J.Y Delmotte

🚀 The Pocket Guide of Essential YC Advice: Elevate Your Startup Game! 🚀 Starting a business? Here's a cheat sheet from YC that can make all the difference: 1️⃣ Launch now: Don't wait for perfection. Get your product out there and iterate. 2️⃣ Build something people want: Focus on solving real problems. 3️⃣ Do things that don't scale: Personal touches can lead to big breakthroughs. 4️⃣ Find the 90 / 10 solution: Prioritize the most impactful tasks. 5️⃣ Find 10-100 customers who love your product: Early adopters are your champions. 6️⃣ All startups are badly broken at some point: Resilience is key. 7️⃣ Write code - talk to users: Balance building with real-world feedback. 8️⃣ "It's not your money": Be frugal and smart with investments. 9️⃣ Growth is the result of a great product, not the precursor: Quality drives expansion. 🔟 Don't scale until you've built something people want: Validate first, grow second. 💡 Key Insights: - Valuation ≠ Success: Focus on value creation, not just valuation. - Avoid lengthy deals with big customers unless necessary. - Steer clear of corporate development queries that waste time. - Attend conferences selectively - prioritize those that bring customers. - Pre-product market fit? Stay nimble and do things that don't scale. - Solving one problem well > solving many poorly. - Founder relationships: Your co-founders are your greatest asset. - Sometimes, firing a toxic customer is necessary. - Ignore competitors - focus on your path to avoid 'death by comparison.' 🌟 Final Tips: - Be kind! Courtesy costs nothing but means everything. - Prioritize your health - sleep, exercise, and self-care are non-negotiable. Let these insights guide your entrepreneurial journey. What resonates most with you? Share your thoughts! ⬇️ #Startups #Entrepreneurship #YCombinator #BusinessTips #GrowthMindset #Innovation

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Founders love moving fast… Why do so many make this mistake in hiring? (#6 in my founder hiring mistake series) Founders fail to close candidates quickly enough. They get excited when a promising candidate makes it to the offer stage. Finally, a potential hire after months of searching! But then they slow down. They delay sending the offer, or take a few extra days to finalize compensation. Meanwhile, the in-demand candidate is left hanging. They assumed the finish line was close since they got the verbal offer. Any delays at this stage erode trust and leave them confused. So it’s no surprise when they take another offer that moved faster. Your new goal: Shorten the time from verbal offer to accepted offer. Once you’ve identified a strong match, prioritize closing. Be the company that moves decisively. • Align hiring managers and key stakeholders early on level and compensation to avoid last-minute hang-ups. • Empower the right point person to determine details like equity and start date – and stick to them. • Set an ambitious target to get terms signed within 72 hours of verbal offer. And push yourself to hit it. Top candidates likely have competing options. Win them over by valuing their time and giving clear next steps. P.S. This is post #6 in my series on common founder hiring mistakes. Last post coming in a few days.

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It so depends on the nature of the business and industry. YC’s advice is excellent on many levels, but applies primarily to relatively straightforward software companies that address clear pain points. It does not really apply to the more visionary companies that lead or redefine categories, or ones that have a significant hardware / upfront capital component.

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Imagine you’re meeting a VC today and pitching your company. Now, also imagine the VC goes home tonight and tells his or her spouse about the meeting with you. How do you think the VC would (or should) describe your product to the spouse? Remember, this is for someone who doesn’t have any context, and probably doesn’t have time to listen the whole story. If you can think of a story version that's plain and simple -- how you want the VC to describe your product to the spouse -- perhaps that version should be your pitch in the first place?

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How did a YC founder scale from $0 to $4M+ ARR in 6 months? What I learned surprised me: Getting to $200k ARR is possible through just hacking something together. But to break past the $1M ARR mark and keep scaling? To sign enterprise contracts with name brand companies? That's a different milestone. The fact that a technical founding did this and handled it all through founder-led sales is even more astounding. Surely, there must be some kind of secret sauce, some kind of unexplained context, I wondered. How did 2 technical founders who graduated college recently build something so robust, so performant and scalable, that they had enterprise companies lining up left and right? But no -- the founder let me know they did this through great engineering and sheer force of will. No proprietary edge. No silver spoon. No past domain experience. And in that moment, that simple answer made sense. We've also been speaking with amazing product engineers, many of them former founders, for whom things are just easy. Sometimes they cite great engineering mentorship as the key to their success. But more often than not, they simply "get it." And my team and I have over time honed our ability to naturally spot what makes a certain candidate special. It's a unique combination of high horsepower, high grit, incredibly sharp slope growth, and an ability to parachute into any problem and just figure things out. What seems like a quarter-long epic to some folks is a one-week project to others. New domains are never daunting. Never learned GPU inference optimization? No problem. I'll figure it out. This is the kind of talent that all startups need -- but understandably is truly rare to secure. This is the truly great, truly unique product engineer. And startups are rapidly learning how this kind of talent changes their own growth trajectory.

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Most people don’t realize that there are 7,000+ YC founders. YC is adding 1,000 founders a year. It’s the most powerful founder network in the world. These founders have built across all verticals and all stages. There is someone amongst these 7,000 who is one of the best experts at something. I think about the pace of learning and iteration in the group because of that. I could talk to 100 founders who are building companies at the forefront of AI and learn a ton from them. There are people to answer anything, I’m only limited by my questions.

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Founders, don’t make this common mistake early on (#4 in series): Rely too heavily on referrals without any process. Every founder knows referrals are the holy grail of hiring. Who doesn’t want a warm intro to a strong candidate that comes vouched for? So founders ask their team for referrals anytime a new role opens up. Maybe they’ll get a few leads. But without structure, referrals stall: • Current employees get distracted by their day-to-day. • They forget to tap their networks. • High-quality references dry up quick. Your new goal: Systematize referrals. • Set aside dedicated time every quarter to re-engage your team on referrals. Remind them of open roles and relevant skill sets you seek. • Provide clear guidelines on who and how to refer. For example, share ideal candidate criteria and specifics on where they should introduce you. • Incentivize referrals with gift cards or team rewards. And track submissions to notify when a referee gets hired. Putting a structured referral program in place reduces ad-hoc asks and motivates your team to proactively tap their trusted contacts. You’ll see candidate quality and hiring velocity increase overnight. P.S. This is post #4 in my series uncovering common founder hiring mistakes that burn cash. Follow me to catch the rest of the series.

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🚀 Reviewing the 2023 YC batch mortality rate by Jason Fan🧠 The most common reasons start-ups either failed or founders gave up were: Co-founder drama/breakup: 40% 💔 Lack of conviction, stuck in pivot limbo: 30% 🔄 Too much conviction, pivot-resistant: 30% 🛑 Loss of motivation: 10% 😔 Indifference towards the problem being solved: 10% 🤷 What didn’t factor in? Competition, funding issues, poor launches, lack of vision, legal issues, or scaling problems. Zero companies faltered for these reasons. The early stages of a start-up are truly a mental and emotional marathon. 🏃‍♂️💨 I'm doubling down on investing in solid relationships and mental wellbeing. 👥💖 When we get that balance right, everything else tends to fall into place. 🌟 What are your views on common challenges? #Startups #CoFounder #MentalWellbeing #YC2023 Y Combinator

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The Ultimate Cheat Sheet collection for SaaS leaders & Founders - by Vencha, Included #VC & Notion Capital Here you have 15 cheat sheets on marketing, sales, fundraising, pitch decks and more: 💵 How to price and package your software ? 🎢 The 5 prospect stages 🚀How fundable is your company? 💸 Leadership transitions at different stages of business growth 🎯 SaaS monetisation in 8 steps 🕹️ Identifying your market: TAM, SAM & SOM demystified 🛠️ How to skyrocket SaaS sales? ⚖️ The ICP Grid, goal setting and how to prioritize ? #Fintech #saas #CheatSheet #isaphr #isapone #isapsolutions #starthubagency #isapinvestments www.isap.group www.isap.one www.isap.hr www.isap.agency www.isap.investments iSAP Solutions ltd iSAP ONE iSAP.HR StartHub.Agency iSAP Group Investments ltd Tino Herold

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I've invested in over 300 startups over the last 5 years, and there is one common trait that nearly all failed early stage startups share - they don't run a proper customer discovery process. You can read about the importance of customer discovery all over the internet, but that practical application of it among first time founders is still extremely low. We look at over 10,000 deals each year Forum Ventures and I see firsthand just how few founders actually excel in this process. One subset of founders simply doesn't do it at all. It's a classic archetype - build product in a vacuum without running any validation cycles. Typically the founder profile here skews more technical/product where founder-led sales feels out of character and not an area they enjoy spending time. Often founders think they can "product their way" to initial customers, but more often than not that new feature set they are excited about fails to generate user demand, simply because they never asked anybody if they care about what they were building. There is a classic startup'ism - first time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution - and it rings very true within this subset. The second group of founders actually understands the importance of running discovery and leans into it early in their build process. While they have the best intentions, ultimately they come up short because in practice they don't actually know how to run an unbiased process. Discovery that focuses around a feature/solution set will skew toward lukewarm positive responses from potential customers, "sounds interesting, let me know when the beta is ready". The reality is no one is going to tell you that your baby, in this case your product, is ugly when it's far easier to just smile and nod. Founders often take this false signal as validation and race to ship a product that ultimately falls flat on its face. There is an art to soliciting feedback from a potential customer. The process emphasizes questions on their existing workflows, bottlenecks they experience in their day to day, understanding what motivates them and how they measure success in their role. This is a critical area we emphasize when evaluating investment opportunities, and a process we are very hands on in assisting our portfolio companies. Having a strong network is a massive advantage when launching a startup but close network relationships have the potential to give false signals across a customer discovery process. There are ways to combat this by being very deliberate when once solicits feedback from their network, but there are definitely bonus points for net-new out of network customer validation.

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20 meetings w/ investors and startups in 3 days around SF/Bay Area. Here's what’s happening in hiring right now: 1) Elite engineers demand elite offers. Early-stage startups are winning top talent by paying up (sometimes as high as $250k-$300k + equity). 2) Startups are prioritizing candidates with brand names, interest in startups, history of solving complex problems, ambition, higher ego (not too high). 3) The best candidates have clarity on career direction. Some good questions I heard founders ask, “Where are you going?” and “How can we help you get there?” 4) Despite early funding surges in Q1/Q2, investors are becoming more selective - especially in AI.  This creates an opportunity for startups to hire from struggling shops with top talent. Invest now before the market shifts again.

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Facts! Most startup playbooks are bullsh*t. There is NO cookie cutter approach to build a company. You will learn this lesson trying to follow a playbook(s). I definitely did. If any guru tells you presents a framework or playbook as though it is the only way, ask probing questions about why. Ask for examples of startups that were successful using that exact playbook. And, the best question to ask is “what success did you have using this framework?”

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Startup decks vs Business plans. It's accepted that a startup needs a deck. Dax Dasilva of Lightspeed Commerce made an important point on 20VC. Writing a business plan - including financial projections - is an important step. It requires discipline. It provides a rigorous framework for thinking deeply about the problem you're trying to solve. Harry Stebbings countered that he doesn't even want to see a deck since it's all dreams. We spent a lot of time and energy on our business plan with the expectation that we would show it to no one ever. The business plan was part of our roadmap for the company. We researched customers - including having 50+ conversations. We wanted to understand them: their background, their interests, their presence on social media. We also wanted to understand how they were evaluated by leadership and how integrated they were with the business of the company they were protecting. We researched pricing both with potential customers and other products in our industry to find out if OpEx or CapEx was a better fit. How did they buy today? How would they like to buy? We did market research to understand the verticals and map the right entry point - we were wrong but that doesn't reduce the value of the research. We looked at competitors in depth to understand what they were seeing that we weren't. Dax is right. This is an invaluable document that should be updated every year - the company is changing, the market is changing, there's more feedback about price and ICP. It's not for sharing with the outside world. It's a map for driving forward. Decks won't get you investment - VCs invest in people. We make decks but we know they don't tell our story. The deck is a calling card. Dax and Harry are both right. https://lnkd.in/e25M82xY

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24 hour rule for startup ideas. Like the 3 sec rule about approaching attractive strangers. Don't lurk around your idea. Crystalize a memeplex via content creation. Build an audience. Launch an upside hub on Slyk IO. Don't be a beta orbiter--launch fast, grow fast, raise fast. Here's how: 1. Choose a short form video platform: TikTok, instagram, YouTube or X. 2. Launch a Slyk: https://lnkd.in/gjnrGZWj. And add that link to your profile in your video channel. 3. Record a 45s pitch video for the home video of your Slyk and for your first social media post: Hook with a grabber. Empathize with Problem (because you have it too). Describe a better world. Explain the new tech and your expertise you are leveraging to build the solution. CTA: follow, like, share, and join my Slyk (link in bio). 4. Record a 45s Product video for presales in your Slyk: Grab attention with an insight or statistic about the problem, Share your suffering with the problem, i.e. you know it and want to solve it, the technology you are leveraging to solve it, and why it's a much better solution than existing options, then CTA a presale for easy access to the solution-- you'd be surprised how many people will pay you to get started. Post the video to your video channel. 5. Record a 45s Collaboration Opportunity Video-- if folks want to help you build and grow your startup, they need to earn or pay their way in-- you want folks who are invested, not look-loos. Make them apply to collaborate and earn the right. Post that video to your channel. 6. Record a 45s Task and Reward Video to solve the biggest problem faced by your startup that you can't solve yourself. Need help building? Selling? Explain what you need and what you're willing to pay someone who makes the intro that ends up solving the problem you face. Post this video to your channel. Do this all within 24 hours of having an idea. As someone once said (probably Naval, maybe Nivi) inspiration is perishable. Act on it.

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Congratulations to all the startups who made it! 👏 XDC-0xCamp Season 6 - Phew! 😓 This cohort been underworks for a while at Foundership! 😅 Completely designed in-house based on the needs of the Founders, Partners & Market. Key driver was Pranav Agarwal leading the design of the program! 👏 A clear outcome of the journey working with growth stage startups from our #LaunchCamp Program This is special, as XinFin Powering XDC Network trusted us with real capital for each of the startups 🤝 Also, it’s a program conceptualized, designed from scratch. Its rolled out with coaches and partners with a very unique structure and a playbook which will only get better with every cohort! 👍 Very excited that it has taken shape and reached this milestone! 👍 While we will see these 6 startups launch their tokens soon, there are several more token launches from Foundership Portfolio in the works and taking shape! 🎉 with Santosh Panda Foundership Pranav Agarwal Ritesh Kakkad Aneri Merchant 🙌 #xdc0xcamp #web3 #startups #tokenlaunch #blockchain #crypto

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🌟Yes to pitch decks that get investors attention! $$$ 🌟 Absolutely love this practical pitch decks tips!! Stay apt! Understand what matters most to your investor audience and deliver just that! strategywithifeoluwa.com

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How I signed up 50+ new users from one LinkedIn Creator Campaign **Full Disclosure - total Costs: $150 / $3 CAC The Step-by-step guide: > STEP ONE: My cofounder posted this: https://lnkd.in/gBquGc5G >> STEP TWO: We then offered 10 creators $25 each to reshare the post with their own captions. >>> STEP THREE: we provided script ideas and assistance with the copy. >>>> STEP FOUR: they reshared it with their LinkedIn audience. $3 CAC – We managed this entire process in PARTNAR You can too. It's free to use.

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Stay Updated on New Investments. Access the list of startups that have recently secured funding at any time. View the list here https://lnkd.in/gYmXGnx8 #startup #startups #vc #venturecapital #investmentbanking #privateequity #managementconsulting #b2b #founders #entrepreneurs

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Could be useful for those looking for jobs in Tech.

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