Office Hours with Kevin & Qasar

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

Um, 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.

Uh, we were acquired by Google coincidentally on the exact same day as WFU, so that's an interesting fact for me and Kevin. And I've been a partner here; this is my first batch. I've been a partner a couple of times. Uh, 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. So office hours are a big part of what YC is. Um, and 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 actually are sub-broken into many groups at YC, and Kevin and I have group office hours with small groups every Tuesday, and this is the case with all the partners.

Um, 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, what problems you're facing. And 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. Uh, it's individual partners sitting down with companies. We do a lot of individual office hours every week, hundreds of them. Uh, 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's two other types of office hours worth mentioning. Uh, one is investor office hours, so Alfred and I actually did office hours when we were going through Talkman.

So investors come to YC, we pair them up, and literally go through, you know, what the companies and short, short meetings. And then there are what we call like company office hours, so Amazon or Apple will come and, very tactical things, like how to, you know, problems with the App Store, AWS or whatever it might be—Rackspace, Heroku, etc.

So today we're going to do individual office hours to give you guys a little bit of a peek of, you know, what happens at YC. So these are obviously going to be a little bit different than actual office hours.

Um, 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.

Uh, so 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.

And so we might not get into that today, but letting you know that's how things are going to be a little bit different.

Um, one thing I—and we don't have 800 people watching, so right, that changes the dynamic a little bit.

The other thing is, um, 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 sort of notable investors, um, there are some things that I would highly recommend to you.

So both for the startups that we're about to meet with, but also for you guys out there.

Uh, if you go talk to us later today or with other investors down in the future, um, because office hours tend to not be like pitches, right? Which is where I would recommend you focus on being concise and clear.

Um, in regular office hours where you're having a relationship with an investor, uh, what we want to know is very quick…