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.
Cash flow management
YouTube
Managing startup finances: avoid the cash traps that kill companies
Y Combinator
August 22, 2019
Cash flow management
10
Unit economics
7
Processes & SOPs
5
Three numbers — burn, runway, growth rate — tell you everything about company health
Hiring before product-market fit won't get you there faster; it just burns cash
Start fundraising at 12 months runway, not 6 — leverage disappears as cash falls
MVP & prototyping
YouTube
Common mistakes first-time founders make in year one
Y Combinator
August 16, 2019
MVP & prototyping
9
Long-term planning
6
Productivity & habits
5
Founders who don't care about their problem lose motivation fast.
Launching late is a mistake — users won't remember your launch day.
Prioritising press and conferences over product is cargo-culting a startup.
How to launch repeatedly and stop treating launch as a one-time event
Y Combinator
August 15, 2019
Growth hacking
9
MVP & prototyping
6
Waiting for the perfect launch kills startups before they get a second chance
Every community, channel, and feature is its own separate launch opportunity
Build a warm email list pre-product — your network will amplify more than you expect
Product-market fit
YouTube
Growth for startups: product-market fit, channels, and decisions
Y Combinator
August 15, 2019
Product-market fit
9
Growth hacking
8
SEO
6
Retention curves are the only honest signal of product-market fit.
Most successful companies grew through one or two channels, not all.
A/B tests routinely disprove founder intuition — data beats gut feel.
Founder interviews
YouTube
Feather: building a furniture subscription business from scratch
Y Combinator
August 14, 2019
Founder interviews
9
Business models
7
Scaling infrastructure
6
The problem isn't owning furniture — it's committing to ownership too early.
Built a full proprietary logistics stack because nothing off-the-shelf existed.
Cold-emailed West Elm's CEO; landed a meeting and conviction to apply to YC that day.
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
How to convince someone to join your startup
Y Combinator
August 9, 2019
Identity & self-belief
9
Hiring & recruitment
5
Recruit co-founders only after convincing yourself first
Ambitious and incremental ideas are roughly equally hard to execute
Teams without deep conviction quit at the first rough patch
Identity & self-belief
YouTube
Key economic concepts founders can use from EconTalk
Y Combinator
August 7, 2019
Identity & self-belief
7
Long-term planning
6
Business models
5
Emergent order: many business problems solve themselves without your intervention.
Measuring only what's quantifiable makes you forget everything else exists.
Founders' irrational ownership of their company makes rational handoffs nearly impossible.
MVP & prototyping
YouTube
How to build and launch an MVP as a pre-launch startup
Y Combinator
August 1, 2019
MVP & prototyping
10
Customer discovery
6
Pivoting
5
Launch something bad quickly — speed beats perfection every time
Airbnb, Twitch, and Stripe all started with embarrassingly broken products
Hold the problem tightly; iterate the solution, never pivot away from the user
Product-market fit
YouTube
Analytics setup for early-stage startups and MVP validation
Y Combinator
August 1, 2019
Product-market fit
9
Data & analytics
7
MVP & prototyping
6
Retention cohorts below 20-30% at week four signal no product-market fit.
A TV dashboard reviewed daily is what separates data-driven teams from blind ones.
A 43-minute personalised founder email generates more feedback than any other channel.
Long-term planning
YouTube
How to set KPIs and goals for early-stage startups
Y Combinator
August 1, 2019
Long-term planning
9
Product-market fit
7
Unit economics
5
Why email signups and MAU are traps that mislead founders
Revenue almost always beats active users as your primary metric
5–10% week-over-week growth separates real startups from the rest
How to evaluate a startup idea: problem, solution, and unfair advantage
Y Combinator
July 25, 2019
Business models
9
Product-market fit
7
Fundraising & VC
5
A startup idea is a hypothesis about why you'll grow quickly.
Without one clear unfair advantage, investors have no reason to pick you.
Starting with technology instead of a problem makes growth far harder.
Customer discovery
YouTube
How to talk to users: a practical framework for founder interviews
Y Combinator
July 25, 2019
Customer discovery
10
Product-market fit
8
Prospecting & outreach
5
Ask about past specifics, never hypothetical future features
Three numbers reveal your best first customer before you build
40% 'very disappointed' is the quantitative product-market fit signal
Managing technical teams: lessons from IC to engineering leader
Y Combinator
July 17, 2019
Management
9
Delegation
7
Hiring & recruitment
5
Coding your way out of a team problem is always the wrong move.
Removing one toxic person improves team output more than you expect.
Leadership is providing clarity in ambiguity — not a title or charisma.
Why early startups must do things that don't scale
Y Combinator
July 16, 2019
Pivoting
8
Customer discovery
7
Processes & SOPs
5
Unscalable manual work is the only path to eventually scaling.
Skip the handmade effort early, and you'll never get big.
Heavy manual work for first customers is always worth it.
Resilience & grit
YouTube
Irrational commitment as a common trait in successful founders
Y Combinator
July 16, 2019
Resilience & grit
8
Identity & self-belief
6
Successful founders share an almost irrational, all-in obsession.
Musk bet his entire fortune on SpaceX — three rockets exploded first.
Focus, frugality, obsession, love: Buchheit's four-word founder distillation.