YC partner Garry Tan: It's important to make things fine in the early stages of entrepreneurship

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One of the emerging craze in China is the emergence of many entrepreneurial incubators. In contact with them, they often talk about the object of their common gaze, Y Combinator (YC), the world's most prestigious Internet start-up business incubator in the United States.

Recently, the move Point technology Lu Gang (Weibo) to YC's partner Garry Tan conducted an exclusive interview. Garry Tan, co-founder of microblogging services Posterous, joined YC as a partner in early 2011, especially in product design to guide YC's various teams. For YC's success, the direction of entrepreneurship and the place to pay attention to, Garry talked about his own views.

The key to the success of a business incubator: the operator

Paul Graham,y Combinator's founder, not only YC's leader, but also became the godfather of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Paul's own background is a programmer and entrepreneur, who inquires about his introduction to Wikipedia and computer programmer in the back of his name. He issued a well-known online electric business software viaweb, after being Yahoo acquired into Yahoo! Store.

Garry believes that as a result of these experiences, Paul understands the needs of start-up companies. Garry says there are also many incubators in the US to replicate YC models, but there are no YC successes at the moment. Paul is not an academic, not a manager of a top 500 company or a financier, he is a hacker (Hacker) and a founder. He knows how to start a business, from product design to product development to users. This is the fundamental to YC's success.

Venture capitalists have a lot of background in economics or finance, or MBAs, which are of limited value to startups that don't have anything. After the start-up team has accumulated a certain amount of users and developed a possible business model, the value of venture capital entry will be better reflected.

Garry also believes that the VC industry is also changing, the United States has gradually emerged in some VC companies, their founders of the background is already 100% geeks and know how to start from the 0 start-up companies.

YC Select project Criteria

For project selection, Garry is very certain that the entrepreneurial team is more important than the project itself. As Paul himself once said, YC chooses people, not business plans or business ideas. Business ideas are always changed by time, so the most valuable thing you can see from that idea is the person who raised it.

So Garry thought it would be normal for some projects to enter YC to evolve over time and initially change things. For example, some projects in the beginning of mobile internet, smart phones and so on industry environment is not good enough, then access to mobile Internet is not a good time, and now different, so some of the center of gravity must also change. But Garry also believes that this can not be absolute, like Airbnb, Dropbox and so on some of the company's direction has never changed.

For teams, we generally tend to choose the hacker teams who have the ability to develop good products. But more importantly, they must have the ability to understand what society, market and customers need.

For each of YC's selection processes, Garry A brief introduction that each YC selection will attract thousands of applications from around the world, with almost one-third of the items being rejected in the primaries, The remainder of the project YC's partners and some of the principals will participate in the review and vote to screen out a part of the interview phase, with an average of 3% of the project eventually entering the YC incubation program.

How to define Innovation

YC's project, many of them will give people a bright feeling. For the definition of innovation, Garry says, YC gives members of each team a T-shirt, printed on: Make something arranges Want. He thinks this is the best interpretation of innovation. Innovation is to make the world, this society better, although at the beginning may just make some money, but there is the potential to make a lot of money in the future.

Three tips for the entrepreneurial team

1. The founding team must trust each other. The founding team is a family, a marriage.

2. Don't be afraid to break the routine. Do not simply repeat what someone else is already doing, or you must have new ideas. Garry cited an example, many Web sites in the user registration requires them to enter two password, this seems to be a regular user process, because people think you can avoid the user later forget the password. Why can't you just lose it once? Because from another perspective, allowing users to input too much information will result in the loss of users, especially on mobile devices. Another example is Uber, the start-up company. What they do is help users find private car driver pick-up service via app. What they do at first can also be said to be illegal, but it turns out their service is valuable and many people like it. Garry emphasizes the source of power for startups is breaking the rule!

3. Do things unscalable from ' trifle '. Start-up teams should not focus on what they are doing to scale. It's important to do the things you want to do in the early days of your business. Garry For example, YC's Project Wufoo is a good example. Wufoo is a very useful online form generation tool that has no new financing after getting 118,000 dollars in investment and was bought last year at a price of 35 million dollars.

As for the 3rd suggestion, I asked Garry, if the thing is not scale (unscalable), then I believe many people will question how big the market of this project will be. Garry thought it was like a fire, and all you needed was a match to light a small fire, of course, if you only had stones, there would be no firing. Insisting on doing unscalable things until you find out where it can be scalable shows that you are on the way to success.

Trends: There is no need to emphasize what Solomo

Solomo is just a chewing head. Social social, mobile, localized local is a feature that the product naturally needs to consider. For the trend, Garry does not think that from the perspective of Solomo has great significance, he thought we should be concerned about the current market problems, that is, the market itself needs.

Garry said, actually think about how many times people are complaining about the current technology is not power? In fact, people are most concerned about how the current technology can solve the problem better. What the common people need, what the start-up companies can offer to solve the problem is most important. Just as Airbnb helped people rent out their spare rooms, while also satisfying the need for a lot of people to find short-term accommodation, yougotlistings a good example of building a better platform for housing intermediaries and renters.

Thinking

Although the vast majority of domestic business incubators operate for a short time, it is not yet possible to assess their success or failure. But repeatedly thinking about the various views of Garry, really worried about the prospects of domestic incubators and development ideas, at least according to Garry's thinking, we do not expect to have their own YC. Because we have only type, no God.

Perhaps you have to say that China's national conditions are not the same, YC is not absolutely right. Perhaps, I hope my worries are superfluous.