Gustaf Alstromer

Product-market fit is the only metric that matters in the early stages, and it is achieved solely through user conversation.

"If I drill down what makes companies fail, it's quite simple. It's just like they don't talk to users, which means they don't find product market fit. And if they don't find product market fit, nothin..."

Founders often mistake fundraising success or investor praise for actual product-market fit.

"We have to remind everyone on the first day in YC, 'None of you have product market fit because you probably don't,' right? Almost nobody has. Because people confuse this external validation with the..."

Scalable growth loops are for later stages; early startups must focus on unscalable, manual customer acquisition.

"I've seen a lot, and this is when I had to reset my thinking coming from a growth team joining YC, is you can't start a startup ethic with a growth team mindset because that is just scalable things al..."

Candidate excitement and mission-alignment are better predictors of early startup success than just technical pedigree.

"First of all, we made sure we hired people that were really excited to be there, right? They wanted to build Airbnb and they were really excited to work on Airbnb. That was the most important thing. O..."

High-performing early teams often feel more like a mission-driven group of friends than a corporate environment.

"Airbnb did not feel like a normal job. It felt like more like a group of friends trying to just do something together and we were friends. At least in the beginning it did not feel like this was a job..."

Explicitly interviewing for core value alignment is essential for maintaining culture during growth.

"We did something we call culture interviews that I think the founders have written about or there's probably content online about this. We did a lot of culture interviews early on to try to figure out..."

The specific decision-making style matters less than having a consistent, agreed-upon process that prevents rehashing.

"Small startups agree on how they decide together. So after that, everyone just follow the process. That's usually how things work out... I think you just have to have a process so you don't rehash eve..."

Storytelling is a core leadership skill used to simplify complexity and inspire teams and investors.

"Finally, what I would say is the skill that's really attributed to great founders is excellent communication skills. So the ability to communicate really complicated ideas clearly... I would say commu..."

In early startups, strategy is often a distraction from the singular most important priority.

"Whenever someone wants to have a strategy conversation, it assumes that they don't understand their priorities. The priorities is always a list from top to bottom where there's one thing that's more i..."

True problem definition comes from identifying inefficiencies that users are too close to see themselves.

"You can't actually ask them how difficult is it to do X, y, z because they won't even know that it's that difficult to them. So the best thing I've learned about how to discover the pain is to watch p..."

Finding the right users to interview requires high-volume outreach to filter for the 10% who are early adopters.

"The problem is, which anyone who hasn't done sales before that joined YC, they realize this, is that if you take the average customer group in the world, 90% are not early adopters... Those 10 percent..."

Indifference is more common than hatred; rejection is a natural part of the discovery process, not a sign of total failure.

"I think people just have this fear that, 'If I get a lot of rejection, that means everything is bad.' But the rejection should be put in context to the early adopter idea and that most people who don'..."

Observational research is superior to verbal feedback because users often don't realize how much pain they are in.

"The best way for you to figure out what is the intensity of the problem is not to ask them but to watch them or to watch them solve the thing that they do... have them screen share, have them walk you..."

Weekly shipping velocity and tangible progress are the best predictors of long-term startup success.

"One good indicator is if each new Office Hour there is really exciting new stuff, right? We're not talking about the same thing we talked about two weeks ago or four weeks ago. They've already done th..."

Founder-led sales is a numbers game of filtering for early adopters who are willing to take a chance on a new product.

"The problem is, which anyone who hasn't done sales before that joined YC, they realize this, is that if you take the average customer group in the world, 90% are not early adopters... Those 10 percent..."