Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb)

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:00)
If I drill down, what makes companies fail? It's quite simple. It's just like, they don't talk to users, which means they don't find product market fit. And if they don't find product market fit, nothing else really matters.
And what mistakes do people make is all about that. It's all about talking to customers and learning that you're building something that's actually useful. YC's headline is, Make Things People Want, and it's still true, and it's always gonna be true.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:30)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Gustaf Alstromer. Gustaf is a group partner at Y Combinator, where he's been for almost six years. Prior to that, Gustaf was at Airbnb for over four years, where he started the original Airbnb growth team, and where I was very lucky to get to work alongside him for a number of years.
Gustaf is also at the heart of YC's increased focus on climate tech, and in my opinion, is one of a handful of people who've had an incredible impact on the increasing amount of investment and people flowing into climate tech. We chat in depth about what's happening in climate tech, why things have shifted so much recently, what's new and exciting, and how to think about the space if you're hoping to make the jump. We also get deep into Gustaf's experience working with over 600 startups over his time at YC. We talk about what are the most common mistakes that early stage startups and founders make, what advice YC partners give founders most often, the most common attributes of successful founders, the importance of having a technical co-founder and why that's the case, so much more. I guarantee you will leave this episode smarter and more inspired, and I can't wait for you to hear it. With that, I bring you Gustaf Alstromer after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.
This episode is brought to you by Linear. Let's be honest, the issue tracker that you're using today isn't very helpful. Why is it that it always seems to be working against you instead of working for you? Why does it feel like such a chore to use? Well, Linear is different. It's incredibly fast, beautifully designed, and it comes with powerful workflows that streamline your entire product development process, from issue tracking all the way to managing product roadmaps.
Linear is designed for the way modern software teams work. What users love about Linear are the powerful keyboard shortcuts, efficient GitHub integrations, cycles that actually create progress, and built-in project updates that keep everyone in sync. In short, it just works. Linear is the default tool of choice among startups, and it powers a wide range of large established companies such as Versel, Retool, and Cash App. See for yourself why product teams describe using Linear as magical. Visit linear.app slash Lenny to try Linear for free with your team and get 25% off when you upgrade. That's linear.app slash Lenny.
This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next-generation A-B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful and Cameo rely on Epo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country and by user stage. EPPO does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. EPPO lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your north star metrics, like activation, retention, subscriptions and payments. And EPPO supports tests on the front end, the back end, email marketing and even machine learning clients. Check out EPPO at geteppo.com, geteppo.com and 10x your experiment velocity.
Gustaf, welcome to the podcast.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (4:17)
Thank you Lenny. It's honestly so great to see you. I'm excited to be talking to you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:22)
I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while ever since we booked this. We worked together at Airbnb for many years. I was really lucky to get to work with you before you moved on to bigger and better things at YC.
Speaking of Airbnb, you once tweeted about how special an experience that was for you. I think even more interestingly, how many of the people that have left Airbnb can't find another place that's as special. They just like that bar has been set too high.