When you’re making important decisions as a founder — like what to build or how it should work — should you spend lots of time gathering input from others or just trust your gut?In this episode of Dalton & Michael, we talk more about this and how to know when you should spend time validating and when to just commit.Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc…

One trait that many great founders share is conviction. In this episode of Dalton & Michael, we’ll talk about finding confidence in what you're building, the dangers of inaccurate assumptions, and a question founders need to ask themselves before they start trying to sell to anyone else.Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-applyWork at a St…

Startups need to innovate to succeed. But not all innovation is made equal and reinventing some common best practices could actually hinder your company. In this episode, Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the common innovation pitfalls founders should avoid so they can better focus on their product and their customers. Apply to Y Combinato…

Within the world of startups, you'll find lots of discourse online about the experiences of founders bootstrapping their startups versus the founders who have raised venture capital to fund their companies. Is one better than the other? Truth is, it may not be so black and white. Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the virtues and struggles …

Based on the thousands of companies YC has funded over the years, the biggest common element between all successful startups is having technical talent on the founding team. But what do you do if you don't know how to code? You may think you can get by using no-code tools, part-time consultants, or dev shops to bring your startup idea to life. But …

In this episode of Startup School, YC Group Partner Tom Blomfield discusses one of the most important elements of running any startup: metrics! Tom shares what key metrics to track and how to use them to make the best decisions for your company.Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/SUS-applyWork at a startup: https://yc.link/SUS-jobs…

Social media often promotes a doom and gloom outlook about our future society. But is that worldview accurate? In this episode, Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the best ways for founders and aspiring founders to think about weighing optimism and pessimism in their day to day lives.Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-applyWork at…

Casetext started out in 2013 as a crowdsourced law library — a sort of “Wikipedia meets Reddit” for the law. Ten years later, Casetext is one of the biggest wins to date in AI, capable of turning weeks of arduous legal work into hours or minutes. Just months ago it was acquired for $650 million dollars. What happened between those two points? For t…

The stories are true: technical founders (and early technical employees!) often end up with the short end of the stick when starting a company.In this episode of Dalton & Michael, we’ll discuss the questions and best practices that an aspiring technical founder should think about — whom to start a company with, and how to think about things like eq…