Gustaf Alströmer: belief

Transcript context

…That's a great segue to a question I've been meaning to ask, which is, how good are you at predicting in a batch which startups are going to be the monster hits? So maybe like you and then just generally YC, how good are you all at knowing what's going to work out, is going to be the next Airbnb or Dropbox? Gustaf Alströmer I think the truth is that we're not very good at knowing what's going to succeed. Certainly we cannot figure out who's going to be the really successful company in the batch. That's not possible. What we're good at is knowing what failure looks like. What we sometimes like to tell founders at the beginning of the batch is like, "If you fail, please do it in some new exciting way. Not one that we've seen 100 times." Because we have seen people fail for a large number of reasons. The best way for us to sort of not predict, but the best way for us to make more companies succeed is to tell them how they might fail, right? Be very direct and honest with them and say, "You doing these three things, these things are likely going to lead that you won't succeed." And if we do our job well, most people get that feedback and they're on the track for succeeding. Now, which of those companies end up becoming the best? There are so many things that are uncorrelated to being the best, and it's the things that people don't like. I'm in a hot industry, I was writing up on TechCrunch like, this investor started talking to me. You'd be surprised how many of the things I just mentioned are uncorrelated to outlier success, right? That's why it's so hard to actually do this. I think people really want these questions to be answered. People really want to believe that you can pick really great companies at the seed stage, but everything I've learned from the plus 600 companies that I've worked with is that it's just not that easy and it's maybe not even possible and certainly not possible when you talk about finding the outlier companies. I don't think it's that easy. And if it was easy, then we would accept a lot fewer companies. We just accept those ones, but it's just not that easy. Do you have a sense of which ones are likely to work out better than others? Or is it just like, "We have 150 really unclear, but one of these, hopefully."…

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