#149 - Startup School Week 8 Recap - Adora Cheung on Prioritizing Your Time and Kevin Hale on Evaluating Startup Ideas

**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 eighth week of Startup School. I've cut down the eighth week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast. First, we'll have a lecture from Adora Cheung. Adora is a partner at YC, and her lecture covers how to prioritize your time.
Then we'll have a lecture from Kevin Hale. Kevin's also a partner at YC, and his lecture is the second part of his talk on how to evaluate startup ideas.
All right, here we go.

**Adora Cheung** (0:32)
Hello, as Kevin said, my name is Adora. I'm one of the partners at YC, and I'm going to talk about how to prioritize time.
Time, as you know, is precious, especially when you're working on a startup. Time burns money, and money is the very basic thing that keeps a startup alive. Not to be too philosophical about it, but even if your personal burn is super low, you can eat ramen days on end, which I don't suggest, and you don't have to pay yourself for a very long time. There's always a high opportunity cost to doing your startup. So it's super important to use your time the best way possible to maximize your startup's chance for success, which means you need to be really good at identifying and prioritizing tasks that are going to be the most impactful for your startup's progress, which I've noticed after going through thousands of weekly updates from startup school founders, that a lot of founders are not doing this well. So hopefully this will be helpful. Let me first preface all of this by defining what time I'm talking about. So obviously there are 24 hours in a day, and I'm not here to tell you how to allocate those hours across your startup versus everything else that is important to you, sleep, family, friends, hobbies, and so on and so forth. Everyone has different situations, so it's hard for me to, from up here, give you good generic advice on how to allocate your time across these things. I'm just going to assume you're doing what's best for you. Whether it's two, six, 12 hours a day that you decide to work on your startup, it doesn't matter to me for the purpose of this lecture. I just want to help you figure out how to spend those two, six, or 12 hours that you've decided to allocate your startup in the best possible way. All right, so when it comes to things to work on your startup, my guess is that you already have something like a task list in which you put new ideas on to eventually work on, and you update that very frequently. So let's start from there, that you have a task list of things to do. First, I want to make a real clear distinction between real and fake startup progress. This is the easiest way to classify whether a task goes in the should do or the should not do bucket. If it contributes to real startup progress, you should consider doing it, and if it doesn't, then don't. This seems trivial at first. Why would anyone do anything that amounts to fake startup progress? But let me explain further. So real startup progress is when you're really focused on things that really move the needle for your startup. And in the beginning, the best way to show this is through growth, in particular, growth of your primary KPI. I gave a whole lecture on this a few weeks ago on KPI and goals. If you haven't watched it yet, please watch it.
I talk a lot about primary and secondary KPIs. There's always a balance between what to focus on, but for the purpose of this lecture, I'm just going to refer to the primary KPI as a thing to focus on growing. So to summarize, your primary KPI almost always is either revenue or active users, and you should always be setting weekly goals for this. To move the needle on the KPIs, the highest leverage thing you can be doing always comes in the form of tasks that involve talking to users and building and iterating your product. Nothing else.
This is in direct contrast with fake startup progress, which is when founders focus on things that are not directly related to growing your primary KPI. So common things I see in weekly updates are things like attending conferences, focusing on winning awards, network events, optimizing the wrong metrics. While you may convince yourself these are good things to focus on, they are actually many steps away from delivering real value to your customer. And so if all the things you could be possibly doing, spending any significant time on any of these things, is almost always a bad idea. The goal is not to optimize startup vanity, but actually delivering value to your customer. Doing the things that will help you directly, help you increase your KPI. Now that we have one way to filter what tasks you should be working on, let's go a little bit deeper and figure out how to determine if you're prioritizing the right tasks. This, at first, also seems trivial. Presumably, you're doing what you believe is high-value work. I mean, nobody ever says, oh, let me do the thing that is going to help my startup the least. Right?