Takeaways from Y Combinator Startup School

I recently signed up for Y Combinator Startup School and spent many hours here so far. It’s incredible. YC partners doing Stanford lectures on MVP, getting traction, small teams, sales, 30 second / 2-minute pitches, slide decks, and/or written transcripts or essays. They are terrific passive watching videos or audio e.g. going for a walk, a run, doing chores, holding a screaming baby. A few highlights so far below!

YC Essential Startup Advice 

(1) Launch now
(2) Build something people want
(3) Write code – talk to users
(4) Pre-product market fit – do things that don’t scale: remain small/nimble
(5) Don’t scale your team/product until you have built something people want

Before the startup or 43-minute Stanford Lecture

(1) Startups are so weird that if you trust your instincts, you'll make a lot of mistakes. If you know nothing more than this, you may at least pause before making them.
(2) Be an expert on your users and the problem you're solving for them.
(3) Don’t neglect the one thing that's actually essential: making something people want.
(4) Get yourself to the leading edge of some technology — to cause yourself, as Paul Buchheit put it, to "live in the future." When you reach that point, ideas that will seem to other people uncannily prescient will seem obvious to you.

How to plan MVP 

(1) Focus on a small set of initial users and their highest order problems, and then ignore the rest until later. You should have a vision of everyone, you should have an MVP small.
(2) The user’s job is to give you problems.
(3) I have this saying: “hold the problem you're solving tightly, hold the customer tightly, hold the solution you’re building loosely.”
(4) Once you get anything out in the world, the momentum to keep anything going, is extremely strong.

 How to design a better pitch deck 

(1) “Fucking Screenshots: Let’s talk about screenshots. I usually hate screenshots in Demo Day presentations. Screenshots are almost always illegible, complex, and non-obvious. They break all 3 rules! The text in most interfaces are too small (not legible). Most interfaces do multiple things (not simple). Most screenshots take longer than a glance to understand (not obvious). They are the worst.”