#143 - Startup School Week 2 Recap: Michael Seibel, Adora Cheung, and Ilya Volodarsky

**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 a recap of the second week of Startup School. I've cut down the second week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast. First we'll have a lecture from Michael Seibel. Michael is CEO and a partner at YC. His lecture is about how to plan an MVP.
Then we'll hear a lecture from Adora Cheung. Adora is a partner at YC and a co-founder of Homejoy. Her lecture is about how to set KPIs and goals. Last, we'll have a lecture from Ilya Volodarsky. Ilya is a co-founder of Segment. His lecture is about analytics for startups.
All right, here we go.

**Michael Seibel** (0:44)
I work here at Y Combinator. I help run the accelerator. Before that, I did two YC startups, one in 2007 and one in 2012 And today I'm going to talk to you about minimum viable products. So, MVP. We always yell at founders to not use jargon, yet we have this whole set of stupid startup jargon, and MVP is one of them.
When you think about an MVP, you should think about something ridiculously simple. This is the first thing you can give to the very first set of users you want to target in order to see if you can deliver any value at all to them. That's all it is. It's extremely simple.
Okay, so the goal of a pre-launch startup is extremely simple. Step one, launch quickly. This is something that's been part of the YC ethos from the very beginning, and it's been great advice for 10 years, and it continues to be great advice.
If you can walk away from one thing from this presentation, it's launch something bad quickly.
That's it. Like literally, the rest of what I'm going to say is basically going to be resummarized versions of that same thing. The second thing that an early stage startup needs to do is get some initial customers. Get anyone using your product. You don't have to have a vision of how you get everyone using it, but just anyone interacting and seeing if they get value out of the product. You'd be surprised at how many founders' journeys end before a single user has actually interacted with a product they've created.
It's very, very common, so please get past the step. It's extremely important. The next one is talk to your users, any of them, after you've launched this MVP, and get feedback. This is one that's also an extremely common mistake, because most founders in their heads have a idea of what they want to build. And so they kind of have this weird feeling that if I haven't built the full thing yet, getting feedback on the shitty initial thing is kind of useless. Of course it's not gonna work. It's not the full thing. The full thing's gonna take three years, 10 million dollars, a whole team. So feedback on the little thing is useless. The reality is that in some ways, the full thing is this really awesome idea in your head that you should keep in your head, but it should be very, very flexible, because it might turn out the full thing that you wanna build isn't what your customers want at all. And last, most important, iterate. And I like to kind of distinguish between iterating and pivoting. A lot of founders, once they've figured out how to build something, fall in love with it. And so if it doesn't work for a certain set of users, they start thinking, well, I wonder what other problems this thing can solve. Well, you know, the screwdriver is not actually good at screwing in anything. But I wonder what other problems it could solve. And they're like, oh, maybe you can use it to cook. Maybe you can use it to clean. And it's like, no, like, the problem was I need to screw something in. The user was like a mechanic. And if your screwdriver doesn't help the mechanic solve the problem, keep the mechanic, keep the problem, I need to screw something in, fix the fucking screwdriver. Like, that's the thing that's broken, right? The broken thing is not the mechanic, and it's not the fact that they need to screw something in.
In most cases, most people should be building a very lean MVP. So by that we mean you should be able to build it fast in weeks, not months. This can either involve software, or honestly, we see startups just start with a landing page and a spreadsheet. But most startups can start very, very fast. The second, extremely limited functionality. You need to condense down what your user needs, what your initial user needs, to a very simple set of things. A lot of times founders want to address all of their users' problems and all of their potential users.