#112 - Ryan Hoover and Dalton Caldwell

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Ryan Hoover and Dalton Caldwell. Ryan is the founder of Product Hunt, which was in the YC Summer 2014 batch, and was acquired by AngelList. He also invests in startups through his Weekend Fund. Dalton is a partner at YC, where he runs admissions. You can find Ryan on Twitter at rrhoover and Dalton at daltonc.
All right, here we go.
Welcome to the podcast, guys. How's it going?

**Ryan Hoover** (0:29)
Doing well. How are you?

**Craig Cannon** (0:30)
Good.
All right, Ryan. So for those of our listeners who don't know who you are, what do you work on?

**Ryan Hoover** (0:36)
So I started a company five years ago almost, or actually just over five years ago, called Product Hunt, a place to discover new products. You see a lot of makers and companies launching their new apps or their new products to the world and kind of like Reddit or Hacker News, you have people commenting, asking questions and uploading what they think is most cool.

**Craig Cannon** (0:51)
And Dalton?

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:53)
I'm Dalton. I'm a partner at Y Combinator. I'm also the head of admissions.
So that's the selection process for who we fund. And I actually worked at YC when Product Hunt was in YC. And so I remember it from the inside, kind of what the story was.

**Craig Cannon** (1:07)
Were you there for the interview?

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:08)
I was not. Nope.

**Craig Cannon** (1:10)
Do you remember who it was?

**Ryan Hoover** (1:11)
Yeah, it was Sam.
Who else was it? It was such a blur. It was 10 minutes of just rapid fire questions and I was like, all right, anyway, I can't remember who else it was. Yeah.

**Craig Cannon** (1:23)
Anyway.

**Ryan Hoover** (1:24)
All right.

**Craig Cannon** (1:24)
Cool. Yeah. So Dalton, I think he has a question for you to start it off.

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:27)
Yeah. So maybe to start with, like, because I remember it so well from being there, walk me through from the formation of Product Hunt into applying to YC and to getting into that interview that is already a blur.
You're not sure who's there.

**Craig Cannon** (1:46)
Was I there? I don't even know.

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:48)
That's a very common thing, by the way. It's almost like an out of body experience. Maybe people don't remember them that well.
So it's not just you. I hear that a lot where they...

**Ryan Hoover** (2:00)
There's a lot of anxiety when you go into it, frankly. And you know, you try to, well, someone gave me this advice actually during YC is before you do anything like that, before you do a pitch, pump your chest physically. It might have been Kevin Hale that said this. Yeah, I could be wrong. So sorry, Kevin, if I'm putting words in your mouth.
But there's a step where you can like pump your chest physically and that active physical nature of like doing something that feels like a little bit aggressive can inspire some confidence. And you know, it's actually I may have done on a few different times, you know, throughout my career, not gonna lie.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:31)
I've never heard that advice before.

**Craig Cannon** (2:33)
Yeah, that was Jordan Peterson's first rule in his book. It says stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Anyway.

**Ryan Hoover** (2:40)
All right.

**Craig Cannon** (2:41)
Okay, so you blacked out during the interview, basically, but yeah, what else was the process like?

**Ryan Hoover** (2:48)
So see, we're going to start. So Product Hunt, I'll do the beginning really, really quickly. It started off as a side project and it was right between startups. I was leaving in another one and kind of tinkering and interviewing at other startups.
I started Product Hunt. It started off as an email list, got some traction there. That then turned into a website and we looked a lot a lot of inspiration like Reddit and Hacker News and other communities and like how do you, what systems do we want to take inspiration from? How do we want people to engage? And so we built that. That got some traction and it was probably for, I want to say four months after the email started and when the website was kind of operating, it was still a side project. It was not incorporated. It was still like a thing I woke up every morning super excited about and found my mind continually 24-7 focusing on it, but I still didn't know what we wanted to turn it into.