Startup School

YC's Kat Mañalac wants to change the way you think about launching. In her talk, she shares the multitude of ways to launch and get attention for your product, with tangible strategies and examples from companies like Airbnb.

How do you find a co-founder and build a great partnership? YC's Catheryn Li (who also built our Co-Founder Matching tool) and Visiting Partner Divya Bhat cover the importance of having co-founders, how to get and vet one, and the ways to build a successful working relationship with them.

How do you get your first customers? YC Group Partner & former Head of Growth at Airbnb, Gustaf Alströmer, gives tactical advice to answer this question for all kinds of companies — whether you're B2B or B2C — and discusses why it's important for founders to do sales early on.

One of the most common topics that founders ask us about is pricing and monetization.  In this talk, YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein outlines 9 different business models, and highlights lessons from top YC companies on how to best monetize and price your product.

YC often says talk to your users, but actually doing that is surprisingly tricky. YC Group Partner Gustaf Alströmer gives non-obvious advice on how to talk to both current and potential users, how to run a great user interview, and how to interpret the feedback in these conversations. 

YC's Jared Friedman shares a framework for how to get and evaluate startup ideas. He delves into examples of YC companies and the inside stories of how they came up with the ideas that turned into billion-dollar companies. Even if you have an existing idea, this talk helps founders confirm that their idea is good and/or provides a framework for a future pivot.

In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Harj Taggar shares his advice on the types of people best suited to be startup founders and how to prepare to start a company in the future.