Chief AI & Innovation Officer, Gen (Fortune 500); Stanford Lecturer | Formerly CEO of TrustPath; Greylock Partner EIR, Founder of VMware networking
This kid quit Carnegie Mellon University after the first semester not the first heart. Beat Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, Google’s cofounders Larry and Serge, ans Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg’s record easily. But far more importantly, what Ethan Hilton learned in one week beat the record of 99.9% of the first time founders out there!!
I just finished my first week at Y Combinator. In no particular order, here's some lessons I've learned: Explosive founder-led sales is forced, not serendipitous. 🔽 The founder of an AI call center startup shared that he did: - 150 cold calls/day - Attended 5 conferences during the batch - Maxed out connection requests on four different LinkedIn accounts every week (using the accounts of their angel investors) - 45 personalized cold emails per day - Moved 4 times to where their customers lived - Kansas, Texas, NYC, Mexico Because of this, they CRUSHED their sales targets and raised $4M for their seed. Don't listen to what your users want? 🔽 - That sounds misleading, but it's partially true. Aravind Srinivas, the founder of Perplexity (went from $0 to $9B valuation in ~2 years), said that you should pay very close attention to your user's problems, and not what they say they want. There's usually a root problem that could be better addressed whenever they ask for a feature. Religious follow-up 🔽 - The founder of a $3.5B security company shared that after she had her first meeting with a prospect, it took 29 subsequent emails before they closed their first sale. Velocity >> ⬇️ - A YC partner stated that "almost every piece of startup advice is a bandaid to the underlying disease of not moving fast enough". Your startup should have morning goals, afternoon goals, and after-dinner goals. 'End of week' should be 'by lunch'. The famous term here is a founder that 'executes by the hour'. - A good way to tell if your startup is moving fast enough is if you think you're on the 'same level' as you were last week. If you haven't moved completely past the big-picture issue or task your entire company was thinking about and working on last week, you're not executing fast enough (i.e. "last week we went from 0 to having a built product, this week we got our first two paying users, next week we'll fix all the issues with the first MVP and get to 10 paying users) The AI riches lie in replacing ⬇️ - Michael Seibel said that the best B2B SaaS products were allowing enterprises to make their company 5% more efficient. He then said that with AI agents, you can wipe out entire divisions - allowing for some industries to cut costs by 30%. The calculus becomes very easy to decision makers (pay $200k to save $2M) with that value proposition. He predicted that this will fundamentally change the unit economics of these businesses. These were a just a few of the many teachings that really stuck out to me. The YC community has been incredible, and I feel so fortunate to be a part of it. We're looking forward to the next two months, and are on a mission to fundamentally change the unit economics of the legal industry. If you know any attorneys (at all), send them my way - I'd love to chat!
Event Director & Host at Live Talent Network
2moIt's inspiring to see someone take bold steps early on. What do you think are the key lessons that set successful founders apart from the rest?