When to Launch Your Startup and When to Wait

**Harj Taggar** (0:00)
I think there's this image founders have of the launch, which is it's gonna be like the launch, and it's gonna be like the Oscar ceremony or something, where there's just gonna be like hordes of people, and like, you're gonna be treated like a celebrity. And so like, you don't wanna turn up to the Oscars in like your scruffy, like top and bottoms, right? Like you wanna like, you wanna spend some time getting in shape, you wanna be looking good, like it's just this whole thing.

**Michael Seibel** (0:29)
Hi, this is Michael with Harj and Brad, and welcome to the Partner Lounge.

**Harj Taggar** (0:33)
So as YC Partners, we find ourselves repeating the same seemingly obvious advice to startup founders over and over again.

**Brad Flora** (0:42)
Before COVID, we'd often gather together in the Partner Lounge at the YC office to try to figure out why this was the case and how we could help startups figure it out faster.

**Michael Seibel** (0:51)
Now that we're in the remote world, we're gonna do this in front of all of you. So the first topic we're talking about today in the Partner Lounge is why don't startups like to launch early and move quickly?
Harj, to be honest, this is painfully obvious advice, right? This is, you know, YC, Paul Graham, 101, like no one applies to YC not knowing. This is what we're gonna tell them, right? So what do you think is going on? Why do you think people are getting screwed up here?

**Harj Taggar** (1:25)
Bunch of reasons. The first one that springs to my mind is you have to know what fast is to move fast.
And I think one of the things we get to see as partners is across hundreds of companies and founders, the different speeds they can move at. And honestly, I remember when I first started working at YC, it surprised me, right? Like I thought my startup, we were moving as fast as we could. And then you see some of the top companies, you're like, wow, how do you get so much done in a week?
And so I think there's that effect. I think maybe a specific version of that is if you've only ever worked at a big company, that you might think you're moving fast because you're moving big company fast, but like startup fast is a whole other ball game.

**Michael Seibel** (2:13)
Fast means you have to be a little bit uncomfortable what's going out there.
You know, you were talking about Instacart before. How dirty did Instacart look back in the day when you saw them go through YC?

**Harj Taggar** (2:24)
I mean, there's the classic story with Instacart, which is we interviewed them, and they did a demo of the product where they clicked to order beer, and beer turned up pretty quickly. And I think it actually turned out it was like our poover's friend or someone just drove to the store. There was no backend, right? And so that kind of continued during YC too, from what I remember. It wasn't like they had, they didn't spend a year building a sophisticated fulfillment center with complex algorithms to optimize delivery times. Pretty sure they just had the founders and maybe some people off Craigslist driving to the grocery store to pick up groceries.
Pretty dirty. I think it was a good UI, but the product was very much hacked together.

**Michael Seibel** (3:14)
Well, it's funny because Brexit was almost the exact opposite. When they come in to tell their story at the batch, there was no UI. They could give you a virtual credit card and it worked. But that was it. You couldn't see what you spent money on. You couldn't see how much money you spent. You couldn't...
All they knew was that you had a card and it worked. One of the things, though, that I think is going on, and you brought this up a little bit, Harj, is that founders will lie to themselves. They will think, I'm the exception.
I know the advice is good in general. I've heard all these great examples, but we are different. Brad, you were talking a little bit about the idea that maybe I could...
Maybe I can do a perfect launch. So how do you think founders think about their perfect launch and why they maybe can't move fast?

**Brad Flora** (4:03)
Well, I think the minute anyone starts making something, they start thinking about the moment when they show it to people and what they want the reaction to look like and sound like and feel like.
And yet they also know that there's a chance that it won't be like that and it will be crushing and devastating. And so I think every founder, no matter what they're working on, has this like parallel universe in the back of their mind of what the reaction is gonna be to their product. And when they let that parallel universe kind of win out over the reality that they need to get it in front of people faster and not worry about that, it can slow them down because they start optimizing for this thing that is just living in their head and it's not real at all.