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patio11's profile
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11

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Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

I work for the Internet, at @stripe, mostly on accelerating startups. Opinions here are my own.

東京都 Tokyo
kalzumeus.com
Joined February 2009

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    1. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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      We worked with YC on a guide to pitching early stage investors: https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/pitching … I've got some thoughts:

      4 replies 17 retweets 100 likes
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      Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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      As somebody who has spent time outside the Silicon Valley circle of cool kids and a bit inside of it, I think it's easy to overestimate position and underestimate acceleration.

      8:29 AM - 5 Mar 2018
      • 4 Likes
      • mcnock💻🐨 Thomas K Saku Panditharatne
      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          At the point of applying to YC, even many well-equipped startups look _incredibly_ immature when compared to businesses. Everyone expects that. It's fine.

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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        3. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          "Less revenue than a lemonade stand" is true of lots of startups that will succeed as well as ones which will fail. The big differentiator is rate and acceleration of learning.

          1 reply 1 retweet 6 likes
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        4. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          I was very surprised when I heard that only about half of an entering YC class had revenue on day one. I thought that would be substantially higher.

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        5. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          Ideally, as an entrepreneur, you want to seen as someone who will be one of the experts in the space. You should talk to customers *voraciously.*

          1 reply 0 retweets 14 likes
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        6. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          The best pitches have very high information density, a clear thesis, the nascent sketch of a product delivering on the thesis, and substantial evidence of hustle.

          1 reply 1 retweet 31 likes
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        7. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          Investors are generally smart people with very limited subject-matter expertise relative to founders. A good pitch should teach them things very, very rapidly.

          1 reply 0 retweets 18 likes
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        8. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          You want your pitch to be quickly comprehensible by a smart person who may not have experience in your industry, understand its jargon or fundamentals, etc.

          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        9. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          Hustle is some combination of social skills, seemingly limitless energy, self-generated morale, and (props to @delk for this part) the ability to apply them all in the correct direction. Without direction, it's a lot of looking busy for the sake of looking busy.

          1 reply 0 retweets 25 likes
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        10. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          It's very likely that the startup will be the hardest thing the team has done in their careers. It is unlikely that it will be the only hard thing they've done. Evidence of having done hard things is evidence in favor of ability to do harder things.

          1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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        11. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          As a sometimes engineer who couldn't code his way out of a paper bag when I graduated, I am worried if I read a technically ambitious pitch which doesn't come attached to overwhelming evidence that you can ship software.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        12. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          I've done reviews for Stripe Atlas companies' YC applications before. After 25 of them, I can scarcely see straight. Actual YC reviewers do many, many more. Make an effort to frontload the awesome bits of your story and to be memorable.

          1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
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        13. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          There is an art to telling good stories. If you're not good at it, you can steal one of the oldest narrative structures we have: A thing is broken. Our hero chances upon it. They try to do the thing that everyone else tried. It doesn't work. But they persevered. Suddenly...

          1 reply 0 retweets 28 likes
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        14. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          (Yeah, there are plenty of other ways to tell stories too, but classics are classics for a reason.)

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        15. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          A thing which took me more than ten years to appreciate: founder/product/market fit is a *lot* better than any two of those.

          1 reply 1 retweet 12 likes
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        16. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          "Why is this market attractive?" is often pretty obvious. "Why is this market what you're devoting 10 years of your life/career to?" is less so. A compelling answer to that materially derisks "Are they going to quit in 4 months when it feels like they're still so far away?"

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        17. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          Many founders were good students in school. Somewhat surprisingly given that, most pitches lack concrete detail or evidence for claims. Equally surprisingly: the number of founders who think the investor wants a Wikipedia article. (They do, but: from the future.)

          2 replies 2 retweets 22 likes
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        18. Patrick McKenzie‏ @patio11 5 Mar 2018
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          What's the big problem in the industry? Where is the industry almost inevitably going? Why aren't we there yet? What stumbling blocks are going to slow progress? How do you plan to overcome them and be the firm written about in the Wikipedia article?

          1 reply 2 retweets 32 likes
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        19. End of conversation

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