Harj started working with YC in W10 (my batch), and even 3 batches later, he still responds instantly to our emails and hops on skype whenever we need advice. Truly a stand-up guy and someone we really trust.
I’ve noticed that technical founders especially have realized that local small business will pay you money for products
This is true. They also pay a fair chunk of change with a very short sales cycle (even no-touch in some cases -- though Hubspot and Groupon certainly prove you can do well with higher touch sales), and they're not unwilling to be billed monthly for software/services which demonstrably add value to the business.
On the last picture on the page, I think there should be a bubble coming out of pg's mouth, "One of you has betrayed me. Judas, did you add unnecessary features before launch?"
> With all this experience, I asked about when he launches his next startup, what will he do differently? “I would definitely work on a problem or product that I personally was interested in and meant something to me. When I was working on Auctomatic, we bought all this stuff from China and tried to trade it on Ebay [Auctomatic was an auction and marketplace management system] to try and understand how power sellers work and the problems they faced. But it wasn’t the same as making something that I really resonated with."
So, so true. Trying to take this lesson to heart this time around, and build something I want to use everyday.
I hadn't heard much about them before last week - when we launched http://lanyrd.com/ on TechCrunch they conducted an interview with us that same day (through olark, our live-help chat widget) and posted their own story, which was well written and had new information not covered by the TC story: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/31/lanyrd-launches-to-cha...
Yes, although I found the formatting somewhat annoying. It's basically an interview, so rather than trying to make it prose or an "article", with quotes and explanatory text, a simpler interview format would have been much easier to read:
TheNextWeb: Blah blah blah?
Harj: Foo bar baz.
Also there are a number of spelling/grammar mistakes. I think it's normally common practice to correct these in an article, unless you're really just delivering a prepared statement verbatim.
"At our stage companies fail because ... the founders don’t get along"
It seems that this is a serious but less talked about problem to watch out for. Anyone have insight into how to avoid one of the less visible mistakes beyond the obvious know your co-founders well and set expectations upfront?
Only start a company with people you've known for a while and worked on projects with before.
If you don't know anyone like that, you can manufacture them. Find good people and try working with them on projects that are not the startup. College and (especially) grad school tend to create these situations, but you can also make them happen deliberately, e.g. by collaborating on some open source project.
The chances of us interviewing a team of founders who'd built some fairly well regarded open source software together would be close to 100%.
Things like Node Knockout and Rails Rumble are a great way of identifying potential problems relatively quickly. From experience, it's high-stress and you're more irritable than normal because you haven't been getting enough sleep. It's very easy to get annoyed, even when you're doing it with the people you work with all of the time. You discover who you can work with well and who you can't pretty quickly.
I found my team by hanging around the CS lab at UC Irvine and reaching out to the ACM club pres at CSUF a while back. I am a business major that previously had two non-tech startups and I needed hackers in my corner for a project. Luckily, the help found turned into ongoing collaboration with a small diverse group. It helps that we are all upperclass/grad students that have previous experience. We all offer something different to the team and we tend not to argue so much because of this.
When PG says to try projects before a jumping into a company he’s saying: you should date your girl for a while before moving in together.
This generalization seems to ignore teams who work together over time - say a year or three - and while bootstrapping. Have you never seen a data point in that direction?
Teams thrown together for the sole purpose of YC seem likely to have poor records. But YC is a very, very special case. Bootstrapping takes time and effort that either deepens relationships or destroys them. I don't see a middle ground there, actually.
Have you ever looked at how long a team has known each other as a predictor of success/failure? It seems your philosophy assumes more is better. Is there any data to support that belief? What's the record for spouses?
A founding team who's already been working together for years or survived the bootstrapping experience match, or at least approximate, the criteria pg's looking for – a cohesive team that can handle stress well. My take is that the advice he gives is suited for people looking to start a brand new company during yc, not those who have already started and are applying to yc.
More importantly, I don't think pg's saying that length of relationship is a deciding factor. Rather, he's highlighting that you need to know you work well with your cofounders and the relationship – new or old – won't fall apart under stress and trial.
