Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:06:25 · Francois Chaubard
Jeff Bezos famously said that most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. Publishing with 70% confidence in your results isn't exactly a great strategy to get into NeurIPS, so it's natural for academics to hate this. In startups, if you wait for a 100% of the data, you are way too late. By that point, your competitor has already launched and you've lost your first mover advantage. In the great database wars, Michael Stonebraker had a technically superior product, Quel. But Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, pushed SQL into the market faster. Ellison famously said, Quill might be better than SQL. I don't care. SQL is going to win. And he was right. Speed beats perfect information. Number eight, you can't delegate the hard stuff. Researchers love doing research. But as CEO of a startup, you can't be doing research, likely ever. In a startup, you're responsible for everything. Team management, cash runway, hiring, firing, marketing, sales, product development. A lot of academics love the idea of a startup, but they don't actually want to do these messy jobs. They think, oh, I'll just hire an MBA to do the business stuff, and I will do the cool research on VC's dime. This is a terrible idea. If you abstract yourself away from sales and marketing, you will never develop empathy for your customers. And without customer empathy, you cannot build a product they really want. Number nine, outdoor animal psychology. To be a successful founder, you must adopt a more aggressive psychology. You must become a capitalist. Starting a company is the most capitalistic thing you can possibly do, and frankly, a lot of academics are deeply uncomfortable with that. You have to be comfortable charging people money for things, winning talent, making 80% margins, raising capital, and most importantly, beating your competition. To paraphrase Larry Ellison, your competitors want to kill your company and take the food out of your child's mouth. This is the world you're walking into. Number 10, nobody cares how smart you are. Academics love explaining how smart they are to the world, completely unprompted. They will talk your ear off about finite automata or their point of view on P versus NP, but this does not work in sales. It doesn't work in product development, and it certainly doesn't work when pitching VCs.
00:08:30 · Francois Chaubard
You need an innate curiosity about people. You need to think from your user's perspective constantly, and you only get that perspective by listening. Whether you're selling into an IT department, an intern, or a procurement officer, or a consumer, you must empathize with them. As Dale Carnegie once wrote, you can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get others interested in you. This is exactly how sales and product development work. To summarize, the most common piece of feedback I give to academics turn founders is this. Get out of your office, get on a flight, and go meet with your users where they live and work. Validate your assumptions. Will people actually pay you for this? Because that is exactly what your competition is doing, and if you don't do it, they will beat you to it. It will be uncomfortable, but it is entirely necessary. If you want to quiet your academic brain and start growing your founder brain, I highly recommend reading Spin Selling, High Output Management, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and How to Win Friends and Influence People. I'll leave you with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. If you want to change the world, start with yourself. You already have the intelligence. The only question left is, do you have the will?