In this lecture, Sam Altman and Yuri Sagalov, CEO of Amium, hold Live Office Hours with three startups: MoonlightWork, Canny and Tuml. They'll discuss their ideas and their thought processes around building their companies.
Amazing series but for me, this video is easily one of the most useful. Seeing/hearing how you apply the techniques practically and how you both problem solve finally adds the missing "how to" context to the theory. Please do more!
All 3 Startups have great ideas, they try to find the sweet spot where customer have pain with and are still in the early idea stage. I like the way Stanford & YCombinator educates students more and more into the startup scene. Keep up the good work giving people outside of Stanford the possibility to learn from the best. Here is my summary: Startup 1 (Canny): - The idea is great, getting feedback straight from both sides. Clean and easy to use. - easy to clone (does not mean thats too bad) - not sure if they will do hell lot of money in the next 3y but some killer features in the feature might help - btw login with google failed on their website. I wish I could use canny to give them feedback on their own site but where? :D Startup 2 (Tuml): - First things first, if your co-founder has the chance to pitch/discuss your startup in front of Sam Altman & Co. and he/she is not there than this is not your co-founder. (not sure how short was the notice) - 6 Month is way to long for a MVP or start. Someone in India is already developing a crappy version of it in the next 6 days. - I would be interesting when you have a small hardware integration on the parking spot to see if its free or not - maybe sponsored by the government. You simple check the app and see this spot is available or not. (more a core city government problem / then owner issue) Startup 3 (MoonlightWork) - Business first, developing platform second, If you have customers and they want your developers then why not start manually right away? You will see the pain points when they ocure not the other way around. - Invoicing the last thing you need to take care of. Be happy that you can invoice at all :P - Personally as a database consultant for many startups in bay area I can tell you this, finding good developers is super hard - none of the developers will work the same hard as you both founders, so your product reputation is the quality of your developers - developer knowledge and customer expectation is super different hard to define - headhunter would love to have pool where your top developers are listed Cheers
To answer Sam's question at the end, yes. This is very informative and useful. I think it's also good for the co-founders in terms of getting exposure.
Someone did this parking sharing thing a few years back in SF and failed. Sharing parking won't work as sharing house like Airbnb is that the passive income from renting out parking is little that home owners wouldn't really want it, and someone parking there if not moving on time can cause a lot inconvenience to home owners.
I had to check if there's anything like that ii not Melbourne, Australia. There's www.parkhound.com.au and looks like it's going. Knowing their success rate would be interesting.
@ Moonwalk - A great way to ensure quality engineers are on your platform is to design some kind of an entrance test on their skills. This test can be integrated into the signup process. People either have great employers or have great scores to be on your platform/
"One of the things that we've learned at Y Combinator, is that one of the best ways to learn about startups is to watch other startups get advice." So why YCSS does not allow any OH recordings than?
Yes! Thank you, that was very useful. Taking online Startup School residing in Gwangju, South Korea. Some real life problems and issues, and solutions to them are very valuable.
Chris Beltran are you also in startup school or yc? How did you get invited to be part of this lecture ? I really liked your presentation I think it would have been even better had your co founder be here.
The office hours are very useful. Thank you! Tuml has a good potential of being successful, the though process and dedication are great but what will make or break them is the execution. Canny has some potential, but the market isn't that big and there are some competing products which are deployed and successful. I don't think Moonlightwork would manage to compete in this saturated, monopolized market. Upwork (Odesk+Elance) , Toptal, Freelancer and plenty of others are dominating the market and they are doing pretty well when it comes to outsourcing. Charging $150/hour +15% for a minimum of 10 hours = $1725 for a small 10 hours task. Companies would rather assign such tasks to a development agency that they are familiar with and rest assured that their product will be delivered the way they want it. I believe the founders would be better off by planning their differentiating strategy and pivoting early. Anyway, this was just my opinion and I wish the teams all the best. ------ Learning points: 1) Monopolize a market 2) Ship fast then reiterate 3) Focus on one value
just watching tuml, i knew they wouldn't succeed. he just seemed too sure... there is something about founders being too sure about answers at the beginning of a startup, may be a heuristic that it is not based on reality
U can clone the parking lot app in like 10 minutes with codecanyon scripts. It's just a branding play, and it's already been done. Painful to listen to that guy with the stupid hat and no product.
after1001 Vacation girl is even more painful. It's a great a idea, but others who are not on vacation will win with this. In just a few hours the 1000 views must include some smart, aggressive, money-ed players who can put people on such a project with a 20 second email.
The parking guy had the stones to go up there and be recorded in front of everyone so cut him some slack. I did wince when I heard about the tech founder on vacation, yikes. Totally agree this is an execution play.
I'd be curious to know how long they had been working on the prototype before the vacation. I think even startup founders should take vacations. But you've got to defer that when you're starting.
