Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #80 - Office Hours with Adora Cheung

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

Adora Cheung is a partner at YC and she also cofounded Homejoy, which went through YC in the Summer 2010 batch.For this episode we took questions from the internet. If you have questions for a future office hours episode, just tweet them our way.Questions0:41 - topherPedersen asks - How many users did you have when you applied to YC? Also, how much revenue had you generated?2:55 - Hatlii asks - How do you keep going if you can’t raise any money?4:54 - Alejandro Ruperti asks - When/how do you decide to walk away from something you started?10:41 - Chris Melnick-MacDonald asks - What advice and lessons did you learn in entering the #Canadian market?13:16 - Yahya Elamrani asks - Do I have to work on culture in the very early stage?15:39 - Adam Sanders asks - What was the best decision you made for Homejoy?16:53 - Ujjawal Chauhan asks - Would love to know what’s the one thing she’d do differently in hindsight if she were to start over again?20:35 - Nikita Butakov asks - What are some unique data science / machine learning challenges faced by Homejoy?22:07 - Alejandro Ruperti asks - From @tferriss : how has a failure or apparent failure set you up for a later success?32:37 - Siamak Freydoonnejad asks - What are the best practices when doing a cold reach out to an investor?33:14 - 😎rliesaurus @ ✈️ 🇪🇺asks - Is Uber for X still a thing people would invest in, in the US?36:21 - Fedor Paretsky asks - How have YC's views on cryptocurrency/blockchain-related startups changed since Coinbase?42:56 - Manav asks - What type of companies is YC seeing more of this time around?46:45 - Yahya Elamrani - What are the best marketing strategies for year one for a b2c startup?53:55 - Yahya Elamrani asks - What would you say to a founder from a third world country where there is a big lack in tech talents (and you can't compete with big corps due to lack of resources) in term of hiring?55:50 - Aspiring Angel asks - What’s the best way for investors interested in startup seed/angel funding get started? How does location affect the process?

Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Adora Chung. Adora is a partner here at YC, and she also co-founded Homejoy, which went through YC in the summer 2010 batch. For this episode, we took a bunch of questions from the internet, and if you have questions for a future office hours episode, you can just tweet them our way. All right, here we go. All right, hey everyone. Today we have Adora Chung. She's a YC partner and co-founder of Homejoy. Thank you. How's going? Good. How are you? Good. All right. We're going to do some office hours questions from the internet. So let's go. Cool. So first question is from Tofer Peterson. And he asks, how many users did you have when you applied to YC? And also how much revenue had you generated? So when we applied to YC back in 2010, we were a company called at that time Pathjoy, not Home Joy. And we were a marketplace for online services. So we're trying to bring on typically offline services like tutoring, Life coaching, therapy, and all these legal services online.

And our thesis was, this was the time to put it to video and we would be the ones to do it. And so when we applied, if I remember correctly, we had onboarded a lot of people for the supply side of stuff, so service providers, but had onboarded absolutely no one yet on the demand side. So we had obviously generated no revenue yet, but that's what we had when we. Okay. And this was 2010? 2010. Okay. And had you started a company before? No. I had previously worked at a company called Slide, and I ran product there, and we built Facebook apps. I started in 2007 when the Facebook developer platform just launched.

Okay. And what made you want to start a startup? I think I've always knew that I wanted to create stuff and make stuff for the world, and it just was a matter of finding the right idea. And so after a couple of years that slide, I decided it was the right timing also because my brother, who would be my co-founder, had just graduated college. And I said, hey, you should just come out here. Let's work on stuff. So we started working on stuff. Did you have any, like, I don't know, apprehension about starting a company with your brother? Not really. I think it's funny because my brother and I grew up kind of in separate worlds. So it's not like we were together

all the time or knew each other's if we were compatible working together. So it was a little of a trial in error in the beginning. But having a sibling, working with a sibling, you know you can trust them. And they're not going to do anything horrible to you. And so I think there was just that initial layer of trust that was pretty good for us. Yeah. And also, I guess you were out here for only a couple years. You didn't totally have a network either.

Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So makes sense. Cool. All right. Next question.

Hotly asks, how do you keep going if you can't raise any money? So you just have to keep your personal burn really low. And I would say just from experience where my brother and I weren't able to raise much money for two and a half, almost three years. And we were just able to just keep going in terms of trying to find users and stuff like that. You just got to be incredibly scrappy because obviously you can't afford to acquire any users. So which means, which is actually a good thing because it forces you get out of your chair and you have to go talk to users because that's the only way. that you can get them to use your product. And I think going through a period of not having enough cash to work in your startup

helps you develop a lean mentality, which is good to keep moving forward if you, if and when you raise money. Had you raised before YC? No, we hadn't. Okay. And then you raised like 100? Yeah, we raised 100K around demo day. Yeah.

And then use that for the next two and a half. fears. That's kind of, that's amazing. Yes. It was your own employees, just the two of you? It was just the two of us. We, yeah, it was just a two of us. Wow.

Okay, cool. It was cheap to live in Mountain View at that point, so it wasn't. Really? Well, cheap relative, around that time it was about nine hundred bucks a month for like a one big room and bath apartment. So you took the, how much was the YC money at the time? It was, I believe we got 15K. So each or total total total okay um and then we raised 100k from someone else and you made that

last for two years two and a half years yeah wow impressive just didn't do much besides work on a yeah yeah um there there's another question that's like further down the list but somewhat related to you know keeping going or quitting um so Alejandro Reperti asks how or when do you decide to walk away from something that you started um So that's a tough question. I think when you, I'm assuming he means the startup or an idea that you're working on. I think this is one of the things you actually have to think about before you start, which is, okay, great, this is an idea? Maybe you got some users, so and so forth.

Before you even think about raising money or especially hiring people, you should really think about, is this something you want to do for the next five, six, seven, ten years? because success is way down the road. And I think if you can't imagine yourself doing that, then that's not something you should jump into. But if it is, then certainly you should go for it. And then I think during your journey, your startup journey, if you ever start questioning yourself, am I in the quote right game or not,

then, yeah, I think it's important to always zoom out and reevaluate. But I wouldn't be doing it in the corner of, or by yourself, I would always find a set of friends in the startup world, but also outside of the startup world to give you that perspective. And if that doesn't help, you know, you can always find a coach to help you talk through that. And then if you do have, if you have raised money or you have employees, you do have responsibility to them or to your investors as well as to your employees, which is not to say keep going because of that, but it's just to say you need to find a transitionary role or period in which you take care of all those duties.

Did you struggle with that at Homejoy? No, I think we, no, not in particular. I think I just kept on going. I think there are times where we're like, are we working on the right idea or not? Aaron and I, my brother, who's my co-founder, we pivoted a dozen times before we got to Homejoy. And so, which was helpful, the fact that we pivoted that much was helpful in the sense that we were, we learned how to push product out very, very fast, which was helpful when we finally got to the right idea. But certainly, when you're, when each time you pivot, you sort of just think maybe, maybe two more weeks.

Maybe there's one more feature. Maybe, you know, maybe if I just got one more user and things will take off. And so you just have to step back in a ways where you evaluate that. How did you pivot 12? Because like where you ended up from the initial application isn't that far. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So we started with marketplace for online services. And it was just marketplace for an offline service. Right. Starting with cleaning and then eventually some other home services. Yeah, I don't know if. I'm not sure if that pathway could have been shortened or not. Okay. I do think we learned a lot along the way in terms of working with others other that really helped us make that take off at the time that we came to it.

Do you remember what you did in between? Like, was there anything that was just like objectively crazy or terrible? There were a lot of terrible things. I mean, I think we also built, at least I built overengineered a lot of things because I thought it was cool to build some stuff. So after, I'm not going to remember all of them, but Pathway, it was a, was trying to connect service providers with clients. When that didn't start working out, when we couldn't find enough clients for the service providers, we had all these service providers.

So we started, we're like, what can we do with all these service providers? Well, they still needed clients and we thought, okay, what if they just, we just made it into Q&A site. So we had a Q&A site for a while. after a while I think a lot of the service providers got a little tired of just creating essentially free content oh they weren't getting paid okay yeah they weren't getting paid for it it was sort of kind of the pitch was if you write all this content then it'll help you develop your brand right and then here's a profile yeah marketing and then it rolled into a bunch of content sites

and then it turned into basically like a demand media type play and we weren't just I think by the time we rolled into that out we're just like this was not going to be be huge and we're not really into this. So let's just rethink the whole thing. Yeah. Oh, to go back to your other ideas, you said you applied with like a Twitch type idea as well, right? No, yeah. So on my application, I just reread it. I applied with the marketplace for online services, but there's a question on there which says your other ideas. And my other idea literally is Twitch, which is not to say that I made a mistake to not build it because I'm not quite sure I would have made that a huge thing.

It's just that it was just kind of funny for me to see that. You literally just wrote like video game streaming. No, it was just watching people play games and checking in and commenting and doing all these things, kind of like ESPN for games, essentially. And the reason, how I came with the idea was because I was always watching my brother play games. And he would also then go on YouTube and watch other people play games. I'm just like, that's so weird to me.

but he was doing it and like a bunch of other people were doing. I was like, okay, there's something here. And but the thing is I think I'm not really into games that much. And so I'm not quite sure that would have. I'm pretty so confident I wouldn't have worked out. Right. Yeah. It may have been a little early as well.

At that point, yeah. Live streaming was, yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. Let's go to the next question. Chris Melnick McDonald asks, what advice and lessons did you learn in entering the Canadian?

market. So with the Canadian market, just like any other international market, there was the custom, from the customer perspective, there wasn't that much of a difference on everyone. You know, you have a dirty home and you need to get it cleaned. So and so forth. From the cleaning professional side, the service provider side, there is, there are some differences there in terms of, you know, where do people find jobs? In the U.S., it's Craigslist. In other places, in other markets, it's something else. So there are those kind of differences that we had to learn about. But I wouldn't say they were super major.

So there was how to acquire service providers. There are maybe unique channels to acquire customers in each one of the local markets. There was things just like weather, traffic, like where are the traffic jams, public transit, how are people actually going and go from house to house and that had to be all baked into the scheduling stuff? So anyway, going back to the Canadian. point, it's not that there was nothing super special about Canada itself. It's just, it's just the fact that it's another market that we went into. And then we also launched in the Europe as well, Berlin, Paris, and London. And similar to that, there are there are

some locale differences and obviously language differences as well. Yeah. But nothing super major. So yeah, what are your pro tips then? Like if I'm expanding to, I think Canada is like very close to the U.S. But if I'm expending to Europe, what are your pro tips? For that is I'd go, I'd go to the market and identify the opportunity first. Go talk to potential users. For us, we're a marketplace, so it had to be both sides of the users. And there were some markets where we looked at, and I can't recall exactly the right cities, but that we decided just not to enter because we didn't think there was enough demand or supply there for us for us to make an impact. But once you do that, then the other thing is if you're launching a ton of these cities is to find somebody who's hopefully done this before.

And we call them, what we call them was the city launcher. And so this person going to the market, find the first few customers, or sorry, find the first few service providers, first few cleaning professionals. and then we would match them with the customers. And there was kind of like a manual back and forth going on to get the supply and demand running. And then they would find, and then if it worked out, then we would find a city manager. We would hire a full-time city manager to run the operations and be in charge of the PNL there. And I think sort of that playbook, that's been played out now. And so a lot of startups have, I think, executed on this well.

So I think that's a pretty good framework to go by. Okay. Cool. So another question related to kind of like getting started when you're small. Yaha Elam Rani asks, how do I work on culture or do I even work on culture in the very early stage when I'm just building a team in a product? So the number one thing about working a startup is finding the right co-founders. And finding your co-founder is pretty much setting the culture because it is how you work with that person is going to parlay into probably how you work with other people. So I don't think it's like you need a handbook in like write out your core values and all these things right away.

I think it's much more important to know if your startup is going to survive or not. So how do you get your users? How am I going to make my first book? I do think once you start hiring your first few employees, then that is an important time to try to figure out, to try to articulate that thing so that one, you're hiring the right people. But two, there are some, like the people coming in have some expectation of how things. things are going to be run. How did you guys figure it out? Because there's so much unspoken with siblings.

Yes. How do you determine what's part of the company culture and what's just like you guys? That's a good question. We wrote out our core values at some point. We had five or six of them. And that's the way we, that's the framework we chose in which a lot of companies choose, I think. But in the beginning, both of us would interview everybody.

And then we would actively talk about it. Like, is this the right person? Would they work with us well? And so and so forth. And then go from there. Okay. So kind of just like seeing if the person's a good fit, rather than like explicitly writing all the values down.

Yes. In the early days. In the early days. Yes. We eventually wrote all the values down. But I think in the beginning we were just looking for smart people who were going to work who wanted to help cleaning professionals get work. Yeah.

And we're into the mission of the company. Okay, cool. So another Homejoy question. Adam Sanders asks, what was the best decision you made for Homejoy? So I think starting the company, obviously, I don't regret it at all. We were able to bring on a great crew of people to work together. And so what I am most happy about it, and was most passionate about was the fact that we created a platform that created work for people

who needed the work, as well as did a service for people who were busy and having a clean home is one of those things that it's hard to say, it's hard to articulate why, but when you have a clean home, you're just happier and you're more relaxed. And so after a busy day of work, it's nice to be able to go home and just not have to clean it. So I think those two things. So starting that company, I'm proud of that. And like I said, I think our team was a great group of people who really cared. And I would take nothing back for that.

Cool. Next question. Ujewal Chahan asks, I would love to know what's the one thing you would do differently in hindsight if you were to start over again. And I think that's like home joy and life context. Yes. So, okay,

so with Homejoy, there are so many things that I could have done a lot better. But if I had to aggregate a lot of them into kind of like one concept. Yeah, like a bucket. Yeah, a bucket.

It would be, I would have prioritized, I would have prioritized, union economics much earlier in our, in our company. So by that I mean when you're building a marketplace, you're always in this constant battle of trying to figure out how to allocate resources between growth, user experience, and unique economics. And so what we did was we obviously, we heavily worked on all.

three of those things. But if you had to make me stack rank those three, user experience and growth came before unique economics. So this makes sense if, and only really if, there is one ample funding available and what I would think, three other things. So one is there are strong network effects, the really strong network effects, or two, there are strong economies of scale, or three, there is a clear first mover advantage. So one of those and ample funding, or a combination of those last three that I said, strong network of effects, economies of scale, and first move of advantage. But in the case, in the cleaning space, it turns out that there are some of those there, but not to the extent of Uber or Airbnb.

Which meant that we did have an opportunity, in hindsight, to have a much slower growth model and still maybe came out at top, you know, winning in the long term. And so, like I said, in hindsight, had I known about, had I foreseen what the dynamics, the funding dynamics would have been when we needed to raise money, I would have certainly made the decision to at least equalize and put equal effort into, you know, those three things, growth, user experience, and economics, if not had prioritized that much even higher. When you're advising YC companies, do you kind of have a rule of thumb? I mean, every company is different, but say there was a company similar to Home Joy, saying like you should be operating at like a whatever, like X percent margin to be in a good spot. Finding a particular, there's no constant margin you should be at. It's really dependent on the local market, I think, and the prices you can actually bear. But I do emphasize unique economics and user experience above growth.

I think unless in some very odd scenario, which there are very few that, like I said, there are really strong network effects and that I think you can potentially raise a lot of money to just drive through some not so great in economics. But in general, I don't think that's really the case. Yeah, those are usually the catastrophic failures. Yes. All right. Next question. Nikita Budikov asks, what are some unique data science and machine learning challenges? you faced at home joy um so i think some of the cool things we worked on uh well there are a lot of

things but maybe i'll list three the top three the first thing that come to my mind um one is we had to create a lot of prediction models for uh demand so that we knew how to how much supply to onboard um so that supply and demand weren't out of whack they're always almost always out of equilibrium I'm out of whack, but you don't want it to be too, too much and balanced. Another one we worked on is we did a lot of analysis on customers and finding out which kind of customers were the best for us in terms of lifetime value. And so we figured out things like we should be targeting, targeting pet owners, for example. They were like two to three X more valuable than regular, all things equal than regular customers.

Okay. And then finally, one of the more difficult challenges was scheduling when you have thousands and thousands of cleaning a day. And you have preferences on both sides of the market place as well as things like transit, transit issues. And you don't want people traveling too far from one house to another and so and so forth. that was a difficult challenge the way to solve. Cool. Next question. Alejandro Roperti asks from Tim Ferriss,

how has a failure or apparent failure set you up for a later success? I hope people mostly take failure to as a learning experience. And not to let it get you down, but you should be honest with yourself and know what you learned from it. And so, I mean, today I advise, I help a lot of startups out. And so I think the previous things that didn't work out for me, it provides a really strong foundation in a basis of how I can help people.

But I always caveat that. Every time I help somebody, I always think, okay, what is the situation they're in? It never is going to be a copy and paste from my experiences. And so I always think about that first and foremost. And that's what I tell most people when they get advice from people, especially if they're going around to way too many people, is that, like, you are your own situation, and people will give you potentially directionally correct advice,

but that's just direction in the right direction. Like I said, it's not a complete one-to-one mapping. Yeah. And so you always should be taking that into account. Yeah, it's difficult. And it messes with your confidence if you take advice from too many people, especially when they're from all over the market. Like if I was starting a home joy type company now,

And I talk to you, I think I would take your advice. Yeah. But just some random other startup founder is like, why? Yeah. You know, you must talk to so many founders that you must start coming with patterns in your head of. I mean, that's like kind of the YC thing too, right? It's like just pattern matching. Yeah.

And unfortunately, so many of the like pieces of advice just sound trite after a while. Yes. Because it's tweetable. But in reality, it's kind of like all about the nuance behind the scenes. Right. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, you can tell like culture is important or whatever. Go talk to users. There's so many ways to say that. Stop burning money so fast. Yeah. There's. Yeah. And so all of these things are just like at the end of the day, like you have to build the thing yourself and you have to have some confidence because like taste matters a lot in your company and your product. And if you don't have your own opinion, like I don't know how you're going to get through it.

Yes, I agree. Which is, yeah, I mean, obviously you develop. that. But over time, you're like, you're trying out 12, 13 different products before you get to like home joy. Pivot around into it. Actually, I did want to go back because this was about like, so something of failure for a later success. I want to talk about you doing your PhD as well. Because I think it's also interesting to people who, yeah. Would you regard that as a failure? I would regard that, not as a failure, but as time, sometimes I wish I had that time to get back.

And I could have been working on creating things instead of, you know, creating, I don't know, economic models and being a data monkey and, you know, trying to do simulations and stuff like that on my, all my fancy, fancy, very academic models. And so, but, but yeah, I spent right after I graduated from undergrad, I, you know, I actually got a degree. in computer science. And I didn't, I come from South Carolina. And there, for whatever reason, you know, your choices are a little limited in terms of what you're exposed to. So I was never exposed to Silicon Valley. I was never exposed to tech startups or any of these things.

So, you know, by the time I was like 20, I just didn't even know that existed yet. And so the thing I decided to do because I didn't want to work at a big company as a code monkey was to go get a PhD in economics, which sounds weird, but I was doing some engineering work for an econ professor. And so I fell deeply in love with the idea of becoming an econ professor. It could be fun. Yeah. I mean, yeah, like, I think it could be fun. But I generate a lot more meaning and value doing what I'm doing today. Yeah, value definitely. Meaning, I don't know, people like make their own meaning.

Yeah, for me personally, that I'm no qualms with people who decide to become econ professors. Right. Yeah, no, totally. Question not on list. Side projects. Are you building side projects right now to, like, keep that product building, I don't know, gene muscle working? Yeah, I started working. I start, this is one of the things because I'm not working a startup. I start a lot of things.

I see something cool and I just like start working on it. Yeah. But so one of the things, I'm trying to build a tap right now. Really? Yeah, on Ethereum. And just playing around with solidity and all these things. We're starting to invest in a lot of the crypto blockchain startups now. And so I think it's really important that I truly understand how this stuff is built.

So I'm doing that. And nothing else major besides that. But I'm always like tinkering around with something. It's always tough. Like I have the same itch and I desperately only want to complete things. I hate letting things I hate letting things like die on the vine Yes

But it's hard because yeah I'm equally curious And just want to like oh Hack away for a weekend And like see what happens Yes Well what's the last thing you've hacked on? I put something out this week

It's like auto Transcribing podcast Oh that's right And you put some hacker news Yeah yeah which Speaking of unit economics I might be like Committing the mortal sin

Of like selling a dollar for 80 cents Oh because you still have Human being doing it fixing like the little stuff Yeah. Got it. So I have to figure out like either full-time employees or mechanical Turk, which I've never gotten good results from.

At scale, actually like at a scale a little bit larger than we're at right now, I could have someone full-time, like fixing podcasts. But right now it's a lot of like Craig waking up at 5 in the morning and being like, doop do, do, do. This doesn't cost me anything because I'm doing it. I've like created my own $5 an hour job. job. So dumb.

Raise prices. You can always raise prices. Yeah, I think that's a fear that I personally have, but should be okay with breaking. Yeah. Because I didn't, yeah, I knew that if I started too high, I wouldn't get enough customers. Fortunately, I didn't give away any free demos. If I gave away free demos, because we hit one on HN, and if we were doing free demos, it would have been a disaster.

Yeah. This is a very actually classical error, not to pounce on you or anything. I mean, I did it myself at Homejoy too, which is to get the first few users in the door, people tend to want to discount. And then what you haven't done yet, but is that you continue discounting. And then all of a sudden you have a stream of just the worst kind of users because the people that come in just because of the discount are super value-driven. So they want the cheapest thing and they want the 10-star service for,

what you can only provide at maximum as a five-star service. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they always drive the most customer service costs, and it's just a big headache. So it's good. It's maybe okay to get the first few in because, I mean, what they're hopefully also giving you in return is a lot of feedback. So you're improving on the experience and stuff like that. But at some point, you definitely don't want to be scaling that.

Definitely not. Yeah. No, I mean, it's only like a couple handful right now. So it's like totally fine. But I mean, I just honestly didn't know if people wanted it. And that's why I was like, this would be an easy way to find out. It turns out they do. And it's a lot of work.

Yes. using the other ones like Descript and there are some competitors. But I'm still so much more proficient. But at the end of the day, I still wanted transcripts. And so I was like, this is a product I want. Yes. And yeah, it turns out. So the idea is it's a transcripts and then you can also edit it based on the transcripts. I've killed, we've killed the editing. Yeah. Because it's really interesting on the technical side. But yeah, like I said, like it wasn't the product that I needed anymore. Got it. Which is, I'm a little rare because I do very very. video as well.

Okay. But yeah. Yeah, it's a lot more helpful, like when you put it on the blog that there's a transcript there as well to follow and look back on and probably to search through as well, I imagine. Yeah. So it's kind of, it's multifaceted. So it's like SEO for sure.

Sharing, because we can generate little quotes and stuff. Some people only read podcasts. Yes. Which is like as personally as like an affront. But that's fine. Are you a 2x listener? No. Really?

I've done it before, but I was like, I used to do it, and then I realized I was talking faster. Yes. Because, I mean, we've talked about this before, but like, you and I will, like, be at home all day and not talk to someone. I was like, I had a moment where I was like, I've only listened to podcasts today. And I'm at a coffee shop talking to the host at like 2X speed. Yeah, there's, if you listen, if all you do all day is just listen to things at 2X and then you go talk to somebody, you always wonder, it's like, Why are you talking so slow? They're talking normal speed, but it's like you are talking unbearably slow right now.

Speed up. I've actually met a couple podcasters in person after I was listening to them at 2X speed. I was like, oh my God, you're so slow. And then you get really used to listening to podcasters so you know it like Joe Rogan. I've heard so many of his episodes that I basically like know the anecdote that's coming up. And so I'm like, skip, skip, skip. But anyway, yeah, podcasting is awesome. TBD how much money there is in it.

Yes. Because it's all like content marketing or a lot of content marketing right now. Yes. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Cool. All right.

Next question. CEMACF, I'm not going to pronounce that last name, asks, what are the best practices when reaching out cold to an investor? Really easy. Keep it short. Say what you want to say, if you can do in two or three sentences and then ask a specific question, which is can we get Not, which is not can we get coffee, which is actually something that they can answer and actually help you with. And that's something to say that that investor would never meet with you. It's just you have to remember these investors are getting lots of these emails.

And they're also, like their job is to take meetings from people that are inturing them. So all these warm intros. And so you just need to figure out a way to develop a relationship with that person. And one way is just to have a back and forth over email over time. And then when it becomes interesting. enough. Basically, when I get to the point where I'm writing three or four paragraphs back, I'm like, okay, never mind. Let's just either get on the phone or meet in person because this is now gotten to the point where I'd like to actually talk to you for a long bit. Yeah. And also,

investors hang out on the same sites that hackers hang out on and like product people hang out on. So if you're out there making stuff, you can get attention. Oh yeah. On Reddit, Hackern News, all these places. Yeah. They're all there. They hang out on product hunt. It's like you don't have to just like pretend the only email is a way to get their attention. Yes, I agree. Because this is like one of those things that's like you, you make up these like little excuses for yourself. Where I adore it didn't reply to my email.

It's never going to work out. You know, like that's just cheating. Right. I agree. Totally. All right. Next question. From a name with a bunch of emoji in it. I think it says Riley Soros. They ask, is Uber for X? Still a thing people would invest in in the U.S.

So I definitely think so. I mean, we've seen the scooter craze going on now. When I think about Uber for X, I think it's push a button and a bunch of logistically hard operational things happen in the back. And then you get a product and service like within a few seconds, a few minutes, within a day or something like that. And that to me shouts convenience. And I think a lot of people want convenience. That's something people want. Yeah. And so I think there's always products and services.

to be built in the Uber for X realm. Yeah. And I think that, yes, there's definitely less overall less money being put into it than say four to five years ago. But, and that's a result of investors, um, understanding and learning about what these business models look like. The fact that they're, most of these businesses grow a little bit slower so that you can build up a great user experience. Yeah. And understand, they understand that you need economics much better as well. Yeah. And so there's, I would say, not as much hype, but there's certainly, if you're growing

and you have good retention and good engagement, you certainly can probably get funded. Has there been a large success that was kind of like a follow-on company in this way? Like, we're kind of like a copycat or just like a derivative. What's an example? I'm trying to, I mean, you know, like, well, so using the Uber for X example, then you're just like, oh, we're going to make this thing because it's just like Uber. Oh, I mean, when Uber came out,

there were a lot of these like Uber for cookies. Yeah, yeah. I know there are a million failures. I've been to a MacaCon before. Oh, we're looking for success. Yeah. I mean, I would group all this into kind of the sharing economy stuff as well. So if you look at mobility,

there's cars, bikes, scooters now, e-bikes. outside of that. Let's see. Yeah, that's a good question. For some reason, nothing jumps in my mind. I'm sure it exists, but I think it's just not like a dominant player. Like something massive. Yeah, I can't think of anything massive except for, let's see,

if we go to Asia and China, all the food delivery stuff is rocking and rolling there. Same here, actually. I mean, there's Uber Bates and DoorDash. So I think that's working well. There's some storage companies that may do well. But yeah, yeah. There's nothing to the, I mean, if we try to compare it to Uber, I think it's going to be very hard.

Right. But actually, I'm, yeah, I'm so wrong. Because, like, Google wasn't the first search engine. So it's definitely not about being first. Yes, yes, exactly. So, yeah, never mind. All right. next question is

Fador Peretzky. They ask, has YC's views or have YC's views changed on cryptocurrency, blockchain-related startups since Coinbase, and their Coinbase is YC company. Right. So has it changed? I think we've learned a lot more just because there's more activity in the space. I think every partner probably has a different viewpoint of it.

For me, personally, I'm super excited about what's going to on. I think in general people should be excited when a lot of smart people are working on something diligently. And I think there's a lot of tools and stuff like that still to be built for this to take off. But if I try to game out how far this could go, I just think the possibilities are limitless. So the stuff that excites me are when you look at countries, cities or countries in which there are bad currencies or just bad financial infrastructure, I think these are obvious places where blockchain and crypto can help a lot and move them forward, if not even leapfrog, maybe other countries.

And then similarly, in those countries, usually there's also issues with property rights and stuff like that. So I've talked to folks in Greece and places in South America where the concept of who owns land, like each piece of land is almost non-existent. It's somewhere in a drawer maybe in pencil and paper, but even then who knows if that's real. And so I think if any of these countries or cities are serious about it, they could leapfrog, you know, centralized services and just put it onto the blockchain. And wouldn't it be cool if you do that, not only, well, one is just identifying who owns property. Like that would drive, I think, economic growth in itself because it would incentivize people to actually do stuff. But on top of that is increasing the number of transactions that can happen. So even in America, trying to buy property or exchange property is extremely hard.

It's extremely expensive. And it seems to be unnecessarily so. And so anyway, I think like land registries, is an example of something I would be super excited about to see happen. Is that the DAP you're building? No. I don't building is just something very simple. Is it just like you're building a blog?

Yes, almost. It's like a Python tutorial. Almost exactly that. Sending myself fake tokens. I mean, it's on the, yeah, it's, yeah. But the thing that comes to mind for me with crypto and blockchain is, I think there's a lot of skepticism because of what's being built right now.

But I actually think that what's being built now are the right things being built in the sense that one, it's such a new technology that there are still so many issues, potential security issues and putting the wrong types of smart contracts on there. And so now you see a slew of consultants and also companies doing security audits. And we've just invested in a couple of companies that are building AI to help ensure better security and ensure that the economies don't go out of whack and stuff like that. And so I think doing playful things and building playful apps is actually the right way to help develop the ecosystem because you don't want, I think, super serious things on there without all of this stuff. being built already. Right. One of the things that we talked about earlier was, I think it's super, I think for this to go anywhere as well, we need UX people and product people.

Right now it is just way too hard for somebody to use these staffs. Do you know what the DAUs for adapts are? Try a guess. I'm guessing it's really small. 10,000. Wow. Okay. That was pretty good.

I don't know the exact number now, but the last time I read it, it was like around 10,000. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I just know, like, how much of a pain in the house metamask is. Yes. And you're like, come on. And you got to install it and then you got to, you know, move money to it and all this stuff.

So, yeah, I think that needs to be solved before this goes mainstream. And I, but the nice thing is all these things are solvable. Yeah. It just needs to be built. And with due time, it'll be built. And we're more than happy to help. accelerate this by investing in startups who are building this stuff. And the other thing is also, I think, more of a PRM branding thing.

I just think the word blockchain has been thrown around so many times that people don't fully understand what it means. For sure. And so there's a bit of an education. I sort of think that when it goes mainstream, we don't need to use the word blockchain, per se, just like we don't use the word database to explain. Facebook, yeah, no, like my parents don't know what Ajax is. Yeah.

It's not important. Yes, exactly. You just need to tell them what it does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's ultimately it's the product. Yes. But I think with so many smart people working on it, it seems highly unlikely that something won't come out of it.

Yeah, to hope. So, cool, probably related to that question. Mnav asks, what type of companies is YC seeing more of for this batch? We've seen a lot more applications on the crypto and blockchain front. So super excited about that. We continue to see more and more applications on AI, particular machine learning and deep learning, and the applications for it across so many fields now. And so that's exciting.

I don't think we've seen anything where we've seen complete automation yet of anything, really. But it's kind of cool that we're building tools and stuff like that to help doctors, people in the field doing work and stuff like that. And what else are we seeing? Biotech. We're seeing lots of those, which is exciting, particularly the intersection of software and biology. And then also we just launched our YC bioprogram, which all the companies go through

the three-month program that all the other startups go through. But it's targeted towards people or companies that are still in the lab research phase. And so the, and we're focused on what sub area right now, which is health span and longevity. And so we've seen a lot of those and we're really excited about that. Do you have a strong opinion on how long you think you're going to live? I don't know. I hope for a long time. I would like to live over 100, I guess.

Okay. Or whatever the current life expectancy is, which is lower than 100. I mean it's like 78 or something. Yeah, something like that. I mean, I try to do all the things to make sure I'm healthy and sane. But I've, you know, I don't do any drugs or anything to make myself go. No caloric restriction. Oh, so, I mean, I've tried doing that and I didn't notice any specific change other than like a little bit of weight loss.

Yeah. But I actually go back and forth on that a little bit, trying it out. Oh, really? So I do the whole, like I've done in three, six months spans the whole 18, don't eat for 18 hours. And actually, like the first week is kind of hard. It's just like probably any diet you go on. It's like the first week is kind of hard, but it's actually pretty simple. Yeah.

And I haven't done the whole fast for like 48 hours thing, though. Have you? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's fine. Like, you feel better? You feel fine. You get used to it.

I mean, the first, like, by the end of the first day, you really are starting to get hungry. And then you push through it and then you could go like another day or two and be totally fine. I mean, but also my body fat isn't like 1%. Right. So maybe if I was like that skinny, it would be different. Yeah. But yeah, I'm similar to you. I've tried everything out.

I know when I do the intermittent fasting or whatever, I can be leaner. Yes. But the selling point is that you're going to live longer. So it's just like hard to feel a difference. And like ultimately with all this stuff, I'm just kind of like, man, you got to live. Yeah. I want to hang out with my friends and like have a beer. Correct.

Yeah. So I also want to make it to 100 over. But I don't know. We'll see. We got some time. Yeah. I want to make it pretty far and still have an active mind. I think that's probably most important for most people is just having an active mind still.

Yeah. Yeah. It seems like the further we can push the quality of life, the happier we're going to be overall. Because it's not really about, like, yeah, a lot of people lose it well before 78. Right. So cool. All right. Next question.

Yaha Elam Rani asks, what are the best marketing strategies for a year one B2C startup? So the best ones are always the unpaid ones. I think, I mean, this is almost a cop-out, but if you build a product that people love, they're going to talk about it. And that's the best way to grow. I think, technically speaking, there are all the things you can do, content marketing, which you're an expert in. So maybe you can talk more about that. And there are all the tactical things. If you're a consumer product and there, if people are coming to your website and no one's signing up or anything, you know, one of the things that, you know, one of the things that, you know,

that this seems like countertune advice, but is to just put a phone number on there. And people still want to call. People still like to talk to people. Surprise. I never installed the drift or intercom on a product until last year. People use it all the time. I mean, it should be obvious because it's like successful company.

They use it all the time. Yep. Yeah. So having a chat on there, putting a phone number on there, it's actually a good thing because if, No one's signing up. At least you can talk to these people and figure out what it is that they want or what's going wrong. So finding just easy ways for people with contact you is also another way.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would ditto the content marketing. I would say don't waste your time if you're not going to make something good. Because it's really easy to get on the content marketing treadmill and be like, oh man, we just got to like bang out this stuff, put something out every week. And if you look at like the analytics on YC content, it's like a power law with like the stuff that gets the most attention is definitely not linear. And even just the things I'm sure with you as well, like the things you work on what like people talk to you about, you're like, dude, I did that article in like two days.

And three years later you're talking to me about this thing. The ones with the least amount of effort, you get the most views. It's crazy. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, maybe you should just. write like silly pithy tweets. It would be a thought leader.

Yeah. Do lists still work well? Because one of the top posts is that essential advice list, I think. Yeah, that works well. I mean, we couldn't replicate that. Sure. Essential YC advice post, because that was an aggregation of posts over time. People like lists, people like book lists.

but you also want to think like why are the people even reading it? Like we can with with a lot of our content, we could get more attention by interviewing like YouTube celebrities, but to what end? Yeah. I was talking to someone who watches the channel and they were like, oh, that's cool. Like I like all your like science and tech videos. Like what's why Combinator? And it's like, oh, shit.

So if you're like not getting them all the way through the door, it's, yeah, especially when you're tiny and like you don't have a full-time person making stuff. Yes. So yeah, I would just figure out like what actually works for you and like focus on doing a good job of it rather than just mailing it in. Sure. Because that that stuff is I've never had luck with. Yeah. Do you think that it's articles that work best? I guess maybe it's depending on the product or do you think podcast, videos, like what form, what medium works well?

Yeah. I think people still undervalue the ability to write clearly. There aren't that many people that can write well. So if you can get someone who can write well specifically in a niche and then get a channel to engage with it like HN, you can get a ton of traffic because people can consume the entirety, for the most part, consume the entirety of the content. Whereas with the podcast, like you have to be like hardcore like podcaster or YouTuber. YouTube works pretty well.

Our YouTube works pretty well when we cut it up into clips. Right. But if you look at the retention, like it's like anything. Like there's a huge amount of drop off. Right. Whereas with the articles, it's easier to do. Right. But I find that like I don't always have a great thing to write about.

And the podcast is a much easier way to like keep consistent. Are there, not to make this into a podcast about content marketing, but this is to me intriguing. Are there like blogs or like what companies do you feel like do content marketing really well? I would break it apart into different like categories. Actually, I think like not to, you know, blow YC's like on trumpet, but I think PG did a great job. I think like YC is actually like one of the best content marketing companies. ever, except they would never say that. But like HN and PG essays are content marketing.

Sure. I think on the companies, I think like 37 signal, Base Camp does a really good job. Those guys have like established themselves as like thought leaders, but also make content that's pretty relevant. And they're, they're gutsy enough to have an opinion, whereas a lot of people aren't. Sure.

Strong opinions matter and probably get more views. Yeah. especially when it's contrarian, right? So they exist in the software space, but they've pushed pretty hard to be kind of independent. In a similar way, like indie hackers did quite well for that.

So I think that like that stripe acquisition made a lot of sense because people connect to Cortland. I think Intercom has done a really good job. But I mean, honestly, like I pay attention to a lot of people on YouTube because I think like for the most part, like Silicon Valley still doesn't understand how big it is.

Oh yeah. And like just the amount of like pure traffic and consumption. It's a rabbit hole. It's insane. I found myself watching some weird videos after two or three hours. Yeah, yeah. Totally. You're just like one after the next, after the next, after the next, after the next.

And you're like, so we did a podcast with Casey Nistap. And like he gets more views a week than almost any TV show. And you're just like, what? This guy like rides a boosted board around. And then you find out that he's like representing a significant. percentage of boosted sales. Just this one dude in New York. And he's super talented.

And that's like a lifetime of work and a ton of creative energy. But it works really well. Like if you can find someone like that. So yeah. And I think also, but then like on the SEO side, like I think nerd wallet has done a great job. Oh right. Like they have all those like best credit card type things. And it's not like spammy.

Yeah. So yeah. We did a whole content marketing podcast actually. Oh, we should like to. With, with, um, yeah, first round in,

Andrews and Horwitz. Oh, cool. Yeah, so we're like, oh, that's right. I wasn't coming about. That's good.

All right. Uh, next question. Yaha Elam Rani asks, what would you say to a founder from a third world country where there is a big lack

in tech talents and you can't compete with big corporations due to a lack of resources in terms of hiring. So the way to always get around this is to seem more exciting than these big corporations.

And one way is if you're technical, let's just build the product yourself and start getting users. And when you start growing and you start getting revenue, you can probably go poach these people. I always think that in a big company, there's always like a fellow entrepreneur in there, somewhere, stuck somewhere. But if you're not technical, it's a little bit harder.

But there are enough SaaS tools out there these days. webley and all these things where you can just patch together, I think, something and get something out there and iterate a bit to the point where you can also get users and

revenue. And I even see today, like engineers, like real engineers, they're sort of embarrassed to do it, but they have to do it and they'll just put up a Shopify site first. And they totally hate it because they're like, I can do this much better if I can customize it myself. And I have to pay the but in reality, like, that's how you're going to get your first few users quickly, is doing that. And so once you do that, then again, you can go through the same cycle of trying to go find people to join you with something that looks exciting.

Yeah. I mean, I would encourage people with, with like, sales aptitudes to get people to pay them. Because if you're good at sales, you're probably good at convincing people to think that your product is good before it exists. Yep. and only once they give you money, do you know they really want it? Yes. I've made that mistake before. All right. Aspiring Angel asks, what's the best way for investors interested in startup, Cedar Angel funding to get started?

And how does location affect that process? So I think these days it's really easy to get started. I think one place you can go is we have a startup investor school that we held. few weeks back that one of the partners here, Jeff Ralston, did an amazing program with it. It's all on YouTube. And it's all on YouTube. Yep. And so I would watch all of those a couple times.

And then another thing to do is there are, like we said earlier, there's a lot of online communities where people are making things. And so it's just start hanging out there and talking to founders and seeing how they think. And more importantly, if not most importantly, is using the products. and figuring out, you know, developing hypotheses on, is this going to get big? How could this get big? You know, where could this go? And then finally, just contacting the founders.

I think founders, especially when they're starting off, no one's really talking to them that much. And so I think if you reach out to them, I think some of them, some percentage of them will be more than happy to start talking to you. Yeah. What about when you start talking to a founder? And say you're even talking to a YC founder. founder, and you feel like the price is high? I would say is if you're doing early stage investing, price should not be really an issue because in venture business, it's the exit that counts.

And you shouldn't be investing, I think, in a company that you don't think is actually going to do well to whatever standard it is. like it doesn't have to be a billion dollars, but it's whatever standard you want it to be. And honestly, like at the end of the day, valuation is supply and demand. And that is what drives some of those valuations. And so sometimes you just have to pay up to get involved. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Last question. So Adora, you've been at YC now for two and a half years, roughly. How has your view of startups and the world in general change since then? So despite all the horrible stories in the news, I have actually become much more optimistic about life in the world and startups in general. I think we're at YC. We're sitting in a pretty privileged position of being able to spend a lot of our time thinking about problems, talking with founders who are trying to solve these problems, and then seeing all these new cool technologies that they're creating. that I certainly couldn't do myself.

And so I think when I think about if just some of these people do well, like the world can change for the better. And so, yeah, so I'm just optimistic, I guess, more optimistic. But what about yourself? I'm in complete agreement. I mean, I think that it's like it's too easy if you read the news to believe that everything is black and white. And yeah, there are, I didn't quite realize it until I was at YC that like people want to treat Silicon Valley broadly and YC specifically as kind of like the Yankees.

And so it sort of it sort of doesn't matter what you do. They're always going to be like haters out there. But seeing people come in like specifically when they're just like they're building, you know, like artificial wounds and like all this crazy stuff. that's going to be the future. And it's super exciting. So, yeah, I mean, my personal strategy is just, like, not pay attention to stuff. Yeah. And, like, talk to people who are building things.

Yeah. You know what is really somewhat indicative of this is the scooters. Because the scooters, like, when I got one, I fell in love with it. Really? Yeah, I just, like, this could change mobility within a city. Not just scooters, but bikes and Uber and all these other, an avian, stuff like that. But then when it started taking off, people just started making fun of it. Right.

What is the San Francisco thing and like ruining everything? And everyone looks like dorks riding them. But then the critics, I think, started, some of them anyway. I think started riding these scooters. And they're like, oh, it's actually like, I can see. I can see why this could be a thing. And so just by using it and being part of it. And so I think there are some of these barriers, maybe a week, that are dropping.

Well, I think a lot of companies and products have done a bad job at making people feel included. Yes, I agree. People react strongly when they feel like they don't have any agency. And so, you know, ironically, right, like people will be tweeting something about how terrible something in Silicon Valley is and how people are terrible. And then you meet the people here and they're just like, I don't know, I just like want to make something cool.

Yeah. So there's this very weird divide that's kind of just in people's heads. Yes. And I think in this same age, it's everyone's responsibility to know, to at least try to predict the reaction of anything you put out there. Yeah. Because, you know, the world is, the world is, you know, at where it is now for better or worse.

And so it's just being very thoughtful of what you put out there is, it's actually important. Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah, overwhelmingly positive. And I think technology is much bigger than a little app on your phone. Yes. Keeping that in mind, I think it keeps you excited. Yes, yes. Cool. All right. Well, thanks so much for making time. Thank you so much. Have fun. All right. Thanks for listening. So as always, you can find the transcript and the video at blog.combinator.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.