When you hit break even, there's this magical moment where you realize, wait a second, like, I can just generate money from my users. And your users become secondary. The only group of users who are harder to understand than users are investors. For many people, investors are this like really confusing group and it's like, well, I'd rather fight the user fight than the investor fight.
Michael Seibel is a partner and the CEO of YC. He cofounded Justin.tv, which was in the winter 2007 batch and Socialcam, which was in the winter 2012 batch.
In this episode Michael comments on five of his essays. The essays are: Why Should I Start a Startup?, One Order of Operations for Starting a Startup, The Real Product Market Fit, Users You Don’t Want, and Why Does Your Company Deserve More Money?
Michael’s on Twitter @mwseibel.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
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Topics
0:00 - Intro
0:42 - Why Should I Start a Startup?
2:00 - Three types of people: people highly motivated when working for themselves, people that could succeed starting a startup or within a big company, and people that could succeed within a big company.
6:00 - How do you decide what type of person you are?
7:30 - Identify bias in advice givers
10:30 - Peer advice becomes less valuable during college
14:40 - One Order of Operations for Starting a Startup
15:40 - People aren’t taught how to find ideas
17:20 - Find a particular problem that you’re passionate about
20:55 - Find some friends and brainstorm a solution
23:20 - Build an MVP
25:55 - Two failed orders of operations for starting a startup
29:57 - The Real Product Market Fit
30:57 - Why do many founders think they have product market fit when they don’t?
35:42 - Building a successful company is not a single variable problem
37:27 - Socialcam didn’t hit product market fit
38:37 - Justin.tv had $1M in profit before reaching product market fit
42:27 - Some companies take a long time
42:55 - Users You Don’t Want
44:25 - The spectrum of how users are using your product
45:55 - Users that take a lot of customer support time
48:50 - Don’t let the hijack users control the product roadmap
49:31 - Why Does Your Company Deserve More Money?
50:31 - A team, a product, and an office are all just a means to an end
51:31 - If you don’t really deserve money, what is an alternate path to create leverage?
53:16 - Breaking even at Justin.tv was a moment of infinite clarity
55:31 - Series A program and leverage
