When to Launch Your Startup and When to Wait

I think this is the image founders have of the launch, which is it's going to be like the launch, and it's going to be like the Oscar ceremony or something, where there's just going to be like hordes of people. And like you're going to be treated like a celebrity. And so like you don't want to turn up to the Oscars in like your scruffy top and bottoms, right? Like you want to spend some time getting in shape. You want to be looking good. Like it's just this whole thing.

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Hi, this is Michael with Harj and Brad, and welcome to the partner lounge. So as YC partners, we find ourselves repeating the same seemingly obvious advice to startup founders over and over again. Before COVID, we'd often gather together in the partner lounge at the YC office to try to figure out why this was the case and how we could help startups figure it out faster.

Now that we're in the remote world, we're going to do this in front of all of you. So the first topic we talked about today in the partner lounge is why don't startups like to launch early and move quickly. Hard to be honest, this is painfully obvious advice, right? This is, you know YC Paul Graham 101. Like no one applies to YC not knowing this is what we're going to tell them.

Right, so what do you think is going on? Why do you think people are getting screwed up here? A bunch of reasons. The first one that springs to my mind is you have to know what fast is to move fast. Um, and I think one of the things we get to see as partners is across hundreds of companies and founders the different speeds they can move at.

Honestly, I remember when I first started working at YC, it surprised me, right? Like I thought my startup we were moving as fast as we could and then you see some of the top companies, you're like wow, how do you get so much done in a week? Um, and so I think there's that effect. I think maybe a specific version of that is if you've only ever worked at a big company, like you might think you're moving fast because you're moving big company fast.

But like startup fast is a whole other ball game. Fast means you have to be a little bit uncomfortable. What's going out there? You know, you were talking about Instacart before. What are you, what, how dirty did Instacart look back in the day when you saw them go through YC?

I mean pretty. There's the classic story with Instacart, which is we interviewed them and they did a demo of the product where they like clicked to order beer and beer turned up pretty quickly. And I think it actually turned out it was like Arpuva's friend or someone just drove to the store to like, there was no back end, right? Like, and so that kind of continued during YC too from what I remember. It wasn't like they had, they didn't spend a year building a sophisticated fulfillment center with complex algorithms to, you know, optimize delivery times.

Pretty sure they just had like the founders and maybe some people off Craigslist driving to the grocery store to pick up groceries. Pretty dirty. Like I think it was a good UI, but the product was very much hacked together. What's funny because Brexit was almost the exact opposite. Like when they come in to tell their story at their batch, there was no UI. Like they could give you a virtual credit card and like it worked, but that was it. You couldn't see what you spent money on, you couldn't see how much money you spent.

You couldn't, all they knew was that you had a card and it worked. One of the things though that I think is going on, and you brought this up a little bit, Harj, is that like founders will lie to themselves. They will think I'm the exception. I know the advice is good in general. I've heard all these great examples, but like we are different.

Brad, you were talking a little bit about like the idea that maybe I could, maybe I can do a perfect launch. So how do you think founders think about their perfect launch and why they maybe can't move fast? Well, I think the minute anyone starts making something, they start thinking about the moment when they show it to people and what they want the reaction to look like and sound...