Y Combinator
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Y Combinator publishes practical startup guidance on product building, fundraising, founder decision-making, and scaling high-growth technology companies.
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Included for practical education on practical startup guidance on product building, fundraising, founder decision-making, and scaling high-growth technology companies.
Showing 320 digests for Y Combinator.
Pitching investors
YouTube
When investors say no: believe the rejection, ignore the reason
Y Combinator
April 29, 2022
Pitching investors
9
Resilience & grit
7
Fundraising & VC
6
Investor rejection reasons are rationalizations, not expert diagnoses.
Pivoting based on a rejection email signals low founder conviction.
Progress changes investors' minds; better pitch words never do.
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
How to think about and leave a big tech job as a founder
Y Combinator
April 20, 2022
Identity & self-belief
9
Resilience & grit
6
Long-term planning
5
Most FAANG roles are ad servers, not hard technical problems
Vesting refreshers are engineered loss-aversion — the trap is deliberate
Decide your exit timeline before you join, not while holding a bonus
Competitive analysis
YouTube
How to compete with Amazon and Google without losing focus
Y Combinator
April 8, 2022
Competitive analysis
9
Product-market fit
6
Resilience & grit
5
Competitor press and fundraising reveal nothing about their actual product quality
Structural advantage only wins when paired with a good-enough product
Instacart and Cruise survived trillion-dollar incumbents by building better products
Deep work & focus
YouTube
How to protect maker time and stay productive as a founder
Y Combinator
March 31, 2022
Deep work & focus
9
Productivity & habits
7
Pivoting
5
Interrupting a programmer resets 1–2 hours of loaded context.
Advisory boards and accelerators feel productive but rarely are.
Hedging across multiple paths guarantees losing to focused competitors.
MVP & prototyping
YouTube
When to launch your startup and when to wait
Y Combinator
March 15, 2022
MVP & prototyping
9
Pivoting
6
Resilience & grit
5
There is no single launch — you launch repeatedly until it lands
Instacart, Brex, and Magic all shipped with almost no back end
Delaying is only valid if you've already built this product before
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
Overthinking is the founder's biggest mistake: the midwit meme explained
Y Combinator
March 2, 2022
Identity & self-belief
9
Resilience & grit
6
Pivoting
5
The idiot approach and the genius approach are usually identical.
Fundraising, MVPs, co-founders: the midwit overcomplicates every decision.
Most startup ideas that worked started embarrassingly simple.
Why investors cannot fix your company
Y Combinator
February 23, 2022
Fundraising & VC
8
Product-market fit
6
Identity & self-belief
5
Every investor type gives advice shaped by their own background, not yours.
Pre-PMF failure is usually zero customers, not inability to raise a Series A.
Investors with no financial stake give the most honest, useful feedback.
MVP & prototyping
YouTube
Software hacks that don't scale: lessons from Gmail, Facebook, and Twitch
Y Combinator
February 16, 2022
MVP & prototyping
9
Long-term planning
6
Case studies
5
Gmail's invite system wasn't a growth hack — the hard drives were full.
Facebook ran a separate database per university for years to avoid scaling MySQL.
Google secretly served stale search results for months — and nobody knew.
Understanding incentives is how you actually change the world
Y Combinator
February 2, 2022
Market research
9
Customer discovery
7
Business models
6
Why software alone can't kill car dealers, realtors, or recruiters
Ride sharing failed repeatedly until Uber mapped every stakeholder's incentives
Not Googling your idea before building it is willful ignorance
MVP & prototyping
YouTube
Why simple products beat feature-rich ones that don't work
Y Combinator
January 26, 2022
MVP & prototyping
9
Product-market fit
7
Deep work & focus
6
A product with one working feature beats many broken ones.
Validation from investors and press is not product-market fit.
Discipline, not intelligence, separates founders who execute.
Where great startup ideas come from: lessons from Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe
Y Combinator
January 19, 2022
Niche selection
8
Customer discovery
6
Bad existing products beat first-mover advantage every time.
All three founders were told by experts their idea was stupid.
Market size estimates were wrong — always too small.
Why passion follows traction, not the other way around
Y Combinator
January 5, 2022
Motivation
9
Identity & self-belief
6
Passion is a byproduct of traction, not a prerequisite for starting.
Extrinsic motivators — hot tech, investor approval — predict failure, not success.
Revenue as a daily metric chemically rewires your brain to care.
How investors use terms and soft nos to take advantage of founders
Y Combinator
December 16, 2021
Fundraising & VC
9
Pitching investors
7
A high valuation means nothing if the terms hand away board control
"Come back with a lead" is VC-speak for no
Investors push founders to raise more to hit their ownership targets, not yours
Common fundraising mistakes YC founders make
Y Combinator
November 29, 2021
Fundraising & VC
9
Bootstrapping
6
Identity & self-belief
5
Raising before traction is fear-based — it kills your leverage permanently.
Founders who obsess over investors instead of customers are building wrong.
Google and Facebook raised from strength; that's why founders kept control.
Conflict resolution
YouTube
Co-founder mistakes that kill companies and how to avoid them
Y Combinator
November 22, 2021
Conflict resolution
9
Vision & mission
5
Equity & cap tables
5
Co-founders break up over incompatibility, never over skill gaps.
Unresolved conflict is the single biggest company killer.
Give the CEO one extra share to break a 50-50 deadlock.