CEO of Y Combinator, ex-Initialized partner
Garry Tan is president of Y Combinator. He turned down Peter Thiel's offer to co-found Palantir, joined as employee 10 anyway, and started the blog platform Posterous in 2008. His lesson from Palantir is that everything good in his life has been something like a cult. Each one starts from a belief that flies in the face of an orthodoxy.
My First Million 23:26 34:04 59:22 1:00:29 a16z 10:24
Shipping
Ship the jankiest MVP that still provides value. If users tolerate it, the problem is real.
Launch early, launch often. The best founders use launches to diagnose problems, find their early adopters, iterate on the product based on customer feedback, and then they launch again.
Garry Tan
says ship the jankiest version now and let real reaction decide, because fear of launching kills more startups than competition does. The first launch is a probe, so move fast on anything you can reverse.
says measure before you commit. Forty percent of active users answering very disappointed is the product-market-fit line, and scaling on a vibe instead of that number is how founders pour fuel on a fire that is not lit.
From Launch-Jankiest Rule
Y Combinator
a16z
My First Million
