Culture is important to startups.

Abstract: Culture is important to startups. If an entrepreneurial team wants to succeed, it must create a culture. It's one of the areas I'm good at, and it's my main job at YC for the past decade. At first, people and culture played a heavy role in YC.

Culture is important to startups. If an entrepreneurial team wants to succeed, it must create a culture. It's one of the areas I'm good at, and it's my main job at YC for the past decade.

At first, people and culture played an important role in YC. Many people do not know this, on the one hand because I am usually behind the scenes, on the other hand, culture is invisible, it is difficult to be seen as the company's business as the outside world.

Some "soft power" such as values, culture and community are often overlooked by the media, and, more dangerously, sometimes the founders ignore them. Perhaps because this soft power is be quantifiable, on the other hand, when you focus on solving a technical problem that has never been solved, the culture of the company is considered a secondary thing.

But when Paul and I started talking about the first idea on the kitchen table, YC's corporate culture actually existed. In my experience, the founders who first consider the company's culture will make the best companies. In fact, the reason YC never gives the founders the office space is that they want to grow organically in their own spaces early and provide a good soil for their own corporate culture.

Today I want to share some of YC's own cultural origins that have never been mentioned. The true connotation of YC consists of two aspects: first, YC is another kind of investment company; second, YC is a collection of people, founders and partners. And this group of people, most of whom I have selected in the past decade.

My co-founder Paul, Robert, and Trevor have astonishing judgment in technical ideas, but they are not very good at seeing people, and the judgment is no different from children's. YC this decade, they are mainly responsible for judging the entrepreneurial ideas rely on unreliable, I am responsible for judging people, in their eyes I have to see through the pretender and the antisocial person's supernatural powers. And this is very important to YC's growth.

A silent YC interviewer

Before YC decides whether to invest in a project, the final step is to talk to the partner face-to-face. Now we have a total of 5 interview lines, so I can only see 20% of the applicants. But YC's first six years we had only one interview line and I was always involved. In fact, they pay special attention to my opinion on the founder's character, so that I have a veto in my investment decision.

Most of the people we interviewed don't know this, because I don't usually say a lot of things during the interview. What I do is more observation. The typical interview process is this: some of my partners ask the applicants a bunch of technical questions, and I watch the way they answer the questions. Most applicants are hardly aware of my existence. But at the end of the interview, the partner would ask me what it was like to be a person.

In fact, I do not know much about the details of technical issues, until today I could not distinguish between operating systems and distributed databases, but I could tell if a person was being ripped off, whether they were tough people, and if I was given 10 minutes to observe them, I could tell if they were good.

As I mentioned before, the three of them are very good at technical issues, but for that reason they often misjudge founders in terms of human nature. They will be excited to talk about what the applicant's ideas can do to expand everything, and then decide that the interview is going very well, especially when the applicants are always trying to map their entrepreneurial ideas to themselves. But for me, these are not the primary concerns.

Usually we want to invest in knowledgeable and decisive founders, but I find myself more like sifting through character. Prior to YC, investors often did not value personality as a factor, and they often invested in those who were very likely to succeed. But I never wanted to do that. In my eyes, YC is not only an investment company, but also a big family: We invite members to dinner every week.

It's not a deliberate effort, but it turns out to be very valuable to YC. As the scale expands, the value of alumni is growing. Now we have more than 2000 alumni, and sifting out bad people means that when YC's new company finds alumni, most of them are trustworthy. Starting a business is usually a lonely thing, thinking about what it means to be able to ask for 2000 people's help if you ask, and you'll probably understand the value.

Even if we have 5 interview lines now, we will continue to sift through our personalities, as it is now part of YC culture. Of course we make mistakes, but most of the YC founders are trustworthy. They say the organization is the founder's shadow, this part of YC is my shadow.

Why is it so important to have dinner together?

Another place that affects YC is the atmosphere. Before YC, investment companies had little atmosphere, they had only business displays. But YC is not the same, mentioned earlier, after selecting the founder, we will invite them to dinner every week.

The atmosphere of the dinner generally has an obvious yc characteristic. This kind of atmosphere like the university schoolmate dinner, supports each other, the discussion is enthusiastic. But there are some great things that are difficult to describe in words. Stripe's founder, Patric Collison, once said the best thing about YC was the hustle and bustle of the founders as they walked into YC every Tuesday night. I think of these scenes when I think of YC, which is the most common example I used to describe YC.

The atmosphere has been formed since the first dinner of YC in the summer of 2005, even though there were only eight companies. I went to the grocery store that day, and Paul made every dish, and our first headquarters office was in Paul's house, so it felt like a weekly dinner for people to come to their own house, or the kind of supper between friends.

As YC grew, the feeling was inevitably diluted. Now YC has 116 start-up companies, the office area is 12000 flat, so certainly no longer the founder to eat at home feeling. But the activities of these 116 companies will be much more intimate than you think.

Another big reason YC can maintain a family atmosphere is the design of Kate Courteau, the architect of every headquarters. She is part of our big family and knows we all want this family feeling to be there all the time. Relying on her awesome design, our new office building has always been a great and cordial feeling.

Paul once wrote that "entrepreneurship has to start with small things", and there is a view that the company should be given a certain level of attention when it is small, and that it will never be able to do so once the company is big. This will increase your service standards, and as you grow larger, you will find that you can actually maintain these standards well.

It's important for YC to think of entrepreneurs as our family. It was easy for the first entrepreneurs to do it, after all they had only a few people and were young, and only a fledgling entrepreneur would apply for YC. So we're just like their parents, I know where each of them comes from, what's going on in their lives, and they're concerned about the lack of vitamins in their diets.

Perhaps more importantly, we do not expect these startups to make money. YC's huge success may not be understood by many, but the first startups we invest in actually help us learn how to become an investor. We soon realized that the first phase of investing in startups was a great idea and that it was the way we wanted to be, but in phase one it was like an experiment and we were prepared to lose money. The idea of treating the first issue as a non-profit social project also affects the way we treat our founders. It is natural for us to advise them, and from their point of view. Even our initial investment documents are relatively founder-friendly in terms of use, which is different. Nor do we ask for the special rights that usually investors want, and so far.

About entrepreneurship, there is a perverse thing, want to succeed, must not be too early to move for money. Mark Zuckerberg is a good example. If he only thought about the money, may accept 2006 years Yahoo 1 billion dollar acquisition, his name is also not to be you know.

We decided to continue this investment model after seeing that the entrepreneur and their team were helping each other. Gradually we began to think that YC might be able to make money. But it has become a part of YC's culture to put the founders in the first place as a family. Although it is much more difficult to create a home for 116 entrepreneurial teams than 8 teams, the feeling is still very strong at YC.

It sounds like it's impossible to make more than 2000 alumni feel a family, but you'll be amazed at how much we do. And I still want to say old-fashioned words, to some extent, I like the mother of the family.

The problem you're having is not that special.

It was not after the team had finished the demo presentation that YC's relationship with them ended. Every Tuesday dinner is over, but for many years we will continue to help these teams. We are still advising companies that have invested 5-8 of years ago.

Startups need a variety of different types of advice. Sometimes they are trying to figure out what to create, or how to grow, and sometimes have to deal with more personal questions, such as whether they should agree to be bought or whether they should drive someone less capable. I'll give you some advice on these questions. I had a few evaluations of the founders during the interview, which also helped me understand the root of the problem more easily.

Let me tell you something about starting a business: If you've ever started a business or worked in a startup, you might be familiar with these phenomena, but people who don't have those experiences should be surprised. Many startups, in all appearances, are a mess, even the most successful ones. The outside world will not see this, because only a company that looks decent can get a user. But there are always some disasters, for example, I dare say that 10% of startups have a life-threatening argument.

Although none of these are visible to the outside world, the kind of problem I help the founders solve may be more common and dangerous than technical problems.

In this regard, I now have the experience of dealing with hundreds of start-up companies. So now they're having problems that I've usually seen over 10 times. To the founder, I must be like a mind reader, but the real reason is that these problems are not as unique as they think.

One of the most important things is that I know the extent of the worry. After dealing with hundreds of startups, I knew immediately after seeing a problem, I should tell the founder, "Don't worry, these are typical growth pains" or "Your current model is a failure, the company is hopeless." And I think they believe that, and I'm not being judgmental like some other investors, just trying to help them.

In addition to giving some empirical advice, I think sometimes founders just need someone to talk to. Everyone has this demand, especially in the early stages of entrepreneurship.

YC's philosophy of sharing

Although we cannot invest in every start-up company, we try to make it public to all the resources. For example, we will do some public activities to share some of the information we share at YC. And we are the few organizations that are free to do these activities because we know that founders usually don't have that much budget to spend on the show.

Now we have a team dedicated to these activities, but the initial activities are in my hand. We are very ambitious in this respect. In 2005, YC set up an entrepreneurial college just six months old, when only eight companies were on the brochure.

In addition to these activities, we have created several other types of open source investment documents, such as the safe (simple agreement for future equity), to help startups get financing more easily and cheaply.

Paul Graham wrote a number of articles on his blog about topics that would help entrepreneurs, many of them from the advice he gave at YC. Sam Altman now writes countless valuable things. Kat Manalac and I are online with the female founder story this site, hoping to inspire more female entrepreneurs.

We don't have to advise everyone or meet them, but we will share YC's experience as much as we can, which has become our philosophy.

These are certainly not everything I've done in the last ten years, but you can see a lot of culture-related parts. Culture is not just a mission-style manifesto, it's the people you choose to be in your organization, your behavior towards them, and even your behavior to the outside world. My own experience tells you how important culture is, and when we talk about YC, they talk about a novel structure. But this is half the YC, and the other half is the people and culture inside. That's what I've been focusing on for the last 10 years, and the half that YC can't replicate.