"From the beginning I was careful about only funding earnest people. Back then, I never envisioned the people we funded growing into a community of thousands of YC alumni, but I always tried to create an asshole-free culture. If I could tell someone was a conceited asshole, we didn’t fund them."

"Did they seem earnest? Were they determined? Were they flexible-minded?  And most importantly, what was the relationship between the cofounders like?"

"What YC needed was deeply technical people to understand the potential of an idea, and someone like me to understand the founders' characters and the relationship between them."

"One other thing Paul and I had in common was that we weren't driven by money. We were interested in startups and we wanted to help people start more of them. This was the basis for everything we did at YC. It was what allowed us to do something as weird as YC in the first place."

"One thing we've learned from Y Combinator is that the most successful startups tend to grow organically out of the founders' lives."

"if you want to start a startup, I recommend you try asking yourself what's distinctive about you. What unique combination of abilities and interests do you have?  And don't edit your answers, because as my example shows, the most unlikely ingredients could be the key to the recipe."

"the most successful startups do tend to be weird. They're usually such outliers that the idea sounds preposterous at first. To everyone except the founders, because the company has grown out of their experiences."

"1) There is no one mold for a successful founder.  Just because you might only see a certain type in the news, that doesn’t mean you need to turn yourself into that."

"2) Do what you’re genuinely interested in and try to play to your natural strengths. A startup is so much work that you'll give up if you're not genuinely interested in it."

"3) Don’t pay attention to the mainstream’s opinion of what you're doing—whether it’s your skills, your idea or whatever.  Unless they’re your users, their opinion does not matter. (Pay a lot of attention to your users' opinions though!)"

"4) Find a cofounder with complementary skills, but the same moral compass as you."

"5) Focus on making something people want. Everything follows from that. In 2005, people needed a way to get a small amount of funding easily."

"9) Be intrepid. There's room for lots of different kinds of people to be startup founders, but you do need a certain amount of boldness—to work on ideas that most people would consider stupid, and to keep going when you're ridiculed or ignored."

"You are a jigsaw puzzle piece of a certain shape. You could change your shape to fit an existing hole in the world. That was the traditional plan. But there's another way that can often be better for you and for the world: to grow a new puzzle around you."

"The most important thing an early-stage startup should know about marketing is rather counterintuitive: that you probably shouldn't be doing anything you'd use the term ""marketing"" to describe."

"Sales and marketing are two ends of a continuum. At the sales end your outreach is narrow and deep"

"At the marketing end it is broad and shallow. And for an early stage startup, narrow and deep is what you want -- not just in the way you appeal to users, but in the type of product you build."

"Which means the kind of marketing you should be doing should be indistinguishable from sales: you should be talking to a small number of users who are seriously interested in what you're making, not a broad audience who are on the whole indifferent."

"Successful startups start narrow and deep partly because they don't have the power to reach a big audience, so they have to choose a very interested one. But also because the product is still being defined."

"For example, the early adopters of Airbnb were hosts and guests in New York City (Y Combinator funded Airbnb in Winter of 2009)."

"So Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia flew to New York every week to meet with hosts -- teaching them how to price their listings, take better photos, and so on."

"Stripe (YC S09) was particularly aggressive about signing up users manually at first."

"the brothers would install it for them on the spot rather than email a link. We now call their technique ""Collison installation."""

"Many guest speakers at Y Combinator offer stories about how manual the initial process of getting users was."

"The danger of the term ""marketing"" is that it implies the opposite end of the sales/marketing spectrum from the one startups should be focusing on."

"All too often, I've seen founders build some initially mediocre product, announce it to the world, find that users never show up, and not know what to do next. As well as not getting any users, the startup never gets the feedback it needs to improve the product."

"So why wouldn't all founders start by engaging with users individually?"

"I suspect from my experience that founders who want to remain in denial about the inadequacy of their product and/or the difficulty of starting a startup subconsciously prefer the broad and shallow ""marketing"" approach precisely because they can't face the work and unpleasant truths they'll find if they talk to users."

"Our advice at Y Combinator is always to make a really good product and go out and get users manually."

"So focusing on the narrow and deep end of the sales/marketing continuum is not just the most effective way to get users. Your startup will die if you don't."

"Y Combinator began the same way as most other startups: with a hypothesis about something we thought people wanted. It turned out they did want it, and we grew and grew."

"She did what she wanted, and she didn't care if people thought she was unconventional."

"when journalists and biographers write about successful founders, they often focus on early predictors of success in their formative years. In my case there certainly weren't a lot of the conventional kind. No one would have voted me ""most likely to succeed."""

"But while I had no ""achievements,"" I did have three defining characteristics when I was younger that were critical in making Y Combinator work."

"The first was the quality that caused my YC cofounders to nickname me ""The Social Radar."" I was one of those kids that you just couldn’t get anything past. If something seemed off or out of character, I noticed and made inquiries. I was always trying to figure things out based on subtle social cues."

"The second was that I never liked being at the mercy of anyone else."

"And the third distinctive thing about me is that I've always pretty much been a ""straight shooter."""

"We started dating and I felt like I’d finally met Mr. Right. Despite having quite different backgrounds, we were remarkably similar."

"Paul is the best problem solver I've ever met. He’s also a genius at expanding ideas and making radical improvements to things."

"One of his defining characteristics is telling people ""You know what you should do..."""

"Paul and his circle of friends exposed me to this new world of startups. It felt much more exciting than the later stage of publicly-traded tech companies that I was involved with at the investment bank."

"I wanted to hear more stories about the early days of startups, so I started working on a book of interviews with startup founders. The book was called Founders at Work, and was published in 2007."

"We’d talk for hours about how broken early-stage startup funding was, and most importantly, how more people would start startups if it could be made easier for them."

"As the VC firm took longer and longer to decide to hire me, the ideas grew more and more compelling until one night Paul said, ""Let's just start our own."""

"Our initial target audience was programmers, who we felt could handle the technical aspects of a startup but were clueless about everything else, just like Paul, Robert and Trevor had been."

"None of us had any experience at angel investing, and that's where the idea of funding startups in batches came from."

"We funded 8 startups that summer and recognized almost immediately the power of investing in batches."

"But it was also a much more efficient way for us to help the startups, because we could do things for them all at once."

"Every Tuesday Paul cooked dinner for all the founders, and at each dinner we brought in a speaker to teach them about startups."

"Paul talked to all the startups about what they were building, and I helped them all get incorporated as C corporations."

"At the end of the summer, we hosted the first Demo Day, for an audience of about 15 investors.  Reddit was in that first batch, and the founders of Twitch, though they were working on another idea, and Sam Altman’s geolocation startup."

"At the beginning there were tons of errands, like with any startup, that just had to get done and there was no one else to do them."

"When it came to investing, I had something that my cofounders didn’t have: I was the Social Radar."

"I looked at qualities of the applicants my cofounders couldn't see."

"Back then, I never envisioned the people we funded growing into a community of thousands of YC alumni, but I always tried to create an asshole-free culture."

"But when you get to an extreme in something, things get qualitatively different."

"We had to judge the founders not by what they were, but what they could turn into."

"Another secret weapon of mine that was strangely well-suited to Y Combinator was that I was a very experienced event planner."

"Probably the thing that was most different about YC as an investment firm was that it felt like a family."

"Starting a startup is emotionally draining for founders, especially in the beginning."

"And I tried to always be a straight shooter with my advice."

"He doesn’t bury it in euphemisms."

"One other thing Paul and I had in common was that we weren't driven by money."

"I also never cared much about fame. Or my personal ""brand"". I just wanted Y Combinator to succeed."

"It's not true that every person can start every startup. But a lot more people have what it takes to start some startup than realize it."

"A lot of people, perhaps all people, have some distinctive combination of abilities and interests. And a lot of those combinations match some startup idea."

"So if you want to start a startup, I recommend you try asking yourself what's distinctive about you. What unique combination of abilities and interests do you have?  And don't edit your answers, because as my example shows, the most unlikely ingredients could be the key to the recipe."

"I had a weird combination of qualities, but they matched YC because it was such a weird company."

"And the most successful startups do tend to be weird."

"They're usually such outliers that the idea sounds preposterous at first. To everyone except the founders, because the company has grown out of their experiences."

"3) Don’t pay attention to the mainstream’s opinion of what you're doing—whether it’s your skills, your idea or whatever."

"5) Focus on making something people want. Everything follows from that."

"6) Don’t let rejection distract you or hold you back. You’ll get rejected in so many different ways, but you must keep moving forward."

"7) Start small so you can be nimble and open to change."

"To this day, YC has a tradition of trying things on a small scale before expanding them."

"8) It’s ok not to have gone to an elite college."

"You are a jigsaw puzzle piece of a certain shape. You could change your shape to fit an existing hole in the world. That was the traditional plan."

"But there's another way that can often be better for you and for the world: to grow a new puzzle around you."

"That's what I did, and I was a pretty weird-shaped piece. So if I can do it, there’s more hope for you than you probably realize."