Top lessons I learned at Y-Combinator Startup School

In the last few months, I had the privilege to study at?Y?Combinator?Startup School.

For those who don't know, Y Combinator is an American startup accelerator. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.

Startup School is an online course of several months that focuses on how to establish a startup.

The guidance and advice are based on 15 years of knowledge from YC leaders.

Each session included a lecture by the world's most successful founders on how they built the company, followed by networking sessions.

Despite a decade in which I acquired my knowledge and experience in innovation, learning is part of my DNA, the course was fascinating and instructive for me.

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Top lessons I learned at YC Startup Shcool?-

1. How to Get Startup Ideas? By the fascinating Jared Friedman - Group Partner - Y Combinator :

This lesson is for anyone who doesn't yet have an idea for a startup and wants to find one. It's also relevant if you have an idea, but aren't sure it's the one you want to stick with.

The most common mistakes founders make when coming up with startup ideas -

• Believing that you need an amazing idea to get started, starting with a brilliant idea - is NOT the key to having a successful startup. Don't wait to have a brilliant idea before starting something :

It's really easy, when you look at successful companies today, like Google or Facebook, to think, "Wow, that was such a brilliant idea." But I can tell you it only looks that way in hindsight. When Google started, it was, like, the 20th search engine. And when Facebook started, it was, like, the 20th social network. What made them successful wasn't a brilliant initial idea. It was a good enough initial idea, combined with great execution.

When you look at successful companies today, like Google or Facebook, to think, "Wow, that was such a brilliant idea.", It only looks that way in hindsight. When Google started, it was the 20th search engine. When Facebook started, it was the 20th social network. What made them successful wasn't a brilliant initial idea. It was a good enough initial idea, combined with great execution.

• Jumping into the first idea that comes to mind, without really stopping to think critically about whether it's a good idea at all: If your startup is successful, you will spend years of your life working on it <--> if you're going to spend years of your life working on something <--> wouldn't it make sense to spend, at least a couple of weeks first, deciding what to work on? Startup ideas morph over time. Take Airbnb, for example. Airbnb was initially literally a website for renting air beds at other people's houses. It morphed over time into all vacation rentals. Pick a good starting point <--> then even if your initial idea isn't great, it just needs tweaking to get to a great idea. Whereas if you pick a bad starting point <--> there might not be any way to morph into a good one. You'll have to start over completely.
• Start with a solution instead of a problem: Imagine you come up with an App startup idea <--> you push a button, and a plumber shows up. This is a solution. What problem does this solve? You never actually find the problem. You're much better off starting with a problem and then looking for solutions. Mistake #Not solving a real problem
• Believing that startup ideas are hard to find: Actually, they're easy to find because there are many, many real problems left in the world. If you're having trouble finding them, it's just that you haven't yet learned how to do it. Once you learn how to notice good startup ideas, you'll see them all over the place.

2. How to know if your idea is good: 10 key questions to ask about a startup idea, By the knowledgeable Jared Friedman - Group Partner - Y Combinator :

• Do you have a Founder / Market Fit? Probably the most important criteria. Basically, “are you the right team to do this?”
• How big is the market for this idea???How big could it be in the future?
• How acute is the problem???
• Do you have entrenched competition??If so, do you have a new insight?
• Do you want this???Do you know people personally who want this?
• Did this only recently become possible or necessary?
• Are there good proxies for this business? proxies: successful companies that do something similar, but not exactly the same thing
• Is this an idea you’d want to work on for years? Often this develops over time:?watch Should you follow your passions?
• Can your solution scale? Pure software businesses: great, Pure services businesses (i.e., an agency, a dev shop): bad
• Is this in a good idea space? It's a Class of closely related startup ideas. Examples:?“software for hospitals”, “ infrastructure monitoring tools”, and “food delivery services”. Different idea spaces have wildly different hit rates

Picking the right idea space: ?You want to pick a good idea space that has a good hit rate and has a founder/market fit. That way, even if your initial idea isn't quite right, there are good adjacent ideas

Questions to ask about your startup idea: Here's the Link?

Ways to put yourself in a position to have organic startup ideas in the future: Become an expert on something valuable, Work at a startup, and Build things you find interesting.

3. Recipes for generating startup ideas

Recipe #1 Start with what your?team is especially good at.

Recipe #2 Start with a problem you’ve personally encountered, ideally one you were in an unusual position to see

Using Recipes 1 & 2

• Think of every job you've had (+ internships + life experiences).???What problems did you come across?? What did you learn that other people don't know?
• Compared to other likely founders, what are problems or opportunities you’ve been in a special position to see?

Recipe #3 Think of things you personally wish existed

Recipe #4 Look for things that have changed in the world recently

Recipe #5 Find companies that have been successful recently and look for new variants of them

Recipe #6 Go talk to people and ask about problems they have

Recipe #7 Look for big industries that seem broken

Bonus Recipe: Find a cofounder that? already has an idea

4. How to Build the Future By Elon Musk

The most mind-blowing conclusion that I learned in this session is a sneak peek of how Elon Musk Thinks. When talking about the future of Tesla cars, he talked about the way he is aiming to improve the machines that create the cars, He talked about How he uses his engineering knowledge to improve the Machine Learning abilities of the systems that allow the cars to be smart, by defining the right questions to create a valuable Artificial Intelligence which able to be more efficient.

He talked about things that he thinks are most likely to affect the future of humanity:

• "AI is probably the single biggest item in the near term that's likely to affect humanity. So it's very important that we have the advent of AI in a good way that is something that if you could look into a crystal ball and see the future, you would like that outcome because it is something that could go wrong and as we've talked about many times. And so we really need to make sure it goes right."
• "Anything to do with genetics. If you can actually solve genetic diseases if you can prevent dementia or Alzheimer's or something like that with genetic reprogramming that would be wonderful. So I think this genetics might be the sort of second most important item."
• "I think having a high bandwidth interface to the brain. We're currently bandwidth limited. We have a digital tertiary self in the form of our e-mail capabilities, our computers, and phone applications. We're effectively superhuman but we are extremely bandwidth constrained in that interface between the cortex and that tertiary digital form of yourself and helping solve that bandwidth constraint would be I think very important for the future as well. "

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Whom did I learn from?

• YC Group Partner -?Jared Fleitman?(Thank you for the privilege to take part in the program and thank you for sharing your knowledge and successful experience)
• YC's President -?Geoff Ralston
• YC Group Partner -?Harj Taggar
• YC Managing Director -?Michael Seibel?(Thank you for the honest, real and down-to-earth, and action-oriented meetings)
• YC Group Partner -?Gustaf Alstr?mer
• YC Partner and Head of Outreach -?Kat Ma?alac
• YC Partner & Former Head of Growth at Airbnb -?Gustaf Alstr?mer
• One of the most prolific angel investors in Silicon Valley and a YC Partner -?Brad Flora
• YC Group Partner and head of admissions -?Dalton Caldwell
• YC co-founder - @Paul Graham (Thank you for sharing the path that leads you to build YC)?#innovation?#startup?#learning?#leaders?#networking?#founders?#
• YC president -?Geoff Ralston
• Special Thank you?Joan DeGennaro?, Community Manager at YCombinator Startup School, For gathering Innovative people from different parts of the world in such a natural and professional way

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What did I learn?

• The Story of Replit: how a side project became a $1B company
• How to plan an MVP
• How to get and evaluate startup ideas
• How to set KPIs and Prioritize Your Time
• How to talk to users
• How to launch
• How to get your first customers
• All about Pivoting
• How to build and succeed as a technical founder
• How startup fundraising works in 2022
• How to build the future".

Thank you for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I'm now a Y Combinator startup school graduate.