Gustaf Alströmer: belief

Transcript context

…You mentioned YC Office Hours and I had a question around this. I'm working on this piece where I'm interviewing a bunch of B2B founders of companies that are doing super well and I asked them a few questions like, "How'd you come up with the idea? How'd you find your first few customers?" it's shocking how many of them bring up a conversation in YC Office Hours as the most pivotal point that set them on the trajectory that they're on now. I'm curious what happens in these Office Hours? What are the most common pieces of advice that you give or maybe most surprising pieces of advice that you give in these Office Hours so that people can get maybe a glimpse into these conversations you have? Gustaf Alströmer So at YC we have two type of Office Hours, two of the common ones. We have regular Office Hours, which is usually a one-on-one or basically the founders talking to me, or me plus another partner. They happen every week or every other week throughout the entire program. And they happen years after the program on the regular basis. Then we have Group Office Hours, which is you and six or seven other startups talking to us. They have [inaudible 00:17:07] a little bit different purpose. So the goal of the regular Office Hour, I always ask the question, "What's holding you back from moving faster? We don't want to hear updates, we don't want to hear strategy questions. We want to understand what's slowing you down or what's holding you back from moving even faster. You generally have a specific goal." And I think that question of what's slowing you down or were holding you back crystallizes the priorities. There are only so many things you can do as a startup and there are only so many things that matters at that stage. And by asking that question, we can start digging into, "Okay, what's the goal? What are the things that drives towards that goal? What are the things that's slowing you down towards that goal?" Usually, the founders don't know what's slowing it down, so the conversation and us probing questions actually leads to us or them discovering what it is just slowing them down. In the Group Office Hour, it's a little bit different. The Group Office Hour holds a couple of different purposes. One of them is if I think back on Paul and Jessica's motivation to start YC, this is a surprise to them, but starting a company is incredibly lonely. You can't really lean on your employees and say, "Hey, I'm feeling really shitty as a founder today. Everything is going to shit." Employees isn't going to take that well. So you lean on perhaps your investors, but they're not really available. But what you can lean on is other founders because they're all in the same situation. It's sort of like when you ask a founder the question, "How are things going? ", it's so emotional for them to answer that question because it's never going well, right? It's never like, "Oh, everything is going fantastic." They might say that, but everybody knows all founders, when they look each other's eyes, then no, that's not the answer. So founders have infinite number of problems that they're thinking about all the time, which is why they're allergic to the question, "How are things going?" But when YC started, we put all the founders in a group together in a room and they started learning that all founders, all companies are broken in some way, right? They're all having these massive problems and they're all feeling that anxiety when they hear the question, "How are things going?" And just hearing other founders explain their problems, perhaps solving their problems, is a really good way for yourself to both feel motivated to do it yourself and see tion, "How are things going?" And just hearing other founders explain their problems, perhaps solving their problems, is a really good way for yourself to both feel motivated to do it yourself and see how problems get solved when other companies are having similar problems. Nowadays because of the scale at YC, we group companies together that have the same problems or the same area that they're operating in. The second thing that Group Office Hours do well is accountability, right? We ask you, "What were your goals? What were your goals for the last two weeks? Did you hit them?" And then that gives founders accountability because founders are competitive. They don't want to look bad. They don't want to come back after two weeks and say "Nothing worked," or at least like, "We didn't learn anything." They want to learn something and make progress whether it's positive or negative. Group Office Hours to me is the most magical moment because it really creates this very intense three or four month period. Founders often come back to us afterwards and say, "Hey, we want to do that again. We don't have this really intense, really productive period. We don't have a program exactly. We have other programs, but we don't have anything exactly that mimics that experience." But we do encourage founders to continue with Group Office Hours after YC. Many of them do and many of them, ad hoc, continue to meet for years in this group setting where they ask the same kind of questions to each other, to hold themselves accountable, to learn from each other, and to just have someone else to lean on. I think this was unknown and somehow the world didn't know before that starting company is super lonely and you have all these anxiety. By just talking to other people who have the same problems, it's just one of the best thing you can do.…

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