Gustaf Alströmer: recommendation

Transcript context

…Okay, I got one more. Cares more about the product or cares more about the distribution and growth strategy? Gustaf Alströmer Well, there's a lot of assumptions built into that, I would say, because caring about the product to me is caring about the customers. Sometimes if I would say something like, "Oh, great founders care about the product," a lot of founders misinterpret that as in my personal perception of the product or my ideas of what the product is. And that's wrong. The right perception there is the expectations or the use of the product from the customers. So if you are meaning focus on the product or cares about the product in that sense that your customers care about, then absolutely, I think that's a really, really critical, important thing to have early on, like talking to users, doing things you don't scale. Once you get big, if you don't figure out a scalable distribution strategy, you won't succeed. And those are different for different companies, but they're not doing anything that don't scale. Doing things that don't scale is not a scalable strategy. Eventually, something specific will be the things that work for you. If you're lucky, people will talk about your product and you'll have organic growth. But in many cases, that sales, that is some kind of consumer distribution strategy. You can't start with that. I've seen a lot, and this is when I had to reset my thinking coming from a growth team joining YC, is you can't start a startup ethic with a growth team mindset because that is just scalable things all the time. And really what you need to go back to is doing things that don't scale and unscale your way of thinking about customers. But it's really useful to have the growth mindset once something is working, right? Once you have thousands of people signing up everything every day, well how do you get to 2,000? Well, that's probably something that looks more like this thing that the growth team would do or distribution team would do. I would say everyone has different experiences of this based on their prior experience, right? So if you work for a company that was infinitely successful, then you won't care so much about this. If you work for Google, you'll never even think about this because distribution is just the website. But if you work for a really small shitty product, then you think a lot about distribution because that's natural to you on how you succeed. So I think at the end of the day, talking to customers matters the most. That is what it means to care about a product to me. And then distribution is something that you will definitely invest a lot in once something is working. Awesome. All right. I have probably a hundred other questions I want to ask along these lines, but I want to make sure we get to another topic which I know is near and dear to your heart, which is climate tech. So my understanding is you're instrumental in pushing YC to focus on climate tech as a focus area. I believe you led the charge on their initial request for startups I think is the term where you all put out like, "Here's who we want to fund." I think you've mentioned you funded a couple dozen climate tech companies and the last few batches, is that all generally correct? Gustaf Alströmer First,…

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