Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (YC)

Dalton Caldwell is Managing Director and Group Partner at Y Combinator. Prior to YC, he was the co-founder and CEO of imeem (acquired by MySpace in 2009) and the co-founder and CEO of App.net. During his time at YC, he’s advised more than 35 YC unicorns, including DoorDash, Amplitude, Webflow, and Retool, and has worked across 21 different YC batches. He’s also racked up more than 6,500 office hours with founders. In our conversation, we discuss: • Why founders need to adopt the mindset “Just don’t die” • The most common reason startups fail • When to pivot, and characteristics of a good pivot • The concept of “tar pit ideas” and examples of bad startup ideas • Why investors say no to startups • The importance of market size in investment decisions • The pitfalls of founders over-delegating • Effective ways to talk to customers • 20 ideas Dalton is looking to fund — Brought to you by: • Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments: https://www.geteppo.com/ • Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny • Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace: https://coda.io/lenny Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-1000-yc-startups Where to find Dalton Caldwell: • X: https://twitter.com/daltonc • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daltoncaldwell/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Dalton’s background (04:41) The value of simple advice (07:04) Dalton’s advice: “Just don’t die” (08:39) Knowing when to stop (11:45) Deciding to pivot (14:26) Characteristics of a good pivot (17:53) Knowing when to pivot (19:03) Zip’s journey and finding a market (21:22) Why Dalton says to “Move towards the mountains and the desert” (23:45) Tar pit ideas (26:49) Understanding why investors say no (29:14) The importance of market size (32:16) Avoiding over-delegation and hiring senior people too early (36:43) Why startups fail (40:30) Effectively talking to customers (45:17) Examples of startups hustling to talk to customers (48:01) Patterns of successful startups (52:05) YC’s Request for Startups (55:37) Early days of Silicon Valley (01:05:33) Contrarian corner: growth hacking for early startups (01:09:28) Failure corner (01:11:15) Closing thoughts (01:12:22) Lightning round Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Seeing everything people apply to YC with, people all kind of have the same idea.

• 0:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  One of these themes is simple pragmatic advice. Sell shit, make money.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  One of my mantras is just don't die. Being coached and being reminded of the fundamentals and basics puts you in the right mindset.

• 0:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  You have this concept of tar pit ideas.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Seems like an unsolved problem. You'll get all this positive feedback from the world and people have been starting that startup since the 90s.

• 0:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Recently, you put out a request for startups, 20 categories of ideas that YC wants to fund.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  We're trying to mix up some of the information diet about what kind of ideas people might be contemplating. They aren't currently.

• 0:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  A lot of people say you're the king of the pivot.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  A good pivot is like going home. It's warmer. It's closer to something that you're an expert at.

• 0:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Are there other patterns you find across startups that do well?

• 0:43Speaker 00

  There's a lot of founders that come this close to it all being over and through sheer will, kind of just keep it going.

• 0:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Dalton Caldwell. Dalton is Managing Director and Group Partner at Y Combinator, where he's worked for over 10 years across 21 different YC batches, including working closely in the earliest days of Instacart, Retool, Brex, Deal, DoorDash, Webflow, Replit, Amplitude, Whatnot, Razer Pay, and 20 other unicorns. Prior to Y Combinator, Dalton was the co-founder and CEO of iMeme, which was acquired by MySpace, and co-founder and CEO of App.net, which was an early ads-free competitor to Twitter. Dalton has seen and worked with more startups than nearly any human alive. And in our conversation, we get incredibly tactical and deep on the startup journey.

• 1:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  Why it all comes down to simply not losing hope and not letting your startup die? What to do when your startup is struggling and how to know when it is time to give up? What makes a great pivot and signs its time to pivot? Had actually talked to customers. Why every single startup goes through a point where they feel like all hope is lost? Why investors say no to startups? What most often leads to startups failing? Why you need to avoid overdelegating early on? Plus, startup ideas that you should avoid and also 20 ideas Dalton is looking to fund. Also, so many great stories and lessons. This episode is action-packed. With that, I bring you Dalton Caldwell after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

• 2:22Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 3:07Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 3:49Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 4:34Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 4:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Dalton, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks so much, Lenny. I'm really excited to talk to you today. It's gonna be great.

• 4:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  So to prep for this podcast interview, I asked a bunch of founders that worked with you during YC, what advice you shared with them along the journey that was most transformative to the way they think about product, the way they think about building their startup, the way they operate. And there's a bunch of themes that emerged, and I'm going to touch on a number of these themes. One of these themes is just how often you get to like very simple pragmatic advice and how much of your message is just like, sell shit, make money, don't run out of money. Why do you think founders need to hear this advice, which is seemingly simple and obvious?

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Have you ever seen in NBA basketball or college basketball where they have the coach mic up and it shows what they're actually saying in the huddle? You ever listen to what they actually are saying? They're like, okay, we need to really focus and get the ball and win this game. Like, if you actually listen to what the greatest, smartest, most successful athletes are talking about, like if you listen to what Tiger Woods is saying to his caddy, it all sounds like pretty mundane stuff. They're not, it's not like what Tiger Woods is talking about with his caddy is some, you know, impossible to decipher jargon. It's like,

• 6:02Speaker 00

  yeah, you really need to keep your head down on this one. It's things like that. And I think the reason this is true is that even if you're the best in the world, being coached and being reminded of the fundamentals and basics is what puts you in the right mindset and that you already know everything, right? You're at the top of your game if you make it to the elite levels of being a startup founder, basically doing anything that's really hard psychologically. And so, yeah, one of my mantras is just, just don't die. Just keep your startup going.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Just keep going. And I say that over and over again. And honestly, that is often what people tell me is the most impactful thing I said. It's not that I said some ninja 5D chess move that they never would have thought of before. It's just the constant affirmation that continuing to keep going and doing high-quality reps is the game.

• 7:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  I know that you'd give a talk that's exactly called that, How Not to Die. Just to pull on this thread a little bit more, what is the general advice you share there for people that also don't want to die?

• 7:14Speaker 00

  The way to summarize that is if you look at all the startup stories that we have at YC and all the companies we funded over all the years, the underlying theme is that rationally, the founder should have given up at some point.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  And so again, let's talk about Airbnb, obviously something you know a lot about. You know, they probably should have shut down like three or four times before they got into YC. It objectively wasn't working. They were basically ruining their lives. They were disappointing their parents. Everything was wrong. And it was a purely irrational act for the founders of Airbnb to keep working on their goofy startup. And so, and again, that's just one story. If you look across the portfolio of YC and non-YC companies, there has to be this irrational, you know, intention to keep going even when the world tells you it's not working and you feel completely defeated.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  And you likely have to go through this many times and have these near-death experiences. And then you get lucky and then you look like an overnight success.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Right? And so that is the theme, that is the summary, and I provide lots of data and lots of stories there. But this is one of those things that the longer I've had this job, the more I really, really believe this is true.

• 8:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  What's your advice, kind of on the flip side of that, where there's a lot of startups, especially these days, that are just super struggling, have been at it for a while, their mental health challenges, they're really, they'd be very sad if they had to shut this thing down, but often it's probably the right move. What's your advice to folks of deciding, okay, it actually does make sense to give up in this case?

• 9:01Speaker 00

  I think this is a nuanced question, and it's hard for me to say something on a podcast that'll actually be useful to people, but here's, here's a couple of thoughts. One, are you still having fun? Do you still enjoy doing what you're doing? Do you enjoy spending time with your co-founders? You know, like, is this actually a fun thing you're doing? And if the answer is, is yes, I would tend to lean on the keep going. And then if it's more of, wow, this is actually profoundly affecting me in a negative way, and my relationships with people in my life, and my team, you know, I don't really want to work with my co-founder anymore, and things like that, then I would lean on the probably don't do it anymore. Something that a lot of the folks that turn it around have in common is they actually

• 9:47Speaker 00

  do love their customers, and they love their product. And again, in the Airbnb story, and you know it really well, but they really liked Airbnb, like, and they liked working with each other, and they liked the first hosts that they met, and they knew all their names. You know what I'm saying? Like, they were actually, they loved their startup, even though it was going bad. And so that's kind of, to me, a signal to keep going, is that you really, really love what you're doing, and the people you're, you're doing it with, and you love your customers, and you love the problem, versus when you're just like, yeah, I could care less about any of those things, I'm just having a bad time. Harder to be encouraging in that situation, you know? And this is a fixable situation, you know, you can make it more like the thing you love, can't you?

• 10:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, this is actually very practical and great advice. Like, this is something people can sense. Okay, am I actually enjoying this? Do I want to keep doing this? Versus like, man, such a drag that I have to keep running this startup.

• 10:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there anything you could say to folks that are just like, I can't stop because it'll feel like I failed?

• 10:50Speaker 00

  If it's really going poorly, or if you're having a really bad time, it's no big deal. No one will remember that you shut down your company probably in 10 years or 20 years. Like, time, as long as you have integrity, as long as you're an honest person, as long as you handle yourself well through good times and bad, people will remember you fondly. And it's, you know, better, we have such a short life. There's only so many years we get to have our careers. Doing something that makes you miserable, and the only reason you're doing it is to avoid losing face, and you know in your heart it's not going to work. I don't know, that seems like a pretty big opportunity cost on literally your life.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  Right?

• 11:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, that's exactly what I tell founders all the time. Life is short. There's no need to force yourself to work on this.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I really like your point of just like, is it still enjoyable? Do you like working with your founders? Kind of following this thread of the struggle train a little bit more. One of the founders that was, that worked with you during YC, his name is Danny Albersen, shared a story how during one of the batches of YC, some, one of the founders raised his hand and asked you, what is wrong with our batch? Everyone is struggling. Nobody is doing well. What have we done? What have we done wrong? And you shared a story about Brex that made everyone feel a little better. Can, does that ring a bell? And if so, can you share that?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  That definitely happened. And I think the story is the story of the winter 17 batch. And in the winter 17 batch, I funded something like, I don't know, 35, 40 companies in my group. So we subset them into groups. So it wasn't like a lot of companies and I knew, I knew all of them really well. And founders can't help but compare themselves with other founders all the time about who's doing well and who's not doing well. And there was this one company in, in my group this batch. It was called Beyond. That was their name at the time. And it was like a VR headset thing from these Stanford dropouts. And they basically showed up to group office hours and were just ashamed. And they're like, our idea is horrible. You know, we might want to shut our company down. This is like really embarrassing.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Like, they just, I had to like beg them to not give up, basically. And if you would have asked people in the batch,

• 13:03Speaker 00

  What the worst company was, I think they would have said this one. Yeah, not because they were like bad people, but it was just like the founders themselves seemed like despondent about how it was going. And then funnily enough, this is in the story too, there was another startup also in my group called Cashew, which was this P to P for the UK, P to P Venmo, excuse me, in the UK. And it was going really poorly also and not growing. And so if you just took this snapshot in time, the middle of the batch of like, who is definitely not doing well? It would clearly have been this beyond company and this cashew company. And so to catch the chase, beyond changed their idea and got really excited about it and renamed to Brex. And this was Brex, which is like a deck of corn.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  And Cashew changed their idea and renamed to something called Retool.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  And so out of my 35 companies, the ones that objectively seemed the worst in terms of like it's everything is going bad, were by far, in retrospect, the most successful companies in that group.

• 14:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow. Wait, so you're saying Brex was a VR headset company?

• 14:14Speaker 00

  They thought it was really high tech. They want to do a really high tech startup. And so they're like, we're going to build a new VR headset. And you know, they were good programmers, but they just didn't know anything about optics or the things you might want to be an expert in to build a headset.

• 14:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, that's an amazing story. It's a great segue to another theme that emerged from talking to founders about advice that you've shared. A lot of people say, tell me, you were kind of the king of the pivot of helping people figure out how to pivot.

• 14:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm curious just what you've seen makes a good pivot.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Usually a successful pivot gets warmer instead of colder from what you're an expert at, and somehow builds on what you learned on the prior idea.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Right. And so in the case of Brex, it was let's, they had worked on a fintech company in Brazil when they were younger. And so I'm like, you need to work more on the thing you know all about and not the thing you know nothing about. And that was what worked for them. In the case of Retool, it was the same thing. They had built similar internal tools, both at their internships as well as for Cashew. They had all these dashboards they built to like operate their Venmo competitor. And so they knew a lot about what to build. In the case of Posthog pivoting into their idea, they knew a lot about analytics and had strong opinions about it. And so it was much closer than what the original idea is.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  In the case of Zip, Rejul knows a lot about a lot of things and

• 15:48Speaker 00

  she knew a lot about like the crazy procurement process at Airbnb because he worked there. And so it was kind of like, a good pivot is like going home, you know? It's warmer, it's closer to something that you, and it never occurred to you that this thing you know all about would be a good idea. Or maybe you consciously, you're like, I don't want to work on this because I'm burnt out on it. Like sometimes you have to, someone, someone has to get over this barrier they have on why they don't want to work on a certain idea.

• 16:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  These are amazing. I like how modest you are. I'm like, oh, here's like a big idea. And then you just give very tactical items to look for. So essentially, a good pivot in your experience is you're getting closer, warmer towards something you have experience, actual experience in. And two, it builds on something you've done. Essentially the core idea of a pivot, right? Where you're like,

• 16:38Speaker 00

  In the, in the example of Segment, which is obviously a really big, successful company, they started with something to tell your professor you were confused in class. It was like software that they sold to universities. And then they ended up pivoting to something kind of like a mixed panel competitor after like two years. And it's because they didn't, they learned about how analytics works running their first idea. Okay. And then no one wanted to adopt their mixed panel competitor. And so they were like, we should make this JavaScript thing that you embed on your website that can send events to multiple endpoints at the same time. So that way people would be willing to try our mixed panel competitor side by side with mixed panels to show that it's better. And then they were like, oh yeah, no one actually wants that. They just want this JavaScript

• 17:22Speaker 00

  to send events to different locations. And so there's no way those founders could have started with the final idea. You get what I mean? There was no universe where they would have made up the idea for segment because they didn't know anything about how analytics worked. But because they were grinding for multiple years and became experts on these things is a side effect of their earlier ideas, they ended up with really good, unique insights.

• 17:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think that's a really important point there is you don't need to necessarily have that experience before you start the company could come from trying to build a company.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 17:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  A big question people are always wondering is like, should I pivot? Like, is this the time to pivot? Is this, should I keep trying this idea? What's your advice there of just like, okay, now you should really be thinking about something else?

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Again, this is one of those where I like to give very bespoke nuanced advice on a case by case basis to the folks in YC. But again, just to give you a preview of how I would think about it. I would look at how many more ideas the founder has on how to make it grow. Like, if it's not going well, and you're out of ideas, that is usually a good time to pivot. But when there's a, you know, you have like half a dozen or a dozen really good growth ideas that you haven't tried yet, eh, try them. Right? Like, eh, give it a shot. Again, in the Airbnb story, right? They, they tried all sorts of stuff, including cereal and conventions. Like, they had a bunch of zany ideas on growth and they didn't run out of them. And so I think when you,

• 18:46Speaker 00

  I think when there's still gas in the tank on an idea, that might be a reason to stay at the course. And when, when, when literally the founder's like, yeah, I don't know, I guess, maybe we should pay influencers or something. When that's, when that's the kind of ideas they're coming up with, eh, that's, that might be a better sign to pivot.

• 19:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  That is incredibly helpful. Coming back to Zip real quick, they went through, I think, six different pivots before they landed on this idea that is now a billion dollar business. Is there anything from that specific journey that you found really interesting? Because they went in so many different directions, like accounting, marketplaces, and...

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think in the example of the Zip founders, they were both such great experts. And, you know, I knew Rejol really well. He actually worked with me at YC as a visiting partner. And so I was, I was really close to Rejol and he'd done this marketplace called Flightcar when he was younger, which was, you know, raised a Series B. It didn't work out, but it was a really cool company. And,

• 19:41Speaker 00

  I had a lot of confidence in his competence on running a business and executing fast and just having great instincts. He really knows the fundamentals. And the problem was they weren't as clear on what market to go into, is still with me. And so I actually suggested he's to do something in their case, and this is very bespoke. But my suggestion was to start by looking at what companies are publicly traded and or owned by private equity that are large and that also are hated by their customers. And to try to intentionally find where there's a knowable

• 20:23Speaker 00

  big market with an incumbent, combined with the software is horrible. And they kind of did that, like they basically found out about all this procurement software and what the state of the art was. And that was, that was the prompt. Again, maybe he told you this, that was, that was basically the process.

• 20:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  He did tell me that. I love that example and piece of advice so much. I don't know why more people don't do this. Basically, find a large incumbent with very low NPS and try to disrupt them. So straightforward.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I can't promise that works for everyone. But again, in the very bespoke situation with Rejul, it worked really well, because he actually knew exactly, once he locked in on that prompt, oh, man, he was, he ran a masterclass. You know, like they did, they did, they did an A plus job. It was really good.

• 21:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Also Lou, his co-founder, credit to him too.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Of course, like, sorry, yeah, we got to give Lou the shout out. Lou did an amazing job. I just didn't know Lou as well before he did YC. But you're right, we got to give Lou the credit.

• 21:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  I was watching your chat with Michael Seibel, talking about pivots, and you, either you or he used this phrase of you want to move towards the mountains and the desert to find the gold of a new startup idea versus the middle of the city, you're unlikely to find gold in the middle of San Francisco. Is there anything along those lines that you, you can share?

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think maybe this pertains into what we see from applications and interviews, which is From where I sit, seeing everything people apply to YC with and what they interview with and whatnot, people don't, people all kind of have the same idea. Like, like, basically, imagine this, imagine your information consumption where you're listening to the same podcast, wink, wink, you're reading the same people on Twitter, you're reading the same blog posts. Basically, you have the same information diet of all these other founders. And your friends are all the same people. Does it seem surprising then that you would all end up with similar startup ideas or similar philosophies on what makes a good startup idea? Of course you are.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  So this is the metaphor on cities is that if you just are following the same principles and have the same information flow into your brain, you're going to come up with the same ideas as everybody else. And so the prompt here is to try to go more off the beaten path, either from your personal experience, like in the case of Brex and Retool or whatnot. You know, there was no one else trying to build marketplaces for Funko Pops. You know, go, go deeper in your own personal interest or experience to find something that just the, your exact peer wouldn't come up with in exactly the same way. And again, the zip example, I don't think other people were trying to build wonky procurement software. That was just, that was not an idea that we saw much of. And so again, the prompt to people is

• 23:12Speaker 00

  try to mix up what your information diet is or what areas of expertise you have and, and mine that well versus just having all the same thoughts as everybody else. And so again, let me give you one more example. A few years ago,

• 23:26Speaker 00

  startups around trucking were super new and fresh because no one was doing them and they worked really well. And then it became completely conventional wisdom to do like trucking related startups. Yeah, I'm not trying to diss anyone, but you'll see things that become fashionable really quickly because someone found success in this unfashionable space and then it becomes fashionable.

• 23:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  This is a good segue to something I definitely want to spend time on, which is you have this concept of tar pit ideas, which are essentially ideas people all kind of gravitate towards and get stuck in and either pivot into and then can't pivot out of or try to pivot out of. And essentially, it's just like consistently bad startup ideas that people continue to try to start. Can you just talk about this? And then what are some worst examples of just like bad startup ideas that people should stop trying to start?

• 24:09Speaker 00

  For people that are familiar with this terminology from us, sometimes they get defensive and don't get what we were saying. So let me, by definition, it is only a tar pit if it seems like it's not.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Like, like if it's just a regular idea that is hard, that is not a tar pit. The, the weird aspect of what we call a tar pit idea is an idea that a lot of people come up with, and then it seems like an unsolved problem, and you get lots of positive feedback for, right? And you have a really good set of arguments that it's a really good startup idea. And that's different than a bad startup idea. You get what I'm trying to say? A bad startup idea is like, I don't know, something that is obviously bad, or something where you just can't get any positive feedback on. But some of the, the most common tar pit would be something like building like an app to coordinate with your friends to decide where to go out at night, or where to meet up with people, which is, which is a really, it's coming from a good

• 25:08Speaker 00

  place, like it's a good idea. If you ask your friends, hey, would you like an app for us to coordinate to hang out more so we can be friends? And they're like, yeah, I would love that. Like you'll, you'll get, you'll get all this positive feedback from the world. And people have been starting that startup since like the 90s.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  And so you can validate it. Like part of being a true tar pit is that you can get good initial validation. Do you get what I mean? And so anyway, and, and honestly, I worked on tar pit ideas myself as a founder, which is a music discovery. This is something I did in my first startup. That was, you know, Music startups are hard and trying to be like, oh, we're going to fix music discovery. This was classic things where you can get lots of positive feedback and even get users to work on those things. But there are aspects of it that make it a very hard idea. So does that make, does that make sense?

• 25:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  Absolutely. I'm also guilty of this. I had the startup called LocalMind that allowed you to talk to people, checked in in various locations around the city on foursquare in Guala back in the day and asked them how's it going? And everyone, when they used it, they're like, holy shit, this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen. I could see what's happening at this bar that I'm about to go to. And then they never use it again.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Do you remember when foursquare clones was all anyone worked on for two years?

• 26:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, they told, they told us foursquare is going to own this. There's no way this idea, your building is going to be its own thing. And now, yeah, foursquare is a B2B business.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. And all the foursquare clones, if they didn't pivot out of doing what they're doing, wouldn't have worked. So anyway, that's, that's a target. It's just something that's super appealing and a lot of people do it. And that you can, you can kind of get validation. And that's why, that's why it's a target. But is it draws you in and you get stuck? Because it seems like it's like a good idea and you get all this positive feedback.

• 26:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Kind of along these lines, I was talking to a founder recently and she's asking me, what causes an investor to say no to you when you're trying to raise money from them? And I know there's, every investor has a very different perspective on what turns them off to a startup. But is there anything that you find is just like, here, if you do these things, investors will say no?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Maybe my best advice here is for founders to put themselves in the shoes of investors and just imagine what their life is like and how if you were in their shoes, you would make decisions. And so, given this framework, a lot of investors just don't make that many investments. And as per what we talked about earlier, life is short. And so there's lots of things that an investor that in their hearts thinks is like pretty good. And like, oh, like, I like this person and I like their pitch. But I only am going to do a few investments. And so even though I really like a lot about this, I'm going to say no. And I often think that founders think that there's some secret truth that's being

• 27:52Speaker 00

  held from them on why someone says no, or like they're, you know, like they want more feedback. I need feedback. That's like, wow, the feedback is we didn't want to invest. And it really is just that. And so I think if you put yourself in the shoes of an investor of like, hey, I only could do a few of these a year. I have a very limited budget. They're really just trying to pick the things that they're either personally most excited about, or things that they think can be truly phenomenally big in some way. Or, you know, again, I know you do investments too. So it's, it's, it's that you only get so many shots as an investor. And so anything that doesn't seem like this is the one, this is the one I want to do is

• 28:34Speaker 00

  a no. And that that's actually why they're saying no versus this, you did, you know, oh, you, you had a bad zoom setup or something, you know, oh, we didn't, we didn't like what color your shirt was. We said no. I don't think that's, I don't think that's how this actually works, you know?

• 28:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think that's such a good piece of advice, that it's not necessarily they don't believe in what you're doing. It's they have better options and they're waiting for something that hits a higher bar, just because they have a lot of options.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because again, and if you, if you ask someone, well, put yourself in investor shoes, wouldn't you be making decisions the same way? Usually founders are like, yeah. But like they, if you, if you do that exercise, a lot of this starts to make way more sense.

• 29:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Specifically, when you're evaluating startups, I wasn't going to go into this, but I think it might be interesting is market size. How do you think about the importance of large TAM as an investor YC?

• 29:25Speaker 00

  I think it really depends on what stage you're investing at. And it's absolutely critical, the later stage you get, right? If you're going to invest at a very high valuation, it is really important. The earlier you go, the less it matters. And some of the most phenomenally good startups, if you were really panantic about it, the TAM would be like tiny. Like the TAM of Uber would be like nothing, right? Like how, the TAM of Airbnb would have been nothing. The TAM of, I was a, I funded Razorpay, which is, I think, the largest payment processor in India. And the TAM of that was tiny because no one was

• 30:07Speaker 00

  using credit cards in 2015 in India. So you had to believe that the size of the credit card industry in India was like 100x. Well, guess what happened?

• 30:16Speaker 00

  You know what I'm saying? And so, so I'm not saying that the having a large market someday doesn't matter. Of course it does eventually, but trying to be super pedantic about market size when you, when it's like a pre-seed company or someone applying to Y C is not, you know, it's just not something I put a lot of thought on. Again, whatnot, ooh, what's the TAM of the collectible Funko Pop industry? I don't know. I don't think it's that big, man. I don't know if you did that house when you invested, but I, you know, I think it's pretty small, but I wasn't worried about it. That was like the last thing I was worried about.

• 30:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  It makes so much sense that at Y C you don't think about it that much because of, as you said, many startups pivot anyway. So if you like the team.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  But, and I'm not saying it's not important. I just, it's not, and the things I'm worried about is like, hey, how do you get users? Hey, how do you grow things like that? Like, are you making something people want? Those are the things I'm really worried about as opposed to, ooh, I ran an Excel model and I'm worried this might not be a big enough TAM. That's, that's not at the top of my list.

• 31:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think it's important to acknowledge though, a lot of investors are very, like Y C, I think is unique in a lot of ways where you invest very early and you help people through this journey. A lot of investors are very focused on TAM. So you may find you're getting turned down because they don't think there's a big enough market for you to build a big business, right?

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Or that you're asking them to believe a crazy leap of faith that, again, they could say, well, it's theoretically possible you'll be able to sell more than Funko Pops. And I understand that that is your pitch. But I am, I have other opportunities that are less risky. You know what I'm saying? Like, like it's not because a lot of founders make the argument that the TAM is big. And you can say, wow, that's a really interesting argument and I have no, I have no, you know, I'm not going to argue with you about it, but no, I'm not going to.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  And so again, it's, it's hard to get someone to engage in a debate about TAM, even if you have. You know, even if you have some proof points, ultimately, a lot of investors just don't like that risk. Fair enough.

• 32:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Fair enough. Going a slightly different direction. So someone else that worked with you, another Lenny, Lenny Bogdanoff, who started a company called Milk, and then he was head of growth at OpenAI for a bit. He asked me to ask you about things product leaders and startups should watch out for. Does that ring a bell?

• 32:35Speaker 00

  I don't remember the specific office hours, but I understand the question. And of course, you remember Lenny. I think that the advice that he's referencing here is just how important it is to not over delegate and for the founders to stay close to things, as well as watch out for the trap of hiring super senior people with fancy resumes really early in a startup. I think that's what he's referencing there. And again, this is definitely one of those very basic things that we find ourselves repeating a lot, where they're like, yeah, yeah, I get it. Like, don't over delegate. We get it at Dalton. And then like two years later, they're like, wow, we over delegated. We need to, we need to go clean that up. So that is probably the best product advice. And the folks that are really great at product, the founders that are, are always deeply in the weeds on product

• 33:20Speaker 00

  and still care a lot and are still talking to customers, no matter how late stage it gets. Again, I'm sure you experienced this in Airbnb culture, but you know, you can't delegate caring about your users and you can't delegate caring that the product is great. That is so critical.

• 33:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  To make this even more real, what are, what is it that you see them do? It's they hire a PM too early, they hire a senior salesperson too early. What are the?

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think that you get pushed often by investors to hire executives or to scale the team. Or we need, you know, we need, we, you raise all this money, you gotta spend it, you know, we gotta, you gotta show you're serious about growth and building a world-class organization, whatever, stuff like that. And so you end up with super nice people with super shiny resumes from, from big tech companies. Oh, wow. They, they did this amazing thing at Google and then you hire them and then you wake up one day and you're like, oh, wow, everything went wrong. It's not really anyone's fault. It's just that you, you, you, you took your eye off the ball and this is what happens.

• 34:22Speaker 00

  To first time founders a lot.

• 34:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  How do you as a founder then have time to do all these things? Is there any guidance you give just like don't over delegate, don't over hire? But also you need to, you have 24 hours in a day. Is it just find the time prioritize well or is there more more to it?

• 34:39Speaker 00

  I think if you just care a lot about your customers and you care a lot about the product, your instincts are pretty good on what to spend time on. And so, for example, spending tons and tons of time like hanging out with investors and networking, probably not, it's probably the thing that I would be cutting. You know what I'm saying? Like it's what we talked about earlier. If you really love what you're doing, no one needs to tell you how to reprioritize your time. Your intuition will be correct on what you should be spending all your time on, which is being obsessed with product.

• 35:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that advice. This episode is brought to you by Coda and I mean that literally. I use Coda every day to help me plan each episode of this very podcast. It's where I keep my content calendar, my guest research, and also the questions that I plan to ask each guest. Also during the recording itself, I have a Coda page up to remind myself what I want to talk about. Coda is an all in one platform that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets and apps to help you and your team get more done. Now is the perfect time to get started with Coda, especially its extensive planning capabilities. With Coda, you can stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycles in one location. You can set and measure OKRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders.

• 35:57Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 36:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, so one of your former, one of your colleagues, current colleagues, not former colleagues, Gustav was on the podcast previously. His episode is, I think, the fourth most popular episode of all time currently, so no pressure.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Oh, cool. I don't know if I can queue that. All right.

• 36:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think you can. So I asked him, what is often the most common reason a startup fails? And his answer was, they don't talk to customers, they don't find product market fit, nothing else matters if they can't do that. And so his advice is, talk to customers more often. So two questions here. First of all, just, is there anything else you would add to, why do startups fail? I know we talked about some of these already, but just what comes to mind there?

• 37:23Speaker 00

  I completely agree with what Gustav said, but to, to look at this from a different frame, I think is that the founders lose hope.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  And when you in your heart is like, yeah, we're failing, like, once, I can see it when I'm meeting with a founder, when they've resigned themselves, that they're failing. Versus when like, we got one more move in us, we got one more try, like, you can see in their eyes when they feel like there's more ideas, or there's some last ditch, Hail Mary thing. It doesn't always work, but it's, it's almost like you have to not accept that you're going to fail.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  And as long as you don't accept that that's going to happen, there's usually a lot more moves you can try to save the company. What, maybe it's to get profitable, maybe it's to like, do some other zany thing, maybe it's, you know, to launch a new product.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  And so it's pretty rare, I would argue, that the cause of death is that they had lots of firepower and they were feeling really positive and they just ran out of money. That's actually like more rare than founders think. It's much more common that they still have some money left, I'm not saying a lot, but some money, and they're just like, yeah, I'm done, I'm out of ideas, I don't want to do this anymore. And again, fair enough, you know, but you get what I'm saying? Like, I think founders are afraid that they're going to run out of money and that's why they're going to shut down. And it's way more common that they like, their idea doesn't work and they have a big fight with their co-founder, and then they can't agree on what to work on, and then they just like, or like, I don't want to do this anymore, and they shut down. That is the most common cause of death, is something that sounds like that story.

• 38:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  That is so interesting. And again, this comes back to your core advice, don't die, just don't die.

• 39:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  We talked about this already of just like, sometimes it's actually okay to die. And I guess just to refresh that lesson is if you're not having fun anymore, maybe.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're out of ideas. You're like, I'm just, I'm done. Like, if you know in your heart that you're done, you don't have to keep going through the motions. No one benefits from that.

• 39:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  And you've also seen enough cases now, you've shared a few of these where they, all hope was potentially lost, but they kept going and then they turned into a huge success story. And I think most people don't see those examples. I guess, is there anything you can share? Just like how often that happens? How often you see that turnaround?

• 39:40Speaker 00

  I would argue that if we define it as the company had a near-death experience where it was going poorly and the founders seriously wondered if it was all going to be over. A hundred percent of the time, people go through that. You know, where the founder's like, yeah, I guess we're done. Guess we should pack it in. And at least you feel that way at some point in your startup journey. Man, everyone goes through that. And again, there's gradations, people that actually truly got down to very, very hard situations. It's still a high percentage, like maybe 50%. I mean, you can ask founders, there's a lot of founders that come this close to it all being over and through sheer will, kind of just keep it going, you know?

• 40:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  That is really empowering, I imagine, for many founders hearing this of just knowing every single founder goes through. Okay, I think it's actually over.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Following on this real quick, the advice that Gustav shared, which is about talking to customers. I'm just going to keep trying to pull wisdom out of your head. Do you have any advice for just how to effectively talk to customers? We're always hearing, talk to customers, build things they want. Easier said than done. You get a lot of asks. You get one customer asking for a lot of stuff. There's a big company that's like, build this thing, we'll buy, pay a million dollars. Just, do you have a general guidance of just like what to pay attention to and what to build versus avoid?

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think when I talk to to to aspiring founders about this a lot, they're like, yeah, I talked to customers. We get a cool. And I'm like, cool. Well, how many customers have you talked to? And they're like, wow. And they get really quiet. And so I think this is one of those things like, hey, you should have a healthy diet and exercise every day or whatever, where people know it and that doesn't mean they do it. And so I think to start with, you have to get out in the world and talk to people in person. And you can't just hide behind your keyboard and call that talking to customers. Right? And I think a lot of folks, their inclinations are to like, you know, build a landing page and buy some Instagram ads and try to get people to sign up for something.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  And again, maybe I maybe that's something, but I think a lot of the reason people do that is they they're just shy and they don't want to put themselves out there because it's a little awkward to go talk to people. And and you kind of have to set yourself up to go out in the physical world, get people to meet with you, get them to take you seriously, show them a product you're building. And so again, to be very tactical here, you can do a self assessment. In the past month, how many in person, physical meetings have I had with potential customers? Maybe you've done a lot. I don't know, listener, maybe maybe you have, but you know, it's it's shocking how many companies I talked to. They're like, well, we're focused on raising our pre seed round before we talk to customers, like things like that.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  And again, I think the core, the core, core thing going on is just social anxiety.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  And like, looking stupid.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  And I think you just got to get past that, you know, you just got to start doing it until it doesn't feel bad anymore. But you know, think about how how stupid the Airbnb founders must have felt they were like, hey, you should rent out your house and I'm going to come and sleep in your house. And here's an air bed. Like, I guess the whole thing is a little awkward, right? So you got power through the awkwardness of talking to people. And once you start doing it, it's actually kind of fun. And so once you, once you get used to to overcoming this awkwardness, I think people do much better at talking to customers.

• 43:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  When someone does this self evaluation, is there a heuristic that tells you this is enough? What do you look for? Is there a number like how many per week, how many per month?

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know if I know a good number. I think it's look at your calendar and there should be, you know, 20 or 30% of your time that the calendar says something like customer meeting, customer call, like meeting with Foo, meeting with this person. And when the calendar is not that, or it's all, you know, again, what you're actually doing is just buying ads to try to validate your idea. That I don't, I don't think that's talking to customers, you know? I think that's something else.

• 43:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's an awesome heuristic. So roughly fifth of your time at least should be talking to customers.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. And again, it depends on the idea space you're working on. Some are more, some are less. So yeah, I just, it should be a fair amount of time and nothing substitutes for an actual conversation versus just staring at analytics dashboards.

• 44:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Makes so much sense. So Airbnb is a classic example of they went to New York and talked to their hosts and things like that. Is there another startup that comes to mind that did this really well? I've found just a really cool way and hustle to talk to customers.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  Well, again, if you, if you, some of the companies we talked about, I mean, for Brex, they were just talking to other people in their batch and that worked extremely well. Same with Retool is they just sold it inside of the YC network. I think with Zip, they were just beasts at getting companies on calls with them to ask them about procurement. And I think they had way more than 20% of their time. Like when you looked at their calendars, oh man, I think they were doing, they were talking to customers a lot to, to build their first product and kind of pre-selling it before they built it. Same with Posthog, I guess that's a different go-to-market. They launched this open source thing to start with and it was, they, their calendars are filled with people that were trying to implement the first open source version of Posthog or so excited about it.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  And people on Hacker News were excited about it. And like, they had this like huge influx of people that were excited that Posthog existed and had lots of feedback and, uh, bug reports. Like it wasn't always positive, but they never lacked for, uh, people that wanted to talk to them once, once they launched that, which was very helpful.

• 45:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  On Zip, I actually have a lot of their story in one of my series on how to build a B2B startup. And what they did actually, as you know, uh, is they just cold DM'd people on LinkedIn and asked them for advice on, hey, we're, we're trying to understand how you enjoy your current procurement products. And then they ended up being early beta testers. I think they did, and I think they did a hundred, like hundreds of these.

• 45:37Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. No, it was a numbers game. They, they, they were just grinding at this. And so, yeah, that was, that was very good.

• 45:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  The other classic Y C story is the, the Collison collision, I think it's called, or the.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Collison install.

• 45:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, Collison install. Okay. Can you tell that story briefly?

• 45:53Speaker 00

  The Collison install is what often happens with customers is that they say, yes, I want to buy your product. And then they do not implement it. They just go quiet. They're like, there's no implementation. And this is very bad if you're selling software to someone. If they never implement it, they're going to churn. And you're not, you know, you basically failed on the, on the one yard line. Okay. And so they kind of developed this tactic to be like, oh, well, you know, I'm in the neighborhood. You know, I'll drop by your office to help you implement Stripe. And kind of just like create, again, it was a little awkward, like we talked about earlier, but you would, you'd be like, yeah. I'm, I'm in, I'm in the neighborhood. Like, how about I drop by? And then they would show up and they'd be like, cool, cool.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Can you like pull up your text editor? Oh, yeah. Cool. All right. Um, hey, can you, can I, can I drive? Can I have the keyboard? And they would just sort of like install Stripe into the customer's website. You know, smiling, being like charming, charming guys. And then we're like, oh, that's cool. Okay. Well, like, can we like roll out the website now? And, and they basically would kind of not go away until you finish the implementation of Stripe. And like, again, it was actually helpful because they were doing all this white glove service to get it implemented. That was very effective. And I think the takeaway from that story is even when you get a yes, you're not actually done with sales. You have to finish the last mile to get the thing implemented. And they were very good at that.

• 47:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  That was an incredible story. And now they're like, I don't know, a hundred billion dollar business. And that's how it all begins.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was an early Stripe customer at my startup and yeah, Patrick would like, um, we used Google Talk at the time. Patrick would be sending me messages like on a weekly basis, just like checking in. And so again, it's funny how successful he's supposed to get. But yeah, Patrick was very hands on with all of his customers. It was extremely available. Uh, like I can say that because I was one of them. Yeah.

• 47:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I'm sure he had social anxiety going through all that. That wasn't a comfortable thing to do. Just like keep pushing people to install your software and deploy.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Oh, surely not. It's just, you've got to do, like, if you want your startup to work, this is just what you got to do, you know? I was on the territory.

• 48:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  This is going to be just a way broad question and I don't know if you'll have an answer, but just are there other just patterns you find across startups that do well? This is like maybe the 64th million dollar question of just founders and what they do that ends up leading to success.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  I don't think personality types matter as much. I've seen very quiet people, very extroverted people, very, you know, you name it. I've seen all sorts of personality types. So for me personally, I don't think that there's a right, or I don't think there's a personality type that people should copy and be like, I need to be like this person. You know, I need to be like Steve Jobs, I need to be like Elon, you know? I don't really believe in that because there's just so much variation. Like Tony from DoorDash is so different than a lot of folks and Rejol is so different and Grant from whatnot, these are all very, very different people. Patrick is a different kind of person, Ryan from Flexport, like these, these are just very different personality types.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  But the thing that I would argue folks that build really big companies have in common is they just really want it and they really believe in themselves and they really believe they can make it work. And that there's somehow, deep in their internal psyche, there's something that's like, I'm the one.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  And I won't take, I won't accept this not working. And even though objectively, there's all, there's all this data coming in, this isn't working, this is bad, you know, my employees want to quit, my executives want to quit, you know, whatever it is, somewhere deep down in there, they're like, oh yeah, I'm going to make this work. This is, this company is going to be big and they, and they, they just believe. And it's almost like that internal gravitational force inside of them is so large, it kind of warps the world to bend to that will and people start to believe it because they believe it so much and they convince their employees to believe it and they convince everyone around them that this is going to happen for them. And so again, this is not a personality trait.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  This is, I'm arguing this is like a core belief.

• 50:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  So interesting and it connects so much to what we've been talking about. Just don't die, don't lose hope in what you're working on.

• 50:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  Founder hearing this might feel like, man, I don't know if I'm like so convinced this is gonna work. In your experience, how much of this is internally, they're so certain and convinced versus externally, they need to show this confidence?

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's internally, they're convinced. I mean, I'm not sure it's external, but, and this is the big but, no one has this at the early stages when they don't have a good idea and they don't have customers and like it's objectively not working. And so again, I know a lot of founders like, whoa, I don't feel that way. Oh no, maybe I'm, you know, maybe I'm an imposter and I shouldn't do a startup. Well, of course you don't feel that way if you haven't talked to any customers and haven't built a product, like, you know.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  But what, what usually happens is you pivot to a good idea or you start with a good idea that you care about and customers you care about and you launch it and the better the product does, the more obsessed you get with your own company. Like I, I think in the case of Stripe, I don't want to, you know, tell Patrick's story for him, but I recall him saying at, at some point, he wasn't as sure that Stripe was gonna work until they were like a year or two in.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  And then once it started working and then he, you know, they really believed in it, but it wasn't like he woke up one day and like Stripe is the thing. It's gonna be, it's gonna work. Um, I think, I think you build conviction and you have this like, um, network effect, virtual cycle where you get more conviction. The more customers reflect back to you and data reflects back to you that you're on the right track.

• 51:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  This is exactly what Scott Belsky shared in our episode when I asked him when to pivot is do you have more conviction? This is gonna work or less conviction over time? And so I like that connection we just made there. Okay. So we've talked about all these ways startups fail, bad ideas, tarpe ideas. I want to go to the flip side and talk about good startup ideas. So recently you put out a request for startups, which is essentially 20 categories of ideas that you want to fund, that YC wants to fund. Can you share some of these ideas that you're excited about? And basically you're looking to fund and looking for founders to work on?

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so we put out the request for startups just to inspire people to maybe apply with ideas that aren't the ones that we always see. It's not like prescriptive, like we will only fund ideas on this list. It is not that at all. It's just sort of, remember what I talked about earlier with information diet? We're trying to mix up some of the information diet about what kind of ideas people might be contemplating. They aren't currently. And so a couple of the ones that we put out there, one of them, I made one about ERPs, which is, you know, enterprise resource planning software. And I did that because I get so few applications on that. And they're usually pretty good. And I just would love to see more people look at that and learn about what ERPs are, just because it's so rare that people apply with that. And now I have a feeling we're going to see a lot more applications working on that.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  And so it kind of worked as intended, which is introduce this idea space to founders that didn't even know what an ERP was. Now they'll go learn about it. Another one is, you know, we'd like to fund open source companies. And so that's one of the RFSs where, you know, if there, if more people apply to YC with open source ideas, I think we'd be pretty excited about that. And that might, maybe founders didn't realize that would be something we want to fund. Same with space companies. Yeah, we've had a lot of success with space companies. You know, several of the folks that are actually going to space right now that aren't SpaceX are YC companies. And so I think sometimes founders feel like those ideas are too bold and ambitious. But no, you know, I love if more people apply with space companies.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  And so think about it that way, where we're just trying to put out, we're trying to plant seeds of idea spaces that perhaps someone subconsciously filtered out is what might be a good startup idea. And, and, you know, hopefully that creates a, a, a new set of startup ideation for the person.

• 54:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  And we're going to link to this page in the show notes for folks that want to explore. I'll give a couple more real quick. A way to end cancer. No big deal. Spatial computing, new defense technology, bringing manufacturing back to America. So a lot of like hard science, deep tech stuff, which is, which is maybe a new, I don't know. I know, I imagine you guys have invested in this in the past, but it feels like

• 54:30Speaker 00

  We totally have, right? So these aren't like, oh, we've never invested in these before. It's more of like, hey, it'd be cool if we saw more applications along these lines. It would be nice because it currently feels a little bit under, you know, there could be more startups working on this stuff.

• 54:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. Instead of the target ideas, a couple more real quick. Better enterprise glue?

• 54:51Speaker 00

  Yep. I like that idea.

• 54:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Say more about that. What does that look like?

• 54:55Speaker 00

  The software to connect all these business systems is usually pretty brittle and janky. And there's been lots of good startups founded to solve this problem. I think there's still a lot more room for improvement and likely L L Ms will improve, like we'll probably be able to create better and better glue. So all sorts of software systems can talk to each other. And so again, very broad idea, but yeah, I think we'll see a lot of very successful companies where that's the kernel of the idea they start with.

• 55:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. One last one. Small fine tuned models as an alternative to gigantic generic ones.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 55:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  Sweet. And so we'll send, we'll include this link in the show notes and folks can click on each of these and you basically, there's a lot more explanation of what it is you're thinking about there. Awesome. Okay. Just a couple more questions.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 55:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  One is just your background. So from what I've read,

• 55:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  in the early 2000s, you were, you were basically hanging out with some of the biggest success stories of today. Folks like Zuck and Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Elon, Sean Parker. This is before they really became anyone and they all became very successful. I'm curious just what, looking back at that, what you've noticed is consistent across these folks that end up being really successful over time?

• 56:06Speaker 00

  Back in 2003, being in Silicon Valley and being interested in startups, they're just, it was a really small space. There just weren't that many people that were into this stuff. And so I remember I cold emailed Reid Hoffman when LinkedIn was like 12 employees and he just responded and he's like, oh, let's have lunch.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  He wasn't, he was just like a guy and everyone else that was doing, I guess you could call it social networking, uh, where that was sort of the people that I knew. There was a few conferences you would go to and there'd be like 30 people there. It reminds me of stories about the Homebrew Computer Club. I'm not saying this is cool, but when I read stories about what it was like when, when the Homebrew Computer Club existed, it was a very small number of people that all knew each other. There were real like weirdo outsiders that were into this stuff. Okay. And so that's what in the post.com boom, Bay Area startup scene, that's legitimately what it felt like. And so I didn't think a lot about the personality traits of these people. Um, they were all, again,

• 57:09Speaker 00

  they were all pretty different people, but what they had in common is the folks that are now the really big names just had a lot of staying power. Right? So when I, when I met Sam, he had dropped out of Stanford to work on Loops, which is hilariously a way to find people around you to hang out with. Interesting theme here, huh? He was cool. He was just, he was this really young guy and um, he just kind of did that. It wasn't huge. And then he got into other stuff and ended up working at YC, ended up getting involved in hard tech and is now kind of like reinventing himself as um, the, the big mind behind AI, which is, which again, awesome. But if I think about who he was back in the day, he was, yeah, he was like a 23 year old working on a thing for feature

• 57:54Speaker 00

  phones to find friends in your neighborhood. Their customer was Boost Mobile. I bet you could go find the commercials for Loops that Boost Mobile put out on YouTube. Those are actually pretty funny. Have you seen those commercials? No, but I'm going to go check it out. Anyway, it's pretty funny. So yeah, like that's, that's the, the real story. Um, and then yeah, I remember I was in downtown Palo Alto at the time and um, you, some of, some of the folks I was friends with were friends with Sean Parker and this was actually before Sean Parker went to Facebook. He was part of Napster. And so one of my friends was like, oh, we need to get my friend a ride to the airport. And so I ended up giving Sean Parker a ride to the Oakland Airport. And again, what was he like? I don't know. He just basically sat in the backseat on the phone the

• 58:36Speaker 00

  whole time. But, but again, my point is, I wasn't like, wow, these are going to be really big, successful people that one day will be important in the world. It just felt like... A bunch of nerds that really liked the internet and computers kind of doing things that they were interested in and were just obsessed with this. Like, there was no, they weren't like, gee, should I move to New York? Or gee, should I, maybe I should go to law school? Like, it was people that were very bought in to, to staying, working on internet companies. And so you'll see these folks just reinvent themselves multiple eras, right? Okay, like Reid Hoffman, right? He was a, worked at PayPal, right?

• 59:18Speaker 00

  And then he did LinkedIn, and then he was like a VC and like, like, he's kind of had like all these different eras where it's the same person, but it's almost like a different figure, right?

• 59:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's a lot of interesting lessons there. One is that your career is long and you will have the opportunity to do many things. And you can continue to shift, like in my example, this is my fourth career. I realized I was an engineer, then a founder, then a product manager, now whatever this job is. And I think that's really common. I think the other, again, is the personality types point, which I didn't comment on, but I think it's so important that you can be super introverted and be super successful. You can be super extroverted and be very successful. And I think the key there is use your skills and strengths to achieve the same things. You don't have to be the amazing presenter on Steve Jobs type stage. You can do the same thing in a different way. And then the other point there is, again, coming back to, you just need to be really excited and enjoy the work you're doing

• 1:00:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  because that'll drive you forward and make you be successful. So I like that, that, I love that the story is kind of a summary of so many of the things you've shared so far. There's other two other fun stories, maybe pick one or the other. One is you sold your startup to MySpace and your job was basically to save MySpace. And then the other is you're the reason Andreessen Horowitz missed out on Instagram.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  And couldn't invest. So which of those would you want to share?

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's kind of the same story.

• 1:00:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, great.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  And, and the way that it's the same story is, My, my second company, um, basically I sold my first company in Myspace. It was the music company that I worked on and the, they recruited a new CEO, who was formerly the COO of Facebook called Owen Van Natta. So again, hilariously part of the same little circle of people. And Owen was like, okay, we need to fix Myspace. You know, Rupert Murdoch's got the juice. We, he wants me to fix it. Like, we're gonna turn, we're gonna, we're gonna do it. So come up with some ideas and kind of the best idea that I could come up with at the time was doing something around, uh, mobile photo sharing, something kind of like Twitter, but for photos.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  And I figured with Myspace's user base, that would work pretty well. This was like in 2010, so it was right as the App Store was getting big. And I had a lot, I had a lot of success in the App Store with iName. It was one of the top music, top downloaded music apps. And so I was like, wow, the App Store is really good. And I was really into apps being the thing. And at this time, Facebook was a little early on. They were trying to do cross-platform mobile apps, if you recall. And their apps were not great. This was, again, ancient history. And so that was sort of like my plan. And then immediately, uh, Owen Van Natta was fired. And so I didn't even really get on boarded. And so I just like left. I think I worked at Myspace for like a month because the person that acquired my company

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  got fired and there was like, I think the whole work chart got fired. So I don't even know, I didn't even know who to talk to. It was really great. It was a great experience. You know what I'm saying? I wasn't really sure who my point of contact was at that point. I don't think they knew either. It was just a mess. Just Tom, just message Tom. No, no, he was long gone. I know you're kidding, but no, like literally, I don't know who was left at that point. Tom was long gone. Yeah. And so I was like, well, I should just do a new startup and I should work on something like what I was thinking about. And I ended up, yeah, starting the company and quickly was able to raise an angel around because people remembered, uh, my company from the first one. And the, the major investor we had was Andreessen Horowitz.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  This is one of their first board seat investments, like Marc Andreessen was on my board and, You know, again, I have my own set of stories about that, but it was, it was interesting experience and we launched it and I think we got half a million or a million users. Like you can go find tech print show articles about it and it was, we launched on Android and iOS and it was mobile photo sharing and actually it was growing pretty well. Okay. And then what happened is there was another portfolio company called Bourbon, which was originally a fourthware clone that was built by, by these two guys and they decided to pivot out of that and into what, which was pretty similar to my thing, you know, again, fair enough, that's just how this works.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  And they did something smart. Again, this is me talking, I don't know what their version of the story is, but what I think they did that was smart is if you looked on the paid app store charts, the number one app was Hipstamatic and Hipstamatic cost money. And what do we know about what people want? They want things that are free that cost money. Right? And so they basically built a pretty legitimate knockoff of the Hipstamatic filters, combining it with a social graph and they launched it and it pretty quickly took off. So of course this is Instagram, right? And so it took off really quickly and like, you know, that was like a wild experience for me to be like, oh, this seems familiar. Um, and, and basically because Andrew C. Horowitz had like invested in my company was

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  on the board, even though they were investors in Instagram, that was like a conflict and they didn't do the deal. And then for whatever reason, this became like a big source of like Silicon Valley gossip, which was like, wow, I can't believe this happened. And so it was just a really weird experience for me as a founder to, um, to be right in the middle of something that became culturally so important.

• 1:04:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  I imagine there's a bullseye in your back from A16Z for a little bit.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  Oh, they don't, I don't actually think they care. I don't think they held it against me, um, cause like, what did I do wrong?

• 1:04:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's true.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  I started a company, like, you know what I'm saying? Like, obviously there was some frustration, but I was like, I was a guy who had a company. That they invested in. I don't know. I didn't feel like they, I didn't feel, I didn't feel much higher for them. I think it's, this is just how, this is just how life works.

• 1:05:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. I wonder if they changed their conflict policies after that at all.

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  I don't think so. This, I think this happened, I think this has happened multiple other times, but those aren't my stories at all.

• 1:05:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  And by the way, I don't know if you mentioned the name of your startup. It's called Pick, Pick Please.

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's called Pick Please. Yeah.

• 1:05:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  Great. Okay. So for the final phase, before we get to our very exciting link ground, I have these two segments, recurring segments. I have failure corner and contrarian corner. We can do both or we can pick one or the other. Failure corner, share a story of something, a time in your career where you failed and what you learned from that experience. Contrarian corner, what's something you believe that a lot of, that most other people don't believe?

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think for contrarian corner, I know where I would start and I think it's relevant for your listener. Like, I think this is relevant to this. And so, again, maybe, and you could argue this isn't contrary, but here is, here's what I think. I think growth and growth hacking and doing all this analytics, A B testing stuff

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  is a total waste of time for very early startups and that one of the weird things about having lots of startup advice on the internet, again, this is one of the reasons we started making videos at Y C. Is a lot of the advice was catered towards later stage companies. Like, oh, here's how you set up your board and here's how you motivate your sales team. Like, it was all aimed at series A, series B founders and not for seed stage founders. The problem was seed stage founders would consume all the later stage advice and get really confused. And so the anti-pattern I see is there are lots of founders that are very familiar with your awesome work, which again, I really recommend. I like it, but when you have no customers and you're reading, you know, Lenny's guides on how to set up

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  split testing and how you did growth at Airbnb. Oh, man, that is so dumb. That is so not helpful. And so you see this inclination away from getting a first customer, getting one customer and talking to that person. And instead they have like all this really complex growth hacking theory. I think this also happens if you worked in big tech where they're up, your product already has scale. And so, you know, if you work at Facebook and your job is to launch new little features, yeah, of course you should make heavy use of analytics and A B testing and split testing and feature flags. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it makes sense. But when you have no users, what are you doing?

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  So do you think that's contrarian? What do you think? Like, I'm just trying to argue this advice applied to a startup that's too early is like actively not helpful.

• 1:07:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  I, I think it's contrarian for many people, 100%. I also 100% agree with it. Makes me feel like I need to, at the top of my post, share, here's who this is for. If you're earlier than this, ignore it. If you're later than this, ignore it.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  I mean, again, I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong, but imagine if the OG Airbnb founders took all of your current advice and applied it when they had like four users and they knew their names. And they were like trying to run complicated growth hacking, split testing.

• 1:08:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, maybe just to clarify, when you talk about growth, growth hacking. So obviously, when you're starting something, say a consumer app, there's a, you need to get a bunch of users somehow. What's your sense of just like, when you say, don't do this sort of thing, but this is okay? What kind of falls in those buckets?

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  I think it depends on the idea. I think in the case of whatnot, they obviously, it was a consumer app and they needed to get users. But they were very intellectually honest on the metrics for how you get a marketplace off the ground. And they didn't just go dump all their money into Instagram ads. And like, they effectively knew they needed to focus on buyers and on the buy side and build momentum on the buy side. They really understood marketplaces. And so for consumer, I think it's having a sophisticated view of how you get the consumer company off the ground. I think if you look at the Facebook story, them getting 100% penetration on the Harvard campus first, instead of launching overall. Again, good strategy, would recommend that strategy.

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  So again, the way to extrapolate that is know what your comps are of what companies you, your archetype is. And then look at what they did on the zero to one and ignore what they do today. Right? Don't pay attention to what Facebook does today if you're a brand new startup founder. Pay attention to Facebook when they were getting their first thousand users. What were those tactics?

• 1:09:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  I feel like this should be its own episode where we just go into how to get your first thousand users. I know there's a video actually we'll link to that Gustav made with YC's advice on how to get your users. Did you want to visit Failure Corner or not? Or shall we move on?

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  I failed at tons of stuff. I, as an investor, I thought I make lots of bad investments as well as good ones. I think in my startups, I pivoted a lot and a lot of things I did didn't work out. And so again, I just gave you a specific story with, with, with Pickle, right? You just heard a specific story there. I guess what I learned is that you just can't let it get to you too much. And you gotta keep going. And that if you keep going, no one really remembers those as much. And it doesn't really define you. And it shouldn't, you know, fear of failure shouldn't dominate all of your thoughts. And instead you should use your energy and positivity to keep trying to do good work. Right? Cause back, back in the day, if I would be like, well, you know, I guess startup isn't for me.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  I guess tech isn't for me. I, I wouldn't have had a career doing any of this stuff. I wouldn't be working at Y C. I wouldn't be advising companies. Right? So I always had to have in my life, um, a lot of optimism and energy. And use that energy and motor to keep me going. And it served me really well. Right? Even if lots of stuff I tried didn't work and continue to not work. You know, again, obvious stuff, I know, but yeah, that doesn't mean it's not true, even though it's obvious.

• 1:10:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  I feel like that's a recurring theme here. And I love that it's another version of just how not to die. There's like the startup itself that shouldn't die. And then there's your just drive and motivation to keep going and trying new things when things don't work out. I love all the recurring themes and messages for people here. Dalton, is there anything else you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess, I guess the final thought is, um, you know, if someone wants to do a startup and doesn't know where to start, just to give you permission to talk to potential customers and try to pre-sell something before you write code and have those conversations. I think so many folks don't know where to begin on starting a startup. And my tactical advice is start doing customer validation.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  First versus building a PowerPoint deck versus trying to raise money versus like all these other things. I think a lot of people don't use that strategy. And basically, if you if you find people that are really excited and you do line up customers, that is a great green light that it is time to do a startup, right? That can get you down the path. So yeah, I think that's my final.

• 1:12:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  And then with that, when does the building come in? Is it build it while you're talking? Build it before you depends on basically.

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  Build it once you have some conviction that you're like, oh, I think I would have a customer. I think I'd at least one person would use this thing I want to build, at least one.

• 1:12:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love it. I love the simplicity and pragmatism of all of your advice. Dalton, welcome to the very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready?

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 1:12:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  I think a lot of founders are afraid of doing sales and they don't know how to do sales and they think they need these really experienced sales coaches and they need all this training. And I'll be like, well, go onto Amazon and find the most popular sales books, like Getting to Yes, that everyone reads and just read those and that'll get you 80% of the way there. You know what I'm saying? That they want to hire someone for millions of dollars to give them sales coaching. I'm like, well, have you read these really basic sales books? And they're like, no. And so I think that's a low cost way to go on Amazon, Getting to Yes, and a few other of the top sellers, I forget the names, and just read those. And that is your crash course on how to be great sales.

• 1:13:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. There's also this book called Founding Sales that I imagine you're familiar with. Pete Kazanji was on the podcast talking about that. And that's something I always recommend because it's just like how founders can do sales.

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  Start there.

• 1:13:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  Start there. Great. We'll link to that. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  This may be warping the what you're asking for, but I like to watch old shows a lot. And so I keep rewatching like The Sopranos and The Wire, and it always is different to me every time. And I, you know, things like that. I think here's a silly answer. I've been really enjoying watching old episodes of Columbo, which was a television show from the 70s and 80s. I don't know why. I don't even know if this is instructive, but it is, for some reason, I'm really into that right now. It's very old episodes of Columbo.

• 1:13:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  You're an old soul, Dalton.

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  I guess. I don't know. I it's it just feels like a time machine to a different time when I watch these things.

• 1:14:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Definitely. Maybe one of the most unique answers yet.

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 1:14:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Columbo.

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  Well, again, I guess I'm not trying to give you an answer where I sound super clever. I'm just, I'm actually telling you the right answer. So that's actually what I'm watching.

• 1:14:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  It does actually sound very sophisticated and clever.

• 1:14:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask, I guess, founders in this context?

• 1:14:28Speaker 00

  I don't really believe in trick questions, and I think I just start with, hey, so tell me about what you're working on. Or what have you learned since you started? None of these are trick questions, but I think you can get the most honest and interesting answers by asking the most straightforward, basic things and having that be like a blank slate for their answers to draw on. You know what I'm saying? So I like the most simple prompts and let them take the conversation where they want to go.

• 1:14:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  I know this probably is a very big question, but just what do you look for in their answer that gives you a sense of this is a good or bad answer?

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  For, for, for YC interviews?

• 1:15:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. And I know this is like its own podcast episode.

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  I think evidence that they actually have thought about it, like as far I said earlier, that they've done research, that they have opinions, that they, they care about it. Right? Sometimes when you, when people answer questions are like, you can just tell that it's really superficial and they haven't put much care or soul into their answers, you know?

• 1:15:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  Awesome. Do you have a favorite product that you recently discovered that you really like?

• 1:15:35Speaker 00

  Like my Oura ring and my Apple watch and all that good stuff. Like I've been a fan. Uh, there's a YC company called SciFox, S I P H O X. I just signed up for, and they do at home blood testing. And basically I'm trying to sync that at home blood testing thing into all my other devices. I think, I don't know, I really enjoy all the stuff that Apple and other startups are working on and YC companies are working on around personal health. And so, yeah, those are products I'm into.

• 1:16:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  SciFox, okay. And wait, then you do like a needle and stuff and you take your own blood?

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  It's this little tiny needle. It doesn't hurt at all. And it just, it takes a few drops of blood and you do it at home and you mail it in and then it has all these blood tests. It's actually really cool. Yeah, and that's I just discovered that it's one of those cases where I I saw it.

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  I saw it and then and then I later was like, oh, wait, that's a Y C company like basically I became a customer and was pleasantly surprised. That that it's a Y C company.

• 1:16:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I think I found it. So it's S I P H O X health.com.

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it really rolls off the tongue, right? Yeah, that's the name of it.

• 1:16:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Very cool. Okay, I see this little needle. Okay, great. Go, Cyfox. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful in work or in life, share with friends?

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  Just check in with yourself that you're having fun. And and that you enjoy what you're doing. And if you don't, you should probably make a change, whatever that is. And again, if you're a founder, you're in control. Right? You can change your own company. But I think a lot of people go through life and they don't ask themselves this question like, am I having fun? Am I enjoying is? Do I value what I'm spending my time on? And I think that you just can go back to this over and over and over again. Is that is a is a good prompt on how to decide what to do with your life?

• 1:17:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  Easier said than done to change that in many cases, but it always starts with realizing, okay, this isn't actually.

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it did to yourself. Yeah, I'm not really enjoying this. And then trying to be like, well, how can I fix it? Having that conversation with yourself.

• 1:17:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, it reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote where you wake up day after day. Like, it's okay to wake up some days being like, I don't want to be doing this. But if it's every day and continues to happen, then that's a sign you should change it.

• 1:17:53Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:17:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  Final question. You and Michael Seibel have been doing this incredible podcast together. If somebody wanted to check out the podcast and dive in, is there an episode that you love most that you think they could start with?

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  It depends. Some of the episodes are more for folks that already have a startup. And they they're dealing with like problems. I don't know. Some of the episodes about. Investors or, or things like that. Like it's very clear that the audience for those is current startup founders. And there's a lot that are just more life advice, how to make decisions and think about. And that is, those have strangely become very popular and gotten a lot of views with non-startup founders, which is a pleasant surprise. And so I recommend those for folks in the audience that are not currently startup founders. I don't know. Um, life tips from top founders, I think is-

• 1:18:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Or from billionaires. Is it that one?

• 1:18:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I think that was pretty popular. So what I'd be looking for is diagnose, am I a current founder and I have founder problems? Or am I just looking for general philosophy type questions? And I really like those philosophy ones. We have one for high school students and it's aimed, the audience is, here's advice for high school students that are interested in startups. Here's some tips that you should be thinking about. Again, pretty narrow target audience, but I love that episode because we're really trying to speak directly to that audience. Um, and you know, I think it's pretty good advice.

• 1:19:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  Dalton, you are wonderful. Thank you for sharing so much wisdom. This is action packed. I'm really excited for founders to listen to this. I think it's going to make a big dent in a lot of people's lives. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and follow up on some of this? And how can listeners be useful to you?

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  I am on Twitter slash X.com and Dalton C is my username. And also my LinkedIn is pretty good. It's, it's pretty popular. I don't know. Just search for my name on LinkedIn.

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  And yeah, I love to see you all there. And then how can folks be helpful? I mean, honestly, it's just great when folks want to apply to YC and, and do a startup. And so feel free to dive into other videos and apply to YC. And something that's really special about my job is I get the privilege of getting to fund companies that they already know me from videos and they're shocked that I'm exactly the same. Like, like effectively, um, they're like, wow, you're, you're just that guy from the videos I've been watching. And, and, and it's so cool that you're just exactly like you seem in the videos. And so basically, yeah, if, if people like what I have to say and they like the videos and apply to YC, it'd be, I would love to fund their companies.

• 1:20:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Dalton, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  Sure thing. Thanks so much, Lenny. Appreciate it.

• 1:20:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  Bye, everyone.

• 1:20:29Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.