Decode SV Startup Success - Product Market Fit (Michael Seibel, Y Combinator) | UC Berkeley

"Decode Silicon Valley Startup Success" is a semesterly DeCal offered under the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley.
The third lecture is titled Product Market Fit. It features guest speaker, Michael Seibel, CEO of Y Combinator. In this lecture, Michael talked about his experience as the CEO of Y Combinator, his startup experience of founding Twitch and Socialcam, and his advice to young entrepreneurs. This lecture was recorded on February 27th, 2019.
Speaker Bio
At the age of 23, Michael founded Twitch and developed it into the largest gaming broadcast platform (LoL, Dota2, PUBG etc.). Later, he sold Twitch to Amazon for $1 billion.
At the age of 33, he became the CEO and the first African American partner at Y Combinator, the largest startup accelerator that has incubated over 1900 startups and funded over 4000 entrepreneurs in the last decade. To date, the total valuation of startups funded by YC exceeded $100 billion.
During his career at Y Combinator, Michael mentors and invests in hundreds of startups including Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, Twitch, etc. Michael is an important mentor to Airbnb's founders and introduced the team to YC, which later proved to be the transforming point for Airbnb and set the company on the trajectory to become a game-changing unicorn. Over the past couple of years, Michael works closely with early-stage startups and help them find product market fit in areas including Biotech, Aerospace, FinTech, and etc. Before joining Y Combinator, Michael co-founded Twitch (sold to Amazon for $1 billion) and Socialcam(exit for $60 million in merely 18 months). Before that, he was a Yale student majored in political science.
For more information, check out our website www.svstartupdecode.com/ or email at [e-mail]

[@Greg_Chase]

I met and talked with one of the founders of AirBnB in the Bay Area at a tech hire gathering in 2007 or 2008 when they had just got started. Since I had a side hobby owning and operating rental properties for a few years, when he explained the idea to me, I thought "he's going to give complete strangers access to people's residences without the normal credit check, eviction check, criminal background check - no tenant screening - my god they're going to die a painful death and get sued by all their users"
It's like the cab drivers around the country - "Uber and Lyft will fail miserably, because it's illegal to operate a taxi service without a taxi medallion"
Rules mean nothing, often enough.
.

[@margaretcezar1109]

Thank you Michael 🙏

[@eliaslouw6400]

Hi michael thank you for a excellent leaning experience

[@theuncoverfacts582]

😊😊 1:07:14 1:07:16 1:07:17 1:07:17

[@Greg_Chase]

It's hard (at first) to understand why, as you stated around time 21:35 in the video, "we analyzed YC-funded companies that had raised $5 million to $10 million dollars, and then failed"
Here's my thinking on why people throw money at a startup with no PMF (product-market fit):
- "Looks like they're onto something - it's too early to expect they would have achieved PMF by now- they don't have PMF yet, but let's invest early then ride the hockey stick growth" ?
- "We have LPs who expect us to invest their money. This startup looks better than the last 100 that made presentations to us. They don't have PMF but hey they look better than the last 100 startups we looked at, and we have investors expecting us to put their money to work in startups" ?
Excuse the conservative approach, but just as a startup founder should not spend much time on any one idea as they iterate on several ideas until they find PMF - it's questionable why angels and VCs would throw money at a startup before signs of solid PMF.
.
.

[@mrjohncrumpton]

What's a LP?

[@slycer10]

Around 24:56 ...
How sales should feel if your startup is working on the right problem+solution
"If you're trying to find someone to convince that they have the problem, then you are doing it wrong."
"If you find yourself doing something that feels like traditional selling, you are doing it wrong."
Of course there are other things like unit economics & business model that would matter but the above statements are a brilliant simplification of how you can identify whether you are working on something that will reach product-market fit or not.

[@pottymouthmexican]

what does Y COM want? whats their percentage?

[@Dreamwriter4242]

7%. For that, they give the company $150,000. They then require the full team come to Silicon Valley for 3 months during the program.

[@Balidromio]

@@Dreamwriter4242 What happens after those first 3 months? do they proceed to a second capital raise?

[@jmigsan]

😃