#119 - Amy Buechler and Michael Seibel

**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 Amy Buechler and Michael Seibel. Amy is an executive coach for startup founders. Michael's a partner and the CEO of YC.
In this episode, we talk about coaching and use examples from Michael's time working on Justin TV and Socialcam.
You can find Amy at her site, foundercoach.io, and on Twitter at amybue.
Michael is on Twitter at MW Seibel. All right, here we go. All right, guys, welcome to the podcast.

**Amy Buechler** (0:33)
Thanks, Greg.

**Craig Cannon** (0:34)
How's it going? Great. Good. Amy, you are a founder coach.
I think a lot of people don't know what coaching actually is, so maybe you could explain it.

**Amy Buechler** (0:43)
Yeah, that's actually a great question because what coaching is depends a lot on who the coach is and what their expertise is and what their experience has been. So coaching in its most simple term is a supportive relationship.
And it's a supportive relationship that helps people, usually founders or execs, like managers, resolve problems that they're experiencing in their life.

**Craig Cannon** (1:08)
So I think some people might be familiar with therapy and maybe have even done it before. How would you differentiate it from coaching?

**Amy Buechler** (1:15)
Therapy is a relationship that uses that relationship to affect change, whereas coaching is using the coach's own life experience to affect change.
They're both really similar. Coaches often use their relationship with the client as information to help them understand the client in order to better serve their needs. But therapy is almost all that. It's all about the client, the client's relationships, the client's marriage, friendships, family, all that stuff, whereas coaching is the client and their work and their eating habits and this, that or the other. That's not all the relationship.
Another big difference actually is the credentialing process. So in therapy, for example, I had to go to grad school. I had to get a master's degree and then have 3000 supervised hours before even being able to apply to take the licensing exam. So that's five years of my life. Whereas with coaching, one day I decided, I'm gonna be a coach. And that's really the difference and you can imagine the different types of people, for example, that would opt into one career path versus the other.

**Craig Cannon** (2:20)
Okay, and so we've kind of outlined a few of the most common problems startups have here. And so I think what could be most helpful to people is we're just gonna talk about the problems and then we can outline the symptoms, talk about a couple examples and just go from there.
Okay, cool. So what is the most common problem you see startups having?

**Amy Buechler** (2:39)
The most common problem I think that I see my clients have is an inability to have difficult conversations because their emotions get in the way and or an inability to even pinpoint the actual problem that they're experiencing. Often the real problem that is like many levels below what they're experiencing as they go about their day.

**Craig Cannon** (3:05)
Okay, and so we've broken a few of those out. So we've called them roles and responsibilities, discussing equity, talking about founder performance and the last one is talking about runway, how much you have left in the bank.
So maybe, I mean, maybe even Michael, you could give an example of one of these from, you know, any of the things you've worked on.

**Michael Seibel** (3:24)
Sure, yeah. So in the early days of Justin TV and Twitch, roles and responsibilities was something that we did a very bad job at. And like one of the kind of very clear ways that I know we did a bad job is that every single one of us started another company and did a better job.
And so we did a bad job and we realized it and we fixed it. So very specifically, we had four co-founders.
We were equal co-founders. And while we each sort of knew what we were supposed to do, it wasn't extremely explicit who was responsible for what. It wasn't extremely explicit who was responsible for product. It wasn't extremely explicit for who was responsible for... Well, actually, now that I think about it, it wasn't extremely explicit who was responsible for product. And maybe that was actually the core issue. Because it was explicit who was responsible for the hardware, that was Kyle. It was also explicit who was doing the software, that was Emmett. It was Justin's show, so he was responsible for filming. And I think it was explicit for me, I was responsible for fundraising and customer support and press and so on and so forth. But who was responsible for the product was actually unclear. And I know that because we fought about it all the time.