The Basics

Startups take off because the founders make them take off.

Startup advice from many YC partners distilled into one document.

Build something users love, and spend less than you make.

What we at YC consider the most important, most transformative advice for startups.

Ideas

A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make, is extraordinarily powerful.

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas.

The initial idea is not a blueprint, but a question.

Staying Alive

Jessica Livingston’s keynote from our third annual Female Founders Conference.

You have to keep trying new things.

If you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed.

Some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive.

Startups run on morale.

Within a few weeks of Allen's arrival, I found people telling me that I had no power at all.

Fundraising

Venture funding works like gears.

Hackers don't know how little they know about this strange world.

Explain what you're doing and why users will want it.

You should always feel richer after trading equity.

Founders have to treat raising money as a dangerous process.

Why not let the founders have that first million, or at least half million?

What a top VC firm looks for, and the format they want to see it in.

Your presentation is one of the first steps to articulating your idea.

It is much better to think of a venture capital deal as a loan plus an option.

Others

The market is a lot more discerning than any employer.

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.

Starting a startup could well become as popular as grad school.

You may not believe it but Microsoft is scared of you.

There may be more pain in your own company, but it won't hurt as much.

Even a small increase in the rate at which good ideas win would be a momentous change.

The economy of the future will be a fluid network of smaller, independent units.

Cases where trade secrets and/or patents are both protectable and essential are rare.

YC

Y Combinator's free 10-week massively open online course (MOOC). Learn the fundamentals of running a startup.

Essays and updates from the YC community.

We talk with people who are shaping the future.

Explore Y Combinator companies by country.

Our Videos

Everything we know about how to start a startup, for free, from some of the world experts.

Videos from Startup School 2017, Y Combinator's free 10-week massively open online course (MOOC).

Official videos from public Y Combinator events.

Documents

Y Combinator's open-source simple agreement for future equity.

Y Combinator's open-source Sales Template Agreement

Y Combinator's Series A term sheet with clean and standard terms.