Geoff Ralston - Parting Advice
High startup school founders,
I am Jeff Ralston, YC's president, and I'm here to say so long and to give a few words of parting advice. It's after 10 extraordinary weeks of startup school. We here at YC are about to focus on our winter 2020 batch, and you all will be off working on your startups. Hopefully, we'll see many of you at interviews for winter 2020, and no matter what, you'll all continue working on your startups regardless of what happens with YC.
Here are a few things to think about as you enter this next phase of your company. It's so easy to be distracted by what's happening with other startups. It's a great thing to be part of a community of startups, so this is the one thing you have to be careful about and to remember: every startup, every single one, has a different path. Every founder has a different path.
When I first came to Silicon Valley to work for the venerable company Hewlett-Packard as a coder, I dreamed of starting a startup. We used to go drinking Friday nights and talk about – well, drinking was the important part, and talking about startups was the second most important part. But that's what we did. We always talked about what our path would be, what our founder path would be, but we had no idea how to go about it. PG hadn't started Y Combinator yet. We couldn't go online to ask basic questions about how to start a startup. Actually, there wasn't even an online back then. Venture capitalists were these mysterious suits who only would talk to MBAs. We didn't know where to go.
It actually took me 12 years to find my path to start my startup, and that was my path, and it worked out. But everything's different now, thanks largely to Paul. There's so much help! I hope that YC startup school has been transformational for you guys, for your companies, and for your future. I hope you've learned enough, focused enough, and launched enough to make a difference – to make a difference that will put your startup on a path to success. That path will be different for everyone.
When I finally gave up my job, gave up working for the man, and began to search for my future startup, I came to build web-based email. Later, that was purchased by Yahoo, and that's where I met Peih-Gee and his co-founder Trevor at their company, ViaWeb. Before starting YC, Paul spent tons of time doing other things; he wrote, he painted, before he found his next path. Trevor moved out to California, funded his own hardware startup to build robots.
Whatever your path, find it! Make it yours. You do this by focusing on the important things: focus on what matters. Focus on what you've learned at startup school. Stay connected with the community, use the updates, use the forum, talk to people. Most importantly, as you've heard again and again, make something that people want. As you do that, as you make something people want, measure it. Keep track of your progress. Make sure you know where your value is added. Hire incredible people; surround yourself with the best of the best, and that will give you the best chance to build an epic company.
And don't give up! Focus on making a company that is healthy and happy and moving forward always. We say this all the time at Y Combinator: startups are hard. The books written about startups talk about how hard they are. Well, there are no easy decisions; it's hard, and it's all-consuming, and it's the most wonderful thing in the world. PG wrote an essay where he quoted a founder saying, "It's surprising how much you become consumed by your startup. You think about it day and night, but it never does feel like work."
However, one of the constants of startups is that things will go wrong. Things will go wrong with your startup; they always do. It's almost the beauty of startups, and you guys are the problem solvers in chief. The times I remember the most when I was at startups were when things went wrong and we found solutions. Even when I was by myself, when I quit HP to start a startup, I was lost. I didn't know what to do until I realized I needed to make something. I started coding, and I started talking to customers in that startup that Yahoo bought for one of the problems we ra...