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Y CombinatorSuccessful Founders Are OK With Rejection – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Founders Must Embrace Rejection and Talk to Real Users
- Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel say founders should talk to users constantly because their assumptions about what people want are often embarrassingly wrong once reality tests them.
- Caldwell argues surveys are weak for validating a startup idea, and the stronger signal is whether someone will pay, use the product regularly, or share it with friends.
- Seibel's AirBnB and Twitch stories show that deep conversations with expert users surfaced valuable, often easy-to-build insights, even for a team five years into its company.
- Both frame avoiding user feedback as ego protection, and Seibel urges founders to act like scientists, test the key hypothesis (as the Stripe founders did by charging more), and treat quick 'no's in sales as a gift.
- Caldwell contrasts being an employee, who is shielded by layers of filters, with being a founder, who faces unfiltered feedback and must become the filter for the team.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasFounders' assumptions about users are often wrong
Caldwell says ideas in founders' heads are embarrassingly wrong once real people use the product, and talking to users is the inoculation against building irrelevant things.
Surveys are poor for validating an idea
Caldwell sees surveys as useful for micro-optimizations like choosing between company names, but getting someone to pay, use, or install the product is a much higher and more truthful bar.
Seek out expert users for deep conversations
Seibel notes that only a small subset of users have real expertise, as with the AirBnB host who kept a decade-long notebook of what platforms did well and badly, and surveys never expose that.
User conversations can reveal easy, high-impact fixes
At Twitch, streamers first asked for higher stream quality and a way to make money, both easy to build, while the team's brainstorm list held months-long projects.
Judge feedback by the capital customers will commit
A quoted YC founder says an opinion is only valuable if the person will pay (financial capital), use it regularly (time capital), or share it with friends (social capital).
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesWe have all these ideas in our heads as founders about what people want, that the moment they are subjected to reality are embarrassingly wrong.
— Dalton Caldwell
I would argue that the best salespeople are spending a lot of their time doing two things, learning and filtering.
— Michael Seibel
That no is a gift. Figure out what you could have asked them so they would have said no in the first three minutes of the conversation.
— Michael Seibel
You're just out there dangling in the wind, and every breeze that comes your way, you're gonna feel.
— Dalton Caldwell
It's more fun to look at the sky with your own eyes than to look at a drawing of a picture of a movie of a da, da, da, da, of the sky.
— Michael Seibel
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
