📰 Summary (use your own words)

What makes someone successful is that they are good at executing and persistence. And to be able to spot that is the key to the YC interview process.

✍️ Notes

• Questions:
  • How to to ace your YC interview?
  • How it is mistaken to believe that the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people
  • And how these two things are interrelated
• Paul's job is essentially a billionaire scout, and he claims after all these years, he still don't have one fast rule, and if he did have a rule it is definitely not seeing how well they exploit people
  • YC looks for founders that can identify and make what a group of users wants
  • YC's motto is "make something people want" #quotes
  • But in a market economy it is hard to define whether the "want" is real or not
• ==The challenge is identifying if there is a path to a huge market==
• A larval market is one that is small but growable
  • Apple when it was founded is an example of this
    • Not many people owned personal computers when Apple was founded in 1976, but today that market is massive
  • Founders who are living in the future can identify a want that more people will have as time progresses
  • These markets can also be small in geography, the need is localized in an area but have the potential to spread globally
• All this needs to be sparked by a seed user group
  • One of the most important aspect YC interviews will dig into
  • Who are the first users
  • How do you know they want this?
  • If you can prove the want with prototypes that is being spread by the word of mouth then you might have hit on something good
• YC doesn't need to be excited like the founders and their users, because that doesn't prove anything
  • They need to be able to see the founders are
  • ==They rely on the founders to explain to them who the users/market is==
• YC interviews are short, but it is the questions that help the investors to understand the value
  • Through random access
• So to do well in interviews you have to be able to answer to questions well
  • Answer honestly without prefabricated bullshit
  • Be honest with competitors, because competitors rarely kill startups, poor execution does
• The most important motivator of them all is - ==to be interested in what you are building==
  • All billionaires share one thing in common, and that is they could have stopped sooner
  • What keeps them working is not the money, but the product itself
  • There is nothing else they'd rather do