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Bio and Headshot. Michael Seibel works at Y Combinator as a Group Partner and Managing Director of YC early stage. He joined YC in 2013 as a Part-time Partner and in 2014 as a full-time Group Partner. Michael also serves on the board of two YC companies, Reddit and Dropbox.
By Geoff Ralston and Michael Seibel. · Advice. A lot of the advice we give startups is tactical; meant to be helpful on a day to day or week to week basis. But some advice is more fundamental. We’ve collected here what we at YC consider the most important, most transformative advice for startups.
In this post I’m going to cover product development cycle fundamentals that I learned to help solve all of the problems above. This will help you rapidly iterate, measure, test, and improve your product while fully engaging your team. This is not that same as shipping an MVP.
As a founder you’ll have to pitch your startup countless times. To be effective, your pitch has to be clear and concise. In this post I’ve condensed the pitch creation process to answering seven questions. If you can answer all seven questions succinctly you’ll be well ahead of the curve. The Seven Questions.
My answer to why you should start a startup is simple: there is a certain type of person who only works at their peak capacity when there is no predictable path to follow, the odds of success are low, and they have to take personal responsibility for failure (the opposite of most jobs at a large company).
Stating the typical valuations in post money terms, YC companies are now raising at $6.5m-$18m valuations. Thanks to Craig Cannon, Geoff Ralston, Jon Levy, and Kat Manalac for reading drafts of this post. As YC grows, founders are wondering how it’s improved over time.
Once you have your first users of any kind, you have a startup. That being said, you still need someone with the technical skills to ship the MVP. Once you’ve put your MVP together, there’s a ton of startup advice to follow. Here are a few resources I recommend: – YC’s Essential Advice. – Paul Graham’s Essays.
As an early stage investor I want to help startups succeed. Whether or not YC invests in the company, I still want to offer any helpful advice or introductions that I can. If you email me - or anyone, really - your job is to succinctly communicate your situation and how I can help. Every day I receive hundreds of emails.
My best friend and I started and ran a club in college, and it was a resounding success. Our skills are complementary, and we’re both very driven and entrepreneurial, having each run our own side projects. However, our underlying friendship suffers when we disagree about product and company decisions, as we’re both very stubborn and hardheaded.
By Michael Seibel · Advice When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee.
