I have encouraged a lot of founders building technical tools, you know, developer tools to spend a lot of time hosting about their thing and telling the world about it because if no one knows that your technology exists, it's kind of game over.
And the best technologies are good at marketing, whether you admit it or not.
Today, we're going to talk about real startups versus fake startups.
In this video, I'm going to say nice things and Dalton's going to make people mad.
What's the definition of a fake startup?
Okay, so you're setting me up.
Let's start with the extremes, right?
Like with the cartoonish extremes.
So a cartoonishly extreme fake startup is a startup that never builds a product and never writes any code.
So founders are on the 30 under 30 list somehow.
That was a high priority.
Somehow, that's the main work product.
The founders have raised money despite never having shipped a product or any customers.
Basically, it's almost like performance art.
It's like if you had a modern artist be like trying to disassemble the startup culture in some edgy way, that's a fake startup.
I like that performance art.
It's like Hamilton on stage versus actually being there.
Yeah, the whole thing is a performance.
It's what's a real start.
So, or the cartoonish version.
The cartoonish version of a real startup is where, you know, everyone is working 996 and it's only programmers.
There's not a single non-technical person in the business.
And they're all writing Rust.
They're writing their own programming language.
Yes, because it's got a scale.
They can't be bothered to do all sorts of things.
They're just like super hardcore.
Don't have to do any sales.
They don't have to do any sales.
And I think back on our day when we were early founders, Google was like the textbook example that I was taught of like one real is just being hardcore.
Yeah, they look at trace AT scores and they're trying to recruit you.
Just everything about Google.
My memory as a founder was we were trained at that.
That was the golden standard for a real hardcore organization.
These are clear characteristics, right?
Like Google, for example, Google is like one of the best sales companies in the world.
They've been advertising business, right?
Or like Stripe, which is perceived as this just like, oh, self-serve thing.
It's like one of the best enterprise software payments companies in the world.
I think this real versus fake startup thing is interesting because we interact with a lot of founders who aren't taking a sober look at whether they're taking a real shot at the startup game or not.
What do you think causes someone to kind of slide into the fake side?
Because the problem with fake is like, if you're not taking a real shot, this is so hard if you're taking a real shot on goal.
If you're not even taking a real shot on goal, you're kind of wasting time.
That's such a great question.
Let's try to make the most
charitable explanation of someone that's doing what might seem like a fake story.
I think that humans are social animals.
The way we learn things is we look around the room and we try to see, you know, if you go to a new culture, you're like, okay, everyone's wearing this kind of hat.
Everyone takes their shoes off.
He just kind of like go through the motions.
And so I think some of the most unintentionally funny performative startups
Might be someone that's just like, they're like a merchant that's just trying to pretend.
If you're almost consuming startup culture solely on Twitter, like depending on who you're following, you might just be congregating this thing that looks like startups business.
And you're like, wait, I thought this was, but you don't realize you're doing it.
You're just trying to go along with what everyone else seems like they're doing and no one's told you otherwise.
I see people slip into fake startups when they have poor starting conditions, but high urgency.
So it's like, I've got these poor starting conditions and maybe I'm in the wrong place.
Maybe I can't work full time.
Maybe I don't know a technical co-founder.
Like all these kind of like kind of non-ideal starting conditions.
Like, you know, Dalton, that soil is full of rocks and it's nothing growing in it.
And instead of asking themselves the question, how do I fertilize that soil?
How do I improve my started conditions?
They kind of tell themselves grit alone can overcome any starting condition.
So yeah, I have technical vendors, let me just pay for a contractor to build the V1.
Or yeah, I don't know what I'm doing yet, but let me put together a pitch deck and try to, like it's just kind of like grit will see me through.
But oftentimes I'm telling founders like use the grit to improve your starting conditions.
It's a lot more efficient.
use of grit, you know, it's like do high leverage work.
Improving your shard condition, starting conditions is often high leverage work.
You know, that's why we tell people to come to the Bay Area.
Like all things being equal, your starting conditions are better here.
I feel for the people who slip into fake, because sometimes I think they're slipping into fake because they don't have any interest in winning, right?
They just want to be part of the game and look cool.
But more often, I think they slip into fake because they feel as though they have to start right now.
Again, you said the term cargo holding, you know, to recap if you want to, yeah, I mean, out there once look up what a cargo hold it is, is where you would like performatively do something and expect it to have like a magical outcome.
I don't know, you guys read the history of that on your own time, but it's pretty fascinating.
And so it'd be like, okay, let's rent an office.
Let's hire people and put them in the office.
do investor meetings, that's what a startup is, right?
If we put those three things together, Google pops out, right?
Yeah, it's sort of like superficially building infrastructure without, with missing the point that the reason Google worked wasn't that they had pastel colored balls, served lunch, served lunch.
Those were the important parts.
It was that they built a really good search engine with actually the high order bit.
What I have found at YC is like, you know,
We tend to pick real startups, right?
We tend to pick startups that are probably more on the, I want to put my head down and build developer tools than on the, I want to raise infinite money in what is software again.
is probably more, let's call it sales and revenue oriented than people would expect.
How do you think about that?
Who are we actually talking to on reading that advice?
Advice is most helpful when it's something that you never would have done on your own.
If we're just telling you to do stuff you would have already done, that's not useful.
Did you see the tweet recently where it was like Ben Horowitz was like,
some VC told me to only hire ear players and I'm like, thanks, dumbass, that never would have occurred to me.
So basically, if you're just telling people shit they're already gonna do, that's not that useful.
But telling people things that they never would have coped up on their own or that they sort of need inspiration or a pep talk to do.
It's actually pretty important.
And so when we take some super technical teams and we're like, no, you should hire salespeople.
Or you should sell yourself.
And so you'll notice at the beginning of this talk, we were talking about the extremes.
I have encouraged a lot of founders building technical tools, developer tools, to spend a lot of time
Posting about their thing and telling the world about it because if no one knows that your technology exists It's kind of game over and that the the best technologies are good at marketing whether you admit it or not and that Stripe is great at marketing whether you're aware or not Google is great at marketing and you know some of my newer startups like like post-hog Yeah, they do a lot of developer marketing and that's why people have heard of it Yeah, they couldn't just like wait in the ivory tower for people to hear about post-hog.
They have to market the heck out of that thing
I think that there are myths created about startups that people kind of model themselves after like, oh, like, you know, Google didn't do any marketing.
This was always self-serve forever.
And kind of when you take the startup that the company you think is one, and you create a myth about it that's not true, and then that's where you set your North Star, you really screwed yourself, right?
You really screwed yourself.
You make a really great point.
The best company is our whole job is to get them to be better at some of the things that don't come naturally.
Because on the stuff that comes naturally, they're good.
Like, just keep doing what you're doing, like, good work.
And if we're in there saying, like, you should really build better software, like, we probably made a mistake.
That's real versus fake startups.
If you find yourself in the fake camp, do something about it.