How Do You Know if You Have an Unfair Advantage?

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You have to have an unfair advantage that explains why you're going to grow quickly. 99 % of the people we fund at y c do not fall into that category. If this is your only company advantage, then it's one of the weakest ones that you can have. Andi has to be related to growth. So there's five different types, and companies do not have all of them. Really great ones. We'll go through two examples a but, ah, you want at least one.

We've cut down the first week of Startup School lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.

First, a lecture from Kevin Hale. Kevin is a YC partner and a cofounder of Wufoo. His lecture is about How to Evaluate Startup Ideas.

Then, a lecture from Eric Migicovsky. Eric is a YC partner and the founder of Pebble. His lecture is about How to Talk to Users.

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/

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Topics

00:00 - Intro

00:43 - Kevin Hale on How to Evaluate Startup Ideas

2:04 - How can I predict if an investor will like my idea?

2:50 - A startup idea is a hypothesis

5:44 - Problem

6:59 - Solution

8:16 - Insight

8:57 - Unfair advantages

13:45 - Two beliefs about startups

15:19 - Eric Migicovsky on How to Talk to Users

17:36 - Three common errors people make when talking to users

20:20 - Five questions to ask in a user interview

20:28 - What's the hardest part about doing the thing you're trying to solve?

21:02 - Tell me about the last time that you encountered this problem

21:22 - Why was this hard?

23:08 - What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this problem?

24:10 - What don't you love about the solutions you've already tried?

25:21 - Three stages in which talking to users is extremely beneficial

26:07 - Idea stage

30:40 - Prototype stage

33:41 - Iterating towards product market fit