No idea why you would write this up or share it honestly. Call me old fashion but I wouldn't want to do business with someone who scream irrationally as loud as they can in response to simple questions or during business meetings. Especially since the outcome didn't lead to anything, just was 'something different'. Truly what is the message here?
Honestly being in the room I didn't feel screamed at. I felt like we finally got to the real reason why he was passionate about this problem/company. We just had a wade through all the "pitch stuff". I still think he ID'd a huge widespread problem that we still need a solution for.
I probably would have funded the guy (haven't seen the graveyard myself doing these interviews over the years, TBF), too, or at least kept in touch, as mwseibel did. The article made it sound like this wasn't lashing out in an inflammatory way, it was impassioned frustration.
And for every single self-serving puff piece out there about getting rejected from the YC interview, I'd say this one stands out as one of the few that are genuine.
That's fair, thanks for your clarification then.
I donât get the niece problem⌠itâs not a lack of itinerary but a lack of time. If I had a relative / friend visit ⌠weâll I wouldnât care if we had to just sit in a Starbucks or even McDonalds or do the most obvious tourist stuff as long as there is time.
You wouldn't care, but the niece wouldn't have any interest. I think that's the point, create another outlet for cool activities.
The message is written at the end of the post:
> The lesson that I walked away with was to listen to that pain, no matter how irrational it may seem in the moment... Iâve been learning to listen and to trust my emotions in less desperate situations in the years since the YC interview.
I do not think the author is claiming you should shout about your niece in a YC interview. They told a pretty interesting anecdote and gave the insight they gained from it.
Not to be rude but your comment seems kind of like it should just be a downvote (or I suppose a withheld upvote).
I tend to find when someone starts a sentence with "not to be rude" or "with all due respect" or "I don't disagree", this person's subconscious is telling them "hey don't say this thing you're about to say because..."
And then the person just tells their subconscious to take a back seat and prefaces their statement with a dismissive phrase.
It could also mean:
"I'm struggling to find the right words, and the only ones I've found don't reflect the note I'm trying to sound."
There has to be some irony in you writing a passive aggressive reply over me adding in "not to be rude" in an attempt to not sound passive aggressive myself.
Maybe the irony is in me taking the bait and writing a passive aggressive reply to your passive aggressive reply.
I'm sure that you didn't mean to be rude, but you came off that way. That's fine, I also have a hard time articulating a balance between tone and content.
That's why I tend to preface comments that may be perceived as rude with a statement that it is not my intention.
For me, anytime I've used any variation of "with...respect" it stands in as a polite substitute for "Fuck You" just before I tell them exactly why they are full of shit.
That's just me though.
My takeaway, more than anything else â as someone who has never interacted with Michael Seibel â is immense respect/admiration for how well he handled it â staying focused on the true goal (understanding the pitch) and in the process coaxing out something even the entrepreneur couldnât easily vocalize, and along the way gracefully de-escalating the situation.
There are a lot of ways the situation could have ended up with negative value for everyone involved, and it took a bit of skillful steering to turn it into something valuable. That level of emotional composure seems worth developing.
If you don't want to do business with people who are weird and erratic, you're probably not going to be great at seed investing.
What is telling about this example is that what seemed to have made the biggest impression was the least rehearsed, thought out, planned answer he could give, but rather the one that was the most sincere and most "down to earth."
I think there is so much about the YC format which really hints at that strategy likely being your best route of success -- the time constraint, the lack of pitch deck, etc. I mean, these are people who quite literally go through thousands of these. I can't really see any other way to possibly stand out than to try to be radically genuine and sincere, even when that seems (as the author seemed to have thought!) that it is the "less fancy" or "not the thing you are supposed to say." Quite literally anything else will be something they will have heard, at a minimum, dozens of other times.
It seems to me they're not evaluating the pair {problem, solution}, they're evaluating the pair {problem, founder} - the solution may be changed and tweaked and not be special but the founder has to be special, and carefully designed charts with pretty numbers don't explain a founder, emotional speeches do.
> It seems to me they're not evaluating the pair {problem, solution}, they're evaluating the pair {problem, founder}
I think that's a good insight. "Plans never survive contact with the enemy", and so solutions are constantly changing as a startup explores the problem space. Perhaps what VCs are actually looking for is:
1. The founder identified a problem that actually exists.
2. The problem actually has a solution that can be monetized, in theory.
3. They have confidence that the founder can hone in on a viable solution that can be monetized.
The pitch doesn't have to be the solution, it only has to show that a financially viable path to a solution plausibly exists, and that the founder seems competent enough to find the way towards a financially viable outcome. If even one of the above requirements isn't satisfied, investing money doesn't seem sensible.
Or as Mike Tyson put it: Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth
The evaluation is {solution, founder}.
Problem is, in some sense, irrelevant. You don't make money from the problem.
A good founder makes money from a solution.
How are you inferring that from this blog post? Everything about it seems to be saying "I've heard this solution a million times, and seen a million failures, do you have anything new?"
The answer is to have a solution that has not seen a million failures.
Because, just like the author of the blog, most of us have trained ourselves not to share these kinds of feelings.
In his pitch the founder conceived/pitched the solution as a veiled way to talk about his real problem.
I see it at my job all the time, we talk about technical problems and their solutions as a way of trying to share our fears, anxieties and feelings.
All the heady technical talk is just a proxy for what we really wish we could say.
I know this because I'm often the only one on the team brave enough to state the subtext openly, and have I often been thanked for that.
Every team needs a therapist, it would seem.
pg has in the past been quite blunt that he sees the quality of the founders as the most important thing, regardless of the solution.
As has repeated time and time again to the point of almost becoming mythology in my opinion, pg has posted about how he originally hated the AirBnB idea but loved the founders.
Seems like the sort of thing that wants to be a game. If you asked me to name a successful "urban exploration" startup, I'd probably name Pokemon Go and maybe Groupon.
The former isn't a "startup" companywise, and the latter isn't one now, but both were certainly novel, and strongly adjacent to the space under discussion. They both got people out of their homes and offices and into unfamiliar parts of town. My guess is the ultimate winner will find a way to hit both the Pokemon Go and Groupon psychological buttons at once.
No, the answer is not to be one of the million failures.
Which apparently means keeping your passion under pressure.
You nailed it.
Wait does this mean I get to interview for YC? /s
Not a founder, but a fan of y'alls work :-)
> I can't really see any other way to possibly stand out than to try to be radically genuine and sincere
You could have a unique idea that isn't shit. If you can't have a unique idea that isn't shit, you shouldn't be a startup founder in the first place.
I don't think a unique idea is necessarily required for a startup. It could be instead that you've identified an under serviced market niche. This could still be a very good startup idea.
True, but your idea has to at least be good or relevant, which OP's unfortunately wasn't. It doesn't take some weird emotional outburst to stand out, it takes having an actually good idea. Of course you need to convince them it's a good idea, but again you don't need an emotional outburst for that, if it's an actually good idea it should not be difficult.
What startup has a truly unique idea? Doing the same thing a hundred other companies are doing and being slightly better and luckier is how most of them got successful.
> If you can't have a unique idea that isn't shit, you shouldn't be a startup founder in the first place.
A taxi service available via a phone is not a unique idea, and it loses millions every single day (Uber).
A company that trades in government issued tax credits for not-pollution is not a unique idea, the Reagan administration invented it (Tesla)
A database sold to end users is not a unique idea, IBM did it in the 1960s (Oracle)
This list could go on ad-infinitum.
Youâve grossly mischaracterized every single one of these.
Nice story, but I think people here have the wrong takeaways from it. Having an outburst or sharing personal anecdotes isn't going to help you in an investor pitch. Had it happened earlier in their YC interview things wouldn't have gone any different, as they make it seem. The fundamental questions and doubts would have all been the same.
If you don't have solid differentiators, growth charts, revenue models a touching story will not help your startup.
Yeah, exactly ten years ago I heard a story from the founder of an urban exploration startup (yep) that was about a hundred times more touching and inspiring than this niece story. It was like best story of the year for me. The startup? Failed after two years.
I wonder what the story was
Yes, the author is basically saying that they felt unnoticed and were not receiving enough attention from the VC. Becoming very emotional did capture their raw attention, but in a way that was probably irrelevant to their goals.
This is a clear misreading of what is written in TFA.
They had lots of attention from the VC, but all the VC did was shoot down their idea(s). The emotional outburst changed the mood in the room, and they got a different kind of response from the VC.
I donât think yours is a good reading, either. They had already gotten all the negative feedback so there wasnât much of that left to get. The outburst also didnât change the primary outcome (no funding). All it did was open the door to a different set of questions and a potential advisor (in my opinion not very helpful in this case). Weâre also relying on the OP to tell us the mood was better when in fact it could have easily been a pity party to the other people there.
I read it as, at first, they had a mundane take on a problem and a mundane solution. Millennials want experiences so we can <do whatever>. Then, the outburst revealed they actually had a more insightful take on the problem, the specific example of difficulty relating to the author's niece. However, they still didn't have insight into the solution.
My takeaway is something like it's better to drive from the clearest articulation of the problem to the solution, rather than divert into business-speak and make yourself sound cookie cutter. e.g. "I couldn't connect with my niece. It was isolating. Many millenials feel isolated this way. We solved the problem with my niece by doing X. X can scale to other millienials" is a better type of pitch.
Hmm, I think the article shows - to say it another way - a desire for validation from the VC, to be taken seriously. Which is of course a natural thing to want. Instead the VC was casually shooting down their idea. So they wanted a different kind of attention, and acknowledgement that they were different and remarkable (the article is actually pretty clear on this point). They wanted to be remembered, and, well, perhaps they were.
Correct. And after getting that attention they didnât get funded. Because Michael was likely right and the world doesnât need yet another urban exploration app. It seems to me that this creates a fun blog post and some long term personal growth but shouting about your niece doesnât seem like the winning strategy when it comes to VC funding.
They should have understood their core ambition / pain point themselves earlier, and structured the product and strategy based on it. If many people clearly have this problem and it has not been addressed, that's their differentiator.
Though I'm glad they did finally figure it out, I think the lesson is to really reflect on your goals before pitching anything.
I had a previous co-founder have an outburst like this and I immediately cut all ties. It was one of the most astonishing un-professional things I'd ever experienced. It also hurt deeply because I'd largely considered this person to be my friend, until they started sending me threatening texts filled with vitriolic threats basically because things hadn't worked out for our concept. I believe mental health problems may have been the root of this, but it was a really bizarre experience.
I took a break from doing startup anything for about a year after that happened - I still have trust issues as a result of this experience. For anyone who thinks "radical honesty" or BS like that is effective in life or business, you're just going to look like an immature asshole or someone with serious mental issues.
The outburst insight here seems promising. Gen-X people want real-world activities to do with their millennial relatives that are engaging to both. I'm in that situation myself. I struggle with arranging such activities, and I'd be happy to fork out real money for curated, guided shared experiences that connect with both generations.
The next step would be for the founders to start personally arranging such activities and see what works and which parts are hard.
I want a gaming community wherein every month an old multiplayer server based game is revived and people compete for prizes. The problem with this is that it requires good connections to the corporate owners of those games, to get permission to ship the .exe with a simple hex edit changing the master server list host. Or even add game modes. The intent being donations for various charities too of course.
There's still an existing community for games like the original PC Red Faction, as crazy as that is. Perfectly fun games, just needs players and some names in game streaming to pick it up.
I've thought about this problem a lot too. In my mind, there is no "Adult rec league for eSports" that exists right now. I can go to my local rec center and sign up for adult soccer, football, volleyball to meet people and play for fun in a lightly competitive environment, but no one has done that for eSports yet.
I like the idea of booting up old games in that format as well.
It's definitely a hard problem, but with the increase in recreation time, especially for creative workers, that we're continuing to see I think it could be a big company.
> The problem with this is that it requires good connections to the corporate owners of those games, to get permission
Does it? There might be some games to avoid from publishers that are still active, but I imagine there's a ton of effectively-abandonware games out there to build your idea upon.
I think that's a chicken and egg problem. The community would exist around games that were/are popular (like Red Faction for example). You can't just shoehorn in any old abandonware game and call it a day for community building.
Fuck I miss Red Faction series - hit me right in the feels.
>The next step would be for the founders to start personally arranging such activities and see what works and which parts are hard.
Yes! If you really believe you have a solution to a problem, then it makes sense to execute that solution in a way that doesn't scale, to verify that, with infinite resources, the solution works, and it feels good. This is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for what comes next, which is (roughly) about making the production more efficient with technology. If you can maintain the utility of the solution and drive the cost down, there may be profit in those hills!
> I struggle with arranging such activities, and I'd be happy to fork out real money for curated, guided shared experiences that connect with both generations.
In the last few months this has actually become a relatively straightforward problem to solve thanks to now having 10x more data on various social activities due to the pandemic.
I totally agree!
"Michael Seibel is a professional hater. I've never been denied so consistently by such a charming, kind, and basically snuggly person."
Investors are both skeptics and speculators. And they can't be a good speculator without being deeply skeptical.
That's very different from hating and haters, though.
Haters hate irrationally, often driven by malicious envy.
Skeptics rightly ask people to give evidence for their claims, especially if those people are asking for funding. Why should they believe you?
Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia, was famous for asking: "Why the f*ck should I give you my money?"
He was right to ask that, and that was a tone that worked at the time, when capital was scarcer.
For the record, Michael Seibel is not a hater. He is a skeptic when he has to be. And he is right to be skeptical. The burden of proof, when you have neither product nor traction, must be on the founder to prove to an investor that they should give them money.
The term is entertainingly used here to contrast it with the positive traits listed immediately after it. The sentence loses most of its humor if you change "hater" to "skeptic."
Everybody understands what the author is saying and that it isn't an insult.
I don't believe every one understands that, and while I recognize the attempt at humor, it was not effective for me. It would have been better if the author had chosen the mot juste.
I liken Michael in question-mode to being on train tracks with an engine bearing down on you. He will follow a line of reasoning with deep questions rapid fire. This puts you off guard and makes you lower your defenses â that way he gets to the shared understanding faster.
The important thing for the entrepreneur to do afterwards is to remember your responses and try to understand what he was driving at. There is a lot of emotion in the moment, but when you look back you find the wisdom.
For reference we were lucky enough to get him and Dalton as our YC advisors.
I learned this technique from one of the best YC interviewers of all time - Paul Buchheit.
I assume you get exhausted after doing that all day. Just know that I appreciate you doing it!
I got interviewed by Michael Seibel and didn't get into YC. The difference is my startup was doing 6-figures a month & growing 20% monthly but Michael just hated the idea. It was in cannabis and YC publicly stated they were interested in cannabis companies but apparently not cool with the whole smoking weed part.
It honestly felt like a big waste of time. The critiques weren't helpful, mostly just along the lines of "Why should I like your idea?". I thought we did well in the interview and kept our cool the whole time. We weren't in it for the money as we were profitable and wanted to expand our professional network and talent pool. It felt like we were just there to teach them about the cannabis market. We were acquired a couple years later with a nice outcome and I hold nothing against Seibel but I wish it hadn't felt like he was so antagonistic from the start.
Tg
This has been my experience with so many entrepreneurs. They have these visions that are planned and structured and overly though out that they miss the primary pain point their business is trying to solve and lack the ability to pivot because they have overly planned everything out.
I have gone out with entrepreneur clients and after a few drinks I suddenly have clarity as to why they really are trying to build their app/product/etc and that always changes everything. I sorta wish people would be more honest like this more often.
I wonder how much of this has to do with the medium of communication. People often have wonderful clarity when speaking but then muddle things up horribly when they write/create decks/etc.
I previously worked with a very smart and capable woman who was in charge of a client-facing department at an agency I was part of. She would ask me to review a presentation she had put together (often sales-focused, but not always), and I'd go through and at the end I'd often find myself saying, "You know, I'm finding this is (muddled | too much information | unclear). What exactly are you trying to say?"
And then she'd give me a succinct, spoken paragraph that completely nailed it. And I would say, "Okay, write that down and present that!"
I thought about this a fair bit because it was such an effective approach. It bears noting that, AFAIK, different parts of the brain are used for written communication as opposed to spoken communication. For instance it is possible to acquire a brain injury that prevents speech but not writing or vice versa. So although I think part of this issue is psychological (people get less clear, e.g. unnecessarily formal or stilted, when writing), I think another part of it has to do with the way people think.
I think a good technique that helps with this is having someone verbally ask you pointed questions ("what does this do?", "why should I care?", "how is it different?") while being recorded, and then take your spoken answers and use those in your written materials.
I feel while decks are terrible they force whoever said intelligent individual to sit down and try and package all their thoughts into a cohesive narrative. If they can't do that, then they have a seriously problem ahead of themselves getting capital and people to come work for them.
Alternatively - if they can't do that as they are really good speakers, they need to find someone who can translate their in-cohesiveness into something digestible for other people. This skillset is very rare and I would argue is super important in the early days alongside building effective product/executing/product fit.
I often find the confusions comes from not clearly understanding what is being communicated, and what you think the other side expects. The slide deck format, is often build from top-down hierarchy. Slides for areas A, B, C. When really you might have a narrative where you want to convey the material from C, with A & B as footnotes. Are you telling a story or writing the table of contents for textbook?
> People often have wonderful clarity when speaking but then muddle things up horribly when they write/create decks/etc.
I find writing (narrative prose, not PowerPoint) a great way to force me to clarify my thinking.
Totally. Speaking is so easy for me, writing is a bloody challenge. I think it has to do with interaction resonance with another person, too, not just the medium.
Opposite for me. I often wish I could end verbal meetings and send a note instead.
Entrepreneurs can get better at story-telling.
But frankly, fundraising is so formal that it makes it really hard to try. You get a 30m (maybe 60 if you're lucky) slot with an investor and a pitch deck. The investor may decide to lead the meeting themselves and just ask any question that comes to mind (most questions are objections disguised as questions... Sometimes not really disguised at all) or they may just stay quiet and let you do the old pitch monolog.
In any case, it's really stressful especially for first time entrepreneurs and especially if you're introverted and not the witty think-on-your-feet type.
The good news is with time and practice you can get better at it. But generally it is soul-crushing work, at least until you find one investor who "gets" it.. And usually you only need one!
> In any case, it's really stressful especially for first time entrepreneurs and especially if you're introverted and not the witty think-on-your-feet type.
Yes, but maybe it's still a good predictor of which founders will succeed and which won't?
If you can't spontaneously answer probing, challenging questions from customers, employees, vendors, and yes investors, will you do a good job running and growing a successful company?
Many do, by eventually finding and hiring the right person.
There are a lot of confounding variables and luck involved. Iâve met some frankly terribly antisocial founders that happened to get the perfect niche, Iâve met some that worked their asses off and were doing everything right but still failed due to terrible timing and a market crash, and everything in between.
As an entrepreneur, what would you like from your investor in that initial pitch meeting?
A check
Ideally you want to know what boxes you need to tick to get the check. Do they already like the product, and just want to vet the founders. Do they not understand the problem? Do they get the product, but question its ability to scale?
Basically what is the current set of things they require more depth of understanding in order to make their investment decision.
I hear what you're saying, but I think you've drawn the wrong conclusion, from OPs story, and your experience having drinks with clients.
OP blew up in his interview and got to the truth. But really, what he shouted when out of control wasn't that different from the story that he started with. Imagine that he started with that honest story. It would have been part of his elevator pitch, and part of his deck, and he would have given that same speech a few hundred times, and all the color and passion would have long since evaporated.
The conclusion that I draw is that you get to the truth by getting someone to switch off autopilot. And that can be done by provoking an emotional reaction (not that that's what the YC guy was intending to do, I'm guessing), or by loosening up through the application of a little alcohol.
It's what I meant. The stop trying to overly polish something and just be honest with your goals. Turn off the "salesman autopilot" so to speak.
"...Michael Seibel is a professional hater. I've never been denied so consistently by such a charming, kind, and basically snuggly person."
Haha, chuckled at this. YC was perhaps the only interview in which my co-founder and I felt like the interviewers were incredible kind â but also some of the most challenging ones. We loved it!
We had two rounds of interviews and I'm pretty confident that Michael was the reason why we ended up getting rejected but I'll always love him for how blunt he was with us about not launching sooner (it's a mobile app that uses computer vision, he claimed we should have launched before the ML models were ready and was completely right)
Our interview was on election day in 2016, they called us in for a second interview, we then went out for drinks with a bunch of other founders and watched all of them get email responses that day. We didn't hear back all day and stayed up all night watching the election results come in, then woke up, drove to the airport, took the plane back to NYC and finally got the rejection when we landed.
> but I'll always love him for how blunt he was with us about not launching sooner (it's a mobile app that uses computer vision, he claimed we should have launched before the ML models were ready and was completely right)
Is this advice to always launch sooner still applicable?
I've heard it regurgitated a few times over the past decade or so, especially here and from the YC/VC crowd, and I feel like it made sense at some point.
But nowadays do people not expect a little bit more? The field is more crowded and the bar to entry is much lower for competitors/cloners/etc and your first impression can only be made once.
I've also contemplated this, and the conclusion I've reached is that YC expects the problem you're solving to be so painful that will people will put up with a shitty version.
It doesn't matter that it's 2021 and things have gotten more polished. If it's a painful enough problem people will put up with a shitty solution at first.
Wanna bet there is now a rash of interviewers who have 'breakdowns' about a problem in their lives?
"My {extended family member} has been {mildly imposing verb} for {duration} and {frustrated expression}!"
Sign up now for early access to my Udemy course, Scream Your Way To Funding
Or sign up for mine, How to appear authentic and sincere in your interview.
Because it's easier to learn sincerity and fake it than it is to have an idea that you actually believe in and can support.
Does that sound bitter? It's not meant to.
You can do a lot better with more professional VCs by not having ideas you believe in and can just articulate the gap in the market and how you'll extract value from it and exit. Not gatekeeping VC types here, just saying there are some that are swayed by emotional stories and nobody needs to be.
The analogy I use is an expedition to the new world. Get funding from the Queen, get the ships and crew, sail to the new world, get the gold, come back, distribute profits and disband.
Really there is no need to pretend to get married, or actually get married, to a business line.
I would be immediately suspect of all the founders that cannot compartmentalize the idea. Save the "passion" for all the employees you need to gaslight into accepting lower compensation.
I doubt enough people will read this for that to happen.
I think what's important is not the breakdown, but the demonstration of pain. You can probably recreate this genuinely by focusing on the specific who and what around your customer. Who are they (in his case himself/his sister), why are they in pain (reconnecting with his sister/her brother), and I guess you probably need a way to turn that pain into a gain, but it sounds like that last part is something you iterate on, so it's not as big of a deal.
You don't have to shout at VCs to be interesting to them, but shouting at VCs is a way to show VCs both the who and the what of pain, which they find interesting.
Well, it didn't got him funded so not sure what the lesson is here.
And the Giya site is still email-for-launch-notice mode two years later. So maybe it wasnât an itch that got scratched.
If the niece was an instigator for the idea, I assumed the author would have created the product and tested it with the niece? If theyâve shown no interest and stayed in their room, maybe itâs not a great idea?
The problem with your statement is that it doesn't account for magical thinking.
Rational thinking: my pitch wasn't great, but I at least connected with the personal problem side of my message. My idea needs work, or my use-case needs attention.
Magical thinking: If I had made that outburst early enough to change the tone, I could have made a better impact with my message. If my pitch starts to go south, just have a breakdown to shift the focus from that to my personal story.
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