YC Ultimate Job Guide: Startup Stages

[Music] Yeah, we're here to talk about startup stages. Try to be as informative as possible. Obviously, you know, given my position here, I would love for you to consider working at a YC startup. It sounds like some of you are already at startups, but I'm going to overview this the way that we talk about it, which actually aligns really well with what you're talking about.

And then, if you know all this stuff, hopefully you'll stick around, and there's some things to learn. If you don't know all this stuff, hopefully you'll learn a little bit. So, see it as we talk about it is typically pre-product, right? They don't have a product. It's like your typical, or your story of two people in a garage just trying to build a thing and build a product, get customers. Obviously, it's pre-revenue.

We also talk about seed as, you know, one million to five million raised. Maybe you'd want to find something even earlier than that, and YC has resources to do that, basically it's Paige and I. But when companies raise money, one to five million dollars, that’s when we call them a seed round, and they're ready to hire.

We'll talk about what it means to do a SAFE and an unpriced round. Angel investors, again, it's two to ten people, really small, work with founders, and the roles that they're typically hiring for are engineers, maybe ops people, depending on the type of company. They're looking for people who are more jack-of-all-trades, who are flexible.

Again, we're gonna go into each of these in detail, so I just want to give an overview so you get a sense of where we're going with this. Series A, not it is correlated and not always, you know, definitely correlated with having product-market fit. If you don't know a product-market fit, we're going to give you a very specific and recent definition of it.

So, product-market fit, maybe you haven't hit it, but it has raised as five or 20 million. It is a priced round; that's important for your stock and your equity. VCs, venture capitalists are involved—10 to 50 people. You know, then you start bringing in mid-level managers. You're not working with the founders as much, and that's just a slight distinction of how the company is growing.

And maybe you're going to be the mid-level manager if you were there at seed. You know, a lot of people want to be there earlier so they can have more of a leadership position. Also, at Series A, you might have go-to-market roles open, maybe recruiting roles open, and maybe some specialization.

We'll go into each of those in more detail. Next is growth. So, say you have product-market fit and this thing is firing. We're going to talk about what product-market looks like, but you're at this point of market capture. You're trying to get more users; you're trying to grow.

You're going to bring in more gunpowder, if you will, and that's like 50 to 100 million BCD rounds. The VCs are definitely involved, maybe strategic investors if you're in a specific industry, and you might need that 50 to 500 people scaling organizations, codifying departments, meaning that before it was a little loosey-goosey, and now you're trying to scale something to be an organization that's durable.

Then, the roles are ops, customer support, specialization. The last stage we talk about is scale; like it's really, really, really just market expansion. Maybe you're going international; maybe you're trying to find partnerships for more user acquisitions.

I have some examples to give around Twitter and Lyft. Maybe you're raising literally a half a billion dollars, a lot of institutional money, 500 plus people, prepping for an IPO, building out the executive team, redundancy. The types of roles that are at those companies change, and so that's why it's important to think this is, you know, going to be a public company, and what does that look like if you guys work there?

Hiring for everything and lots of specialization. So, that's where we're going; that's the overview of this thing. I almost like to give the overview because if people are like, "I know all this crap, I'm gonna go have my beer," that's fine too. All right...