mean to me?

You're a retailer? We put sensors in your stores. We detect customers as they move around.

And we show you what type of sensors? We put in Wi-Fi sensors that pick up smartphone signals.

Okay. One multiple sensors? We put multiple sensors in, actually. And then is that it? Just Wi-Fi access points, basically?

So they are, yeah, the reconfigured Wi-Fi access points which can then detect the Wi-Fi signals from smartphones.

We try to relative people as they move across the floor. What about people who just walk by? I mean, Wi-Fi is... I mean, it has notorious problems, right?

So what happens? I just walk by the store. I didn't actually go in. That’s the biggest problem in our space product-wise.

Most of the companies in our space try and detect people using a footfall counter, which, as you've highlighted, you’re not able to actually figure out whether the person’s inside or outside.

So what we've built is a system that actually is able to tell whether the person’s really outside or inside.

This is live. This is out in the real world. This is live right now. How many customers do you have?

We have four customers. Four customers? Is that four locations or four companies?

Four companies. Okay, four. How many locations? They're in pilot stage about one or two locations each.

Pilot stage? That means they're paying you or it's not? They're all paid.

Okay. So you and they're just Wi-Fi access point sensors. The Wi-Fi access point; is there anything else? Is there any other type of sensor, quote, unquote?

Yeah, so we also use foot counters, 3D cameras that can pick up people as they move across the shop.

Bearing the lead on the cool stuff, what was that? Bearing the lead on the cool stuff. First thing you say is like we install custom Wi-Fi access points, 3D cameras, all that stuff, and we track data for retail outlets that hasn’t been tracked beforehand.

And we could have an awesome dashboard to do it. Yeah. So now Kevin wants to join your company and pitch. He's pitching it back to you. Talk afterward.

Okay, so I think we understand what you do. I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious. But let's why do retailers want this?

So it depends on what do they currently do. Okay, so today about, let's say, 43% of UK retailers actually track people who move into their stores using a footfall counter.

It's either a physical one or an actual footfall counter above a door. Why aren’t the other people tracking? So those who aren't tracking either don’t see the business benefit yet.

It could be a supermarket where they get maybe 90 something percent of people who walk in convert anyway, or it could be a business that's too small and focused on survival rather than on analytics.

So your product, these four pilots, are large locations, mid to large size businesses rather than locations? Even businesses with small locations and lots of them are still valuable customers.

Okay, so just large companies that are sophisticated enough to actually digest some of the analytics that you're giving. So let's talk about the analytics that you give.

What’s the thing that the retailers want the most? Okay, the two pieces of information they want the most: one of those is the percentage of visitors who were outside who are now inside.

And that ties back to the USP I talked about earlier on. The second of those is how much time people spend inside, so the dwell time and the stop and power, as we call them.

And then what can they do with those three pieces of data? So with the dwell time, we see a relationship between the amount of money people spend and the amount of time they spend.

So literally, time being money. For every 1% increase in dwell time, you have a 1.3% increase in the actual spend per customer. That’s great.

Yeah. The second is stop and power. So if you're running a retail store and you're getting, let's say, 10,000 visitors in on a day, you don’t know if that was 1% of pass traffic or 5% of passing traffic.

You’re able to optimize and actually increase that. So how did you find these first four? So we actually went, we did an accelerator when we first got started, and the accelerator introduced us to a few different customer groups, and we really threw a few things at the wall to see what stuck.

We started out targeting smaller retailers, going for a short... What was your key insight there?

Smaller retailers, they just don't have time. They're trying to survive. They're not interested in optimizing; they just want to be around tomorrow.

So we went through this, and we discovered that retail is the largest market, and they have a need. The challenge that we found, though, is that they have quite a long sales cycle, the larger they get, but that's where the real need is as well.

So we're just working through that sales cycle right now. So you guys, you're running the pilots. When is the next step for those pilots where they become like paid customers?

So the steps are typically six months, 3 to 6 months to a pilot, and then you've got to time after that when they're evaluating the product and then they do a rollout.

Is this just like a guess you have, or from past experience? No, this is this is based—I mean this is coming in from other companies who’ve been in our space before, so there are incumbents that we're replacing.

So we’re going—it’s a mix of what we've learned and what they've done as well. What the—I assume you talked to more than four to get these four pilots.

In the ones that said no, what was their most significant objection? So those that have said no, some of it's because they literally have so much analytics in place already, and they just don't need any more.

Some of them want lower granularity. That’s a little worrying, right? Because especially sophisticated retailers that means they're probably employing a lot of this technology already.

So I think one definite thing is like they just don’t have the kind of brain power to digest and sort of analyze it, like they just don’t have time to bring on data science people to sort of work on that stuff.

So that's usually a problem for some companies. One suggestion would be to adjust that value prop to say. “Hey, listen, we actually make this digest. We make this actionable through these different ways.”

Because even their current kind of products that they’re using are probably not actually giving them great information. They'll tell them so many people visited this, and in your sales pitch you already give like a little detail of this, like this factor is highly correlated to this.

Then you have to take it the next step. So you can’t stop there for this product to be compelling and for them to have it actionable.

Then you have to say like, “All right, here are your options now at play.” And ideally, you would have the kind of product that says, “We'll take you there. We can help you finish those things.”

Is there any insights that you have in terms of or any way they're using data to compare retailers against each other or against a location?

Yeah, so we're building this. This is something that would come with enough of a spread of installations, but we’d like to build an industry-wide benchmark for customer behavior, some network effects.

Because I think I mean what’s tough about I think the business right now is what you're talking about is like commodity hardware. The thing is you don't have any—you don't have any network effects right now.

And quite frankly, like with benchmarking, in my experience, like having known forms and surveys and stuff with a lot of people, they'll look at benchmarking numbers and they will immediately say like, "Well, my company’s different, right? That doesn’t apply to me.”

Right, and then they’ll continue doing what they want because they think like that's someone else. I run my company differently. What happens?

The reason I what worries me is... So the picture I’ll paint is you're talking about long sales cycles, six months, a year, in the best case. You're talking about a year plus before you get money in the bank.

There's not a very clear way to go from one retailer or the other than they just outbound sales. So it’s not like a consumer product in which there is some, quote unquote, virality or some way that you can move over, so you could run out of money before you actually prove the end.

Time to... right now is a challenge. Yeah. Are you...? What are you spending most of your time on right now? Product or sales?

No, most of the time is sales. Which makes sense. Yeah. And then here's the thing I'd want to like challenge that assumption that you said like we have to wait this long period of time to like sort of close people.

Like I want you to make people feel uncomfortable, all this stuff. But also, like your whole thing is like we’re providing value, and you want to get started right now.

And like if you get in like on the ground floor with us with this, like you're going to get so many benefits out of it. Yeah, pilots are definitely valuable in certain cases, but the one downside, and you could potentially be experiencing, they actually don’t really want it.

And as long as you’re willing to do some free legwork for them, they’re like, “Oh, cool, like maybe we’ll get some insights. Maybe not. Who cares?”

So all our pilots are actually paid for. Okay. To date, we've generated about six figures or so in revenue just from the pilots alone, and all customers go through pilots.

So what's your pricing? What's your pricing model? It's a per star model, so rather it’s a per square meter model. So for larger locations, single loc pay a lot; small locations, lots of them pay a smaller amount.

Why that rather than like recurring like a...? It is a recurring model still recurs. Yeah. So where are these pilots right now?

Are they like three months in, four months in? So the first of those is about a month or so in right now. Okay, that’s very recent.

Very, very recent. Long sales cycle to get there, yeah. And then what are you supposed to have at the end of it that's going to tip them over?

Like have you identified and set up a roadmap that says like, "Okay, if we achieve this, or like you start seeing these sort of numbers and improvements, then when you sign up?"

Because like right now I'm worried that like you're just collecting data, and you're showing it to them, and like if they feel like, "Oh, well, I can’t do any actionable with these things right now," they're not going to see that there’s any value to them at the end of the six months or a year.

You realize, "Meh," is the answer. So I would do everything you can to say like, "Okay, you now see where you are while working with us. We’re going to help you drive those downwards or upwards depending on where they need to go."

So that’s exactly it. So the first conversations we had, we figured out that leaving them to run the pilots on their own just wasn’t going to work.

And they needed actually a fair bit of account management and hand-holding to make sense of the data. Right? Because that means you're really...

I mean, you don’t want the company to become a consultancy, essentially a consultancy. So if you have a product business, you basically have to be able to knock out a pilot and then...

I would start thinking about definitely those sort of features that like help them get to the touchdown sort of moment, not just the ones where they’re identifying and assessing.

No, it's definitely about one thing we use actually is making sure that they focus on ROI. So we use ROI as the key metric to determine all...

I mean, these, there’s other ways that you can like. The 50, 60% that said do not use any sort of internal analytics, and the ones that said no to you, there’s going to be other rationalizations for not to do this.

So the ROI has to be so clear that the industry assumes it’s a standard. That’s a very, very, very high benchmark for a young company to hit in the first year or two before money runs out.

That's scary. We're out of time, unfortunately, but on that note... yeah, good way to finish.

Okay, it’s a pleasure talking to you. Thanks, Kevin.

Thanks! What Kevin is telling him is our email addresses so we can stay in touch. I mean, these guys are brave to talk about their company in front of a large group of people.

All right, next one is the third and last, and we're going to do something slightly different here. Yeah, screen push. Give him a round of applause!

Yeah, you've got to EMP as being founders. You have to empathize with other founders; this is not an easy job.

So first off, tell us your name and tell us about Screen Push. Okay, so my name is Will, and Screen Push is essentially a screenshot collaboration tool.

So what we're doing is we're trying to target the design, digital design vertical. We're really interested in kind of if you're redesigning, let’s say, Hack can use the website, you might, you know, maybe go to an agency, which Kevin is literally doing.

You might go to an agency, let’s say instead of doing it yourself, and what you don’t want is that agency. You give them the brief, let’s say, and you don’t want that agency to go away two weeks later and say, “Hey, here it is, full final product.”

Okay, so it makes it easier for designers to collaborate or a person in a company to collaborate with somebody outside their company by sharing their screen.

So yeah, like kind of twofold in the sense that it’s a tool that allows the designers to... So here’s the thing I'm worried about. Like we're gone several sentences into this and I don’t know exactly what the thing is.

Okay. You just told me about like this is the kind of solution, and then you talked a little bit about the problem.

So like desktop application, perfect. Let’s start with that desktop application that the designers download themselves, and then keyboard shortcut to actually send the current version that they're designing to the other designer while each and every screenshot is kind of saved and organized in a timeline so that the client can then go onto the website, not have to download any kind of desktop application.

That's a good place to start in terms of you talk about copy for your actual landing page is that you actually want to describe... you can start off with that.

That’s very verbose. What you literally do... and then on... but this is actually a typical problem that we see all the time, especially as investors.

A lot of founders, the reason that they start their company is around the why, right? The problem, whatever the inspiration for them getting into the space, and it’s like, it’s the passion that sort of fuels them.

But for people who like see tons of pitches over and over again, the problem that we have from our perspective is just like remembering what you do.

So always lead that first right; make sure we understand that, and then if we're interested, we’re going to prompt you and pull out of you all the whys, the passion, and all that stuff.

However, we’re going to stop here, and we've actually done a lot of the kind of office hours that Kazer and I do at YC is actually UX reviews.

So we go through people's sign-up flows and stuff, and so we want to do something different with you totally.

So we're literally going to go through the sign of the product and give us our thoughts and hear why you made decisions that you made. Sure, okay.

So why don't you turn around so you can see? All right, and then the way we did this because we didn’t want to take a chance on trying to do like a live demo or what have you is I just went through the product through the sign-up flow, and it took like a billion screenshots of going through that experience.

I’m just going to sort of narrate and go through it here. So here’s the front page of Screen Push.

This is the top third of it, so it says “Screenshot collaboration made easy.” And then the next sentence is “Collaboration—it’s what we do.”

And literally, I think K and I both thought the exact same: “Like, what do you do?” All right, really? We’re doing something together; I wonder what it is.

So if we scroll down the page a little further, and he talks a little bit about his features here.

So in descriptions here, each team member is assigned a specific shortcut. Notifications are subtle, gentle, and understanding.

Yeah, the punchline here is I really... no one would read this; we’d probably be at the bottom of the page right now.

So cross-compatibility, and I’m starting to get the first hint by looking at one screenshot that says, “Mac, Windows—check, check.”

“Oh, this is a desktop app,” right? Then the last part says, “Looks familiar—thought so. Say goodbye to the screenshot graveyard forever.”

So now I like... this is the first time I hear about like this is some kind of problem that it’s sort of solving, but I still don’t know exactly what it is.

Okay, there should be an image to be fair on the left that demonstrates what is the screenshot graveyard, but that may have not come up.

Okay, it happens; it’s understandable. So I think...I think just before we go into the actual sign-up flow, the punchline here is if you sat down, you know there’s hundreds of people here with your site and said, “Hey listen, I'm an intern or I got hired by this company called Screen Push. What do you think this page is?”

After looking at it for not... like we've already talked for five minutes and within you know, 500 milliseconds, or two seconds, or three seconds or four seconds, I don’t think any of them would get what you think your company is, and that is a big deal.

Because that’s how most people are going to discover your product, and that’s kind of a meta piece of advice is you have all these things that you know what you mean by the word collaboration.

But not collaboration means of things to a lot of different. I think it’s become like this big buzzword, and we got drawn into that, so it's like, “Yeah, we’re collaboration!” Us it twice right here—exd.

And we got drawn into that kind of the same with like big data; everybody uses these words, and everybody has completely different interpretations, and we definitely...

So one thing I will say positive before I get... we move on to it is it is a beautiful site; it’s well— I mean it’s visually well-designed.

Are you a copywriter? Did you write all the copy? I did write all the copy. So like I highly recommend you guys like go through the site and do the sign-up flow because there's some like really nice copy in terms of the sign-up, in terms of the emails that he sends.

All right, and in real office hours, we wouldn't compliment you; we would just go on to the next thing. All right, cool, cool, cool, good to know, good to know.

So I went through and you click on the button and you go through a sign-up procedure that goes over, “So what’s your email? The password? Can you tell me your name? And then what do you do?"

And this is a place that CS actually got stuck. Yeah. I mean, I so beautifully—it’s in line; I think that's great.

It's a unique sign-up process, but literally what you do, I didn't know what to put there. I think the example you have is the front-end dev, and I was like, “Should I put product manager? Should I put investor? I didn’t know what to do.”

And then if you go back one slide—two slides, I'm sorry—I didn’t know if it was full name or this password. There’s no indication of this is alpha-numeric, how long it is, so what ended up happening is when I got an error state at the end of the sign-up flow.

That was very frustrating because I’d already gone through a bunch of questions, and then I had to figure... I think that’s when I closed the browser.

Sure, sure. All right, so you go through it, and then it kind of does this nice pause, and it says, “You’ve got...” which was a really nice touch.

I was like, “Oh, something a little different.” And so I go and check my email, and I get into the app. And then the first thing it shows me is this screen right here.

It says, “My team, you did it! Let’s get started!” Oh, you don’t seem to have created any teams yet. Let’s get started.

So we’ve got repetition there: “Start a lot.” And then team name, add team, and then team invites, and so the first thing I’m thinking is also like I don’t know what this is.

The first thing I do not want to do is send it to my friends, right? So like this would not be the ideal setup, and as desktop software, a lot of times the hardest part is like getting them to install software.

It’s weird that it didn’t start off with that, which is where I went to because I was like, “Let me see what it is before I send it to any friends.”

Cool, so go and download it, so it goes here. No convenient shortcut link to the applications folder.

So, I see people are falling all left and right here at this point, you know? You have one soul left! So go through here, and then what happens when you hit, like, ‘open,’ is absolutely nothing?

It like clears away, and I was like, “I’m going to start. What’s going on?” And you'd have to notice, and this is the S with the hexagon—that icon appeared in the top dock.

If you didn’t know that’s the only indication that it started and you’re into it, so I click on here, and I see username.

I'm like, “Uh, I don’t remember adding a username to my flow; I only put in email address.”

So I made, like... I don’t know what’s going on and I go back through, and I actually go back to the account and I said, “Like, oh, let me just log into the app.” And when I come back here, there’s no link to log in.

So I'm like, “Okay, well, let me refresh,” because I remember this thing showed up dynamically, and then I'm like, “I don’t see a link to log in!”

And it took me a while to realize ‘the already registered’ is the way I get to login. Subtle! I finally get there.

I actually had to go through a password reset theme at some point. Good copy! Thank you; it's really great copy in the places that you sort of catch me!

And I think that’s like sort of like what got me through it. So we get to reset password. I do this, and this actually, this page just refreshes backwards, but there are no confirmations on it. Okay?

Except there’s an email you do send me, and that’s the only way I know that the password reset. So I probably hit that thing like ten thousand times, right?

And so when I finally like, because I did it like five times, I don't know which password actually got accepted or so I eventually get logged in, and I sit here and I’m finally here.

I’m like, “This, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” The thing I think is like, “Oh, I should click the biggest button on here.”

Yeah, because it's the most, it has the greatest sort of affordance. And of course, it’s like a feedback email form.

So okay, that’s not it. So I finally hit the hexagon push thing and it takes a screenshot, and this is all it does.

It’s like a crop, Kevin from Y Combinator and a check and an X and I’m like, “What am I checking? What am I crossing off? I don’t know what’s happening!”

And eventually, I check it off and I go back to the... I have to see any clues about it, and there really isn’t anything there.

So anyway, that is very harsh, and it’s... [Applause].

Yeah, so in regular office hours, we really would be going step by step and really figure out okay what would be better copy here, what are the individual things, we’d literally just got called for time.

What would we actually change on every single one of those screens? And it's very tactical, and it's Monday morning, but like that’s what building a company is.

But seeing it that way, you can see like every place that I had a problem. And like just the fact that that slide deck had like 25 slides before I got to the part where I’m logged into the app.

The point I would take away if you, for you guys who are all building products right now is you should do what Kevin and I basically did here, which is have people who don’t know your product use it all the time.

I’m talking about every single day meeting people who don’t know what your company does and letting them actually go through the sign-up flow, their first interactions, because that—I mean you’re just so caught in your own company that you don’t realize like the most basic things.

Like it’s a desktop app—that’s not obvious and therefore, you know, it becomes a real fundamental problem. Exactly! Awesome!

All right, so we’re at those; those are not normal hours. We'll do a regular conversation with him off stage.

Yeah, so we’re at 4:00 now. I think we're having a break until 4:30. We will see you then. Thanks, guys! Thank you!