Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #151 - Startup School Week 10 Recap - Ali Rowghani on How to Lead and Kevin Hale and Adora Cheung on Startup School 2019 by the Numbers

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

We've cut down the tenth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.First, a lecture from Ali Rowghani. Ali is a partner at YC. His lecture covers how to lead.Then a lecture from Kevin Hale and Adora Cheung. Kevin and Adora are both partners at YC. Their lecture breaks down this year’s Startup School by the numbers and they share tips on what helped companies most.Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/***Topics00:00 - Intro00:36 - Ali Rowghani - How to Lead1:36 - Ali's background2:56 - There's no single archetype for a great leader so be yourself5:16 - Great leaders think and communicate clearly9:56 - Great leaders have good judgement about people12:56 - Great leaders have strong personal integrity and commitment13:46 - The transparency test14:41 - The best way to measure great leaders is in terms of the amount of trust they engender in the people that work with them15:21 - The science of trust16:08 - The art of trust16:36 - Optimize for trust17:40 - Kevin Hale and Adora Cheung - Startup School 2019 by the Numbers19:24 - Startup School grew during the course20:24 - Did SUS make a difference?21:14 - 106 SUS companies were accepted into YC23:17 - How can you replicate their success?23:44 - Be clear and concise26:59 - Edit your company description28:04 - Weekly updates submitted28:39 - Top 7 biggest obstacles for SUS companies29:04 - Top 7 KPI movers29:59 - Top 7 user insights31:04 - Average startup weeks to launch31:54 - Average hard tech or biotech startup weeks to launch32:54 - % of weekly updates from launched startups33:34 - Group sessions33:59 - Companies got better at explaining their ideas, selling themselves, and getting others excited35:09 - Founders like qualitative feedback36:09 - No shows37:19 - Morale37:49 - Technical, launched, full-time, revenue generating, non-flaky, non-solo founder startups that talk to users are happier41:14 - Summary

Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is a recap of the 10th week of a startup school. I've cut down the 10th week of lectures to be even shorter and combine them into one podcast. First, we'll have a lecture from Ali Rogani. Ali's a partner at YC. His lecture covers how to lead. Then we'll have a lecture from Kevin Hale and Adora Chung. Kevin and Adora are both partners at YC. Their lecture breaks down this year's startup School by the numbers, and they share tips on what help companies most. All right, here we go. Good morning, everyone. My name is Ali Rogani.

I'm a partner at Ycombinator, and it's a pleasure to welcome you guys to this lecture. And I understand it's one of the last ones in startup school, which in a way is really appropriate because my talk is about leadership, which is something important, but probably not top of mind for everyone in here. You've probably got more burning concerns as you're getting your startup off the ground and figuring out what to build and working through product market fit and fundraising and so on. But it's a really, really important long-term question, because if any of you is going to succeed in building a big company in the long term,

you've got to really get good at leading, motivating, retaining great people. And so I just wanted to take some time this morning to share some of my experiences and hopefully help you guys develop a bit of an early mental model for how to think about leadership at your startups. So first, a quick word about me. Prior to Y Combinator, I had a 15-year career as an executive at two companies. The first was at Pixar, the animation studio, where I spent almost 10 years,

and I was the CFO of Pixar for the last four. And then I spent about five years at Twitter, where I started as the CFO and then I was the C.O. And during that time, I had the amazing good fortune of getting a chance to work with and observe some really amazing leaders in action. People like the founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, the CEO of Pixar, Steve Jobs, Twitter's founders, Jack Dorsey, Ev Williams, Biz Stone, and now some of the really amazing founder-CEO-O-Mobile.

at YC, people like Patrick Collison and Peter Reinhart, Drew Houston, and so on. So I've had sort of a front row of seat being able to observe some great leaders in action. And so what I wanted to do is to share three observations on leadership that I've learned in my career. And as I said before, you know, this may not be pertinent exactly today if you're just a couple of people working on an idea. But hopefully for most of you, it'll be pertinent very, very soon. So three observations on leadership.

The first one is that there's no single archetype for a great leader. No single archetype. Great leaders come in all shapes and sizes, all personality types and characteristics. And I say this from personal experience because it was a big lesson for me. I used to think that there was kind of a single leadership persona, like a way you had to be, a way you had to act in order to be a great leader, to be followed by people. But it turns out that all of the great leaders that I work with and got to observe, they were all really different. Some were introverts. Some were extroverts.

Some were technologists. Others were storytellers. Some were diplomatic and very calm. And others were emotional and a little bit hot-headed. Some were nerds and some were cool kids. So if you think about it, it's kind of a liberating idea, actually, that leaders come in all shapes and sizes because it means that any fundamentally has the capabilities to become a great leader. But the other implication, which I think is also really important, and I'll touch on again later,

is that in your quest to become a great leader, in your quest to have other people follow you, you have to be yourself. You have to be authentic to who you are. You can't try to be someone else if you want to be a great leader. You can't try to imitate Steve Jobs and hope that people will just be someone else. kind of think that you are Steve Jobs. I remember reading a quote some years ago from Reed Hastings, the amazing CEO of Netflix, who basically said the same thing. He said for the first few years of his career as a CEO, he was just trying to imitate Steve Jobs, and he realized, well, that's impossible.

I have to be read. And it was that simple sort of realization that helped him become a much better leader. So you can only be yourself in the end because humans are very good. at detecting inauthenticity. We're really good at telling when someone is being fake. And we don't generally follow or trust those that we find inauthentic. So first observation on leadership is that there's not a single archetype. Anyone can be a great leader, but in order to do so, you have to be yourself. Second, while there's no single archetype, great leaders nevertheless share three fundamental attributes. And you kind of got to be really good at these things. three things if you want to be a great leader. The first is that great leaders think and communicate

clearly. And this really makes all the sense in the world. If you're going to have other people follow you, if you're going to have other people want to do the thing you're compelling them to do, you have to be able to paint a clear and compelling vision of the future for them to be able to follow. And as a company grows, as any organization grows, your communication has to get better and better and better because you've got more and diverse, more diverse people who are hearing it. And your processes that you use to communicate can no longer be one-on-one, but they have to scale as the organization itself scales. The biggest lesson in good, clear communications to me, the most sort of important thing is that great communication needs to be simple. And simplicity in communication

is really hard. And to communicate simply takes a lot of time and preparation. There's an example here of Woodrow Wilson, President Woodrow Wilson, who was once asked how long it would take him, was asked to give a speech, and he was asked how long would he need to prepare. And he said, well, it depends how long you guys want me to talk. If it's a 10-minute speech, then I need two weeks to prepare for it. If I can talk for half an hour, I only need a week. But if I can talk as long as I want to, then I don't need any preparation at all. I can speak right now.

So that from, you know, one of the Presidents of the United States, in effect, captures the point. If you want to communicate simply, if you want to express things that are memorable and that can be repeated, it takes time to prepare. Another great example here from business for me is from Jeff Bezos when he was asked about Amazon's retail strategy. What is Amazon's retail strategy? And he said that the way we think about our retail strategy is that there are three things that will never change in our world. world. In other words, customers will always want three things from Amazon. They'll always want lower prices. They'll always want bigger selection of merchandise, and they'll always want faster delivery. So lower prices, more merchandise, more selection, and faster delivery. And he could never imagine

that a consumer would ever want the opposite of any of these three things. And that became, those three things became the pillars of Amazon's retail strategy for the last 20 years. And employees knew that anything they did to drive those three things, lower prices, faster delivery, and more selection would be in the long-term strategic interests of Amazon. And it was clear as day, and it drove the strategy of the company for a long, long time. So that's the kind of communication that we're talking about. That's the kind of simplicity that's effective. So how do you get good at this?

Obviously, clear, concise communication comes more naturally to some people than others. But I do believe that practice does make you better when it comes to communication. And I believe that even in small startups, even in two to four-person startups, as long as you have other people you're working with, it pays to work on communicating clearly. So the way you get better is, number one, to realize that clarity of thought precedes clarity of language. So you have to think clearly to communicate clearly. And so the first step is to free up time in your schedule to just think and try to jot down your thoughts and try to think about how do I express these thoughts in clearer and clearer ways. And plan and practice your communications. This is probably more appropriate in a slightly bigger company, but if you're standing in front of a group of employees, don't wing it.

Try to prepare, try to have it written down. If the company is big enough, practice in front of a smaller audience, get some people. coaching, ask for feedback. All these things will help you guys become better communicators. And there's really no reason not to start now to try to work on this. It's such a fundamental skill. Okay, so great leaders are all different, but they share three fundamental attributes. The first is clarity of thought and language. The second is that great leaders have good judgment about people. And why is this important? Why is it important for you to have good judgment about people? Well, as your organizations grow, as your startups grow, you know, before long, when you get to have

20 or 30 employees, you're going to have to either hire or promote other people to be leaders in the company, to be managers and directors and one day vice presidents and so on. And the decisions that you make in terms of who to empower as leaders in your organization have a really profound impact on the future of the company. And if you make consistently bad decisions, on the people that you're bestowing authority and power to, then your authority, your followership, the trust that people have in you will diminish. So you have to make really good choices in terms of who you empower,

because in the end, they become extensions of you. So how do you get good at this one? Again, you know, good judgment, good EQ is probably, you know, more natural for some people than for others. but my best advice here, especially, again, this is a few steps ahead of probably where you guys are now, but when you're starting to recruit for any position in your company, you should try to meet a lot of people. You should put real time and energy into it. You should try to even meet people who you have no hope of hiring because it's important to kind of get a sense for what really great leaders are like,

what great engineering managers are like, what great sales leaders. or like, et cetera. And just talk to them about their jobs and their backgrounds and how they came to be where they are, ask them about how they lead people, what they think goes well, doesn't go well. This type of kind of educational interview will really help you, will really help hone your judgment about what's good and what's bad and who's good and who's bad. And don't be, don't think that you're wasting time in doing this. You know, you guys will, many of you will be hiring senior people one day for the first time.

You'll never have hired a CFO before. Don't cut corners. Spend time meeting people and honing your instincts. The other thing I would say is, you know, as you guys start to grow your companies, you're obviously going to have to hire and recruit a lot of people, and some of those people will not work out. Just make sure that you view the hiring process as something that you can, learn from every single time. And just be very diligent in terms of learning, you know, who you hired, why you hired

that person, what went right, what went wrong in terms of their original hire, their onboarding and their career at the company. Be self-reflective about the development of people in your organization and your own choices as to who you're empowering with authority. Okay, last thing the great leaders have in common. Great leaders have strong personal integrity and commitment. That means standing for something meaningful beyond themselves and being motivated by things outside of their narrow personal interests. It means avoiding behavior that diminishes trust, diminishes credibility in a leader like favoritism, conflicts of interest, inappropriate language, inappropriate work relationships, etc.

commitment means making your work into a life mission in ways that inspire other people. It means giving it your all. People see this and they respect it and they follow it. So how do you get good at this? Well, my simple advice on this one is to try to hold yourself accountable to the transparency test, which means ask yourself if all of your private communications and behavior towards others, et cetera, all that were to be transparent to everyone at the company, if everyone saw everything you said and did, would you be embarrassed by any of it? We obviously all make mistakes, but patterns of mistakes

are bad and mistakes that sort of damage the integrity that you have or damage the perception of integrity or the worst of all. So that is, I think, of very important characteristic in leaders. Third observation about leadership. So number one, all leaders are all different. There's no single archetype. Number two, nevertheless, they have three common traits, communication, judgment about people, and integrity and commitment. And the third observation about leadership is the best way to measure great leaders is in terms of the amount of trust they're able to engender and the people who work with them, for them, around them, etc. trust is the metric, the success metric for leadership, and trust in a 360-degree sense of the word.

I would say that across any organization, the job of every leader is to build trust, trust in employees, investors, customers, users, and so on. And building trust is both an art and a science. So the science of trust is fairly simple. You have to be right about the empirical questions. in your business. You know, if you're predicting, hey, we should build this product, we should try to sell to this customer, or, you know, we should try to market the product in this way. These things over time, like these choices get proven right or wrong, and hopefully you're

right much more than you're wrong, because if you're consistently wrong, then, you know, you diminish the amount of trust people will have in you. It's almost like asking someone what's two plus two, and if they consistently answer five, then they can be the most trustworthy the ethical person on the planet, but you're not going to trust them at the end of the day with anything having to do with math. So that's the science of trust. I find that founders often get this part right. The second aspect of building trust is more of an art. This is about being able to show empathy and good judgment, having timing, good timing when you confront issues. It's about striving for something bigger than yourself and not being selfish or self-centered. And this is

a more delicate, obviously, the art of trust, building the art of trust is a more delicate topic, and again, practice makes you better, but I would always try to keep it in mind. So my parting advice for you guys, as you guys are sort of tadpoles on your way to building big companies, is that as you, with every step that you take forward, try to optimize for trust as leaders. You're going to have lots of hard decisions to make in the coming years. You'll have to fire people, you'll have to admit mistakes to your customers, you'll have to say no to people because you disagree with them and their ideas.

Try to view every challenge that comes in your way. Try to view every challenge as an opportunity to increase the trust that people have in you as a leader. Try to view every challenge as a trust-building opportunity. And as you evaluate one course of action versus another, ask yourself which path is going to generate more trust in you as a leader and always try to choose that path. That's my parting advice. I wish you guys all the luck and success in the world. And it was great talking here today. Thank you.

All right. Now for Kevin and Adora's lecture. Hello, Berlin. We made it to week 10. This is the last stop on the startup school tour. We have something kind of special today. We have something kind of special today. So Ador and I are doing a presentation together, and it's all based on numbers from the last nine weeks of startup school. She's going to sort of kick it off. And what we're going to do is probably talk for like hopefully 20 minutes, and then we'll open up to Q&A to answer all of your questions or anything else you want to talk about. And then we'll have like more mingling and eating and such until we have to kick you out and go have you work on your company or apply to YC, if that's what you still have to love to do, at 8 p.m.

Adora. 5 a.m. Berlin time. 5 a.m. Berlin time. Plenty of time. All right, thank you, Kevin. Thanks for being here. So Kevin said, my name's Adora. I'm one of the partners at YC.

And we're just going to go over what we learned during startup school. So it's week 10, we made it. Congratulations. So the startup school team has been in the past few weeks traveling around the world visiting cities where there's lots of startup school founders. We've been, we've done 20 events at this point, over 15 cities, and we've interacted with over 2,000 founders in person. So similar to how we started, we wanted to end startup school by looking at the numbers. Most of you don't know this, but startup school actually grew a lot during the course itself. When we held orientation back in July, end of July, we were around 20,000 founders and 21,000 startups with over 20,000 people auditing the course just for the content.

And as we let more people in during the course, as of today, the number swelled by over 40%. So you'll see we have now over 40,000 founders in startup school and over 30,000 start. There are over 77,000 people actually subscribe to the content and over, yeah, with the number of people increasing between 30% and 50%. Really cool that female founders increase the most here. So one of the things that we wanted to look at was whether startup school made a difference. So we looked at the last two batches to see how last year's participants compared to the rest of the population in regards to the to their ability to get funding from YC. So in the end, from the past two batches,

9.7% of start-school applicants that applied got an interview versus 9.1% of non-start-school applicants got interviewed. That means 6.6%. If you did start-school, 6.6%, you had a higher chance of getting interviewed. And we think this year it will be much, much higher because we focused the course a lot on helping you build that application and just focus your startup on the right things to get those questions done well. All right, so if you look deeper into the numbers, as of today,

160 Startup School companies have been accepted into YC. For a group of people who are more likely to get interviewed, you think they look amazing on paper. They got into YC, but you would be wrong. Startup school founders accepted into YC are surprisingly different. In every city we visited, founders are constantly asking us to see if YC still wants to accept companies that are not perfect that are like them, but not perfect. And the big takeaway is that YC is not afraid of Warts, and we can assure you no startup we've

ever accepted has been perfect. So dig a little bit deeper into these 106 companies from startup school that has gone to YC already. 40 of them had no traction when they got in, so that means no revenue, no users yet. 57 also had no revenue. 50 had no funding whatsoever, meaning zero dollars cash in the bank. Some of them didn't even incorporate yet. Quite a few of them were still working at jobs or might have been college and still working part-time.

40 of them applied previously, so this is one of the things as we encourage you, even if you don't get in, is to keep trying again. A lot of people apply three to four times, and on that fourth or fifth try they get in. Some of the companies, we didn't really like the idea they applied with, and they actually pivoted during the batch, and so that counts for a dozen of them. And 11 of them applied late.

So by time you watch this video, you're applying late, and we still encourage you to apply. And finally, this is the most asked question in our tour, which is, if I'm a solo founder, or can I still do YC? And the question is absolutely yes. Ten single founders got in from startup school. We average around 10% of the batches around solo founders now,

if not a little bit more than that. We highly encourage every team to have a technical co-founder, but if you don't, it does not disqualify you. In fact, three of the startup school companies that have gotten into YC were not technical. All right. So how can you replicate their success? It's very simple, and I'm about to repeat a lot of

of things we've already said during startup school. But the best thing you can do is when you talk about your startup, there's a question on the applications, is what are you making? And that is to be very clear. Or it is. And if you've watched Kevin's lecture from a couple weeks ago, the next few slides will seem very familiar. So one is be clear on what you're working on, no jargon. Not only be clear, but don't use all the words in the dictionary. Be very concise and how you get your point across. So to be even more specific on that question, on the application of what are you working on,

startups that have gotten accepted into YC use on average 78 words to describe what they do. So 78 words might seem a little or a lot to you, but in fact, what it does is it looks like this. It's two paragraphs and gets your point across well. So if you have something that looks longer than this, and you should really go through your description and start cutting words and finding sentences

that you really don't need to have them there. All right, so if this is what a description should look like, what should a description not look like? Well, here's an example of, this is literally, this is actually one of my favorite ones because, as you'll see next, of a description that did not get accepted or get an interview. So we couldn't fit the whole thing in here, but if you read, like this guy, or I forgot

who the founder is, but he basically knows he needs to write something short, but decides to write a wall of text. In fact, that wall of text was the longest description we got of all applications in the past two batches. It was over 2,000 words. Obviously, please don't do this. It doesn't to help us understand your startup any better, it actually just confuses more and frustrates us. It basically tells us that you don't know how to be efficient when it comes to getting people to understand what your startup does.

So if you think about it, if this is how long it takes you to describe what you do, if you can imagine when you come in for a 10-minute interview, the interview would be done before you even finish your description. Furthermore, what culminates at the end of YC itself is a two-minute demo date pitch. So again, that's even less time to get your point across. And so you really need to start practicing now on how you deliver your, how you deliver

on how you explain your company. The good news is, in startup school when you applied or when you registered, you had to fill out your company description. And we actually forced you to write it in less than 200 characters or less. Now, this is a histogram of a number of characters of words that startup school companies use, and you can see that a lot of you got to the 200th character and probably wanted to write more, but have to stop because we forced you.

Stop it. The result is this description actually averages around 40 words or less. So by force, we've made you do it less than the average of 78 words, so that's good news. So when you transfer your descriptions to your OIC application, we suggest you to not expand much further than the number of words you've already used.

All right. So one thing we noticed and we're worried about was the lack of editing on your hand when you entered in that startup school description. So over the course, over the 10-week course, we've been trying to help you make that description a little bit better. In fact, a lot of the group sessions were designed to help you with that. But as you've been practicing pitching every week, many of you didn't actually go back into your profile and edit your company profiles with.

a better description. It's actually the one thing we do at YC to help startups more than anything else is really get down the one or two liner in their descriptions. So the next startup school we're going to probably focus more on helping you do that and forcing you to document your changes over time. The median number of edits was only one. So we think that most likely the description you have right now can be improved on drastically. So if you need more tips on how to do this well. Kevin's last lecture, how to evaluate ideas part two. That's a name on the YouTube channel. Please, please go watch. As you see, a lot of the slides are lifted from there. So, all right, I'm going to let Kevin take over for the next bit. You guys submitted a lot

of data to us. Every week we ask companies to let us know about their progress. If you got an email from the Kevin inspirational back, then you know that basically were trying to get you to just spend 10 to 15 minutes at the most, to just tell us what's been going on with your company. And in the last nine weeks, that's been over 124,000 pieces of data. And so we've got a lot of interesting insights from them. The first thing is concerning what startup school companies considered their biggest obstacle. So not surprising to us, but it is kind of worsome.

Number one was funding. You were worried about lack of resources and you couldn't move forward as a result of not having money. And the other one that's interesting on here is like needing a co-founder at number six. And the reason I want to kind of point these out is that if you look at what people said actually improve their KPI, the metric that they considered mattered the most. When we did the text analysis, it looks very different. So you think your biggest problem is one thing, but the thing that would actually help you the most are very different. So number one, of course, is launching, getting out the door.

Once you launch, you can move that KPI, which is wonderful. All that stuff on here, a lot of it concerning product, the things dealing with the users. If you're having problems where the difference between what you think your biggest obstacle is and the thing that makes the biggest difference to your KPI are two different lists like this, watch a Doors lecture. She talks about how to prioritize your time. It's actually doing really, really well on YouTube. It's the fastest spreading one.

A lot of people found her tips in there on how to think about your to-do list in a much more KPI-driven way, very, very helpful. We asked you to talk to your users and tell us what did you learn from them? And these are the top things that people got. Not surprisingly, they're focused on product. And basically, the best thing you can do is make something people want. And the top two insights, because they're focused on conversion and monetization, I've got two lectures that we did back-to-back on improving landing page conversion and pricing.

So those are good places to start if you want to improve things for your users. Now, actually, most of the participants, unfortunately, in startup school did not launch. And so when you were considered not launched, the KPI that you try, was weeks to launch. And so these are the numbers and how they came out. People, on average, went from WTO weeks to launch,

of seven weeks, down to five weeks at the end. For some reason, that should have been to zero by now. What's actually super interesting here is that the median weeks to launch is about four. So that indicates

that in the average there, it's being actually very much impacted by people having very large weeks to launch. That's really bad. And so if you haven't already, you're going to find a theme here for this presentation. Watch Michael's lecture on how to plan an MVP. He talks about how you should only be making

the first version that takes just a few weeks to launch. And so even that meeting is double the number that we recommend for our companies. In that talk, he also coined a new term that we've been using as her school at YC, the heavy MPP, and this is if you're a hard tech or biotech company, you might need to build something that's a little more substantial. And in fact, you guys actually believe you do need to.

You're almost double the number of weeks to launch that you estimate. And unfortunately, if you look at the graphs by comparison, so this is the average startup school weeks to launch as it's going slightly down over time. This is the biotech, hard tech people. You guys actually go up over time. So now add features over the course of the week. And that's not good. Because actually, from our experience funding, over 200 biotech, hard tech companies,

is that they should be following different advice or rules than other companies. I'm just why we recommend, if you haven't watched it, watching Jared's lecture on advice for biotech and hard tech companies. He basically talks about seven wonderful examples of YC companies. that built a much lighter weight, heavy MPP, and creative ways of getting their company off the ground, even though they don't have millions of dollars and lots of time to build the first version.

For the companies that did launch, you guys did great. So this number represents the percentage of the weekly updates that were submitted that came from companies that launched. So at the beginning of the course, a third of the weekly updates came from launch companies. And by the end, half of them were from launch companies. That's super awesome.

In fact, 2,253 startups, we could actually track switch from weeks to launch to a different KPI during startup school. To put this into perspective for us, it took over 10 years for Wycombinator to launch that many companies through our program. And in certain school, we did it in 10 weeks. Dora's going to talk about group sessions. All right. As you know, every week during startup school, we matched you with other startups to help you practice talking about your own startups. And we rate everybody at the end

would rate each other on three metrics. Did you understand this idea? Were you excited about the idea? And would you want to work with the founders? For the first question, over time, you guys got better at explaining your idea. As you can see, the differential from each week to week was over 0.1%.

To put that in perspective, a 0.1% increase represents almost 100 startups. because of the number of startups in startup school. And by the end, there was a 7.1% increase overall. All right, in terms of improving on selling yourselves, you guys also got better over time. There was a 9.5% improvement from the beginning. The biggest improvement was actually getting other people

excited about it your idea. And so there was a 17% improvement since the beginning. We know that there's a lot more work that needs to be done here. We want to, in the future, create a lecture to help you get better at getting other people emotionally excited about your ideas. Being able to do that helps you with things like recruiting and getting customers on board and also investors on board in the future. If you want more help instructing your investor pitch, Kevin's lecture for, who's second lecture? It was called How to Evalute Startup Ideas Part 1. I would go watch that.

All right. So while the quantitative ratings made it easier to get founders involved, startup school founders loved it when you actually gave each other qualitative feedback comments after the group session. We were amazed to see how supportive everyone was with each other in terms of giving this feedback. In fact, over 93,000 pieces of qualitative feedback were created during the course. So many of you offered to help with introductions to customers,

often whispered words of encouragement that we know made a huge difference to someone struggling to make the magic happens. One of the main reasons for doing these group sessions to the other is sort of like emotional supporting group therapy because we're all going through the same things. And so I think that achieved the result we were looking for in that sense.

The generosity we saw in the comments is what makes doing a startup in a batch incredibly powerful. So thank you for everyone for taking the time to do this. It really means a lot. to everyone. On the flip side, not all of you are great. A bunch of you no-showed. So 19% of startups who requested a participant in group session did not show up. Booh. Yes. So this graph shows updates, requests for group sessions and attendance and no-shows over the last nine weeks. Oddly enough, 23% of startups who submitted a weekly update didn't even request a group

session. We're looking for the next time, for the next course of how to make this easier and more convenient for startups because we think that this has been actually helpful, not just in improving your pitch, but also for morale reasons. Interesting enough, this graph actually shows where we messed up in the first week. So that big gap there between number of updates submitted and requested shows that you guys were very confused about how to request group sessions at the very start of startup school. And that's why we gave everyone to free me on that first one. And that sort of stabilizes as we get down here on the end.

Just like how you guys are probably using metrics to help improve your startup, we are too as well. Okay. So we also ask you guys to submit, how are you feeling? What's your morale on working on your startup? And overall, out of 124,000 pieces of weekly feedback, and you can see the trend is you got a little happier over time. But we actually wanted to segment this out to see what actually really impacted and what made a big difference for morale for companies. And so it led to some of the most interesting and unique insights from the program for us at Y Combinator.

First one, technical startups, no surprise, are happier. You're just able to get more done. One thing to notice is you'll think that the difference here and changes are small, but because of the amount of data that we're collecting across each one of them, these are pretty statistically significant. And so if you're looking to be quantitatively happier, these are ways to do it. If you launch, you're a little bit happier than the unlaunched people.

One thing that helped a lot of companies to rethink how they thought about launching was watching Katz lecture on how to launch again and again. It just really changed that bar from being a launch that requires press to being one that is just about shipping and deploying on a regular basis. If you're full-time on your startup,

you're a lot happier, obviously, probably because you can also make more progress. If you're making money, you're happier. That whole aphorism, money can't buy you, happiness, not true. Adora's got a good lecture on this, on focusing on revenue, how to set KPIs. It's her first lecture from the startup school, and I actually think it's one of the unappreciated ones. It's a lecture that really talks about why 99% of you should be focused on revenue and be honest with yourself about whether you're actually doing that or not. Here's one that's really surprising. People who did not flake on group sessions were way happier

than people who did. Basically, feeling like you're doing a startup and having other people to talk to and being part of the community in batch meant that you're happier working on your startup than those who did not participate at all. The happiest cohort was actually people who were in teams. And this is actually one of the main reasons we always say that we want companies that try to have co-founders. It is so hard to do a startup on your own. And this is usually morale is the thing that kills a lot of companies and founders.

And so again, when we talk about we want you to try to have a co-founder, it is to help with the longevity of your startup, not because we just don't want to select those that don't have teams. And then this was the most surprising thing that we learned from startup school. That founders and teams that talk to users were way happier over time than those who didn't. And what's interesting about these two cohorts is that the people who did not talk to any users at all, they were the only cohort that actually had morale get worse over the coaches of startup school. in the nine weeks that knows who didn't.

So the lesson, the moral of this morale, are you feeling sad? Talk to users. It doesn't take very much to do it. The median number of users that start school teams talk to with just three users a week. It actually provides a ton of insight for you, but apparently it's better than Prozac.

If you want more information about how to talk to users than a better way of handling that, in a sort of structured way that helps you improve your product. Watch Eric's lecture from the first week of Startup School. Let's bring it home a door. In summary, from this presentation, startup school helps you get interviewed. It's okay not to be perfect,

like you can get accepted even if you have a word. Try to write your description in 78 words or less. Prioritize launching. you're probably taking too long to launch. Practice makes you better at pitching, talking about getting people to understand you, get excited and want to work with you. And lastly,

talking to users make you happy, which is why we're going to switch over to talking to you guys. Thank you so much. All right, thanks for listening. So as always, you can find the transcript and video at blog.w.ycombinator.com. And if you have a second,

it would be awesome to give us a rating and review wherever you find your podcast. See you next time.