here. </p><p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.snapdocs.com//">Snapdocs is the leading digital closing platform for the mortgage industry. Today, the company touches 25% of all US real estate transactions and is valued at $1.5B. Founder and CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/a_w_king/">Aaron King</a> and his team have expertly navigated fundraising and market cycles. We sat down with Aaron to hear his insight into getting a business up and running with minimal outside funding and building through volatile market conditions. </p><p><strong>Why did you decide to raise minimal funding early in the company’s history?</strong></p><p>I never considered funding to be a requirement for building — but I also didn't know much about fundraising early on in the company’s history. Snapdocs was started as a side project a couple of years before ever thinking about applying to YC. By the time I applied, we had a live product, customers, and revenue. Even after YC, we didn’t raise much immediately. We stayed focused on building and then raised a seed round later in the year.</p><p>It wasn’t until three years later that we raised our Series A. By then, we had spent about $1MM of our seed round and were at a $5MM revenue run rate. Around that time we started working with much larger customers, and it was clear we would need more capital to be successful in this bigger market. So, we raised our Series A. After we closed the round, our lead investor revealed how capital efficient we had been compared to our peers. </p><p><strong>Do you feel you had to ruthlessly prioritize when building the product because you didn't have the capital?</strong></p><p>Yes, and I’ve learned that you should take the same approach even when you do have the capital to be less disciplined. Back then, ruthless prioritization was our only option. We couldn’t afford to build features that weren’t essential. There were always a hundred distractions that would result in a broader, less focused product. But our capital constraints kept us focused on going deep with our paying customers. That helped us avoid the common trap of building products no one wanted. </p><p>It also meant that when we decided to build a product, we had to think about the smallest version of that product in order to quickly ship. That helped ensure we had a short feedback loop from our users and ensure our resources were continuously being invested in building the right features. Looking back, I’m amazed at how much we were able to accomplish without spending much capital. </p><p>Being capital constrained forced good behaviors that served us well even after we raised more funding. We continue to be thoughtful about every dollar we spend. But, there is a cost to this approach, and we’re paying for it today. We built many things that weren't engineered for scale or flexibility. However, now we can afford to reengineer those unscalable solutions because we built something people want.</p><p><strong>What did your product cycles look like before you raised your Series A?</strong></p><p>We were always heavy on customer involvement when building product. We spent a lot of time in our customers’ offices watching them use what we were building and understanding their work. We also kept a lot of our prospects in the loop as we built new features. Some of the best feedback came from people who had chosen to not yet work with us. Responding to that feedback with a killer feature was a great way to ultimately get them on board. </p><p>We built a lot of trust and rapport with these early customers, and the in-person interactions helped immensely. As a result, they would call one of us the moment they thought there was a problem or if they thought a competitor was doing something compelling. Customer churn for Snapdocs has always been incredibly low as a result. </p><p>We created a disciplined product release process, even in those early days, but we were still able to move quickly. We shipped code every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Customers were impressed by how quickly we could respond to issues and feedback. </p><p>Interestingly, not having too much pressure from investors early on allowed us to experiment more in an underappreciated part of our market. The Serviceable Available Market (SAM) of our initial product was roughly only $20MM, but we believed it would allow us to expand into more critical parts of the mortgage ecosystem. It was the type of opportunity that would be hard to discover through market analysis or spreadsheet exercises. You had to get deep into the problem set to see the opportunity and develop the right strategy—and that ultimately worked to our advantage. </p><p><strong>Founders need capital to hire employees. As a bootstrapped company, what was your strategy around hiring? </strong></p><p>Hiring was hard, but we did a few things that worked well. Even before the company could afford full-time employees, I worked with talented contractors. I also leaned on friends to help me work through both technical and business challenges. Someone would come over and whiteboard with me or we’d get into the code and work through a problem. </p><p>When I could afford to hire full-time employees, I treated them like founding team members. I was generous with equity and shared everything about the potential and challenges of the business. We built a lot of trust as a small team. Getting a few really good people into the company early on was foundational to the company’s success. </p><p>The first person to join full-time was an engineer I had worked with in a previous role (and one of the friends that would help in those early days). The second and third hires were applicants from job postings on Hacker News. All three turned out to be excellent. None of us initially had large networks in the startup world, so most of our early hiring involved lots of interviews and hiring a few of the wrong people. We couldn’t attract well-known talent and took risks; invested in people we thought had a lot of potential. </p><p>One mistake I made in the early years was being too timid to approach more of the people I respected. I should have tried to convince them to quit their successful jobs and join our small (yet risky at the time) startup. I’m fearless on this approach now, but back then I was intimidated to try to convince a friend to join a company that might fail. In hindsight, I did them a disservice by not trying to recruit them. The truth is that these people are smart and you’re not harming anyone by sharing your vision and the potential of the company with them. As long as you’re honest and transparent about the inherent challenges, you should give them the opportunity to take a risk on you. </p><p>As Snapdocs grew, it became easier to pull from the team’s networks. We continued to build a lot of trust within the team, and they started referring their friends to apply. Eventually, we attracted well-known investors, and that, along with our culture and growth, made hiring easier. </p><p>Because we were capital constrained, we also didn’t hire anyone until there was a clear and painful need. It made running the company harder because we were all spread thin but ultimately made us incredibly productive, as it meant we were always working on the most important things. </p><p><strong>How have you navigated different market conditions? When do you decide to react?</strong></p><p>A big part of our success has come from selectively ignoring some market changes while reacting quickly to others. It has always been a question of how the change aligns with our resources, vision, and north star metric of market share growth. </p><p>For example, the biggest and most dynamic change we regularly experience are fluctuations in the number of mortgages that happen in a given month or year. This can change quickly based on a host of economic factors. When we are well-resourced and growing fast, we can ignore some of those market downturns and stay focused on market share growth — knowing we have the momentum and capital to power through it. Other times we’ve had to scale up or scale back based on the size of the fluctuation.</p><p>But other market dynamics can change quickly too, like the industry’s appetite for new technologies and the competitive landscape. There have been times when the market was demanding a technology but we believed there were underlying factors in the industry that would prevent that tech from scaling. If we built the technology, it would pull resources away from the priorities that drove us toward our long-term goals. And so, sometimes to the protests of our sales team, we ignored it or invested minimally in these trendy areas. By doing so, we were able to stay focused on the things that were truly going to transform the industry. </p><p>It’s also worth noting that navigating change was relatively easy in the first few years of building the company. It was a lot easier to adjust course on company direction or strategy when the team was smaller and could all fit in the same room. The product cycles were relatively short and malleable. The cost of making a change was low. </p><p>As the company has grown, we’ve had to be a lot more thoughtful and methodical about changing the speed or direction of the business as we react to market changes. The cost of making a change has increased a lot. Investments take longer to play out. Changes to headcount take longer to scale up or down. There are more people on the team and more layers in the organization to communicate the change through. </p><p><strong>In March 2020, Snapdocs made a huge shift because of changes you were seeing in the housing market. How did you communicate this shift to your team and ensure their goals were aligned with the new priorities? </strong></p><p>COVID accelerated demand for our product, but with that came a shift in what our customers wanted from a platform like ours. We had to expand quickly to serve their needs, and we had to pivot our roadmap on a dime. It’s a testament to the team that we were able to pull that off. </p><p>To make decisions quickly and then communicate them, we worked in concentric circles. We started by discussing the change in a smaller group of 3-4 people. This is where the hardest and messiest conversations took place. We moved quickly to define the problems and opportunities and set a direction for the company. We then looped in the senior leadership team for further discussion and to arm them with everything they needed to share the directional changes with their teams. Finally, we held a company-wide meeting to share the new direction and answer questions. All of this happened over the course of about 2 weeks.</p><p>Now, our business required more speed and flexibility as information was coming in and changing week on week. We dealt with this by creating temporary pods of 4-5 team members focused on solving specific challenges that would spin up for a few weeks and then dissolve once the challenge was addressed. We also increased the frequency of our company-wide all-hands meetings from monthly to weekly so we could keep the whole company up to speed. </p><p>Luckily we had a deep culture of transparency that goes back to the beginning of the company. We’ve always tried to share everything with our entire team — our cash balance, monthly growth rate, burn, our biggest challenges. This got harder as the team grew, but we’ve largely continued this transparency to today. It’s much easier to be transparent in times of great change if you've laid a foundation of trust and transparency in the past. </p><p>We also worked hard to be intellectually honest about the growth we were experiencing. It’s easy to take credit when the business accelerates, but our message to the team wasn't, “Look at how great we're doing.” The message was closer to, “This industry works in cycles. We're in an up cycle now and that's great. There's going to be a down cycle. We don't know when or how strong it's going to be. But we should not overly congratulate ourselves for the current situation, just as we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves when we’re fighting through an inevitable downturn in the future.”</p><p><strong>In 2021, Snapdocs </strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.snapdocs.com/resource-center/blog/announcing-our-150m-series-d-funding-round/">announced a Series D round. How did this change your mentality around resources?</strong></p><p>It was clear that the pandemic would be an accelerator for our business, and we needed to move fast to stay ahead of the market. We went from being frugal to raising larger rounds of capital and hiring seasoned executives who could help us scale. It’s important for companies to evolve at the right points in time and ask themselves, “Is what I did yesterday the thing that's going to get me to where I need to be tomorrow?”. We asked that question and decided we needed to change parts of our culture and capital investment strategy if we wanted to win.</p><p>When we raised capital in 2021, transactions on Snapdocs had steadily increased to millions of closings a year and thousands of lenders and title companies were using our technology every month. Demand for mortgages throughout the pandemic was strong, and we deployed an intentional strategy of prioritizing effectiveness over efficiency. We needed to get aggressive and expand our market position, which required capital. </p><p>The market turned again later in the year, with demand for mortgages cooling. It was clear that it was time to go back to some of our old ways of doing things. We ditched the motto of being effective over being efficient. This meant a return to ruthless prioritization of our focus. We shifted away from investing so heavily in future scale as we wouldn’t need to tap into these systems for a few years.</p><p>I find it helpful to remember that market fluctuations are normal and unavoidable. Startups should scale up at times and scale back at others. It’s hard and painful. There’s nothing easy or enjoyable about being understaffed to meet customer demand on one side, or needing to let team members go on the other. But these ups and downs are natural and a necessary part of building an enduring company. In a startup, you’re always making hard decisions based on insufficient information. You’re never going to be able to perfectly predict the future. You need to keep making the best decisions you can — knowing all the while that you may be wrong and need to change course again once the future becomes clearer.</p>","comment_id":"63d45276ba7a5900012d1cb7","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/02/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--24-.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2023-01-27T14:38:46.000-08:00","updated_at":"2023-02-22T18:17:22.000-08:00","published_at":"2023-01-30T08:59:00.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":"Founder & CEO Aaron King expertly built Snapdocs through volatile market conditions and with minimal outside funding into the mortgage industry's leading digital closing platform, valued at $1.5B today. This is what he learned about navigating market cycles.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71158","name":"Leadership","slug":"leadership","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/leadership/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71170","name":"Startups","slug":"startups","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startups/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"},{"id":"63d45389ba7a5900012d1ccf","name":"#622","slug":"hash-622","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/learnings-of-a-snapdocs-aaron-king-on-navigating-market-cycles/","excerpt":"Welcome to the fourth edition of Learnings of a CEO. You can read previous editions here. ","reading_time":9,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"6357f9044557ad0001018040","uuid":"b73507ea-8de6-4799-8305-1554bd33437c","title":"How to maintain engineering velocity as you scale","slug":"how-to-maintain-engineering-velocity-as-you-scale","html":"<p>Engineering is typically the function that grows fastest at a scaling startup. It requires a lot of attention to make sure the pace of execution does not slow and cultural issues do not emerge as you scale.</p><p>We’ve learned a lot about pace of execution in the past five years at Faire. When we launched in 2017, we were a team of five engineers. From the beginning, we built a simple but solid foundation that allowed us to maintain both velocity and quality. When we found product-market fit later that year and started bringing on lots of new customers, instead of spending engineering resources on re-architecturing our platform to scale, we were able to double down on product engineering to accelerate the growth. In this post, we discuss the guiding principles that allowed us to maintain our engineering velocity as we scaled.</p><h2 id=\"four-guiding-principles-to-maintaining-velocity\">Four guiding principles to maintaining velocity</h2><p>Faire’s engineering team grew from five to over 100 engineers in three years. Throughout this growth, we were able to sustain our pace of engineering execution by adhering to four important elements:</p><ol><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/how-to-maintain-engineering-velocity-as-you-scale/#1-hire-the-best-engineers\">Hiring the best engineers</a></li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/how-to-maintain-engineering-velocity-as-you-scale/#2-build-a-solid-long-term-foundation-from-day-one\">Building solid long-term foundations from day one</a></li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/how-to-maintain-engineering-velocity-as-you-scale/#3-track-engineering-metrics-to-drive-decision-making\">Tracking metrics to guide decision-making</a></li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/how-to-maintain-engineering-velocity-as-you-scale/#4-keep-teams-small-and-independent\">Keeping teams small and independent</a></li></ol><h2 id=\"1-hire-the-best-engineers\">1. Hire the best engineers</h2><p>You want to hire the best early team that you can, as they’re going to be the people helping you scale and maintain velocity. And good people follow good people, helping you grow your team down the road.</p><p>This sounds obvious, but it’s tempting to get people in seats fast because you have a truckload of priorities and you’re often the only one doing engineering recruiting in those early years. What makes this even harder is you often have to play the long game to get the best engineers signed on. Your job is to build a case for why your company is <em>the</em> opportunity for them. </p><p>We had a few amazing engineers in mind we wanted to hire early on. I spent over a year doing coffee meetings with some of them. I used these meetings to get advice, but more importantly I was always giving them updates on our progress, vision, fundraising, and product releases. That created FOMO which eventually got them so excited about what was happening at Faire that they signed up for the ride.</p><p>While recruiting, I looked for key competencies that I thought were vital for our engineering team to be successful as we scaled. These were:</p><h3 id=\"a-experts-at-our-core-technology\">a. Experts at our core technology</h3><p>In early stages, you need to move extremely fast and you cannot afford to make mistakes. We wanted the best engineers who had previously built the components we needed so they knew where mistakes could happen, what to avoid, what to focus on, and more. For example, we built a complex payments infrastructure in a couple of weeks. That included integrating with multiple payment processors in order to charge debit/credit cards, process partial refunds, async retries, voiding canceled transactions, and linking bank accounts for ACH payouts. We had built similar infrastructure for the Cash App at Square and that experience allowed us to move extremely quickly while avoiding pitfalls.</p><h3 id=\"b-focused-on-delivering-value-to-customers\">b. Focused on delivering value to customers</h3><p>Faire’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs to chase their dreams. When hiring engineers, we looked for people who were amazing technically but also understood our business, were customer focused, were passionate about entrepreneurship—and understood how they needed to work. That is, they understood how to use technology to add value to customers and product, quickly and with quality. To test for this, I would ask questions like: “Give me examples of how you or your team impacted the<em> </em>business.” Their answers would show how well they understood their current company’s business and how engineering can impact customers and change a company’s top-line numbers.</p><p>I also learned a lot when I let them ask questions about Faire. I love when engineering candidates ask questions about how our business works, how we make money, what our market size is, etc. If they don't ask these kinds of questions, I ask them things like: “Do you understand how Faire works?” “Why is Faire good for retailers?” “How would you sell Faire to a brand?” After asking questions like these a few times, you’ll see patterns and be able to quickly identify engineers who are business-minded and customer-focused.</p><p>Another benefit of hiring customer-focused engineers is that it’s much easier to shut down projects, start new ones, and move people around, because everyone is focused on delivering value for the customer and not wedded to the products they helped build. During COVID, our customers saw enormous change, with in-person trade shows getting canceled and lockdowns impacting in-person foot traffic. We had to adapt quickly, which required us to stop certain initiatives and move our product and engineering teams to launch new ones, such as our own version of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.faire.com/thestorefront/introducing-faire-summer-market-our-first-online-trade-show-event//">online trade shows</a>.</p><h3 id=\"c-grit\">c. Grit</h3><p>When we first started, we couldn’t afford to build the most beautiful piece of engineering work. We had to be fast and agile. This is critical when you are pre-product-market fit. Our CEO Max and a few early employees would go to trade shows to present our product to customers, understand their needs, and learn what resonated with them. Max would call us with new ideas several times a day. It was paramount that our engineers were <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://angeladuckworth.com/grit-book//">gritty and able to quickly make changes to the product. Over the three or four days of a trade show, our team deployed changes nonstop to the platform. We experimented with offerings like:</p><ul><li>Free shipping on first orders</li><li>Buy now, pay later</li><li>Buy from a brand and get $100 off when you re-order from the same brand</li><li>Free returns</li></ul><p>By trying different value propositions in a short time, our engineering team helped us figure out what was most valuable to our customers. That was how we found strong product-market fit within six months of starting the company.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/CrRDf25EV8if-oP6rfEnSYeA_ttfKsayeQoM61gMOYFODZvpYsId0z2Y5RQ8z5xH4zt8UQaPBOwe1xus8oaqKQW1zxqNxz_ss9LHTpWyCc6tWsyJUm6_g6lVUtb6PkHluwNcqIU9MN3silgCLqtNHO2S8RkPcQCHBYiVPhK9Fteoiq_w9dZJqaxTqA/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\"></figure><p><em>Our trade show storefront back when we were called Indigo Fair.</em></p><h2 id=\"2-build-a-solid-long-term-foundation-from-day-one\">2. Build a solid long-term foundation from day one</h2><p>The number one impediment to engineering velocity at scale is a lack of solid, consistent foundation. A simple but solid foundation will allow your team to keep building on top of it instead of having to throw away or re-architecture your base when hypergrowth starts.</p><p>To create a solid long-term foundation, you first need to get clear on what practices you believe are important for your engineering team to scale. For example, I remember speaking with senior engineers at other startups who were surprised we were writing tests and doing code reviews and that we had a code style guide from the very early days. But we couldn’t have operated well without these processes. When we started to grow fast and add lots of engineers, we were able to keep over 95% of the team focused on building features and adding value to our customers, increasing our growth. </p><p>Once you know what long-term foundations you want to build, you need to write it down. We were intentional about this from day one and documented it in our <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://craft.faire.com/handbook-89f166841ec9/">engineering handbook</a>. Today, every engineer is onboarded using this handbook.</p><p>The four foundational elements we decided on were:</p><h3 id=\"a-being-data-driven\">a. Being data-driven</h3><p>The most important thing is to build your data muscle early. We started doing this at 10 customers. At the time, the data wasn’t particularly useful; the more important thing was to start to collect it. At some point, you’ll need data to drive product decision-making. The longer you wait, the harder it is to embed into your team.</p><p>Here’s what I recommend you start doing as early as possible:</p><ul><li>Set up data pipelines that feed into a data warehouse.</li><li>Start collecting data on how people are using your product. As you add features and iterate, record how those changes are impacting user interactions. All of this should go into a data warehouse that is updated within minutes and made available to your team. As your product gets increasingly complex, it will become more and more important to use data to validate your intuition.</li><li>We use Redshift to store data. As user events are happening, our relational database (MySQL) replicates them in Redshift. Within minutes, the data is available for queries and reports.</li><li>Train your team to use experimentation frameworks.</li><li>Make it part of the product development process. The goal is to transform your intuition into a statistically testable statement. A good place to start is to establish principles and high-level steps for your team to follow when they run experiments. We’ve set principles around when to run experiments vs. when not to, that running rigorous experiments should be the default (and when it isn’t), and when to stop an experiment earlier than expected. We also have teams log experiments in a Notion dashboard.</li><li>The initial focus should be on what impact you think a feature will have and how to measure that change. As you’re scoping a feature, ask questions like: How are we going to validate that this feature is achieving intended goals? What events/data do we need to collect to support that? What reports are we going to build? Over time, these core principles will expand.</li><li>The entire team should be thinking about this, not just the engineers or data team. We reinforced the importance of data fluency by pushing employees to learn SQL, so that they could run their own queries and experience the data firsthand.</li><li>It’ll take you multiple reps to get this right. We still miss steps and fail to collect the right data. The sooner you get your team doing this, the easier it will be to teach it to new people and become better at it as an organization.</li></ul><h3 id=\"b-our-choice-of-programming-language-and-database\">b. Our choice of programming language and database</h3><p>When choosing a language and database, pick something you know best that is also scalable long-term.<strong> </strong>If you choose a language you don’t know well because it seems easier or faster to get started, you won’t foresee pitfalls and you’ll have to learn as you go. This is expensive and time-consuming. We started with Java as our backend programming language and MySQL as our relational database. In the early days, we were building two to three features per week and it took us a couple of weeks to build the framework we needed around MySQL. This was a big tradeoff that paid dividends later on.</p><h3 id=\"c-writing-tests-from-day-one\">c. Writing tests from day one</h3><p>Many startups think they can move faster by not writing tests; it’s the opposite. Tests help you avoid bugs and prevent legacy code at scale. They aren’t just validating the code you are writing now. They should be used to enforce, validate, and document requirements. Good tests protect your code from future changes as your codebase grows and features are added or changed. They also catch problems early and help avoid production bugs, saving you time and money. Code without tests becomes legacy very fast. Within months after untested code is written, no one will remember the exact requirements, edge cases, constraints, etc. If you don’t have tests to enforce these things, new engineers will be afraid of changing the code in case they break something or change an expected behavior.<br><br>There are two reasons why tests break when a developer is making code changes:</p><ul><li>Requirements change. In this case, we expect tests to break and they should be updated to validate and enforce the new requirements.</li><li>Behavior changes unexpectedly. For example, a bug was introduced and the test alerted us early in the development process.</li></ul><p>Every language has tools to measure and keep track of test coverage. I highly recommend introducing them early to track how much of your code is protected by tests. You don’t need to have 100% code coverage, but you should make sure that critical paths, important logic, edge cases, etc. are well tested. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://leanylabs.com/blog/good-unit-tests//">Here are tips for writing good tests</a>.</p><h3 id=\"d-doing-code-reviews\">d. Doing code reviews</h3><p>We started doing code reviews when we hired our first engineer. Having another engineer review your code changes helps ensure quality, prevents mistakes, and shares good patterns. In other words, it’s a great learning tool for new and experienced engineers. Through code reviews, you are teaching your engineers patterns: what to avoid, why to do something, the features of languages you should and shouldn’t use. </p><p>Along with this, you should have a coding style guide. Coding guides help enforce consistency and quality on your engineering team. It doesn’t have to be complex. We use a tool that formats our code so our style guide is automatically enforced before a change can be merged. This leads to higher code quality, especially when teams are collaborating and other people are reviewing code.</p><p>We switched from Java to Kotlin in 2019 and we have a comprehensive style guide that includes recommendations and rules for programming in Kotlin. For anything not explicitly specified in our guide, we ask that engineers follow <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://kotlinlang.org/docs/coding-conventions.html/">JetBrains’ coding conventions</a>.</p><p>These are the code review best practices we share internally:</p><ul><li>#bekind when doing a code review. Use positive phrasing where possible (\"there might be a better way\" instead of \"this is terrible\"; \"how about we name this X?\" instead of \"naming this Y is bad\"). It's easy to unintentionally come across as critical, especially if you have a remote team.</li><li>Don't block changes from being merged if the issues are minor (e.g., a request for variable name change, indentation fixes). Instead, make the ask verbally. Only block merging if the request contains potentially dangerous changes that could cause issues or if there is an easier/safer way to accomplish the same.</li><li>When doing a code review, ensure that the code adheres to your style guide. When giving feedback, refer to the relevant sections in the style guide.</li><li>If the code review is large, consider checking out the branch locally and inspecting the changes in IntelliJ (Git tab on the bottom). It’s easier to have all of the navigation tools at hand.</li></ul><h2 id=\"3-track-engineering-metrics-to-drive-decision-making\">3. Track engineering metrics to drive decision-making</h2><p>Tracking metrics is imperative to maintaining engineering velocity. Without clear metrics, Faire would be in the dark about how our team is performing and where we should focus our efforts. We would have to rely on intuition and assumptions to guide what we should be prioritizing. </p><p>Examples of metrics we started tracking early (at around 20 engineers) included:</p><ul><li><strong>Uptime.</strong> One of the first metrics we tracked was <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/uptime//">uptime. We started measuring this because we were receiving anecdotal reports of site stability issues. Once we started tracking it, we confirmed the anecdotal evidence and dedicated a few engineers to resolve the issue.</li><li><strong>CI wait time.</strong> Another metric that was really important was CI wait time (i.e., time for the build system to build/test pull requests). We were receiving anecdotal reports of long CI wait times for developers, confirmed it with data, and fixed the issue.</li></ul><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KiE8tjsqkFvtJFmyY_6-IinXuT1A6C4x6JBUSX9qb9nDHB9lurJZAlHocGDEi3Sx_HSHNuBxozMBljGOsNokrQIJ9Hk6ZolI39yQtKPz0yuAbue0G2weaKWXqD65_Gbal_LYuEC5TpPoGIdCGd0jflhy1yRQzuG-pxV1IePbh8LuEtvqehC1gHs5lw/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\"></figure><p><em>This is a dashboard we created in the early days of Faire to track important engineering metrics. It was updated manually by collecting data from different sources. Today, we have more comprehensive dashboards that are fully automated.</em></p><p>Once our engineering team grew to 100+, our top-level metrics became more difficult to take action against. When metrics trended beyond concerning thresholds, we didn’t have a clear way to address them. Each team was busy with their own product roadmap, and it didn’t seem worthwhile to spin up new teams to address temporary needs. Additionally, many of the problems were large in scale and would have required a dedicated group of engineers. </p><p>We found that the best solution was to build <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/the-power-of-tagged-metrics//">dimensions so that we could view metrics by team. Once we had metrics cut by team, we could set top-down expectations and priorities. We were happy to see that individual teams did a great job of taking ownership of and improving their metrics and, consequently, the company’s top-level metrics.</p><h4 id=\"an-example-transaction-run-duration\">An example: transaction run duration</h4><p>Coming out of our virtual trade show, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.faire.com/thestudio/faire-summer-market-2021-our-global-trade-show-event-is-coming-in-july//">Faire Summer Market</a>, we knew we needed significant investment in our database utilization. During the event, site usage pushed our database capacity to its limits and we realized we wouldn’t be able to handle similar events in the future.</p><p>In response, we created a metric of how long transactions were open every time our application interacted with the database. Each transaction was attributed to a specific team. We then had a visualization of the hottest areas of our application along with the teams responsible for those areas. We asked each team to set a goal during our planning process to reduce their database usage by 20% over a three-month period. The aggregate results were staggering. Six months later, before our next event—<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.faire.com/thestorefront/announcing-faires-2022-winter-virtual-trade-show-events//">Faire Winter Market</a>—incoming traffic was 1.6x higher, but we were nowhere close to maxing out our database capacity. Now, each team is responsible for monitoring their database utilization and ensuring it doesn’t trend in the wrong direction.</p><h3 id=\"managing-metrics-with-kpi-scorecards\">Managing metrics with KPI scorecards</h3><p>We’re moving towards a model where each team maintains a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) that get published as a scorecard reflecting how successful the team is at maintaining its product areas and the parts of the tech stack it owns.</p><p>We’re starting with a top-level scorecard for the whole engineering team that tracks our highest-level KPIs (e.g., <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/guide/configure_an_apdex_for_your_traces_with_datadog_apm//">Apdex, database utilization, CI wait time, severe bug escapes, flaky tests). Each team maintains a scorecard with its assigned top-level KPIs as well as domain-specific KPIs. As teams grow and split into sub-teams, the scorecards follow the same path recursively. Engineering leaders managing multiple teams use these scorecards to gauge the relative success of their teams and to better understand where they should be focusing their own time.</p><p>Scorecard generation should be as automated and as simple as possible so that it becomes a regular practice. If your process requires a lot of manual effort, you’re likely going to have trouble committing to it on a regular cadence. Many of our metrics start in DataDog; we use their API to extract relevant metrics and push them into Redshift and then visualize them in Mode reports.</p><p>As we’ve rolled this process out, we’ve identified criteria for what makes a great engineering KPI:</p><ul><li><strong>Can be measured and has a believable source of truth.</strong> If capturing and viewing KPIs is not an easy and repeatable task, it’s bound to stop happening. Invest in the infrastructure to reliably capture KPIs in a format that can be easily queried.</li><li><strong>Clearly ladders up to a top-level business metric.</strong> If there isn’t a clear connection to a top-level business metric, you’ll have a hard time convincing stakeholders to take action based on the data. For example, we’ve started tracking pager volume for our critical services: High pager volume contributes to tired and distracted engineers which leads to less code output, which leads to fewer features delivered, which ultimately means less customer value.</li><li><strong>Is independent of other KPIs.</strong> When viewing and sharing KPIs, give appropriate relative weight to each one depending on your priorities. If you’re showing two highly correlated KPIs (e.g., cycle time and PR throughput), then you’re not leaving room for something that’s less correlated (e.g., uptime). You might want to capture some correlated KPIs so that you can quickly diagnose a worrying trend, but you should present non-duplicative KPIs when crafting the overall scorecard that you share with stakeholders.</li><li><strong>Is normalized in a meaningful way.</strong> Looking at absolute numbers can be misleading in a high-growth environment, which makes it hard to compare performance across teams. For example, we initially tracked growth of overall infrastructure cost. The numbers more than doubled every year, which was concerning. When we later normalized this KPI by the amount of revenue a product was producing, we observed the KPI was flat over time. Now we have a clear KPI of “amount spent on infrastructure to generate $1 in revenue.” This resulted in us being comfortable with our rate of spend, whereas previously we were considering staffing a team to address growing infrastructure costs.</li></ul><p>We plan to keep investing in this area as we grow. KPIs allow us to work and build with confidence, knowing that we’re focusing on the right problems to continue serving our customers.</p><h2 id=\"4-keep-teams-small-and-independent\">4. Keep teams small and independent</h2><p>When we were a company of 25 employees, we had a single engineering team. Eventually, we split into two teams in order to prioritize multiple areas simultaneously and ship faster. When you split into multiple teams, things can break because people lose context. To navigate this, we developed a pod structure to ensure that every team was able to operate independently but with all the context and resources they needed. </p><p>When you first create a pod structure, here are some rules of thumb:</p><ul><li><strong>Pods should operate like small startups.</strong> Give them a mission, goals, and the resources they need. It’s up to them to figure out the strategy to achieve those goals. Pods at Faire typically do an in-person offsite to brainstorm ideas and come up with a prioritized roadmap and expected business results, which they then present for feedback and approval.</li><li><strong><strong><strong>Each pod should have no more than 8 to 10 employees. </strong></strong></strong>For us, pods generally include 5 to 7 engineers (including an engineering manager), a product manager, a designer, and a data scientist.</li><li><strong>Each pod should have a clear leader. </strong>We have an engineering manager and a product manager co-lead each pod. We designed it this way to give engineering a voice and more ownership in the planning process.</li><li><strong>Expect people to be members of multiple pods. </strong>While this isn’t ideal, there isn’t any other way to do it early on. Resources are constrained, and you need a combination of seasoned employees and new hires on each pod (otherwise they’ll lack context). Pick one or two people who have lots of context to seed the pod, then add new members. When we first did this, pods shared backend engineers, designers, and data analysts, and had their own product manager and frontend engineer.</li><li><strong>If you only have one product, assign a pod to each well-defined part of the product.</strong> If there’s not an obvious way to split up your product surface area, try to break it out into large features and assign a pod to each.</li><li><strong><strong><strong>Keep reporting lines and performance management within functional teams. </strong></strong></strong>This makes it easier to maintain:</li></ul><p>\t\t(1) Standardized tooling/processes across the engineering team and balanced \t\tleadership between functions</p><p>\t\t(2) Standardized career frameworks and performance calibration. We give our \t\tmanagers guidance and tools to make sure this is happening. For example, I \t\thave a spreadsheet for every manager that I expect them to update on a \t \t\tmonthly basis with a scorecard and brief summary of their direct reports’ \t\t \t\tperformance.</p><h3 id=\"how-we-stay-on-top-of-resource-allocation-census-and-horsepower\">How we stay on top of resource allocation: Census and Horsepower</h3><p>Our engineering priorities change often. We need to be able to move engineers around and create, merge, split, or sunset pods. In order to keep track of who is on which team—taking into account where that person is located, their skill set, tenure at the company, and more—we built a tool called Census.</p><p>Census is a real-time visualization of our team’s structure. It automatically updates with data from our ATS and HR system. The visual aspect is crucial and makes it easier for leadership to make decisions around resource allocation and pod changes as priorities shift. Alongside Census, we also built an algorithm to evaluate the “horsepower” of a pod. If horsepower is showing up as yellow or red, that pod either needs more senior engineers, has a disproportionate number of new employees, or both.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pJk7SUqsmeQLU_dYU3BrN5wMnzyHwVySmydpuiNbHgDddt_FzwwQzCQ_pQH75FX-InduoRGg5hSVhcfXZxRC3FztBZ3aF_2JnwIFMBOhjSey2cgRQEqs38oORhgZgrtwrmgO7CM-WSU_34oeyp15hdzHOrH_FAXTlFlJOt-A87J4Brce_ri3MER8RA/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\"><figcaption>.</figcaption></figure><p><em>Census.</em></p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/N7btbx4GDkomhZp8wj0CMlTiGywqDffV6qCakK6aZEILScjRiIqjhwjV1q2AlT6bmrzU9vqo_pa1ggXn8j_C0CWsO4BEQdHoq5EcPfOhZwhe8tg1oMmmmDeYQXNrjF99WOdM5AKVTT5GAisZM_idtecOsjdXH_qQ2ezvEVRLltbkMfmk1j3qouwt7g/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\"></figure><p><em>Pods are colored either green, yellow, or red depending on their horsepower.</em><br><br>One of the most common questions that founders have is how to balance speed with everything else: product quality, architecture debt, team culture. Too often, startups stall out and sacrifice their early momentum in order to correct technical debt. In building Faire, we set out to both establish a unified foundation <em>and</em> continue shipping fast. These four guiding principles are how we did it, and I hope they help others do the same.</p>","comment_id":"6357f9044557ad0001018040","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/10/BlogTwitter-Image-Template-2.jpeg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-10-25T07:56:04.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-10-26T12:38:29.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-10-25T09:00:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Faire’s engineering team grew from five to over 100 engineers in three years. 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Building","slug":"company-building","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/company-building/"},{"id":"62d804e33644180001d72a1f","name":"#1543","slug":"hash-1543","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d4","name":"Marcelo Cortes","slug":"marcelo-cortes","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/10/Instagram-Image-Template--Square---7-.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Marcelo Cortes is a co-founder and the CTO of Faire, an online wholesale marketplace connecting mostly small brands to independent, local 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It requires a lot of attention to make sure the pace of execution does not slow and cultural issues do not emerge as you scale.","reading_time":16,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"6356a9c957e9f90001984b62","uuid":"32e1602f-ec89-49b0-932c-61ef6bbacfcb","title":"YC Founder Firesides: Mutiny on AI and the next era of company growth","slug":"yc-founder-firesides-mutiny-on-ai-and-the-next-era-of-company-growth","html":"<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.mutinyhq.com//">Mutiny (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mutiny/">YC S18</a>) uses AI and data to convert website visitors into customers. Today, the fastest growing B2B companies such as Notion and Snowflake use Mutiny to identify ideal customers, determine sections of websites that will increase conversion, and produce copy that converts visitors into customers. </p><p>YC’s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/anuhariharan/status/1557784730543632384/">Anu Hariharan</a> sat down with Mutiny co-founder and CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/jalehr/">Jaleh Rezaei</a> to talk about their <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/jalehr/status/1582352047659024385/">recent acquisition</a> of Intellipse, an AI marketing platform, as well as how AI will impact the next era of growth. Throughout, Jaleh shares advice about acquisitions as a growth strategy and evolving your product with AI. </p><p>You can listen here or on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://open.spotify.com/episode/7dy1qB7XQfOryE4kj4spGS/">Spotify, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/160-yc-founder-firesides-mutiny-on-ai-and-the-next/id1236907421?i=1000583708925\%22>Apple Podcasts</a>, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1yNxaNzAPPnKj/">Twitter.

Notion drives 60% more leads through paid marketing</a></li><li>Example 2: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.mutinyhq.com/blog/the-second-lever-replays#conversion-secret-how-snowflake-runs-abm-at-scale\">Snowflake builds an ABM and enterprise marketing program</a></li></ul><p><strong>12:50</strong> - You recently shared that with data and AI, Mutiny transforms conversion from a niche A/B testing tool to a platform that every go-to-market team can use to drive efficient growth at scale. What does that mean, and how have you leveraged the advances in AI over the last four years? </p><ul><li>When you can give the entire go-to-market team x-ray vision into every visitor and how they are converting – and then pair that insight with the ability to change the website for different segments – every team will make the website a core part of their strategy to drive more revenue. Mutiny uses AI to give teams this insight and answer questions like: What segments should I prioritize? What parts of the website should I change? What copy will resonate? Where should I focus? </li></ul><p><strong>17:00</strong> - At Mutiny when looking at data, when do you know the right questions to ask and when do you say these are not questions we need to optimize now?</p><ul><li>In the early days, one of the most valuable things we did was follow our customers’ growth teams. We would attend team meetings, watch them use our product, and ask questions. It became clear what we should build for our customers. </li></ul><p><strong>20:30</strong> - Since you started Mutiny, what are some of the advances in AI that you’ve leveraged? </p><ul><li>We did things that didn't scale in the early days to solve customers’ problems. As our customers grew, our data set grew and we used AI models and inputs to improve our recommendation engines and service a broader customer base. Today, we can build models that tell a user where on the website they should make changes and write personalized copy leveraging GPT-3. </li></ul><p><strong>29:10</strong> - Did you have moments when you felt Mutiny could be doing more with the advances being made in AI? </p><ul><li>We saw an opportunity to marry our proprietary data set with GPT-3 to produce highly personalized copy. </li></ul><p><strong>32:15</strong> - GPT-3 was an inflection point for Munity. What is the next inflection point? </p><ul><li>There are a lot of opportunities with DALL-E, as visuals are important in marketing.</li></ul><p><strong>36:30</strong> - Do you have cautionary advice on how to think about using technologies like GPT-3 and DALL-E for founders dabbling in AI? </p><ul><li>Think through the ultimate long-term vision of the product and the long-term defensibility of the business. And launch fast, as technology develops quickly. </li></ul><p><strong>38:40</strong> - What advice do you have for founders in terms of leveraging OpenAI, GPT-3, etc. while focusing on the long-term vision? </p><ul><li>Your vision and long-term view is separate from your day-to-day execution. Your long-term vision (i.e. the opportunity and what you’re trying to create over the course of a decade) provides clarity around where you’re trying to go and brings other people along with you, like your investors and employees. Day-to-day, you’re focused and executing quickly – and not always thinking about the ten year vision when you’re building V1.</li></ul><p><strong>43:45</strong> - You decided to grow your team by acquiring Intellipse. And now, Mutiny has one of the larger engineering teams with production experience in modern marketing AI technologies. Why did you decide to pursue an acquisition? </p><ul><li>Founders have to look for inflection points where something happens in the market leading to the “old way” no longer being as good. And as a result, a much larger portion of the market is open to a new and better way. We’re in a recession, and this is an inflection point for Mutiny. Companies need to convert every dollar to a customer, and Mutiny has built a product that makes marketing dollars more efficient. We can accelerate our road map with the acquisition of Intellipse</li></ul><p><strong>46:40</strong> - How did you know you wanted to work with the Intellipse team so much that you had to go through an acquisition?</p><ul><li>We were interested in the Intellipse team and the skills the team had developed. Their CTO and senior engineers had a unique experience with marketing AI and newer technologies, like GPT-3.</li><li>The personality and values of the founder spreads in an organization and becomes the company culture. After getting to know the founder and the free am, it was evident the two companies had a similar culture and shared values – and we’d be able to bring this team in and enhance our culture.</li></ul><p><strong>50:15</strong> - How long did it take to assess the culture? </p><ul><li>We spent the same amount of time with each individual as if we were hiring them onto the team through our typical recruiting process.</li></ul><p><strong>51:30</strong> - Do you expect to acquire more companies in the future? And how should founders and CEOs determine whether this strategy is right for their company? </p><ul><li>Be clear about your goals and why an acquisition is the right way to achieve those goals. When a company is working toward a similar goal – building something we would have done ourselves – it is a successful acquisition. With Intellipse, the team shared similar goals and company culture, and could accelerate our timing.</li><li>We want to hire founders onto our product team who are user focused and move quickly. Founders can focus their entrepreneurial energy on building a product and growing that business area within Mutiny. </li></ul><p><strong>54:55</strong> - What are your thoughts about how AI will impact the next ten years? </p><ul><li>There has been enough productization of backend AI technologies that as a founder you can tap into AI to accelerate the product you want to build and the value you give to customers. From a user and growth perspective, AI enables us to automate many of the tasks no one wants to do. And for those who aren’t technical – but understand what they are trying to do – they can now be self sufficient.</li></ul>","comment_id":"6356a9c957e9f90001984b62","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/10/BlogTwitter-Image-Template-1.jpeg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-10-24T08:05:45.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-10-25T08:44:16.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-10-24T09:25:31.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"YC’s Anu Hariharan sat down with Mutiny co-founder and CEO Jaleh Rezaei to talk about their recent acquisition of Intellipse, an AI marketing platform, as well as how AI will impact the next era of growth.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a7106f","name":"Y 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Pave helps companies plan, communicate, and benchmark employee compensation. Today, the company has 160 employees, more than 3,500 customers, and is valued at $1.6B. Founder and CEO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/matthewschulman?lang=en\%22>Matt Schulman</a> has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community. We sat down with Matt to hear his insight on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/pave-2/">building a team</a> in the early stages of his company and today as a CEO of a growth-stage company. </p><p><strong>Many of the first Pave employees were hired as a contractor before converting to a full-time employee. Would you recommend this strategy to founders? </strong></p><p>I strongly recommend the contract-to-hire setup in the early days of a startup, as it led me to have a 100% close rate with the candidates we wanted to convert to full-time. This strategy worked for two reasons: </p><p>1) By the end of the contract, the contractors had poured weeks of energy into the work – learning the code base and investing their time – and getting to know potential coworkers. This escalated their sense of commitment.</p><p>2) I was flexible on working hours – open to them working nights or weekends. This made it easier for the candidates who were busy with full-time employment to say yes to working with Pave and earn extra income on the side. </p><p>To convince people who were employed to work for Pave as a contractor on top of their current job, I framed the process as a mutual evaluation. This is an opportunity to evaluate the company and come to a mutual decision at the end of 2, 4, or 6 weeks together – no pressure. We paid them a fair market rate, and as mentioned, we were flexible on working hours. One contractor worked their day job until 5:00pm and then on Pave from 6:00pm-2:00am, for example. They were excited to be able to build something from the ground up and work closely with me at the earliest stage of the company – which is another strategy I used to encourage people to work with us. </p><p>Before Pave, I was an engineer at Facebook and regularly worked on side projects. These projects were my fun, guilty pleasures because when I built something from the ground up, I felt an emotional attachment to the work. Usually engineers at large companies feel part of a machine, but when they build something full-stack from the ground up, there’s a magical allure to that work. I gave those contractors ownership over the work and often jammed out with them – working side by side at all hours. (One note: I did not have the contractors touch customer PII.) Within weeks, we’d both know whether Pave would be a good fit, and if so, we were already committed to each other.</p><p><strong>What were you looking for in early employees? </strong></p><p>When starting to build out the team, I was given a tip that the first 10 hires would set the tone for the next 100. Because of this, I personally recruited 100% of the early Pave employees. I sourced people, took phone screens, went to dinner, coffee, and on walks with candidates, and spoke with them for hours on Zoom and Facetime. It was an all-encompassing process. But I found that early advice to be accurate: The first 10 employees are the most important aspect in the company’s life cycle – other than finding product-market fit – and recruiting has to be the founder’s priority.</p><p>When recruiting for the first ten employees, I wasn’t looking for experts in specific areas but generalists with rapid career growth, passion for our mission, and a hunger to work. Those early employees readily tackled whatever fire we were facing that day from engineering work and sales to back office and HR. I also had a deep level of trust with those first ten hires, as they were all in my network. </p><p>Today, I still look for mission alignment and hunger but there are times I need to hire a specialist. I identify the tightest set of criteria for the role and only talk to people who fit that criteria. This is very different from the early days when I was solely looking for generalists who could fill multiple roles.</p><p><strong>How did you convince those early employees to join Pave? </strong></p><p>I always found ways to continue our conversation even when I could sense the candidate wanted to turn down the offer. I would do this by scheduling future conversations – saying that I needed to share something new with them – and then I would get to work writing a Google Doc that showed how I planned to invest in their career. We still use this strategy at Pave today, but it has evolved and is now affectionately called the collaborative Google Doc.</p><p>The collaborative Google Doc is shared with the candidate and used throughout the entire interview process. The document outlines expectations for the role and frames the interview process in stages, communicating which stage the candidate is in at any given time to ensure we are working within their ideal timeline. We encourage the candidate to comment and add their thoughts to the document, including feedback for me and their thoughts on the interview process.</p><p>As we get further into the interview process, I get more specific about what I’m looking for in a candidate. And when we get even deeper, I write multiple pages on what I’ve learned about their career aspirations through our conversations and backchanneling, and how I’m going to support them. </p><p>When it comes to backchanneling for potential executive hires, I try to talk with at least 10 people and ask, “If I have the privilege to be this person's manager, I want to set them up for the utmost success. What are your specific recommendations about the best ways to set this person up for success and unleash their full potential?” This 360 review is shared with the candidate right before I deliver the compensation package. I outline what I learned about their strengths and weaknesses, and specific ways that I’ll push them and support them.</p><p>When I communicate compensation, I lay out all the facts, including cash amount, equity (shares and dollar amount), and the benefits package. In addition, we also share:</p><ul><li>The salary band for the role (and implicitly their position in it).</li><li>The level that the employee will be in the organization, along with more information on our leveling framework and what each level means.</li><li>The methodology for determining the compensation, like the market data we use (75th percentile for similar stage companies).</li><li>Broader information on compensation philosophy, including how someone moves through the band, gets promoted, etc.</li><li>Additional info on equity: current preferred price, current post money valuation, details on vesting, PTE window, 409A price, and more – essentially everything they need to determine the actual value of the grant.</li></ul><p>We’re ultra transparent about compensation because compensation should not be a guessing game; people deserve to understand every aspect of their compensation package and how it was derived. I then offer to meet live to answer any questions or discuss feedback – or ask them to leave their comments in the Google Doc. Most candidates will ask questions in the document, as it can be more approachable.</p><p><strong>For every open role at Pave, a Slack channel is created to drive urgency and ensure no detail goes missed. Tell me about this process. </strong></p><p>As a seed-stage company, I was creating Slack channels for every role. Today, Slack channels are created for roles that I’m involved with – like hiring a head of finance or VP of engineering. The process still looks the same, however. </p><p>I create a Slack channel for that role and add relevant stakeholders. Every morning I ask for an update. What’s the movement? Have we sourced any more candidates? Have we talked with candidates X, Y, and Z? I do this to keep the process moving forward every day. I also post updates – sharing with the team when I spoke with a reference, for example. When we extend an offer, I use this Slack channel to encourage stakeholders to reach out to the candidate through text messages or Loom videos. </p><p>Loom videos are an interesting medium. If you’re a candidate and receive six Loom videos from different people at the company, it may feel bizarre and a bit overwhelming. But the videos show we are excited about the candidate and also gives insight into our energetic culture. </p><p><strong>You also review email copy and do drip campaigns for candidate outreach. Tell me about this. </strong></p><p>We have a pre-written email sequence that is sent from me or the hiring manager depending on the context, and then we use <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gem/">Gem to automate this. The response rates for these campaigns are much higher than if the emails were coming from a recruiter. Before the emails are sent out, I’ll spend 30 minutes personalizing 30 emails (one to two sentences at the onset of the email) that will be sent to target profiles. And then it’s important you do a drip. If you only send one email, most of the time the candidate won’t respond. I find sending a third email with a short message like, “Hey, any thoughts?” leads to the most responses. </p><p><strong>How do you think about where your job ends and your team begins when it comes to recruiting?</strong></p><p>Today, if I’m not the hiring manager, I delegate and come in only at the end of the process for a sell call. The process looks vastly different if I’m the hiring manager. I spend a lot of time reviewing resumes and identifying the top 25 profiles in the space. Every outreach to them is very personalized, and I have time to do this because I focus on quality over quantity of candidates. Quality over quantity was a big lesson for me, actually. At first, I would look at all inbound resumes and thousands of applicants. But I have come to realize that I have more success when I map out the market and find the top 25 candidates in the space. Then I'll find a way to get one of them in the door.</p><p><strong>Describe the ideal candidate for senior-level positions when Pave was a smaller company. </strong></p><p>As a company of 35 people, we didn’t need managers who delegated – which has merit at a later-stage company. We needed people who would personally take on the hard work. Often, first-time founders hire someone senior for optics reasons. Instead, you should look for someone earlier in their career who has grown at a crazy high slope – often referred to in the tech industry as a high-slope candidate versus a Y-intercept candidate. There is a time and place for both types of hires, but as a 35-person startup, almost always go for the slope, not the high Y-intercept. And in some cases, you may meet exceptional candidates with both high slope and high Y-intercept. This is the dream case!</p><p>Another mistake first-time founders can make is rushing hires by trying to squeeze them in before a term sheet. Don’t try to meet some arbitrary deadline or cliff date. If it takes six months or a year to hire an executive, that’s ok – wait for the right person.*<br><br><em>*This answer has been updated to clarify the founder’s intention behind the statement.</em></p>","comment_id":"6348578e2184dc0001eebf80","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/10/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--8-.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-10-13T11:23:10.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-10-26T08:44:29.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-10-17T09:00:11.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Pave Founder and CEO Matt Schulman has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. 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You can read previous editions here.","reading_time":7,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"62fa7b87ab52db0001d3b656","uuid":"c432a242-4288-4980-a6e9-d9c82359c9ad","title":"YC Founder Firesides: Gusto on building for new verticals","slug":"yc-founder-firesides-gusto-on-building-for-new-verticals","html":"<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://gusto.com//">Gusto (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gusto/">YC W12</a>) provides growing businesses with everything to take care of their team. Today, more than 200,000 businesses use Gusto for payroll, employee benefits, talent management, and more. And with the recent addition of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://embedded.gusto.com//">Gusto Embedded</a>, developers now use Gusto’s APIs and pre-build UI  flows to embed payroll, tax filing, and payments infrastructure into products. </p><p>Last week, Gusto <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://gusto.com/company-news/gusto-embedded-one-year-in-fueling-smb-tech-success-at-scale-with-critical-compliance-/">announced they have dozens of new partners across verticals like laundromats, health &amp; beauty, and construction building with Gusto Embedded. The company also announced they are making it easier for software providers to keep their payroll customers in compliance.</p><p>YC’s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/anuhariharan/status/1557784730543632384/">Anu Hariharan</a> sat down with Gusto co-founder and CPO <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/tomerlondon/">Tomer London</a> to talk about building for new customer segments and the future of embedded finance — sharing advice for startup founders and CEOs along the way. </p><div class=\"kg-card kg-audio-card\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/media/2022/08/Founder-Fireside---Tomer-London--Gusto-_thumb.jpg?v&#x3D;1660587475243\" alt=\"audio-thumbnail\" class=\"kg-audio-thumbnail\"><div class=\"kg-audio-thumbnail placeholder kg-audio-hide\"><svg width=\"24\" height=\"24\" fill=\"none\" xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\"><path fill-rule=\"evenodd\" clip-rule=\"evenodd\" d=\"M7.5 15.33a.75.75 0 1 0 0 1.5.75.75 0 0 0 0-1.5Zm-2.25.75a2.25 2.25 0 1 1 4.5 0 2.25 2.25 0 0 1-4.5 0ZM15 13.83a.75.75 0 1 0 0 1.5.75.75 0 0 0 0-1.5Zm-2.25.75a2.25 2.25 0 1 1 4.5 0 2.25 2.25 0 0 1-4.5 0Z\"/><path fill-rule=\"evenodd\" clip-rule=\"evenodd\" d=\"M14.486 6.81A2.25 2.25 0 0 1 17.25 9v5.579a.75.75 0 0 1-1.5 0v-5.58a.75.75 0 0 0-.932-.727.755.755 0 0 1-.059.013l-4.465.744a.75.75 0 0 0-.544.72v6.33a.75.75 0 0 1-1.5 0v-6.33a2.25 2.25 0 0 1 1.763-2.194l4.473-.746Z\"/><path fill-rule=\"evenodd\" clip-rule=\"evenodd\" d=\"M3 1.5a.75.75 0 0 0-.75.75v19.5a.75.75 0 0 0 .75.75h18a.75.75 0 0 0 .75-.75V5.133a.75.75 0 0 0-.225-.535l-.002-.002-3-2.883A.75.75 0 0 0 18 1.5H3ZM1.409.659A2.25 2.25 0 0 1 3 0h15a2.25 2.25 0 0 1 1.568.637l.003.002 3 2.883a2.25 2.25 0 0 1 .679 1.61V21.75A2.25 2.25 0 0 1 21 24H3a2.25 2.25 0 0 1-2.25-2.25V2.25c0-.597.237-1.169.659-1.591Z\"/></svg></div><div class=\"kg-audio-player-container\"><audio src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/media/2022/08/Founder-Fireside---Tomer-London--Gusto-.mp3/" preload=\"metadata\"></audio><div class=\"kg-audio-title\">Founder Firesides: Gusto&#x27;s Tomer London on building for new verticals</div><div class=\"kg-audio-player\"><button class=\"kg-audio-play-icon\"><svg xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\"><path d=\"M23.14 10.608 2.253.164A1.559 1.559 0 0 0 0 1.557v20.887a1.558 1.558 0 0 0 2.253 1.392L23.14 13.393a1.557 1.557 0 0 0 0-2.785Z\"/></svg></button><button class=\"kg-audio-pause-icon kg-audio-hide\"><svg xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\"><rect x=\"3\" y=\"1\" width=\"7\" height=\"22\" rx=\"1.5\" ry=\"1.5\"/><rect x=\"14\" y=\"1\" width=\"7\" height=\"22\" rx=\"1.5\" ry=\"1.5\"/></svg></button><span class=\"kg-audio-current-time\">0:00</span><div class=\"kg-audio-time\">/<span class=\"kg-audio-duration\">118:07</span></div><input type=\"range\" class=\"kg-audio-seek-slider\" max=\"100\" value=\"0\"><button class=\"kg-audio-playback-rate\">1&#215;</button><button class=\"kg-audio-unmute-icon\"><svg xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\"><path d=\"M15.189 2.021a9.728 9.728 0 0 0-7.924 4.85.249.249 0 0 1-.221.133H5.25a3 3 0 0 0-3 3v2a3 3 0 0 0 3 3h1.794a.249.249 0 0 1 .221.133 9.73 9.73 0 0 0 7.924 4.85h.06a1 1 0 0 0 1-1V3.02a1 1 0 0 0-1.06-.998Z\"/></svg></button><button class=\"kg-audio-mute-icon kg-audio-hide\"><svg xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\"><path d=\"M16.177 4.3a.248.248 0 0 0 .073-.176v-1.1a1 1 0 0 0-1.061-1 9.728 9.728 0 0 0-7.924 4.85.249.249 0 0 1-.221.133H5.25a3 3 0 0 0-3 3v2a3 3 0 0 0 3 3h.114a.251.251 0 0 0 .177-.073ZM23.707 1.706A1 1 0 0 0 22.293.292l-22 22a1 1 0 0 0 0 1.414l.009.009a1 1 0 0 0 1.405-.009l6.63-6.631A.251.251 0 0 1 8.515 17a.245.245 0 0 1 .177.075 10.081 10.081 0 0 0 6.5 2.92 1 1 0 0 0 1.061-1V9.266a.247.247 0 0 1 .073-.176Z\"/></svg></button><input type=\"range\" class=\"kg-audio-volume-slider\" max=\"100\" value=\"100\"></div></div></div><p>You can also listen on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://open.spotify.com/episode/0FTnE08QzuCg6I21S4PB8e?si=ShDfsjwnRWKYH0LjwzI-rg\%22>Spotify, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/159-yc-founder-firesides-gusto-on-building-for-new/id1236907421?i=1000576161014\%22>Apple Podcasts</a>, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1dRKZldrvOzJB?s=20\%22>Twitter.

1:28 - Tomer describes Gusto Embedded and the complexities behind compliance.</p><ul><li>Gusto Embedded takes ten years of Gusto’s experience building payroll software and compliance and makes it available to any software company wanting to ship their own payroll product to the market. </li></ul><p><strong>5:00 </strong>- Why did you decide to pursue startups as the company’s first target audience? How did you think about customer segments in that first year? </p><p><em>Over the last ten years, Gusto has scaled to build for multiple customer segments – starting with startups, then SMBs, accountants, and now with Gusto Embedded Payroll, developers who are embedding payroll directly into their software. </em></p><ul><li>When you have a grand vision, where do you start as a founder? Choose a customer segment. Make sure you choose a segment where 1) they have an important customer problem, 2) the product you are building solves that problem, and 3) you can reach your customer. </li></ul><p><strong>9:30 </strong>- Who were your competitors in the early days? </p><ul><li>The old, traditional payroll solutions, which were complex. With Gusto, <em>anyone</em> can run payroll at <em>any time</em>. Gusto also focuses on employees, a critical part of the system, by building a great payroll experience for them. </li></ul><p><strong>11:30 </strong>- Why did you decide to build for SMBs after startups? </p><ul><li>Look at your current customer base and learn from customers adjacent to the market you want to expand into. When you do expand into another vertical, make sure you maintain that early customer love.  </li></ul><p><strong>14:45</strong> - How did you maintain the customer love of the existing customer segment? </p><ul><li>Think about your long-term vision and don’t put yourself in a corner when you want to move to the next segment. </li></ul><p><strong>17:00</strong> - Most startups find it hard to tackle the SMB market. Why do you think this is the case? </p><ul><li>Traditionally SMBs are hard to reach and use incomplete or manual solutions. Since 2000 an entire generation of business owners had to learn to trust online financial services. Today, SMBs are online and looking for solutions.</li></ul><p><strong>22:25 </strong>- What is different about serving SMBs as a customer versus startups? </p><ul><li>Startups come and go, and the real economics come from the big winners. Focusing on startups is a good place to start your journey, but think about how to scale with them.</li><li>There are more small businesses than startups, and they are around for a long time – but most don’t grow to thousands of employees. You need to build a business model that works with that dynamic. </li></ul><p><strong>27:00 - </strong>Why did you pursue developers and how did you decide to service them? </p><ul><li>For many verticals, it is much better to have an all-in-one platform to run your small businesses. But payroll is really hard to build yourself. Gusto Embedded helps partners deliver a more integrated solution for customers without investing the several years and tens of millions of dollars.</li></ul><p><strong>29:00 </strong>- Gusto went from directly acquiring small businesses as customers to creating an embedded solution – essentially  “giving up” the relationship with the customer. How did you think about that? </p><ul><li>Evaluate the future of the industry and don’t ignore reality. Be the one to create that future. In this case, many payroll customers want all-in-one solutions. We can either try to meet those needs directly, or empower hundreds of partners to customize unique solutions.</li></ul><p><strong>33:00 - </strong>How should founders think about who to partner with? When should founders build directly for the industry and when should they go the embedded route? </p><ul><li>Think about the unique insight you have in the business you’re creating and make sure you own your destiny around that insight.</li><li>For your customer, what does a successful product look like, and could you partner with a company to fulfill those needs.</li><li>Your product must be high-quality. You have to put enough resources behind whatever you own. For everything else, you must ensure you bring in the right partner. It’s all about the end-to-end experience. </li></ul><p><strong>39:30</strong> - Gusto now makes it easier for software providers to bake compliance into embedded payroll. Tomer, I think developers looking at a payroll API would assume that compliance is baked in. But there are often steps companies have to take beyond just calling APIs. Tell us if that assumption holds.</p><ul><li>Regulation can change every quarter and every year. This is built into the product. We protect the customer and make it easy for developers to ship something quickly that is compliant for the long term.</li><li>One third of the companies in the U.S. get fined for mistakes on payroll. </li></ul><p><strong>43:00 - </strong>Compliance is the hardest part of payroll to build and ultimately has to be right. It took ten years of experience in compliance to launch this into Gusto Embedded Payroll. What advice do you have for founders who are building complicated, yet essential, components for an industry?</p><ul><li>Determine the parts of your product that are highly regulated and which areas are not. Build a culture that ensures quality-first in those highly-regulated areas, as well as a culture where people can iterate quickly in other areas. You can’t build a monolithic culture.</li><li>Embrace cross functional work. </li></ul><p><strong>46:00 </strong>- In the early days of Gusto, what guidance did you provide to your engineers about building payroll? What areas could break and which areas could not break? </p><p><strong>48:40</strong> - Looking back, would you have done anything different? </p><ul><li>Start charging what you feel is the value you provide; fix downwards versus upwards. If you’re truly adding value, customers won’t hesitate moving forward at that price.</li><li>Have the humility to learn from the customer and how the market changes around you. </li></ul><p><strong>51:45 </strong>- How should founders be thinking about embedded finance and how does this market evolve over the next 5-10 years? </p><ul><li>When you build a new software system for your customer, the more connected the system is for your customer, the better it is. Embedded products enable you to do that quickly and in high quality.</li><li>Bring more solutions into your product that are driven by what your customer needs. Understand your customer’s day-to-day, and figure out how to build something that solves their entire flow instead of one segment.</li><li>If you are not making money on your product, you don’t know if there's a product market fit. If you can charge and retain a customer, then there is product market fit. </li></ul><p><strong>56:30</strong> - Outside of payroll, what are you seeing product wise offered by APIs? </p><ul><li>This space is brand new and there’s a ton of opportunity to create a product that helps customers go through the end-to-end journey successfully and solves multiple pain points – instead of the customer needing ten years of background to create a high-quality solution.</li></ul>","comment_id":"62fa7b87ab52db0001d3b656","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/08/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--5-.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-08-15T09:59:51.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-08-15T11:48:12.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-08-15T11:32:19.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Today, more than 200,000 businesses use Gusto for payroll, employee benefits, talent management, and more. 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You can read the first edition <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/learnings-of-a-ceo-max-rhodes-faire/">here. </p><p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://zapier.com//">Zapier was founded in 2012 by <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/wadefoster/">Wade Foster</a>, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/bryanhelmig?lang=en\%22>Bryan Helmig</a>, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/mikeknoop/">Mike Knoop</a>. The founders went through YC’s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/zapier/">Summer 2012 batch</a> and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/growth-program/">S18 Growth Program</a>, and today, Zapier automates work by connecting with over 5,000 apps. The company has been profitable since 2014 and is valued at $5B – with 700 employees working remotely. Wade, Zapier CEO, shared his learnings growing into the role of a growth-stage CEO. </p><p><strong>How has your job as a CEO changed from leading a 3-person company in 2012 to a 700-person organization today? </strong></p><p>In the early days, you’re in the trenches with your co-founders and early employees splitting up tasks and touching nearly every part of the business. Often you’re writing code, selling products, recruiting, and helping with HR and finance functions. Today, Zapier is almost a team of 700 – and as we’ve grown, people have taken more and more duties from me to help the company grow and scale.</p><p>Now, one place I feel I am most needed is the vague concept of setting the vision and communicating that vision — and then ensuring everyone understands what we are doing, why it’s important, and their role in getting that done. This came naturally to me when we were small and I was in the trenches with everyone and communicating constantly. But as we hired more folks, I realized leaders were interpreting the vision to their team somewhat differently. I learned that if you are not communicating the vision well, you'll have teams that seem to be working on random projects. In isolation this isn’t bad, but as a collective set of tasks, you discover their work doesn’t fit into the vision. </p><p>We now repeat the vision over and over again in many formats. We put the vision in writing and it's constantly referenced; it's communicated at our all-hands; we bring in customers to talk about Zapier’s impact; we show data, so charts and figures can help tell the story; we have a company podcast. </p><p>When people inside the company start to turn the vision into a meme or Slack emoji, I know they really get the vision. Diagnostic tools, like employee engagement surveys, also help me understand how well employees understand why their role is important. It’s also evident when reviewing roadmaps. If a team’s tasks are tight and cohesive, I can tell they’ve been making tough decisions to align to the vision; if there are a bunch of random tasks, I can tell the vision hasn’t been communicated clearly. As a CEO, you have to ask, “Tell me how this is aligned,” and force those conversations to occur. Over time, people will get more comfortable with these types of assertive exercises. </p><p><strong>As you've grown, what changes have you had to make to keep everyone at your company aligned?</strong></p><p>We host weekly all hands, bring customers in to talk at those all hands, are transparent with metrics, and make sure those metrics are reflective of the good and the bad. Ultra transparency with metrics has served us well, as they are motivating and help people get aligned. People start to ask, \"How do we get these bad metrics to the good category?\" and then work towards change.</p><p>Being candid has also served us well. Whether at all hands, on a podcast, or solely talking with one of our leaders, we have candid conversations about why we didn’t hit a goal, why we were off schedule, why a deal didn’t close – and then immediately dive into what we think needs to happen next. The goal is to give awareness to the organization, so that in various meetings and forums people can try to figure out how to improve those areas.</p><p><strong>What's your advice to other founders on how to hire executives?</strong></p><p>Hiring executives is one of the hardest things you’ll do as a CEO. It's hard to determine when to start hiring executives, exactly what you’re looking for in an executive, and then find that person. </p><p>The best way to figure out when to start hiring executives is to meet with people who are unquestionably good executives at companies a stage or two further along. With no intention to hire them, meet with the VP of Engineering, VP of Marketing, and VP of People and ask, \"What are the things you do? What makes you great at this job? What do people in your job disagree on?”. Get as smart as you can on this topic and then compare and contrast what that set of leaders is telling you with how your company operates. If these executives wouldn’t bring anything new to the table, you may not be ready for that type of leader. This starts to help you answer the when part of the equation – and also the what, because you start to see what these folks are capable of and what they are not. </p><p>Part of determining what you should look for in an executive is understanding your own strengths and weaknesses. This requires honesty with yourself and internalizing feedback you have received. (I encourage folks to work with executive coaches and get 360 performance reviews.) Figuring this out helps you start to realize, \"Okay, within my executive team, I need people who will compliment me in these ways.\" Otherwise, you risk hiring a team that is quite capable and competent at their function, but actually may not work well with each other or with you.</p><p><strong>What is Zapier’s culture? What do you do to cultivate it as a remote company?</strong></p><p>We have a strong set of values that we align around. One is default to action. We hire folks who are action-oriented – and we have to as a distributed company; folks aren’t in situations where they notice someone next to them is stuck on something. So, they need to be curious, self-starters, and (figuratively) scratch and itch when they see something that doesn’t satisfy their innate drive. </p><p>Next, we value defaulting to transparency because folks who are action-oriented should be equipped with a ton of context. The mission, strategy, metrics, goals, systems and processes – all of it – is well documented and organized so people can find them and take action.</p><p>We also have a feedback-oriented culture. I teach a course on feedback to all the new folks to ensure they understand how to ensure they understand how to give and receive feedback effectively because it helps us grow. </p><p>The rest of our values are outlined <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://zapier.com/jobs/culture-and-values-at-zapier/">here, but these are some of the things that drive Zapier’s culture – and as you scale, it’s crucial to create different forums to communicate these values. We have an internal tool we named Async, which is email meets Reddit. The platform is public by default, anyone can post, and information can be targeted at different groups or people. We find this is great for long-form substantive topics that have a longer shelf life (1-2 weeks) versus Slack channels (1-2 days). We also hold all hands and have a company podcast, where we capture evergreen content. For example, when we have key moments in the company history, we’ll break it down: Why we did this thing, what led to that decision, the outcomes, why it is an important moment, etc. We have found podcasts to be helpful when onboarding new folks. </p><p><strong>Why did you decide to not raise any additional funding since your seed round?</strong></p><p>The only funding we took in the history of the company was a $1.3M seed round in 2012. This was partially philosophical and partially about the business. </p><p>The three of us co-founders had worked at a fast-growing, bootstrapped company owned 50/50 by two brothers. When we came out to the Valley (we were from Missouri), we started to hear this line of thinking, “No great company has ever done X.\" Some of these statements would center around the impact of venture funding, and I was dismissive in part because I had this counterexample from my time in Missouri. So, when we raised the seed round, we decided to treat it like the last round we’d ever raise.</p><p>Our second reason for not raising multiple rounds: Across the founding team, we had all the skill sets to do every job inside the company. That meant we didn't have to hire to make progress in the early days. We even had rules in place around hiring like, “Don’t hire until it hurts.” </p><p>Then there was the third, rational component: We were able to grow quickly without external funding because of Zapier’s network effect on our developer platform side. We're able to have low customer acquisition costs (mostly through organic channels), and this is intrinsic to how Zapier works. </p><p>Along the way, some of the philosophical thinking fell by the wayside by observing other companies and realizing fundraising is a tool like anything else. There are moments when it can help you, and there are moments when it can hinder you. You should strive to understand when external funding is a good tool to use versus when it is not – and then apply it if it makes sense for you.</p>","comment_id":"62f15573ab52db0001d3b642","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/08/BlogTwitter-Image-Template.jpg","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-08-08T11:26:59.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-08-15T12:08:14.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-08-09T08:55:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Today, Zapier automates work by connecting with over 5,000 apps. The company has been profitable since 2014 and is valued at $5B – with 700 employees working remotely. Wade, Zapier CEO, shared his learnings growing into the role of a growth-stage CEO. ","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"}],"tags":[{"id":"62b9edfe063d2d0001f0fc58","name":"#442","slug":"hash-442","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71158","name":"Leadership","slug":"leadership","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/leadership/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71170","name":"Startups","slug":"startups","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startups/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a7","name":"Lindsay Amos","slug":"lindsay-amos","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Lindsay.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Lindsay Amos is the Senior Director of Communications at Y Combinator. In 2010, she was one of the first 30 employees at Square and the company’s first comms hire.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/lindsay-amos/"},"primary_tag":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/learnings-of-a-ceo-wade-foster-zapier/","excerpt":"Welcome to the second edition of Learnings of a CEO. You can read the first edition here. ","reading_time":6,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71af5","uuid":"551325eb-6bd3-4671-9f99-4aef0c090014","title":"Growth AMA with YC Partner Gustaf Alströmer","slug":"growth-ama-with-yc-partner-gustaf-alstromer","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>YC Partner <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/gustaf/">Gustaf Alströmer</a> recently did a Growth AMA with <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.startupschool.org//">Startup School</a> founders. It was so good that we wanted to share it here.</p>\n<p>And here&#8217;s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ikpoF2GH0\%22>Gustaf&#8217;s Startup School lecture</a>.</p>\n<p>Enjoy!</p>\n<hr />\n<p><strong>For two-sided marketplace, at which point do you recommend to start focusing on demand side? Do you recommend to grow the supply side first or focus on both at the same time?</strong></p>\n<p>Most marketplaces start with supply-side first. If you don&#8217;t have demand in the early days you should probably create an environment where you can mimic what it would look like if you had a lot of demand. For example, when Uber and Lyft would launch new cities they would promise drivers a certain amount of compensation if they drove during the weekend. Once they had critical mass of supply they would go out and get demand (riders).</p>\n<p><strong>Do you have any tips for leadgen / growth, for B2B SaaS startups? Right now all the available leadgen tools out there, costs thousands of dollars, which is expensive for startups!</strong></p>\n<p>This is what we recommend most YC companies who is starting to do sales:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Figure out who is the actual buyer of your product. Who is the decision-maker that will pull out the credit card / sign the bill?</li>\n<li>Create a Google Spreadsheet, put 100 linkedin profiles in the spreadsheet that fit the profile of the potential buyings, then use a tool like <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://hunter.io/">Hunter to figure out their email-addresses. You can check the email format on their website if there is no response.</li>\n<li>Email them a plain-text email saying you are the founder of your company and you are reaching out a small group of people who you think would be perfect or the product you are building and you ask them to try it. You could also include a short gif/video (like really short) of how it works.</li>\n<li>Use an email software that allows you to check open-rates and click-through rates. If your email is opened many times it means its being forwarded around/getting attention. Email again if no-one responds.</li>\n<li>Expect about 40% to open your email. 5-10% to click on whatever link you included and less than 5% to try your product. If that works, then you just have do the same thing 20x and you have 100 users. The biggest mistake people use when doing this is sending too few emails. </li>\n</ol>\n<p>I recommend using <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://mixmax.com//">Mixmax, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.persistiq.com//">PersistIQ, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.streak.com//">Streak but there are so many.</p>\n<p><strong>What are the 3 things you recommend startups to do NOW to get users when starting out?</strong></p>\n<p>This depends a lot of what kind of company you are. If you are a consumer company one good way is to try to figure out who have this behaviour today? For example, if you would start Lyft or Uber today and needed to get riders you would think about who takes taxis today Well, bar-goers and people arriving at airports take a lot of Taxis so going to a bar and handing out coupons or doing ads in the airport would be a good place to start.</p>\n<p>If your users will be online I would actually recommend Reddit. You&#8217;d be surprised that nearly every single topic in the world have a Reddit community and they are often your most passionate users/harshest in the feedback. Another good places to start is Product Hunt.</p>\n<p><strong>Do you have any particular ideas on how to break into this community which can be notoriously &#8216;anti-commercial&#8217;?</strong></p>\n<p>That is a good question that many struggle with. You have to find a way to approach the community in a way where you are helping. Reddit committees are notoriously sensitive to commercial messages. Make yourself &#8220;one of them&#8221; and ask for feedback on your &#8220;project&#8221;. Language will be very important. Spend a lot of time in the committees to understand the unwritten rules.</p>\n<p><strong>What are the most effective ways companies can target and acquire early users? Are there certain marketing tools you recommend specifically for B2C companies?</strong></p>\n<p>There are only a few really large scalable sources of growth. For example word-of-mouth, SEO, Paid Growth and Referrals are good ones but often when you are small you&#8217;ll go after something non-scaling like asking people in a Reddit forum, meeting people in person and asking them to try your product. The most important thing is to try a lot of different non-scaling growth mechanics. Paul Graham wrote <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://paulgraham.com/ds.html/">an excellent point on this topic</a>.</p>\n<p><strong>What are your top questions to ask during a user/customer interview?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>What do you think this product does?</li>\n<li>Try to do x (for example buy something) and then say all the things you are thinking when you are going through your flow (say it loud if if just a thought you’re having)</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>What is your take on whether to try to get big corporations as your first customers or do you recommend to try to get mid size companies first and use them as a selling point to get the big ones?</strong></p>\n<p>Nearly always easier to start with smaller companies first. Start with companies that move fast and need your product but don&#8217;t have a &#8220;procurement team&#8221; yet, i.e. a company where the person who like/use your product actually can decide to pay for it themselves. You want to go after companies who can afford your product yet have the lower amount of internal friction to get it done.</p>\n<p><strong>Any clever strategies for solving the old chicken and egg problem?</strong></p>\n<p>In my experience there aren&#8217;t that many products and markets where the chicken and the egg are actually equally important. Usually there is one side of a marketplace that is more important than the other in the beginning and you just have to go out o your way to find growth of that side. In Airbnb&#8217;s case you need hosts to be able to have guests but you don&#8217;t need guests to be able to have hosts so you start with hosts.</p>\n<p>How do you find them? PR was important in the early days of Airbnb but PR are hard to measure and hard to scale. It&#8217;s always a good thing in the grand scheme of things but not a very good source of new users for most companies. It&#8217;s better to build a direct channel with your users than rely on press. Then you can be more targeted in your communication</p>\n<p>Paul Graham <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://paulgraham.com/ds.html/">wrote a great article</a> based on these early days of Airbnb.</p>\n<p>Startup growth is actually a lot less theory than you think and more &#8220;doing&#8221;. There was a founder in the most recent batch that decided to visit a bunch of doctors offices to see what they staff thought of his product &#8211; that is actually a better idea than trying to answer that question online for some customers.</p>\n<p><strong>What is the single biggest mistake early stage (MVP) startups make in year one around growth?</strong></p>\n<p>PG <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://paulgraham.com/ds.html/">covered a lot of these here</a>.</p>\n<p>The biggest misunderstanding about growth is that is somehow magically happen once you have a good product. It&#8217;s not the case. You have to do the intentional work in the early days (as well as in the later stage but different type of work).</p>\n<p><strong>How do you balance getting an early product in the hands of a nontrivial number of users without leaving a bad taste in their mouth if it is under-baked? If you turn them off the first time around, do you get a second chance once you address their complaints?</strong></p>\n<p>There is a lot of founders who fear that if people hate version 1 the game is over and as a founder I should just get a job. Reality couldn&#8217;t be further from the truth. Airbnb &#8220;launched&#8221; 3 times because the first 2 no-one cared. Turns out listening to customers if they don&#8217;t like your first version is very powerful way to iterate yourself to a great product. You can&#8217;t build a product in isolation so a &#8220;baked&#8221; product is basically a lie founders tell themselves. You should just launch. Launch early is a great sign of success.</p>\n<p><strong>How can we get our target users at a certain city to find and download the app when we are on a budget? Our advisor suggested Facebook ads and App Store ads, so we are planning to start with those.</strong></p>\n<p>Before you do anything related to ads I would try to do things that don&#8217;t scale. There is probably a way to test this hypothesis without buying ads. Start with your friends. Ask them how important a dish or ingredient is compared to other attributes of restaurants. You probably don&#8217;t need more than like 50-100 of friends and friends-of-friends to test this hypothesis. See if they use the app, do they use it again? Growth here is a function of building something people want &#8211; not trying to get users with ads. I worry in this case that you are not solving a 10x problem.</p>\n<p><strong>Do you recommend any specific strategies for asking users for a favor, e.g to share/review your app? When to do it and how to do it?</strong></p>\n<p>I think the best times to ask users to do something for you is when they are happy, i.e just accomplished something they found valuable in your product. Many of the &#8220;Please review my app&#8221; schemes are tied to a certain number of sessions to make sure only people who like your product will actually be asked to review it. When it comes to sharing, try to figure out the motivation why someone would share. That is often at the core when sharing is working really well vs. the actual sharing flow. For Airbnb, sharing worked well on sharing listings you might want to stay in with other people you were planning the trip with and Referral codes.</p>\n<p><strong>What is your advice on displaying streaks “you used the app for 3 days in a row, don’t screw it!”. Should we use it or do you find it more harmful in the long run?</strong></p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think this actually is good for the world and don&#8217;t think it builds the right long-term incentives to use the product. You will fool yourself/your users to drive a metric.</p>\n<p><strong>How would you help users make something like journaling or exercising a habit?</strong></p>\n<p>If you figure out the exercise part you have probably found a big business (Peloton did). Figuring out how to correctly motivate humans to exercise seems still largely unsolved but with a big price &#8211; so people continue trying. I would try to help you understand the incremental improvements you are making. This requires a lot of real world testing with real users. You can’t solve this in abstract in any way.</p>\n<p><strong>Instagram put the label “You’ve seen everything below this line” to make people spend less time in the app, but feel more “full”. If the feeling of fullness is the key to make users happier than should we try to maximize user time in the app? What is your opinion on limiting access to apps?</strong></p>\n<p>I love this topic and many will be surprised to learn this is actually tightly coupled with growth. To me, anyone working on growth should understand the power of dark patterns and then build principles that allows the team to know when you are there or not. The great user experiences here are actually quite hard to measure. Someone feeling a social product is meaningful are harder to measure than how many days/hours they spend active on the product.</p>\n<p><strong>Any tools/products you would recommend to growth hack at the initial start?</strong></p>\n<p>Some good ones are: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://mixpanel.com//">Mixpanel and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://amplitude.com//">Amplitude to measure your data and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.fullstory.com//">Fullstory or <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.inspectlet.com//">Inspectlet to record users sessions to learn from their behaviour.</p>\n<p><strong>One growth channel we are trying is conferences where we can meet multiple leads at once. What do you think?</strong></p>\n<p>Conferences isn&#8217;t very scalable. I have rarely seen it work. The way to think about sales is to find a scalable way to identify your audience and then a scalable way to contact them. Turns out email works for this in both small scale and large-scale but you have to send at least 100 emails before you know if it works. So just find 100 people who you think is in your target audience and then email them.</p>\n<p><strong>When using a referral program for growth, how do you sustainably incentivise a b2b referral program where your product gives the business using it a competitive advantage from other businesses?</strong></p>\n<p>It&#8217;s quite tricky to get B2B referral programs right. With consumer Referrals program it&#8217;s the audience is large and you have many more connections to other people like you. With B2B referrals you know far fewer people who would want to use that product. Solving that problem is the hardest problem. Gusto have the most impressive version of a B2B referral program that I&#8217;ve seen so far.</p>\n<p><strong>Do some products need some hard growth effort before it goes viral (eg. Facebook just spammed user&#8217;s address book)? What are some of the latest growth hacking strategies today&#8217;s startups can use?</strong></p>\n<p>Growth isn&#8217;t a set of hacking tactics at its core. Growth is understanding the value of a product and removing as much much friction as possible between users and people getting to that value.</p>\n<p>The value of Facebook is that you can reconnect with your friends. Once you were able to see the names and faces of your friends you understood what facebook was all about. The role of the growth team was to get as many people as possible to see the names and faces of their friends as fast as possible. Using an existing graph like your email or phone-book was a natural way to start.</p>\n<p><strong>What are the key skills you would look for, as a startup, in making your first growth hire?</strong></p>\n<p>You should be your first growth hire. The founders should be the ones doing growth in the early days &#8211; it&#8217;s not something you can outsource since it&#8217;s so core to the company similarly that you can&#8217;t outsource product. Once you have a bit bigger team here are two good resources how to staff a growth team:</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-guide2017//">https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-guide2017/
https://caseyaccidental.com/growth-team-evolution

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How do you demonstrate stickiness for an app (DAU/MAU or any other way) in a travel vertical, where you know that once a user books, they are not likely to repeat for 4-5 months?</strong></p>\n<p>DAU/MAU isn&#8217;t the best metric for all products. It works well for things you&#8217;re expected to use every day/month but for many products that doesn&#8217;t make sense &#8211; travel is one of those cases. Airbnb didn&#8217;t really measure DAU/MAU at all. We measured retention within a much longer retention period. What is the goal of your product? To get someone to book? Couldn&#8217;t you use bookings as a metric then?</p>\n<p><strong>When Airbnb introduced referrals, you would have acquired a lot of users who weren’t looking to travel at that time, but sometime in the future. What are the strategies you suggest to reactivate them or market to them, or any secret sauce you could share from your airbnb days?</strong></p>\n<p>If you sign up for Airbnb and got $40 on your account to travel for in the next 12 months we would email / push message you on a regular basis making sure you knew this. This made a difference and is worth doing.</p>\n<p><strong>Is growth rate in % is more important than absolute numbers? Does it really make sense to focus on for the early-stage companies?</strong></p>\n<p>The two metrics I think make sense for early stage startups are Weekly growth and Retention. Weekly growth can be averaged over a bunch of weeks if you have spiky growth but maintaining 10% weekly growth over time is very hard and a great motivator.</p>\n<p>Retention is a great metric because it helps you understand if your users love your product and if they come back to use it/buy.</p>\n<p><strong>What&#8217;s your view on how to speak to business owners of small local businesses? For example hairdressers, restaurants and dentist. Owners are often busy and not always present.</strong></p>\n<p>In my experience this audience are better at answering the phone than they are answering email. Selling to them is hard though because it takes a lot of energy to make it work but the ROI is relatively low since these are often low-margin businesses. For dentists, email is a good strategy I would pursue.</p>\n<p><strong>As many of the startups are now planning for different sort of growth hack ideas, is there a moment where we need to stop doing growth hack and focus on organic growth?</strong></p>\n<p>The way I think about it is that organic growth is a result of a great product but you can always help more people discover the value of the product. For example if you have the best possible travel recommendation service that people love using but signing up is really hard then your growth team should prob spend a lot of time optimizing sign-up so that people who haven&#8217;t tried your product yet get to the product as quickly as possible. In that scenario you are still optimizing organic growth with growth engineering.</p>\n<p><strong>When does a startup need to have its own dedicated growth team? What positions or expertises are needed in this growth team and what do they do on daily basis?</strong></p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/anuhariharan/">Anu Hariharan</a> wrote an excellent post here about this <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-guide2017//">https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-guide2017/.

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Any book/article related to growth you would recommend us to read?</strong></p>\n<p>Here are some good ones:<br />\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://caseyaccidental.com//">https://caseyaccidental.com/
https://www.growthengblog.com/
http://jwegan.com/

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Are there any thought out processes to balance working on new features vs acquiring users?</strong></p>\n<p>This sounds easier than you think to answer &#8211; but we struggled with it at Airbnb. I think the answer depends on the stage your company is in. In the early days you really need both and primarily build features that makes the product/usage growth. It&#8217;s easy for companies to think that just building more features will solve their growth problems but that&#8217;s not the case at all. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/andrewchen/">Andrew Chen</a> wrote a great post about this. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://andrewchen.co/the-next-feature-fallacy-the-fallacy-that-the-next-new-feature-will-suddenly-make-people-use-your-product//">https://andrewchen.co/the-next-feature-fallacy-the-fallacy-that-the-next-new-feature-will-suddenly-make-people-use-your-product/

/n

There will be a core set of features that drives your growth and nothing else really matters and your goal in the early days are to figure out what those essential features are.</p>\n<p><strong>Is there a difference between how to approach users to pay for a subscription vs a one-off product?</strong></p>\n<p>I think you are more likely to build a better business if you build a subscription service versus charging once. Charging once for your product is a relic from a world where software was only installed once. If you are building a subscription business then you can do a lot to optimize how long people stay subscribers but the most important thing is to make your product so great that people want to stay subscribers.</p>\n<p><strong>Do you have some tips on how to attract users from many different countries at the same time (on a low budget)?</strong></p>\n<p>For scalable growth channels most countries use many of the same platforms like Instagram, Youtube, Google and Facebook. You can reach people on all these platforms in most countries in the world. Only exceptions are China, Korea and Russia where the basic platforms are different. There is an over-emphasis on localization as a solution in my experience. Most countries are more similar than they are different and it’s that you have re-invent everything for every country.</p>\n<p><strong>What is the single best advice you can give in terms of Growth for a start-up that is transitioning from an idea to working prototype and then full blown launch?</strong></p>\n<p>Single best advice are different for different companies/stages 🙂</p>\n<p>The most important advice is to read this article and internalize it <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://paulgraham.com/ds.html/">http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

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Would you sacrifice revenue for growth?</strong></p>\n<p>It depends. Hard to say without more context. I prefer doing a trial or giving away a small portion of the product for free than making the entire product free if you are selling to businesses. Then you have less of a risk of giving away valuable features that people actually would&#8217;ve paid for.</p>\n<p><strong>What metrics would you suggest as key focus for higher ticket B2C products?</strong></p>\n<p>Revenue and repeat purchase.</p>\n<p><strong>Any relevant thoughts for early stage from your time at Voxer, observing Mapbox etc.?</strong></p>\n<p>Voxer was very similar to Facebook in many ways. Messaging app that grew through the social graph.</p>\n<p><strong>Is building hype ahead of your first release important? If so, do you have tips for getting people excited and ready to signup?</strong></p>\n<p>Short answer: No, hype is not important. Don&#8217;t focus on building a hype around your product. Start small. Launches are overrated.</p>\n<p><strong>How might growth tactics differ when targeting not &#8220;the Internet&#8221; but very specific professions (e.g. plumbers, teachers, surgeons)?</strong></p>\n<p>In my experience Teachers and Surgeons are certainly spending a lot of time online and online is the best way to reach them. Agree that plumbers are harder to get &#8211; I would probably try to call them but like mention above people that are not online are a hard group to sell too. If it’s hard to sell to a group that might be a challenge for your business in general.</p>\n<p><strong>Re: Airbnb Referral. Does the value of a referral for a person receiving an invite, diminish when they learn that the person sending a referral code is receiving a monetary incentive for doing so?</strong></p>\n<p>Not in my experience. You want to design the language in a way that makes the receiver feel like it&#8217;s a gift. Play around with the Airbnb referral program. It&#8217;s one of the most optimized referral programs in the world and nothing is random.</p>\n<p><strong>Re: Airbnb Referral. How did referral user growth compound over time? What was your viral coefficient and how did you optimize it?</strong></p>\n<p>We experimented our way to double-digit % of all growth coming from the referral program. We ran many many A/B test on the program itself to make improvements. It compounds over times since the input in a referral program are your existing active users which also kept growing.</p>\n<p><strong>What should an early stage startup do about growth if unit economics is negative, so we lose money for each customer who finds and uses us? Should we seek funding, fix our unit economics, or pause marketing (or artificially restrict users via quota)? In which order would you take action?</strong></p>\n<p>You can&#8217;t scale a business with negative unit economics and you shouldn&#8217;t try to. You should fix you unit economics first, then do things that don&#8217;t scale to get early growth and then decide what to do next. But those are the most important things.</p>\n<p><strong>What key metric should be tracked and worked on for consumer/ social product that leads to long term success? Do VCs look at the same metrics?</strong></p>\n<p>Retention is the most important. Good investors all look at retention and cohort metrics these days.</p>\n<p><strong>As Airbnb growth hacked Craigslist, what are your thoughts on pushing the boundaries with other platforms T&amp;C&#8217;s? What do you think about bots and scrapers to hack growth?</strong></p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve gotten the questions about the Craigslist hack many times but this was a very early and very non-important part of Airbnb growth &#8211; I joined early but I could never find any evidence of this being important part of growth. I would emphasize that there is a huge difference with doing that don’t scale vs things that scale. Breaking T&amp;C certainly doesn’t scale.</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1103217","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-10-29T06:24:29.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:00:21.000-07:00","published_at":"2018-10-29T06:24:29.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d1","name":"Y Combinator","slug":"y-combinator","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/1200px-Y_Combinator_logo.svg.png","cover_image":null,"bio":"Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200).\r\n\r\nThe startups move to Silicon","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/y-combinator/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71175","name":"Interview","slug":"interview","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/interview/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7117f","name":"Startup School","slug":"startup-school","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startup-school/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71180","name":"#startup-school","slug":"hash-startup-school","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d1","name":"Y Combinator","slug":"y-combinator","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/1200px-Y_Combinator_logo.svg.png","cover_image":null,"bio":"Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200).\r\n\r\nThe startups move to Silicon","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/y-combinator/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/growth-ama-with-yc-partner-gustaf-alstromer/","excerpt":"YC Partner Gustaf Alströmer recently did a Growth AMA with Startup School founders. It was so good that we wanted to share it here.","reading_time":15,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71a9c","uuid":"268597e5-9aab-4b05-b888-581cdd5be50c","title":"How to Monetize a Freemium Business","slug":"how-to-monetize-a-freemium-business","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p><em>ClearBrain (YC W18) provides self-serve predictive analytics for marketers. This is an excerpt from their Growth Playbook. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://playbook.clearbrain.com/">Read the full playbook here</a>.</em></p>\n<p><em><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissamtan//">Melissa Tan</a> is a Growth Advisor and former Head of Business Growth at Dropbox. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/abbiekouz/">Abbie Kouzmanoff</a> is a Growth Product Manager at Dropbox.</em></p>\n<hr />\n<p>Freemium has become a popular business model with Dropbox, Spotify, Slack, and the likes demonstrating you can build meaningful businesses through a freemium funnel vs. traditional marketing and sales channels. But for every successful freemium business, there are hundreds of companies that have tried freemium but failed. For some of these companies, the product virality and user adoption were there; the point of failure was in monetizing the free user base at scale.</p>\n<p>Here we’ll be sharing a step-by-step guide for monetizing your freemium business &#8211; covering user segmentation and targeting, monetization campaign set-up and best practices, and model optimization. Now let’s get started!</p>\n<h2>Step 0: Plan your monetization model</h2>\n<p>Before building your monetization campaigns, you need to map out your overall strategy. Since the focus of this article is on monetizing an existing freemium business, we won’t cover model design, but are noting a few key elements that need to be figured out before you build your campaigns:</p>\n<p><strong>Paywalls</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>What features are free vs. paid? </li>\n<li>What is your pricing model? Will users upgrade to various paid SKUs or will they pay for feature-based add-ons (e.g., space used, number of messages permitted), or a combination of both?</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>User segmentation</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>What are your user segments? </li>\n<li>How does each segment use your product? </li>\n<li>Which segments map to which paid offerings? </li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Monetization lifecycle and funnel</strong></p>\n<ul>\n<li>What is the ideal lifecycle from free sign-up to activation to paid? </li>\n<li>If you have multiple paid offerings, how do you want users to flow between them?</li>\n</ul>\n<p><em>The key here is to enable users to experience enough &#8216;magic&#8217; in the free version to see the value in upgrading, but not too much so they don’t feel the need to upgrade at all.</em></p>\n<h2>Step 1: Targeting and segmentation</h2>\n<p>Once you have a monetization framework in place, you’re ready to build your upgrade triggers and campaigns! The ultimate goal is to create personalized, differentiated campaigns for your various user segments. For example, a free user that is only using Dropbox to back up photos should get targeted to upgrade to the individual plan. Whereas a group of free users sharing work files should get targeted to upgrade to the business plan.</p>\n<p>The last thing you want to do is to try to upsell users for a use case that is irrelevant to them. This creates user fatigue and makes the product feel spammy &#8211; both of which lead to user churn.</p>\n<p>In order to get to this level of specificity, you will need to:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Score and segment your users</li>\n<li>Create the ability to serve targeted messages to these users in-product</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>Score and segment your users</strong></p>\n<p>To build targeted user campaigns, you will need to create a rubric for how you will identify your various user segments. Depending on your product, the scoring could be based on product actions (e.g., for Dropbox, sharing vs. backup) or user/company attributes (e.g., corporate domain, SMB vs. Enterprise). Scoring can be done through a combination of user research and from analyzing data to see which actions and attributes are correlated with upsell to your paid products.</p>\n<p>Keep in mind that your user segments may not be mutually exclusive. Some users will fall into multiple user segments and you will need to create a hierarchy for your campaigns and user segments.</p>\n<p><strong>Build upsell triggers in-product based on your user segmentation</strong></p>\n<p>The most successful monetization campaigns for freemium companies are run contextually in-product. For example, let’s say users at the same company are exchanging messages on Slack. Sending a notification to upgrade to a paid plan while they’re using the app and experiencing its value is more likely to get higher click-thru than an email sent to them while they’re in the middle of another workflow, not thinking about the app. In order to run these campaigns, you’ll need to <strong>build the ability to do the targeting and segmentation in your app.</strong></p>\n<p>Ideally, this is built in an automated fashion so that you have multiple “always on” campaigns targeted at different user segments. These should run on an ongoing basis with populations being updated real-time vs. setting up one-off campaigns.</p>\n<h2>Step 2: Set up your campaigns</h2>\n<p>Now that you’ve got your segments selected and your infrastructure in place, let’s get going! There are countless ways to reach users along the free to paid customer journey. We’ll discuss a few of our favorites.</p>\n<p><strong>Always on internal ads and banners</strong></p>\n<p>One of the most straightforward ways to message your users is through an “always on” internal ad for your paid products. These placements are important because they raise awareness about your premium offerings and provide users with a reliable way of upgrading. For example, if a user dismisses a contextual upgrade prompt but later changes their mind, these banners provide an easy route back to your upgrade path once they are ready.</p>\n<p>To make this most effective, locate the spots in your product that will get the most eyeballs. Ensure your ads will not block users from using your product effectively, but will also not be easy to miss. For example, LinkedIn promotes a “Free Upgrade to Premium” button that is nonintrusive but always visible as the user navigates the product.</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2018/09/ClearBrain1.png/">\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"Read the full playbook here</a>.</em></p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1102844","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-09-12T02:18:06.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:04:28.000-07:00","published_at":"2018-09-12T02:18:06.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710ac","name":"Melissa Tan","slug":"melissa-tan","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/melissa.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Melissa Tan is a Growth Advisor and former Head of Business Growth at Dropbox.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/melissa-tan/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710ac","name":"Melissa Tan","slug":"melissa-tan","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/melissa.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Melissa Tan is a Growth Advisor and former Head of Business Growth at Dropbox.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/melissa-tan/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/how-to-monetize-a-freemium-business/","excerpt":"ClearBrain (YC W18) provides self-serve predictive analytics for marketers. This is an excerpt from their Growth Playbook. Read the full playbook here.","reading_time":9,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71a0a","uuid":"f92d1b21-83f6-4e08-9c32-ca8af6d37506","title":"Growth Office Hours with Anu Hariharan and Gustaf Alstromer","slug":"growth-office-hours-with-anu-hariharan-and-gustaf-alstromer","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/anuhariharan/">Anu Hariharan</a> and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/gustaf/">Gustaf Alstromer</a> are partners at YC.</p>\n<p>This episode is a follow-up to Anu&#8217;s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/growth-guide2017//">Growth Guide</a>.</p>\n<hr />\n<div id=\"backtracks-player\" data-bt-embed=\"https://player.backtracks.fm/ycombinator/ycombinator/m/50-growth-office-hours-with-anu-hariharan-and-gustaf-alstromer\" data-bt-theme=\"orange\" data-bt-show-art-cover=\"true\" data-bt-show-comments=\"true\">\n</div>\n<p><script>(function(p,l,a,y,e,r,s){if(p[y]) return;if(p[e]) return p[e]();s=l.createElement(a);l.head.appendChild((s.async=p[y]=true,s.src=r,s))}(window,document,\"script\",\"__btL\",\"__btR\",\"https://player.backtracks.fm/embedder.js\"))</script></p>\n<p><script>\n(function(p,l,a,y,e,r,s){if(p[y]) return;\nif(p[e]) return p[e]();s=l.createElement(a);\nl.head.appendChild((s.async=p[y]=true,s.src=r,s))\n}(window,document,'script','__btL','__btR',\n'https://player.backtracks.fm/embedder.js'))\n</script></p>\n<p><script>\n!function(n,i,s,c){n[s]||(n[s]=function(i){n[s].q.push(i)}),n[s].q||(n[s].q=[]),\nc=i.createElement(\"script\"),\nc.async=1,\nc.src=\"https://c.bktrks.com/utils-1.0.0.all.min.js\",\ni.head.appendChild(c)}(window,document,\"BTUtils\");\nBTUtils(function(use) {\n var options = {\n autoplayLinks: false\n };\n use('backtracks-autolink', options).init();\n});\n</script></p>\n<hr />\n<h1>Subscribe</h1>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/y-combinator/id1236907421/">iTunes
Google Play</a><br />\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/y-combinator/">Stitcher
SoundCloud
RSS

/n

/n(Growth)

Learnings of a CEO: Snapdocs’ Aaron King on navigating market cycles

Founder & CEO Aaron King expertly built Snapdocs through volatile market conditions and with minimal outside funding into the mortgage industry's leading digital closing platform, valued at $1.5B today. This is what he learned about navigating market cycles.

AdviceYC ContinuityFounder StoriesLeadershipStartupsGrowth

Lindsay Amos

Lindsay Amos

1/30/2023

How to maintain engineering velocity as you scale

Faire’s engineering team grew from five to over 100 engineers in three years. Throughout this growth, we were able to sustain our pace of engineering execution by adhering to four guiding principles.

EssayYC ContinuityTechnicalStartupsLeadershipCompany BuildingGrowth

Marcelo Cortes

Marcelo Cortes

10/25/2022

YC Founder Firesides: Mutiny on AI and the next era of company growth

YC’s Anu Hariharan sat down with Mutiny co-founder and CEO Jaleh Rezaei to talk about their recent acquisition of Intellipse, an AI marketing platform, as well as how AI will impact the next era of growth.

StartupsInterviewYC ContinuityFounder StoriesPodcastGrowthLeadership

Y Combinator

Y Combinator

10/24/2022

All Posts

Learnings of a CEO: Matt Schulman, Pave, on Hiring

by Lindsay Amos10/17/2022

Pave Founder and CEO Matt Schulman has created one of the most comprehensive and thorough recruiting processes, which has made him one of the most successful recruiters in the YC community.

Read More

YC Founder Firesides: Gusto on building for new verticals

by Y Combinator8/15/2022

Today, more than 200,000 businesses use Gusto for payroll, employee benefits, talent management, and more. And with the recent addition of Gusto Embedded, developers now use Gusto’s APIs and pre-build UI flows to embed payroll, tax filing, and payments infrastructure into products.

Read More

Learnings of a CEO: Wade Foster, Zapier

by Lindsay Amos8/9/2022

Today, Zapier automates work by connecting with over 5,000 apps. The company has been profitable since 2014 and is valued at $5B – with 700 employees working remotely. Wade, Zapier CEO, shared his learnings growing into the role of a growth-stage CEO.

Read More

Growth AMA with YC Partner Gustaf Alströmer

by Y Combinator10/29/2018

YC Partner Gustaf Alströmer recently did a Growth AMA with Startup School founders. It was so good that we wanted to share it here.

Read More

How to Monetize a Freemium Business

by Melissa Tan9/12/2018

ClearBrain (YC W18) provides self-serve predictive analytics for marketers. This is an excerpt from their Growth Playbook. Read the full playbook here.

Read More

Growth Office Hours with Anu Hariharan and Gustaf Alstromer

by Y Combinator12/1/2017

Anu Hariharan and Gustaf Alstromer are partners at YC.

Read More

The Two Most Common Mistakes Growth Stage Founders Make

by Y Combinator8/22/2017

In this Office Hours excerpt, Ali Rowghani shares the two most common mistakes growth stage founders make.

Read More

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