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data-page="{"component":"ycdc_new/pages/BlogList","props":{"posts":[{"id":"6669d02f5df3e40001fdc874","uuid":"57968021-b5aa-49be-8998-40df98cb033a","title":"Dissecting the past to predict the future: Tracy Young on building TigerEye","slug":"tracy-young-tigereye-interview","html":"<p>Tracy Young is unstoppable.</p><p>In 2018, Tracy and her co-founders sold their company <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/plangrid\">PlanGrid</a> for $875 million. By 2021, she was ready to jump back in and do it all over again with a brand new startup: <a href=\"https://www.tigereye.com/\">TigerEye</a>.</p><p>TigerEye builds AI-powered planning and revenue management software for businesses, combining AI and machine learning with a company’s own historical data to help them predict their future. It’s “Moneyball but for business,” as Tracy puts it. </p><p><strong>I recently sat down with Tracy to find out more about her, what drives her, and some of what she has learned along the way. We talked about:</strong></p><ul><li>Why she wanted to jump back in as a founder/CEO, and what sparked the idea for TigerEye</li><li>The YC interview that inspired her to focus on enterprise software</li><li>Why she and her co-founder spent months “dissecting the past” before starting another company, and what they’re doing differently this time.</li><li>The hard parts of joining a big company following an acquisition, her advice for new founders going through YC, and more!</li></ul><p><em>Find our conversation below, lightly edited for clarity and length.</em></p><hr><p><strong>You had a massive exit with PlanGrid. You took a couple of years and then jumped right back in to do it again with TigerEye. What drives you?</strong></p><p>That’s a really good question.</p><p>I think my kids drive me. I always need a project to work on; I’m a busybody that way. I like working, and I like working with really smart, talented people.</p><p>But I also have a lot of energy and intensity, and my kids don’t need me all over them all the time. They have their own life, they don’t need founder-mom on top of them — because then I’m nitpicking every little thing. “Why are your toys out? Go pick that up!” <em>[laugh]</em></p><p>They don’t need that energy on them 24/7. So I output it into a startup.</p><p>But more than anything, I watched my parents work incredibly hard to give my siblings and me the life we have. They were refugees of the Vietnam War. They worked seven days a week for many years; they worked two jobs a piece just to make things work for our family. <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/library/JF-the-immigrant-journey-behind-a-silicon-valley-success-story\">It absolutely made me who I am today</a>, and I want my kids to see that you can dream, you can work hard, and you can do whatever you want as long as you’re passionate about it.</p><p><strong>What came first: the idea for TigerEye or the desire to keep building [after PlanGrid]?</strong></p><p>The desire to keep building.</p><p>[My co-founder] Ralph and I were actually working at YC in between PlanGrid and TigerEye — we were both Visiting Group Partners. We saw a lot of really cool technology come through during interviews, and while reading thousands of applications from all of these ambitious, talented founders.</p><p>It was really clear to us there was so much low-hanging fruit in enterprise, but the only people who would build solutions there… let me tell you a quick story: I remember interviewing a really, <em>really</em> talented engineer. He must’ve been only 18 years old, and he was building.. I don’t even remember, some kind of vague thing around video. We were looking at him and asked: you can build anything! Why don’t you solve real problems for real people’s jobs?</p><p>He looked at us and said: enterprise software is for old people. </p><p><strong>Oh jeez. What was your response?</strong></p><p>I laughed, but it got me thinking that the only people who would build great solutions in the enterprise world are the people who saw it firsthand. </p><p>We had this unfair advantage of having built a startup for almost 10 years, seeing it grow the whole time, and deploying every solution under the sun to make our company scale and work.</p><p>Then we got the privilege to be acquired into a public company, and to form a new construction business unit [within that company], where we then replaced all of our startup tools with the [big brand] winners — we were paying millions of dollars to buy the software each year, and then another several hundred thousand to deploy it and administer it.</p><p>It was so clear to us: we could take any category [of Enterprise software] between CRMs and ERPs and there were ten good startup ideas in there, right? But the only people who would build that type of software are people who saw it fail them for years.</p><p><strong>For those who don’t know, can you explain what TigerEye does? What was the pitch?</strong></p><p>When Ralph pitched me the idea of TigerEye, he said, “Remember all of those spreadsheets we’d have people make [when building PlanGrid], and they’d never actually answer our questions? I think I can build a business simulator — and automatically generate that data through simulation theory.”</p><p>In a past life he worked at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory using simulation theory and he felt strongly that it could be applied to business. That was really interesting to me.</p><p><strong>Can you give me examples of what TigerEye is simulating, and what it bases its simulations on?</strong></p><p>Something that’s interesting about, say, Salesforce, is that it’s a flat database. When a sales rep hits save on an opportunity, it overrides the history. There’s no version control.</p><p>But that history is interesting! Especially if you have a lot of it, because now we can understand rep behavior over time. So we go into the CRM and snapshot everything every 15 minutes. We pick up every minor change that’s happening over time and use a bunch of AI, machine learning, and advanced statistics to use their historical [data] to predict their future. We’re like Moneyball but for business.</p><p>It gets even more important at public companies, where you’re trying to figure out: where are we going to clock out this quarter, or this month? Where’s our business going to be? </p><p>You constantly have really smart people munging numbers on a spreadsheet to try to predict the future, and these spreadsheets don’t work.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><iframe width=\"200\" height=\"113\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/5eYN7-l6d_A?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen title=\"Introducing TigerEye\"></iframe></figure><p><strong>What was it like for you to go from running your own startup for 10 years, moving at your own pace, to being within a larger corporate environment?</strong></p><p>It really sucked for me. I think everyone knew this.</p><p>Startups move at such a velocity. To get inserted into a 40+ year old public company… there’s a cultural difference. There’s definitely decision-making differences, and I think that was the hardest part. I felt like I couldn’t sneeze without asking permission from five head-of-somethings.</p><p><strong>Between your experiences with PlanGrid and then at a bigger company — how retrospective did you get about all of this before diving back in?</strong></p><p>We left Autodesk in March 2020 — and then, as you recall, went right into a worldwide lockdown. </p><p>I’m married to my co-founder [Ralph], so we ended up spending most of shelter-in-place and that COVID period dissecting the past. We suddenly didn’t have a job, we’d left Autodesk, we’re used to moving at such a velocity, and then we came to a complete standstill. </p><p>What we ended up doing is dissecting everything we felt we did wrong, and everything we did right. Everyone we thought we wanted to work with again, and everyone we for sure were not going to work with again. We mapped out the differences between those that we’d want to work with again, and those we didn’t. The first 24 or 25 people [at TigerEye] were people we’d worked with before.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption\"><img src=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/06/tracy-and-ralph.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1388\" height=\"913\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w600/2024/06/tracy-and-ralph.png 600w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w1000/2024/06/tracy-and-ralph.png 1000w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/06/tracy-and-ralph.png 1388w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\"><figcaption><em>TigerEye co-founders Tracy Young and Ralph Gootee</em></figcaption></figure><p><strong>What determined whether or not you wanted to work with someone again?</strong></p><p>It was the people we thought were incredibly talented, and that we had a fun time building with. It’s as simple as that: looking back, yes, I would love to work with that person again. We had that core value in place before we even narrowed in on a product idea.</p><p><strong>Can you tell me a bit about what you’re doing differently as a founder this time, day-to-day?</strong></p><p>It’s a little bit different this time around; when I first started PlanGrid, I was in my mid-to-late 20s. I’m approaching 40 this year, and I have 3 young kids.</p><p>Getting the luxury of doing it a second time around, I know the things that are a higher value — the things that only I can do as a CEO and founder. There are certain decisions only I can make, and there are decisions that are better off made by someone else at the company.</p><h3 id=\"it-makes-people-feel-like-they-suck-at-their-job-when-the-ceo-jumps-in-and-does-it-for-them\"><em>\"It makes people feel like they suck at their job when the CEO jumps in and does it for them.\"</em><br></h3><p>I think in my 20s, as a founder and a first-time CEO, I honestly didn’t know what my job was. I always jumped onto support tickets; if customers had an issue, I’d be the first one to jump in. Companies get to a point where that’s not the best use of your time. We had really great support people on the team — and it feels really bad when the CEO is jumping in to do your job! It makes people feel like they suck at their job when the CEO jumps in and does it for them.</p><p>So this time I’m really deliberate in how I spend my time.</p><p><strong>What does that look like?</strong></p><p>These days it’s mostly product and sales. But it’s also about having really heavily protected family time, and really heavily protected work time.</p><p><strong>That dedicated family time… I generally don’t ask questions about founders being married to each other because it feels too personal, but since you mentioned it earlier: does that make it easier or harder to separate life and work? Easier because your partner already understands the things that are going on in your life, or harder because, in some way, work is always in the air?</strong></p><p>We’ve been doing this together for so long that it’s hard for me to even know what it’s like on the other side. We worked together [on PlanGrid] starting in 2011; we got married in 2013. With three kids, and now two startups — yeah, it’s hard.</p><p>It’s funny, but we often get founders who are thinking about starting a company with their partners, and the advice we give is: don’t do it. And the reason for that is that startups are hard. And marriage is hard. And having children is hard! So it’s this combinatorial explosion of problems that could come up.</p><p>But we’re also a good example that it can work, but we’ve done a lot of work on personal growth, and practicing patience, and practicing forgiveness to be able to do what we do. </p><p><strong>Last question here, but: you have an incredibly rare perspective on YC. You went through it as a founder multiple times, you were a Visiting Group Partner... for anyone going through the incoming YC batch, or applying in the future, what would you tell them to really maximize their time?</strong></p><p>It’s easy to get a bit obsessive — the goal is to make as much progress as you can in three months, so that you have a great Demo Day with as much revenue and progress as you can.</p><p>But I would encourage everyone to look at the people around them [in the batch], and the startups around them, and put in the effort to get to know them. Learn what they’re building.</p><p>I think back to YC Winter 2012 and Summer 2022, and it’s the people that really are the best part of YC. It’s the friendships I made; the partners that I got to work with. It’s really easy to be 100% heads down and obsessive over your thing — of course, talk to customers, make something people want! — but don’t forget that you are getting an incredible opportunity to meet people who are going through the exact same journey you are.</p><hr><p><em>Find out more <a href=\"https://www.tigereye.com/\">about TigerEye here</a>, and <a href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/predictable-growth-7018963257554046976/\">find Tracy's newsletter \"Predictable Growth\" here</a>.</em></p>","comment_id":"6669d02f5df3e40001fdc874","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2024/06/tracy.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2024-06-12T09:43:27.000-07:00","updated_at":"2024-06-12T11:07:13.000-07:00","published_at":"2024-06-12T11:00:00.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"In 2018, Tracy Young and her co-founders sold PlanGrid for $875 million. By 2021, she was ready to jump back in and do it all over again with a brand new startup. I chatted with Tracy about what drives her and some of what she's learned along the way.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"}],"tags":[{"id":"63d1aa7a466acf0001099b6a","name":"#25267","slug":"hash-25267","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"63d1aa7a466acf0001099b6b","name":"#8","slug":"hash-8","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"},"primary_tag":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tracy-young-tigereye-interview/","excerpt":"Tracy Young is unstoppable.","reading_time":8,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"665f5c5c5df3e40001fdc7fb","uuid":"73c659ae-8921-4102-af3c-f0e339f2a9e2","title":"Humanloop CEO Raza Habib shares 5 common mistakes teams make when building with LLMs","slug":"raza-habib-building-better-ai-products-with-llms","html":"<p>When <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/humanloop\">Humanloop</a> started out in 2020, they were working on a better way to train the state-of-the-art language models of that time. These models needed lots of manually annotated data to work best; Humanloop’s first product made it easier for anyone to do this annotation work, while drastically reducing the overall amount of manual work required.</p><p>But they sensed a shifting tide.</p><p>“About two years ago we were watching what was happening with large language models,” says Humanloop co-founder Raza Habib, “and we realized that the biggest risk to us as a business was that these large language models would get really good — the paradigm for how people build AI would change substantially, and you wouldn’t need this annotation any more.”</p><p>In what would prove to be a prescient move, they started exploring a pivot just months before ChatGPT would debut. Instead of helping people annotate their training data, Humanloop would give teams the tools to evaluate how well their LLM-based AI applications were working, and help team members — technical or not — collaborate on building them.</p><p>“Pivoting your company… it’s a scary thing to do,” says Raza. “So we gave ourselves two weeks; we’d make some mockups and go out to the people we know are building with these [large language models] and see if anyone would pay for this. If we could get ten paying customers in two weeks, that’d be a strong enough signal that it’s worth pivoting the company. “</p><p>“In the end, it took us two days,” he says. Today Humanloop counts companies like Gusto, Vanta, and Duolingo as customers — effectively serving as their collaborative LLM playground to find the best prompts, evaluate different models, and track changes over time.</p><p>This week Humanloop is launching a podcast series called <strong>High Agency</strong> (on <a href=\"https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/high-agency-the-podcast-for-ai-builders/id1747605459\">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href=\"https://open.spotify.com/show/5Gl6eoYBldXNveJh0DZKrY?si=d40eded314574e1a\">Spotify</a>, and <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@builtwithhumanloop\">YouTube</a>) where Raza will talk to others building at the forefront of AI to compare notes on what works and what doesn’t in this still-early field. The first episodes will feature interviews with the CTOs at Ironclad, Zapier, Sourcegraph and Hex; all companies that have built great things with LLMs in production — but as Raza puts it, \"nobody is an expert yet, and everyone is learning by doing.\"</p><p>With that in mind, I asked Raza to break down some of the most common mistakes he sees teams making when building on top of LLMs. Here’s what he told me:</p><p><strong>Not having consistent, systematic evaluation in place:</strong></p><p>Figure out what “good” looks like for your AI product’s output, then figure out how to measure against that as you build. </p><p>“If teams don’t have a good way of measuring what ‘good’ looks like,” says Raza, “they’ll spin their wheels for a long time changing things and not really knowing if they’re making any progress.” </p><p>“Everyone wants things that are fast; everyone wants things that are cheap, and accurate. But you’re going to have [criteria] that are really use-case specific to you.”</p><p>If you’re building an AI chat bot for helping someone practice a new language, maybe that means checking the output to ensure it only uses words appropriate for the user’s skill level. If you’re building an AI coach, perhaps that means double checking that each of your user’s stated goals gets mentioned and addressed. </p><p>But there’s more to it than just running the prompt a few times and making sure it all looks reasonable; the systems have to be in place to check the output regularly, as prompts change and the underlying models evolve. </p><p>“For [traditional software development], you write a piece of code, and every time you run it, it does the same thing. Same inputs, same outputs. But with an LLM? Same input, multiple outputs — every time you run it, you’ll get something slightly different.”</p><p>“One of the biggest mistakes people make is just eyeballing [one-off] examples,” he notes. “It doesn’t give them a rigorous enough sense of whether or not they’re making things better.”</p><p><strong>Not paying attention to (sometimes silent) user feedback:</strong></p><p>“What ‘good’ looks like is very subjective!” notes Raza. “What is a good summary for this call? What is a good sales email? There isn’t just one single correct answer.”</p><p>“What your customer says is good is the ultimate answer,” says Raza. But they don’t always say those things out loud.</p><p>“You want to be capturing different sources of end-user feedback,” he notes. “That can be explicit things, like votes — those little thumbs up/thumbs down buttons. But it’s also implicit things that users do within your application that correlate well with whether or not it’s working. If you helped them generate that sales email, did they actually send it?”</p><p>“Plan ahead, when you’re designing an application, to capture the user signals that tell you if it’s working; you want to design that in from the beginning.”</p><p><strong>Not closely tracking prompt history:</strong></p><p>“Another error is not treating prompt management with the same rigor you treat code management,” says Raza.</p><p>The prompts you’re using will change over time; it’s key to track those changes and know why they were made.</p><p>“People start off doing this and they use [shared docs], they’re copying &amp; pasting things in Slack, and they’re losing the history of their experimentation. New people join the team and it’s hard to know what was tried before. Something will be in production for months and you’ll make a change; is this better or worse than what we had before? They don’t know!”</p><p><strong>Not fine-tuning the model:</strong></p><p>For most purposes and when proving your idea works, you can probably get pretty far with the popular base models. But eventually, Raza suggests, you’ll want to fine-tune them for your needs. Good fine-tuning will give you better results, lower latency, and reduce costs in the long run.</p><p>“We recommend to everyone that prompt engineering is where they should start, because it’s the easiest, fastest, and most powerful thing,” says Raza. “but you can get order-of-magnitude cost savings if you fine-tune your models later.” </p><p>“The best way to think about fine-tuning is as an optimization,” he notes. “You want to avoid optimizing prematurely, but once you’ve validated that there’s demand for your product then it should become a focus.”</p><p><strong>Not having domain experts write the prompts:</strong></p><p>If you’re building LLM products for a specific vertical or industry, bring in people who really <em>know </em>the topic to help write the prompts and evaluate the output — don’t rely on engineers to do it alone. Large language models are, clearly, all about language. Language is nuanced, and the lexicons of different industries are deep.</p><p>“This is work that’s best done by domain experts,” says Raza. “It’s one of those things that’s obvious in retrospect, but wasn’t obvious at the start.”</p><hr /><p><em>If you’re building with LLMs, be sure to <a href=\"https://humanloop.com/\">check out Humanloop here</a>, and find Raza’s new podcast for AI builders, High Authority, <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlKEdulzAc0\">on YouTube here</a>.</em></p>","comment_id":"665f5c5c5df3e40001fdc7fb","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2024/06/raza-2.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2024-06-04T11:26:36.000-07:00","updated_at":"2024-06-04T12:45:09.000-07:00","published_at":"2024-06-04T11:57:49.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"After working with hundreds of teams to make better products with LLMs, Humanloop CEO Raza Habib shares some of the most common mistakes he's seen.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"}],"tags":[{"id":"665f5d8b5df3e40001fdc812","name":"#21894","slug":"hash-21894","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"},"primary_tag":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/raza-habib-building-better-ai-products-with-llms/","excerpt":"When Humanloop started out in 2020, they were working on a better way to train the state-of-the-art language models of that time. These models needed lots of manually annotated data to work best; Humanloop’s first product made it easier for anyone to do this annotation work, while drastically reducing the overall amount of manual work required.","reading_time":5,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"6658bc8a5df3e40001fdc6f2","uuid":"2ca66494-2374-4556-a89d-ef42537e8ec0","title":"The origins of RevenueCat","slug":"the-origins-of-revenuecat","html":"<p>If you build something because <em>you</em> need it, chances are good <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0UycVzrZm7E\">others need it too</a>.</p><p><a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/revenuecat\">RevenueCat</a> (YC S18) is an excellent example of this. While adding in-app subscriptions to an iOS application, RevenueCat’s co-founders realized they were spending a ton of time building out the behind-the-scenes plumbing. It was necessary work, but it meant way less time for the features they actually wanted to create.</p><p>So they built a better solution — one that handled the un-fun bits of managing in-app subscriptions, helped with data analytics, and let app developers focus more time and energy on the stuff they wanted to make. Seven years later, RevenueCat’s tools are helping to power over 30,000 apps.</p><p>I recently sat down with RevenueCat co-founder and CEO Jacob Eiting to learn more about company's origin story. He shares the almost-accidental way he got into programming, why he doesn’t let himself spend much too time thinking about RevenueCat’s successes, and some of what he’s learned along the way.</p><p><em>Check out our conversation below, edited for clarity and length</em></p><hr /><p><strong>7 years into building RevenueCat, how do you explain it to people?</strong><br></p><p>I try not to be too meta, but it’s almost harder now to do a one liner explanation than it was during YC. [We’ve grown], but we’re still the same!</p><p>RevenueCat is an SDK and an API that helps developers add in-app subscriptions to their apps and run their businesses. I might pitch it differently today depending on who I’m talking to — we do a lot more than that now — but that’s still the simplest distillation.</p><p><strong>What inspired you to build this in the first place?</strong></p><p>My co-founder and I worked at a company called Elevate, which is a brain training app. This was right at the beginning of Apple opening up recurring subscriptions on mobile. </p><p>We launched subscriptions [for Elevate]. I’ve always been a data/analytics person, and as soon as we launched that app I realized all of the data given out by Apple was really bad. Even basic stuff like number of subscribers, how much they were paying, all of this stuff was really difficult to pull out or do anything with. </p><p>We had to build a ton of crazy infrastructure to extract and enrich that data so we could do analysis. We spent a year building the app itself and then three years just building the infrastructure for subscription management, and I thought: there’s something wrong here. [As app developers we] shouldn’t have had to focus on this, so the idea became to build it as a service.</p><p><strong>Do you ever see Apple/Google getting it together and catching up on this?</strong></p><p>They’ve gotten better; they’ve fixed some things. </p><p>But there’s some fundamental complexities. Apple is, almost to a fault, very privacy-centric. They really restrict what developers can see. On every other platform, you get much more access to things like: who are your customers? How much did they pay? Where did they pay from? All of these things that should be table stakes for a payment processor, Apple withholds.</p><p>Then Google has a similar but different set of things that they show and don’t show. If you’re a cross platform app, it’s a nightmare. </p><p>I can see the excitement fading from your face as I further explain the intricacies of in-app purchases<em> [laugh]</em>.<em> </em>It’s a very boring problem, but that’s why we have a business! Everybody under invests in this stuff because it’s a pain, and it’s confusing, and there’s lots of arcane knowledge. </p><p>[Apple and Google] will never have an incentive to play nice with each other — and that’s where we sit. Our biggest apps are almost all cross platform in some way. My strategy is to go faster than Apple and Google and keep moving up the stack. In the last five years we’ve added a ton of functionality; we take care of your paywall, and a/b testing and experimentation, and all of this stuff that Apple and Google will never do. </p><p><strong>What’s your personal origin story here? What got you into building?</strong></p><p>I actually went to college to be a physicist. I was always into computers, but I mostly saw them as kind of a fun hobby.</p><p>I knew that if I wanted to maximize my physics undergrad, I needed to do research with a professor. So, I guess it was growth hacking even then, but I downloaded the email list of the entire physics department — every professor. I emailed the third of them that seemed like they were doing something interesting and asked: will you give me a job?</p><p>Of thirty, two responded. One gave me a job, and that job ended up being programming. That was the first thing that knocked me off the path of pure science; I started writing computer programs in the lab, then went on to write control software for telescopes, and got really good at programming almost by accident and realized I actually love it.</p><h3 id=\"when-the-iphone-came-out-in-2008-that-was-the-true-end-of-my-physics-career\">\"When the iPhone came out in 2008, that was the true end of my physics career.\"</h3><p>When the iPhone came out in 2008, that was the true end of my physics career. I started building apps. I launched one of the first 200 apps on the App Store and even started an SDK company back then, and I fell down this App Store rabbit hole.</p><p><strong>What was the programming you were doing in your physics work</strong>?</p><p>I was doing Python. We were building a camera that actually deployed not that long ago; it’s crazy, I was like ten years out of academia when it finally went live. That tells you about the pace of academia.</p><p>We were building this thing called a dark energy camera — or DECam. It takes lots and lots of pictures of lots and lots of targets in a procedural way to do some really cool cosmology. I was writing the control code… it was probably the most complicated project I’ve ever worked on, really. One university wrote the shutter control, one university wrote the camera readout, and this, and that — they all have to work together. It was a nightmare.</p><p>There were definitely things in there where I look back and go: I was made for [running a company]. There was a lot of sheepherding, but I just did not have the academia vibe. I was always so much more aggressive, and I want to move fast.</p><p>It’s funny; I haven’t talked about this in a long time, but there was a lot of very formative stuff there. Getting projects done with people like that, I think, fed my career later on.</p><p><strong>Are there any other side-quest projects that led you where you are?</strong></p><p>I mean, apps were a side project, right? They were a thing I was playing with that eventually became a career. </p><p>I think this is something that is undervalued: computers have to be your play thing. If technology is not your plaything, it makes it hard to compete. I think it’s why my co-founder and I work well together; not only were we engineers, but we were passionate about computers. They were fun for us. They were toys.</p><p>I think about all these stupid little things I did as a kid, like hacking up my Dreamcast so I could get it on broadband when I didn’t have dial-up anymore. I had to learn how modems work, so I was going on forums and figuring this stuff out — but I wasn’t thinking: “oh, these are useful skills for me to have a successful career in technology!”</p><p>I was having fun, and playing around, and I think that’s something founders need to do. It’s something we even try to design into our company culture, too — like… remember, this is kind of fun, right? We’re getting paid to play with computers. We have a commercial mission and all that, but… ultimately we should be doing cool computer stuff, you know?</p><p><strong>It’s something I think about as I raise my kids, honestly. The devices they’re playing with — they’re playing with apps, sure, but the devices themselves are so locked down. You can’t really break it and fix it and play with the system itself.</strong></p><p>I worry about it too.</p><p>There’s things that make learning computers easier, now, even if it’s more abstracted. Like, I never really knew how electronics worked, and that was fine. </p><p>But when I was a kid, every computer I had I could take apart. And that’s how I got started! My dad worked at a company that would sell their old IBMs every few years for like 50 bucks. He’d bring them home; they never worked, so I’d fix them. I was six or seven; people would be like, “how the hell did this kid figure this stuff out?” </p><p>But I didn’t really figure it out; I just plugged the plugs. I saw two plugs that went together, I plugged them together, and they’d turn on. You do that enough times and suddenly you know computers, right?</p><h3 id=\"if-i-didn%E2%80%99t-have-computers-that-i-was-allowed-to-ruin%E2%80%A6-there%E2%80%99s-no-way-i%E2%80%99d-be-on-the-path-i%E2%80%99m-on\">\"If I didn’t have computers that I was allowed to ruin… there’s no way I’d be on the path I’m on.\"</h3><p></p><p>But it’s an interesting observation you had; if I didn’t have that exposure, if I didn’t have computers that I was allowed to ruin… there’s no way I’d be on the path I’m on.</p><p>My co-founder Miguel is the same way; in some ways, we’ve been cosmically linked. He was born in Spain, I was born in the US, but we were born right around the same time and experienced the same technological revolutions and were doing a lot of these same things on opposite sides of the ocean. I think that’s an important element of why I’m here today. </p><p><strong>Tell me about your co-founder. You met when you both worked at a previous company; how did you know that you’d fit well together as co-founders?</strong></p><p>We were super privileged to have three or four years of practice working together. But I always had this chip on my shoulder to start a company; I’m in Silicon Valley, that’s what you do, right?</p><p>So I left our previous employer and played around with stuff for half a year; I had a bunch of other ideas [outside of RevenueCat] that.. honestly, I was more excited about. I’m mad because I was really into AI that year. The paths you don’t take, right?</p><p>But ultimately, I knew I was uniquely suited to build this idea. There were other smarter people who know AI better than me — but I don’t think there was anyone who knew in-app purchases better than me. So I thought: who’s the next best person that has seen this same problem? Well, there’s this one guy I worked with…</p><p>We have a lot of mutual respect, but we’re very different; he’s organized, and I’m chaotic. He’s very methodical; I… very much get one thing in my head and sprint to the end. We had built stuff together, but we’re also friends! It’s a rare combination — to find somebody that you’re productive with, and that takes life and work as seriously as you do, but that you can get along with from a social perspective. That made it real easy.</p><p><strong>Did you have to convince him to join you?</strong></p><p>I don’t know if he likes the way I characterize it, but… I do feel like I <a href=\"https://www.techopedia.com/definition/29263/nerd-sniping\">nerd-sniped</a> him a little bit. I didn’t necessarily ask him to be a co-founder, I just came over to his house and was like “Hey, I was thinking about working on this idea… can we whiteboard it a little bit?” </p><p>And it was all over, because he loves white boarding. I don’t know if I would’ve gotten a co-founder if that didn’t work out. Maybe I would’ve found somebody, but that was my one real shot.</p><p><strong>What’s been your proudest moment as a founder? </strong></p><p>There’s moments where you get to “cash in” pride-wise on a lot of work. Like fundraising rounds are weird, right? Because you’ve been busting your ass for years and then you sell some equity for cash, and somebody takes a bet on you, and then it’s in the press or whatever. And then that’s the moment where everyone is saying “congratulations!” for raising that round. But that [round] wasn’t the work! That was just a checkpoint.</p><p>I’m proud of — well, this is not a single acute moment, but… any time we can still be alive. I don’t know if that’s a great answer. But sometimes you’re in the crap all day long, and it’s a bad day... and the next day Miguel and I will be like: we’re still here. The fact that we’re here? And we’re alive, and still compounding, and still growing? That’s insane.</p><h3 id=\"as-soon-as-i%E2%80%99m-like-ooh-i%E2%80%99m-a-fancy-founder-that-they%E2%80%99re-interviewing-for-y-combinator%E2%80%99s-website%E2%80%A6-that%E2%80%99s-when-i-start-to-lose-right\">\"As soon as I’m like 'ooh, I’m a fancy founder that they’re interviewing for Y Combinator’s website'… that’s when I start to lose, right? \"</h3><p></p><p>That does make me proud, sometimes, but I think that’s dangerous. As soon as I’m like \"ooh, I’m a fancy founder that they’re interviewing for Y Combinator’s website”… that’s when I start to lose, right? As soon as you go “Oh, I got this,” with too much cockiness, you’re done.</p><p><strong>I’ve had to teach myself to avoid referring to any company as successful when talking to its founders. They look at me like I’ve uttered a cursed word. </strong><br></p><p>It’s dangerous, right?! It’s a psychological game. I’m sure there will be a day in my life, and in my co-founders life, where we’re like: okay, we’re successful… but I think that’s the day I quit working? I’m 36. I’ve got a while. </p><p><strong>What are some other things you’d share with founders that follow after you?</strong></p><p>If you don’t have some sort of non-money-motivated internal fire for the problem, or the customer, or the work, or ideally some combination of the three… Yeah, think long and hard about doing this <em>[laugh]</em>. </p><p>When you don’t have product market fit, all you want is product market fit. After you have product market fit, you’re like: oh my god, I’ve ruined my life, because now I have this crazy thing I have to carry all the way up the hill.</p><p>Some things you don’t like will go away; some things you <em>do</em> like will go away. You’ll have bad quarters, and good quarters. But like.. any excess space you have for relaxation? You’re quickly like, “oh, I could use that to go faster!” So you gotta love it for the love of the game.</p><p><strong>What’s that thing for you at RevenueCat? What’s that internal fire for you?</strong></p><p>I have a lot of passion for the problem because… it’s kind of where I grew up. </p><p>There’s not a lot of technical people in Ohio. When I went to Apple’s developer conference in 2008, it was the first time I was like: wait, there’s other people like me? People that make apps and can teach me stuff?!</p><p>It became kind of a found family for me; this whole community of people who are in the mobile industry has become my home. So that drives me.</p><p>I mentioned the chip on my shoulder, and I think [as a founder] you’ve got to have that unfixable chip on your shoulder to draw energy from. You need to have a healthy relationship with that chip, and don’t let it consume you… but you need to have something kind of irrational driving you.</p><p><strong>You probably know more about building subscription businesses than most people on the planet. To wrap this up, any tips on what makes in-app purchases or subscriptions work? Any surprise learnings?</strong><br></p><p>Honestly, it’s that there’s very little [universally] applicable advice. We should be wary of saying this or that thing is [always] better, because I’ve seen the variance and outcomes on different apps and the spread can be very wide</p><p>Based on what you’re building, or who your user is, or what they’re using your app for, there’s a lot of irrational decision-making on the consumer side, and so it’s really, really difficult to predict what’s going to work better than something else. </p><p>You have to apply [your own] data to it. That’s the benefit of being in the consumer world; you can run tests for pricing, and packaging, and where you put your paywalls. You can pretend to know, and you can have informed ideas, but you gotta let the customers tell you how they’re thinking about it. The only real data you’re going to get is from the person you’re trying to sell to.</p>","comment_id":"6658bc8a5df3e40001fdc6f2","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2024/05/jacob.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2024-05-30T10:51:06.000-07:00","updated_at":"2024-05-30T13:00:58.000-07:00","published_at":"2024-05-30T13:00:58.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"If you build something because you need it, chances are good others need it too. In this interview, RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting shares how solving his own frustrations led to building a tool that helps power over 30,000 apps.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"}],"tags":[],"primary_author":{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"},"primary_tag":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/the-origins-of-revenuecat/","excerpt":"If you build something because you need it, chances are good others need it too.","reading_time":11,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":"A photo of Jacob Eiting, CEO and co-founder of RevenueCat","feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"663baea3eba13d0001fb3381","uuid":"67ad4c9b-b6c8-4e5d-b9cf-052878e0084f","title":"Lessons on building hardware from the founders of Eight Sleep","slug":"lessons-on-building-hardware-from-the-founders-of-eight-sleep","html":"<p>The founders of <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/eight-sleep\">Eight Sleep</a> — part of YC’s summer 2015 class — set out to solve a problem that resonates with just about everybody: they wanted better sleep. </p><p>Not just <em>more </em>sleep. <em>Better</em> sleep. That real, deep, wake-up-happy sleep that most people only get when the stars align just right. A huge part of that equation, as anyone who has woken up at 2 a.m. to throw the blanket off could tell you, is temperature.</p><p>So Eight Sleep’s founders built the Pod, an intelligent mattress cover loaded with tech that learns the temps that <em>you </em>sleep best at and heats/cools itself accordingly throughout the night. <a href=\"https://www.eightsleep.com/wall-of-love/\">People <em>love</em> it</a>. </p><p>“Hardware is hard” is a saying for a reason, but Eight Sleep has gotten incredibly good at it over the last ten years. With the team launching an entirely new version of the Pod this week — the Pod 4, <a href=\"https://twitter.com/eightsleep/status/1788157138256171010\">read more about that here</a> — I asked co-founders Alexandra Zatarain, Massimo Andreasi Bassi, and Matteo Franceschetti to share some learnings that might help the future hardware founders of the world.</p><p><strong>Here’s what they shared with me:</strong></p><ul><li><strong>Do not wait for scale to solve your unit economics.</strong> If the unit economics don’t work because you are small it’s because you don’t have a business, not because you don’t have scale. Be ruthless on immediate paybacks &amp; [customer acquisition cost], cash conversion, and net margin. These things will not solve themselves over time; take the pain now.<br></li><li>Because the development cycles for building hardware are longer, many assume that velocity is less important when building a hardware company. <strong>The exact opposite is true. </strong>Because of the physical limitations in developing hardware, fewer things are in your immediate control. This means that there needs to be even greater urgency and velocity when the team attacks the things that are in their control. A hardware company needs to move insanely fast and be willing to travel to the other side of the globe in a minute’s notice.<br></li><li><strong>Without a deep technological moat, someone else will copy your hardware and make it cheaper and faster than you can.</strong> Focus on defining the truly unique aspect of your product that will be impossible to replicate. This needs to be something more significant than a beautiful UI, it needs to be something intrinsic to the product story and that solves a real problem more effectively than anyone else.<br></li><li><strong>Make sure software and hardware development teams are closely aligned as you build your product. </strong>Any delays on either side can hold up the entire project.<br></li><li>Customer support should be considered an integral part of the product experience. Products that combine hardware and software are complex and with all the moving parts it's inevitable that some things will not work perfectly. While Customer support should not make up for gaps in the product experience,<strong> it should help identify feedback or issues quickly</strong> and be an advocate for the customer.<br></li><li><strong>Invest in tools that help you diagnose customer issues faster. </strong>There are a lot of external factors that can affect hardware performance, the right tooling will allow you to root cause issues as fast as possible.<br></li><li><strong>Backwards compatibility is absolutely critical.</strong> You have to maintain your product in the field for many years and it's the only way to continue iterating quickly without a huge team.</li></ul>","comment_id":"663baea3eba13d0001fb3381","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2024/05/eight-sleep.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2024-05-08T09:56:03.000-07:00","updated_at":"2024-05-08T11:00:25.000-07:00","published_at":"2024-05-08T11:00:25.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"The co-founders of Eight Sleep share some things they've learned about building hardware over the last 10 years","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"}],"tags":[{"id":"663bbdb9eba13d0001fb33c5","name":"#964","slug":"hash-964","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71157","name":"hardware","slug":"hardware","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/hardware/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"},"primary_tag":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/lessons-on-building-hardware-from-the-founders-of-eight-sleep/","excerpt":"The founders of Eight Sleep — part of YC’s summer 2015 class — set out to solve a problem that resonates with just about everybody: they wanted better sleep. ","reading_time":2,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":"A photo of Eight Sleep co-founders Massimo Andreasi Bassi, Matteo Franceschetti, and Alexandra Zatarain","feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"66294728eba13d0001fb3216","uuid":"e7fbe504-98d6-4c7e-bf58-383775614979","title":"Getting to know YC's newest Group Partner, David Lieb","slug":"david-lieb-interview","html":"<p>Last week we shared some awesome news: David Lieb, the creator of Bump (part of the summer 2009 batch!) and Google Photos, <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/david-lieb-group-partner\">has joined YC as a Group Partner</a>.</p><p>I sat down with David to hear more about his story so far, and I've shared that conversation below. He'll tell us why he built <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/bump\">Bump</a>, why he chose to pivot it even after it saw many millions of downloads, and how that choice led to the creation of Google Photos. He'll talk about the doctor appointment that changed his path in life, what it's like seeing YC from the other side, and what he wishes he knew when he was just getting started.</p><hr><p><strong>What’s the Dave Lieb origin story? Where does your story begin?</strong></p><p>Oh, gosh. How far back do you want to go?</p><p>I grew up in Texas. I was always into math and science, probably because of my parents generally being math and science-y people. When I finally escaped Texas and went to college at Princeton, I saw an entire world out there that I had no idea existed. Then I came out here for grad school at Stanford — I didn’t want to get a job after college, so grad school sounded pretty good.</p><p>While there I worked in what would become Sebastian Thrun’s AI research lab — he was one of the co-founders of Google X, and their self-driving car project that became Waymo. I was really lucky to get to work with him for a bit. </p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption\"><img src=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/04/david-0.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"589\" height=\"469\"><figcaption><em>David, left, at Stanford in 2005</em></figcaption></figure><p>I decided to bail on the PhD and finished my Master’s and I went to work at Texas Instruments back home in Texas, until I got the bug to be more than an engineer. I went to business school, and that’s where I left the traditional path of an engineer and went into the startup world with Bump.</p><p><strong>Tell me about that. Where’d Bump come from?</strong></p><p>It was kind of an accident, I guess is how I’d describe it. It was a side project.</p><p>As an engineer now going to business school, a lot of the early classes were things I’d already learned. So I had a bit of free time on my hands.</p><p>Coincidentally, I met a kid who was in grad school who over the summer had made one of the first iPhone apps that would find open WiFi networks near you. He told me the story of how he made this app in a few weeks, sold it for four bucks a pop, and ended up making something like $100,000 that summer.</p><p>I thought “Wow — that’s interesting… I should be poking around these new iPhones.”</p><p>That got us thinking about different iPhone apps and problems to solve. The [problem] that was really acute to me as a new business school student was meeting all of these new classmates and just getting all of their numbers into my phone. </p><p>It occurred to me that we could build an app to make this really easy, yet nobody had done it yet! It was a total side project, with no real aspirations beyond trying to make something people would use and maybe make a little money like that kid did over the summer. Then we launched on the App Store and it just totally exceeded our expectations.</p><p><strong>How’d you come to join YC back in Summer of 2009?</strong></p><p>Largely by accident. We heard about YC by reading TechCrunch. The reason we did YC sounds crazy in hindsight, but…</p><p>In business school you have to go get an internship between your two years of school. All of our classmates were interviewing for jobs at investment banks, etc, and that just sounded terrible to us. We just wanted to build products and write code.</p><p>So we did it kind of as an excuse to… not get a business school internship. Honestly, that’s one of the biggest reasons we decided to do it. But then we came out, we did YC, and our minds were blown. Our world was totally upended and we never went back.</p><p><strong>In 2013, Bump was acquired by Google... How’d that go down, and how did you decide to sell?</strong></p><p>It was a <em>long</em> process. </p><p>The high level arc of the story is that while Bump got very popular — I think we were installed on like, 20-40% of all phones in the world at the time — we never really had a business model that was going to work. Our long term frequency of use and retention was just not good enough that we could build even an advertising-based model on top of it. It became clear after several years that there wasn’t much to be done with the Bump app itself.</p><p>At the same time, we realized that our users who <em>were</em> really loving it and using it actively were using it to share photos of their friends and family with each other. </p><p>That got us on a new journey, exploring the photo sharing and photo management space. We built a couple other products that were separate from Bump to explore that, and the last one we built was basically the poor man’s version of Google Photos. All of the ideas of Google Photos, with none of the hardcore tech.</p><p><strong>And this is still long before anything like Google Photos exists.</strong></p><p>Yeah! I mean, the state of the art for photos on phones at the time was there was this thing called Camera Roll on your phone and that was it. No cloud backup, no search, nothing. It was just a view of your disk, basically.</p><p>So we kind of saw this future before a lot of other people saw it; we realized that people are just going to keep taking pictures, and will want to organize them, and want to share them. Yet nobody had really built the right solution to that. So let’s go build that!</p><p><em>That </em>ultimately was the thing that got us acquired. We chose to sell to Google so that we could build for both Android and iPhone.<br></p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption\"><img src=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/04/Photoroll.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1170\" height=\"643\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w600/2024/04/Photoroll.png 600w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w1000/2024/04/Photoroll.png 1000w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/04/Photoroll.png 1170w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\"><figcaption><em>A screenshot of Photoroll, the unreleased app that would evolve into Google Photos</em></figcaption></figure><p><strong>How big was the Bump team at the time?</strong></p><p>I think at the time of the acquisition it was about 25 people. At its peak it was about 30. </p><p><strong>So you’re going from still being a relatively small startup to being a part of Google, which even at the time was absolutely huge. What was that like?</strong></p><p>It was a <em>bump</em>y journey, to be punny.</p><p>But at the beginning, it felt really good. At the time it felt more like our 20-person team was acquiring 100 people and technology from Google, as opposed to the other way around. </p><p>[Before the acquisition] we knew <em>exactly</em> what we wanted to build, we just didn’t have the tech to do it. Then we showed up at Google and I remember saying “Oh, it’d be really great if we had face recognition, to automatically group all of the photos of you, your wife, your friends, whoever.”</p><p>And the response would be like “Oh — talk to Joe. He manages the 400-person engineering research team that focuses exclusively on that. Go see what he’s got.”</p><p>That just happened over, and over, and over again, on basically every core piece of technology that we knew was important to make [this Photos app] a great product.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption\"><img src=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/04/david-2.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1764\" height=\"1171\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w600/2024/04/david-2.png 600w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w1000/2024/04/david-2.png 1000w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w1600/2024/04/david-2.png 1600w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/04/david-2.png 1764w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\"><figcaption><em>David on stage announcing Google Photos at Google I/O 2015</em></figcaption></figure><p><strong>So you’re at Google, you build what becomes Google Photos — an absolute monster success of a product, even today. You’re there for about a decade… why leave?</strong></p><p>For a long time people were encouraging me to leave. They’d say “When are you going to do a new startup?”... and my answer was always “Well, I’ve got more I want to get done here.”</p><p>And that was an honest answer! There was more stuff I wanted to build, and whenever I did leave I wanted Google Photos to be in a position where it would be a great product for a long, long time without me. So I was hesitant to leave.</p><p>Then I got cancer.</p><p>Randomly on a Thursday I found out I had leukemia, and that I would need to be out of work for basically an entire year doing chemo to save my life. I did that and I was fortunate enough to beat it. </p><p>When I came back, and was healthy… I guess I realized two very high level things.</p><p>One was that the team, and the product, <em>was</em> in that spot where it would do just fine without me. </p><p>And two, having gone through that experience of almost dying and then.. not dying? It was like getting a bonus period of my life. I’m thinking, “I get some extra innings that not everyone gets. How do I want to use them?”</p><p>The answer was very much that I wanted to be back working with people in the zero-to-one phase, as opposed to managing a very large and bureaucratic organization. </p><p><strong>I’m so glad your treatment was successful like that. What was it like when you learned the treatment would work?</strong></p><p>It’s kind of weird: I went into the ER and I had no idea what was wrong, other than <em>something</em> was very wrong with me.</p><p>The way these ERs work, I’ve come to learn, is that they operate on a very strict triage system. The only thing they’re focused on for the first two minutes of you being there is: could something kill this person in the next two minutes? If so, figure that out.</p><p>Then they move on to: ok, what could kill this person in the next 30 minutes? Let’s exhaust those. Ok, what about the next two hours? </p><p>So it wasn’t for a good 24 hours that they even got far enough down this list to think: oh, maybe it’s leukemia. That was the scariest day, to be honest; I just had no information. I knew it was really serious, and I thought it might be my last day on earth. Thankfully it wasn’t. </p><p>I woke up the next day and they did a diagnostic test on my bone marrow, and the doctor came in and… I’m sure they do this all the time, but in a single sentence (so there was no time for me to get scared) he said, “we know what it is: it’s leukemia, but the good news is this type is very treatable.” He said, “Here’s the stats. It’s going to be a rough year, but you’re going to be fine.”</p><p>It allowed me to be like: well, this is a bummer, but we’ve got a year of work to do? Let’s go.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\"><img src=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/04/david-3.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1588\" height=\"1099\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w600/2024/04/david-3.png 600w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w1000/2024/04/david-3.png 1000w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/04/david-3.png 1588w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\"></figure><p><strong>That’s incredible — the impact and weight that one statement had. Let’s flash forward a bit. It’s 2022, you’ve got leukemia beat; what now?</strong></p><p>I went back to Google for a bit and I had that realization that I wanted to be working with startup founders again. Then the question became like… how do I do that? Should I start another company? Become a professional angel investor? Be a VC? </p><p>I had a bunch of conversations and I came to realize that the part of the job I love the most is being shoulder-to-shoulder with founders when they’re trying to make something new in the world.</p><p>It’s rare to be able to do that and <em>not</em> have to spend a bunch of time on other stuff, but that’s exactly what the job at YC is. We’re not typical venture investors where we’re going out and having to chase deals, and win deals, and schmooze… we have the privilege of having the best founders in the world apply on our website. We get to pick the great teams we work with. </p><p>Going to YC just felt obvious. It was the only thing I seriously considered.</p><p><strong>Has YC changed much since you went through as a founder?</strong></p><p>Heck yeah. </p><p>When we did YC in Summer of 2009, the entirety of the experience was as follows: you go to the Mountain View office on Tuesday nights, PG serves you chili, there’s a speaker for an hour, and then you go home.</p><p>Today we have group office hours, we have scheduled time with every company every week, we have this <em>enormous </em>encyclopedia of startup knowledge in the internal user manual. We have databases that help you understand who the good investors are, and who the good service providers are. We have the massive event that is Demo Day, where companies are raising millions and millions and millions of dollars. And we’ve done all that while also <em>increasing</em> the ratio of YC partners to founders.</p><p>It’s been super cool to see how far YC has come in that time since I went through it. It’s night and day. </p><p><strong>Any surprises so far in seeing it from the other side, from the perspective of a Partner?</strong></p><p>The biggest one is the way that YC operates very similarly to the startups we advise. </p><p>We’re very focused on software; it’s the core of how YC operates. We move quickly — there’s no big company syndrome or politics here. If we see a problem or an opportunity, we figure out the quickest way to solve it that day and then we iterate. </p><p>You kind of suspect that’s the way YC operates, and you hope it’s the way it operates, and then you get in and realize that’s the way it is. It’s just super reassuring — all the things that we tell startups? We’re actually doing those things ourselves. We’re consuming our own advice.</p><p><strong>Last question! If you could go back to the early days of Bump and tell 2009 David anything, what would it be?</strong></p><p>Oh man, so many things. </p><p>There’s a bunch of tactical things, and it’s all literally the stuff we tell founders today: don’t raise too much money, because you’ll just spend it; when you have a lot of money, don’t waste it on stupid things. Don’t hire too many people. Stay focused, all these tactical things.</p><p>If I had to pick a higher level thing, it would be: trust your gut on where this thing should go, and allow it to go those ways. During the journey of Bump, there was so much pressure on us because we raised a lot of money from fancy investors that it probably made it harder for us to see where this product wanted to go — and ultimately it wanted to become Google Photos!</p><p>I think we probably could’ve gotten there sooner if we’d just been more open to seeing it.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\"><img src=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/04/david-4.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1657\" height=\"1079\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w600/2024/04/david-4.png 600w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w1000/2024/04/david-4.png 1000w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w1600/2024/04/david-4.png 1600w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2024/04/david-4.png 1657w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\"></figure>","comment_id":"66294728eba13d0001fb3216","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2024/04/david-1.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2024-04-24T10:53:44.000-07:00","updated_at":"2024-04-24T13:02:09.000-07:00","published_at":"2024-04-24T12:30:45.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Last week we shared some awesome news: David Lieb, the creator of Bump (part of the summer 2009 batch!) and Google Photos, has joined YC as a Group Partner. I sat down with David to hear more about his incredible story so far.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/david-lieb-interview/","excerpt":"Last week we shared some awesome news: David Lieb, the creator of Bump (part of the summer 2009 batch!) and Google Photos, has joined YC as a Group Partner.","reading_time":10,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":"A photo of David Lieb wearing a black jacket and an orange lanyard","feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"65e78a86b27489000102ed0f","uuid":"03fe196b-bf6d-4907-95b7-0f1420e4bf4e","title":"Pivoting to a billion-dollar idea: Lessons from Clipboard Health founder Wei Deng","slug":"pivoting-to-a-billion-dollar-idea-clipboard-health","html":"<p>“Pivot” <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Iy-yc-s-group-partners-share-their-favorite-pivot-stories\">isn’t the bad word</a> some people make it out to be. Many of the greatest companies in YC’s history pivoted along the way.</p><p>One example: <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/clipboard-health\">Clipboard Health</a>. Today Clipboard is built around the idea of connecting independent healthcare professionals — think nurses, medical assistants, or phlebotomists — with healthcare facilities to let them pick up shifts that work with their schedule. It means more flexibility for the nurses, and more much-needed help for the facilities. As of <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/clipboard-health-which-matches-health-workers-with-facilities-raises-80m/\">its last round</a>, it's valued at over $1.3 billion.</p><p>But that idea wasn’t the first idea. Or the second. Or the third. Clipboard Health founder and CEO Wei Deng tells me the company went through “six to eight different pivots” before it evolved into what it’s known for today.</p><p>I recently talked to Wei to hear more about Clipboard’s origin story, and our conversation was absolutely full of insights. Here’s just some of what she shared with me.</p><h2 id=\"talk-to-people-find-the-real-problem\">Talk to people, find the real problem</h2><p>Wei started out with a mission, and it’s one that hasn’t changed: to find ways to lift people up the socioeconomic ladder.</p><p>The initial idea was to offer an alternative to student loans — an income-share agreement, years before the idea would become popular. They tried offering it to software engineers, but didn’t get many bites. They shifted to working with lawyers, then doctors — same deal.</p><p>Another group they tried working with was nursing students. <strong>It was in the conversations with these soon-to-be nurses that Wei noticed a common thread:</strong> they were all very worried about actually being able to get a job after school. </p><p>“The idea morphed into… okay, let me try to help nurses find jobs.” Wei tells me. “Helping them with their resumes, helping them with interviews, finding ways to give them clinical experience… It was hard, but it was the first pivot that was at least into this industry.”</p><p>Wei and her team eventually decided to build a job board just for nurses — and it was there she discovered a deep-rooted problem she could solve.</p><p>“The only people who would post were staffing agencies,” she says. “I would give them candidates, the staffing agency would hire them full time… but then every month, they’d give the nurse a different schedule. They’d say ‘Here’s the schedule for February, here’s [a completely different] schedule for March.’ It was incredibly hard to find full-time people who could commit to this ever-changing monthly schedule.”</p><p>But what if she could flip the formula around? What if instead of facilities assigning nurses an unpredictable schedule, nurses could sign up for the shifts that work for them?</p><p>“At some point I just called the facilities myself and asked: ‘Do you need the same person coming in every month? Or can I give you two different people to fill up that schedule?’ And they all said ‘Yes, we’re very short staffed, we just really need people.’ And this was before COVID, this is 2018!”</p><p>She tried building software for the staffing agencies to do this — they shrugged it off in favor of paper and pen. The existing system worked for the agencies, but she knew it wasn’t working for everyone else involved.</p><p>“At that point I was like, OK, there’s an opportunity here.”<br></p><h2 id=\"find-the-right-person\">Find the right person</h2><p>Wei started reaching out to more facilities directly… but it’s not every day someone calls the front desk of a healthcare facility with a product pitch. The person on the other end generally didn’t know where to send her next.</p><p>“I made hundreds of cold calls a day to try to get someone to even meet me in person […] but I would just get hung up on,” she says. “Everybody thought I was looking for a job. I couldn’t reach the decision makers, so I decided to just go and meet people in person.”</p><p>Seven months pregnant at the time, Wei was Ubering from facility to facility to pitch the concept of Clipboard Health. After a month of this, a key puzzle piece fell into place; at a facility in Walnut Creek, she found the exact right person to talk to.</p><p>“This woman… I think she felt sorry for me because I was super pregnant,” Wei notes. “She taught me a lot of the jargon; she was a scheduler and I was, basically, an agency. She decided to give me a chance — she was like: if you can get two people to fill these two shifts this weekend, I’ll hire you on a permanent basis.”</p><p>“We filled those shifts,” she says with a smile.</p><p>That facility signed on to be Clipboard’s first customer; today, they work with around 5,000 facilities.</p><h2 id=\"the-benefits-of-being-new\">The benefits of being new</h2><p>While coming in from outside the health industry meant there was a bit of a learning curve, Wei now sees it as a hugely positive thing.</p><p>“I’m very happy I didn’t have experience in healthcare… because I would have thought this was really too hard,” she says. “Sometimes experience scares you off. You've seen how others failed and you’re like 'Oh, we can’t do it.'. We would have had preconceived notions of how facilities work and what they care about.”</p><p>“For us it was bad and good: we didn’t have the relationships, but we were able to think about a lot of things from first principles. That was kind of freeing.”</p><h2 id=\"if-you-don%E2%80%99t-win-you-learn\">If you don’t win, you learn</h2><p>Throughout my conversation with Wei, I notice a common theme: she is<em> incredibly </em>persistent. There were the aforementioned countless cold calls with facilities. Before that, there were dozens of rejections from VCs. Years before that, when studying to become an investment banker, she emailed thousands of bankers just to ultimately get career advice from a fraction of them. Even as a teen that just wanted to teach herself chemistry, Wei was cold calling universities to try to get them to let her use a lab. Most, understandably, said no. </p><p><strong>I asked her what keeps her motivated when met with rejection:</strong></p><p>“It’s something I tell my son, and I truly believe: the people who win the most also get rejected the most. When I was pitching investors, I think I got told ‘no’ sixty times. And I’m not a robot — I was crushed.”</p><p>So she turned collecting rejections into a game. </p><p>“If you get fifty ‘no’s, you’re not in a worse place than you are after just one. By collecting the ‘no’s, I’m just getting better at the thing!”</p><p>“Something happens when you have that much practice,” she adds. “You can’t help but just get better. I truly believe that. I definitely felt crushed many times; people would say all sorts of mean things. But I would just regroup and think: one step closer to getting better.”</p><h2 id=\"when-it%E2%80%99s-working\">When it’s working<br></h2><p>I asked Wei how, after a half-dozen-plus pivots, she knew this was the right idea to charge forward with.</p><p>“I noticed a difference in how our customers engaged with us. Customers wanted to talk to us; they wanted to give us suggestions. They had emotions around our product. They were angry about stuff; they were elated about stuff. “</p><p>“Yes, from the qualitative data we were growing much faster” she notes “but you could also just feel the difference. You know when you have a date with someone and it’s kind of lukewarm, versus a date with someone who’s super exciting and you’re both interested? It was like that. I wasn’t sure it was working, but our customers cared a lot more.”</p><h2 id=\"what%E2%80%99s-next\">What’s next</h2><p>Even after growing Clipboard into what it is today, Wei isn’t looking to stand still for long.</p><p>She wants Clipboard to expand into other health care verticals that are natural fits — she mentions dental and anesthesiology as categories the company is exploring. But she’s also building what she sees as the “anti-Clipboard” — the thing that would ultimately replace some of the demand for Clipboard Health. Because if they don’t build it, someone else might. </p><p>“I will never be one to say ‘We’re crushing it! We have product market fit! You have to be honest with yourself; markets change quickly.”</p>","comment_id":"65e78a86b27489000102ed0f","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2024/03/clipboard.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2024-03-05T13:11:34.000-08:00","updated_at":"2024-03-06T11:54:37.000-08:00","published_at":"2024-03-06T10:35:15.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":"Many of the greatest companies in YC’s history pivoted along the way. Here's the story of how Clipboard Health founder Wei Deng found an idea worth over $1B.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/pivoting-to-a-billion-dollar-idea-clipboard-health/","excerpt":"“Pivot” isn’t the bad word some people make it out to be. Many of the greatest companies in YC’s history pivoted along the way.","reading_time":5,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":"A photo of Clipboard Health founder Wei Deng","feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"65550a3bc404610001e13603","uuid":"4c18406c-c636-4ed1-b430-c6d7e2663626","title":"The 10-Year “Overnight” Success Story of Casetext","slug":"the-10-year-overnight-success-story-of-casetext","html":"<p><a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/casetext\">Casetext</a> started out in 2013 as a crowdsourced law library — a sort of “Wikipedia meets reddit” for the law.</p><p>Ten years later, Casetext is one of the biggest mega wins to date in AI, capable of turning <em>weeks </em>of arduous legal work into hours or minutes. Just months ago <a href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/26/thomson-reuters-buys-casetext-an-ai-legal-tech-startup-for-650m-in-cash/\">it was acquired for $650 million dollars</a>.</p><p>What happened between those two points?</p><p>For this episode of Main Function, YC President Garry Tan sits down with Casetext co-founder Jake Heller to learn the real story of their 10-year “overnight” success: the 3 a.m. origin story, how the company evolved as fast as tech would allow, and the “magic demo” that helped turn Casetext into a rocket ship.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><iframe width=\"200\" height=\"113\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/qFBUd0b8TjY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen title=\"AI and the Future of Law: The 10 Year &quot;Overnight&quot; Success Story\"></iframe></figure>","comment_id":"65550a3bc404610001e13603","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/11/SR11E02_Thumbnail.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2023-11-15T10:13:15.000-08:00","updated_at":"2023-11-15T10:32:55.000-08:00","published_at":"2023-11-15T10:32:55.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":"How did Casetext evolve into one of the biggest AI success stories? YC's Garry Tan talks with Casetext co-founder Jake Heller to find out","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"}],"tags":[],"primary_author":{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"},"primary_tag":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/the-10-year-overnight-success-story-of-casetext/","excerpt":"Casetext started out in 2013 as a crowdsourced law library — a sort of “Wikipedia meets reddit” for the law.","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"653976164dccbd0001b388bb","uuid":"b33a6870-8574-4c53-bddb-750540cd92ad","title":"Design Review: How to convert more visitors into customers","slug":"design-review-tips-for-increasing-conversions","html":"<p>Getting people to visit your startup’s website is just step one. Getting them to actually sign up, buy something, or even just care to learn more is a whole different challenge — and it’s one where good design is <em>crucial.</em></p><p>For this episode of <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/library/carousel/Design%20Review\">Design Review</a>, Aaron Epstein is joined by YC’s<a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-ycs-newest-group-partner-and-visiting-group-partners\"> newest Group Partner</a>, Pete Koomen, to cover some of the seemingly small things in a page’s design that can ultimately have huge impacts. Pete knows a thing or two about this subject; before joining YC, he was a co-founder of <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optimizely\">Optimizely</a>, which helps thousands of companies run tests to figure out which potential design changes work best.</p><p><strong>They’ll cover topics like:</strong></p><ul><li>Giving the visitor <strong>one</strong> clear call to action and avoiding things that might compete for their attention</li><li>Looking at every step in the experience to get visitors to the “Aha!” moment faster — or understand where you’re losing them</li><li>How product demos can sometimes make things <em>more</em> confusing</li><li>Why you probably want to avoid animated slides on your landing page</li><li>Ways to reduce friction in the signup process to get more people signed up</li></ul><figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><iframe width=\"200\" height=\"113\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/tJTxDqjO4vg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen title=\"Reviewing 4 Startup Websites: Tips for Converting Visitors to Customers\"></iframe></figure><p>The YC startups that volunteered for this episode are <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rivet\">Rivet</a>, <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/decoherence\">Decoherence</a>, <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/solve-intelligence\">Solve Intelligence</a>, and <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/inevent\">InEvent</a>. Click any of those company names to find out what each is working on — or gauge how well their designs resonate with you by figuring that out as you watch!</p><p><a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/library/carousel/Design%20Review\">Find more episodes of Design Review right here.</a></p>","comment_id":"653976164dccbd0001b388bb","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/10/maxres.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2023-10-25T13:09:58.000-07:00","updated_at":"2023-10-26T10:01:06.000-07:00","published_at":"2023-10-26T10:01:06.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Getting people to visit your startup’s website is just step one. Getting them to actually sign up or buy something is a whole different challenge — and it’s one where good design is crucial.\n\nJoin YC's Aaron Epstein and Pete Koomen as they share tips for turning more visitors into actual customers.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71172","name":"Video","slug":"video","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/video/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71172","name":"Video","slug":"video","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/video/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/design-review-tips-for-increasing-conversions/","excerpt":"Getting people to visit your startup’s website is just step one. Getting them to actually sign up, buy something, or even just care to learn more is a whole different challenge — and it’s one where good design is crucial.","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":"YC's Aaron Epstein and Pete Koomen in front of a purple background. Title text reads \"Getting more customers\"","feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"65203ce0b7f98e0001a1d71a","uuid":"9808fd11-c453-4a7b-9de9-db6623444385","title":"Office Hours: YC’s Group Partners share advice on actually getting things done","slug":"office-hours-yc-productivity-tips","html":"<p>Founders are inherently busy people. A lot goes into making something people want.</p><p>For this episode of <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/introducing-our-newest-video-series-office-hours\">Office Hours</a>, YC's Group Partners are talking about productivity — what works for the founders they help, and, perhaps more importantly, what <em>doesn’t</em>. </p><p>In many cases, it’s about taking just a<em> bit</em> of time to get introspective; is that trendy new productivity tool actually helping you get things done faster, or would a simple notes app/spreadsheet work better with the way you think? How do you know if a task is real work or “fake” work — the stuff that <em>feels</em> like work, but isn’t actually moving your startup forward?</p><p><a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/library/carousel/Office%20Hours\">Find the other episodes of Office Hours here</a>!</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><iframe width=\"200\" height=\"113\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/nF_YWdz6S0Y?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen title=\"Startup Experts Reveal Their Top Productivity Advice\"></iframe></figure>","comment_id":"65203ce0b7f98e0001a1d71a","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/10/maxresdefault.jpg","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2023-10-06T09:59:12.000-07:00","updated_at":"2023-10-06T10:06:25.000-07:00","published_at":"2023-10-06T10:06:25.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"For this episode of Office Hours, the Group Partners are talking about productivity — what works for the founders they help, and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t. 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He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71166","name":"videos","slug":"videos","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/videos/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71166","name":"videos","slug":"videos","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/videos/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/office-hours-yc-productivity-tips/","excerpt":"Founders are inherently busy people. A lot goes into making something people want.","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"64f20d568274c00001f7527c","uuid":"c7339db9-724b-4c54-a413-199dd6b3e333","title":"Design Review: Building a better mobile app","slug":"design-review-mobile-apps","html":"<p>How do you build the perfect mobile app? It should do all the things your users want… but not <em>too </em>much. It should work well wherever your users really are — whether that’s lounging on the couch, or jostling down the tracks on a crowded train. Everything has to fit on a pocket-sized screen, but you also have to make sure it's all big enough for thumbs to tap.<br><br>There’s a lot to think about. Viewers have been asking for a mobile-focused episode of <em>Design Review</em> — and here it is!</p><p><a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/library/carousel/Design%20Review\">Design Review</a> is our series that lets startups volunteer to have their websites (or in this case, their mobile apps) put under the microscope by two design experts. For this episode, series host and YC Group Partner <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/people/aaron\">Aaron Epstein</a> is joined by <a href=\"https://twitter.com/dvdsgl?lang=en\">David Siegel</a>, co-founder and CEO of the no-code app builder <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/glide\">Glide</a>. Having previously been a Head of Design at companies like Microsoft and Xamarin, Siegel has spent much of his career thinking about how to take all of the pieces and make them fit together <em>just</em> right.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><iframe width=\"200\" height=\"113\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/4N55fVuxxOg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen title=\"Critiquing Startup Mobile Apps with Glide CEO\"></iframe></figure><p><strong>They’ll cover concepts like:</strong></p><ul><li>Thinking about context and <em>where users actually are</em> when using an app</li><li>Getting users to the “Aha!” moment as quickly as possible</li><li>How good design uses color and animation for more than just looks</li><li>Why it’s important to watch someone use your app out in the real world</li></ul><p>The startups featured in this episode are <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pyrls\">Pyrls</a>, <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/bluedot\">Bluedot</a>, <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/duffl\">Duffl</a>, <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/boldvoice\">BoldVoice</a>, and <a href=\"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/eden-care\">EdenCare</a>. You can click any of those company names to find out what each of the apps is built to do… or, better yet, you can work that out in real-time along with Aaron and David.</p>","comment_id":"64f20d568274c00001f7527c","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/09/SR0404-David-Mobile-Apps.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2023-09-01T09:12:06.000-07:00","updated_at":"2023-09-01T10:37:25.000-07:00","published_at":"2023-09-01T10:30:32.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"There’s a lot to think about when designing mobile apps, where seemingly small details can have a big impact. 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He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71172","name":"Video","slug":"video","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/video/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"645000ebb09be6000165fbad","name":"Greg Kumparak","slug":"greg","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Greg oversees editorial content at Y Combinator. He was previously an editor at TechCrunch for nearly 15 years.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/greg/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71172","name":"Video","slug":"video","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/video/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/design-review-mobile-apps/","excerpt":"How do you build the perfect mobile app? It should do all the things your users want… but not too much. It should work well wherever your users really are — whether that’s lounging on the couch, or jostling down the tracks on a crowded train. Everything has to fit on a pocket-sized screen, but you also have to make sure it's all big enough for thumbs to tap.There’s a lot to think about. Viewers have been asking for a mobile-focused episode of Design Review — and here it is!","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":"YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein and Glide co-founder David Siegel in front of the text \"Mobile App Review\"","feature_image_caption":null}],"filter":"By Greg Kumparak","featured":null,"pagination":{"page":1,"limit":10,"pages":2,"total":18,"next":2,"prev":null}},"url":"/blog/author/greg","version":"d75754db0b40077dcea67b61a31206170c3fd359","encryptHistory":false,"clearHistory":false,"rails_context":{"railsEnv":"production","inMailer":false,"i18nLocale":"en","i18nDefaultLocale":"en","href":"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/author/greg","location":"/blog/author/greg","scheme":"https","host":"www.ycombinator.com","port":null,"pathname":"/blog/author/greg","search":null,"httpAcceptLanguage":null,"applyBatchLong":"Spring 2025","applyBatchShort":"X2025","applyDeadlineShort":"February 11","ycdcRetroMode":true,"currentUser":null,"serverSide":true},"id":"ycdc_new/pages/BlogList-react-component-ef6d4e85-a508-4a97-99ee-f4cb7221292e","server_side":true}" data-reactroot=""><div class="no-scroll-behind relative isolate z-10"><div data-headlessui-state=""><header class="relative mx-auto leading-tight max-w-ycdc-page"><nav class="flex flex-row items-start 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Kumparak</h3><div class="mx-auto mt-12 grid max-w-lg gap-9 lg:max-w-none lg:grid-cols-3"><div class="flex flex-col overflow-hidden rounded shadow"><div class="shrink-0"><a href="/blog/tracy-young-tigereye-interview"><img width="300" class="h-48 w-full object-cover" src="/blog/content/images/2024/06/tracy.png" alt=""/></a></div><div class="flex flex-1 flex-col justify-between bg-white p-6"><div class="flex-1"><a href="/blog/tracy-young-tigereye-interview" class="mt-2 block"><p class="text-xl font-semibold text-gray-900">Dissecting the past to predict the future: Tracy Young on building TigerEye</p><p class="mt-3 text-base text-gray-700">In 2018, Tracy Young and her co-founders sold PlanGrid for $875 million. By 2021, she was ready to jump back in and do it all over again with a brand new startup. I chatted with Tracy about what drives her and some of what she's learned along the way.</p></a></div><div class="mt-2"><p class="text-sm font-medium text-indigo-600"><a href="/blog/tag/founder-stories"><span class="mb-2 mr-4 inline-flex items-center rounded bg-gray-200 px-2 py-0.5 text-xs font-medium text-gray-800">Founder Stories</span></a><a href="/blog/tag/advice"><span class="mb-2 mr-4 inline-flex items-center rounded bg-gray-200 px-2 py-0.5 text-xs font-medium text-gray-800">Advice</span></a></p></div><div class="mt-6 flex items-center"><div class="shrink-0"><a href="/blog/author/greg"><span class="sr-only">Greg Kumparak</span><img width="40" class="h-10 w-10 rounded-full" src="/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg" alt=""/></a></div><div class="ml-4"><p class="text-sm font-medium text-gray-800"><a href="/blog/author/greg" class="hover:underline">Greg Kumparak</a></p><div class="flex space-x-1 text-sm text-gray-500"><span>6/12/2024</span></div></div></div></div></div><div class="flex flex-col overflow-hidden rounded shadow"><div class="shrink-0"><a href="/blog/raza-habib-building-better-ai-products-with-llms"><img width="300" class="h-48 w-full object-cover" src="/blog/content/images/2024/06/raza-2.png" alt=""/></a></div><div class="flex flex-1 flex-col justify-between bg-white p-6"><div class="flex-1"><a href="/blog/raza-habib-building-better-ai-products-with-llms" class="mt-2 block"><p class="text-xl font-semibold text-gray-900">Humanloop CEO Raza Habib shares 5 common mistakes teams make when building with LLMs</p><p class="mt-3 text-base text-gray-700">After working with hundreds of teams to make better products with LLMs, Humanloop CEO Raza Habib shares some of the most common mistakes he's seen.</p></a></div><div class="mt-2"><p class="text-sm font-medium text-indigo-600"></p></div><div class="mt-6 flex items-center"><div class="shrink-0"><a href="/blog/author/greg"><span class="sr-only">Greg Kumparak</span><img width="40" class="h-10 w-10 rounded-full" src="/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg" alt=""/></a></div><div class="ml-4"><p class="text-sm font-medium text-gray-800"><a href="/blog/author/greg" class="hover:underline">Greg Kumparak</a></p><div class="flex space-x-1 text-sm text-gray-500"><span>6/4/2024</span></div></div></div></div></div><div class="flex flex-col overflow-hidden rounded shadow"><div class="shrink-0"><a href="/blog/the-origins-of-revenuecat"><img width="300" class="h-48 w-full object-cover" src="/blog/content/images/2024/05/jacob.png" alt=""/></a></div><div class="flex flex-1 flex-col justify-between bg-white p-6"><div class="flex-1"><a href="/blog/the-origins-of-revenuecat" class="mt-2 block"><p class="text-xl font-semibold text-gray-900">The origins of RevenueCat</p><p class="mt-3 text-base text-gray-700">If you build something because you need it, chances are good others need it too. In this interview, RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting shares how solving his own frustrations led to building a tool that helps power over 30,000 apps.</p></a></div><div class="mt-2"><p class="text-sm font-medium text-indigo-600"></p></div><div class="mt-6 flex items-center"><div class="shrink-0"><a href="/blog/author/greg"><span class="sr-only">Greg Kumparak</span><img width="40" class="h-10 w-10 rounded-full" src="/blog/content/images/2023/05/greg.jpeg" alt=""/></a></div><div class="ml-4"><p class="text-sm font-medium text-gray-800"><a href="/blog/author/greg" class="hover:underline">Greg Kumparak</a></p><div class="flex space-x-1 text-sm text-gray-500"><span>5/30/2024</span></div></div></div></div></div></div></section><section class="relative isolate z-0 border-retro-sectionBorder sm:pr-[13px] ycdcPlus:pr-0 pt-6 lg:pt-9 pb-6 lg:pb-9"><div class="mt-2 grid max-w-lg gap-5 lg:max-w-none lg:grid-cols-3"><div class="col-span-2"><h3 class="text-xl font-semibold uppercase tracking-wider text-yellow-600">All Posts</h3><div class="flex flex-col overflow-hidden rounded-lg"><div class="mb-6 mr-6 flex flex-1 flex-col justify-between"><div class="flex-1"><a href="/blog/lessons-on-building-hardware-from-the-founders-of-eight-sleep" class="mt-2 block"><p class="text-3xl font-semibold text-gray-900">Lessons on building hardware from the founders of Eight Sleep</p></a><p class="text-md py-2 text-gray-500">by <a href="/blog/author/greg" class="text-blue-500 hover:underline"><span class="">Greg Kumparak</span></a><span class="ml-4 text-sm font-normal">5/8/2024</span></p><p class="mt-3 text-base text-gray-800">The co-founders of Eight Sleep share some things they've learned about building hardware over the last 10 years</p><div class="mt-4"><a class="inline-flex text-sm font-medium text-blue-500 md:text-base" href="/blog/lessons-on-building-hardware-from-the-founders-of-eight-sleep">Read More <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor" aria-hidden="true" class="mx-1 h-6 w-6" width="1.25em" height="1.25em"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M13 9l3 3m0 0l-3 3m3-3H8m13 0a9 9 0 11-18 0 9 9 0 0118 0z"></path></svg></a></div></div></div></div><div class="flex flex-col overflow-hidden rounded-lg"><div class="mb-6 mr-6 flex flex-1 flex-col justify-between"><div class="flex-1"><a href="/blog/david-lieb-interview" class="mt-2 block"><p class="text-3xl font-semibold text-gray-900">Getting to know YC's newest Group Partner, David Lieb</p></a><p class="text-md py-2 text-gray-500">by <a href="/blog/author/greg" class="text-blue-500 hover:underline"><span class="">Greg Kumparak</span></a><span class="ml-4 text-sm font-normal">4/24/2024</span></p><p class="mt-3 text-base text-gray-800">Last week we shared some awesome news: David Lieb, the creator of Bump (part of the summer 2009 batch!) and Google Photos, has joined YC as a Group Partner. I sat down with David to hear more about his incredible story so far.</p><div class="mt-4"><a class="inline-flex text-sm font-medium text-blue-500 md:text-base" href="/blog/david-lieb-interview">Read More <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor" aria-hidden="true" class="mx-1 h-6 w-6" width="1.25em" height="1.25em"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M13 9l3 3m0 0l-3 3m3-3H8m13 0a9 9 0 11-18 0 9 9 0 0118 0z"></path></svg></a></div></div></div></div><div class="flex flex-col overflow-hidden rounded-lg"><div class="mb-6 mr-6 flex flex-1 flex-col justify-between"><div class="flex-1"><a href="/blog/pivoting-to-a-billion-dollar-idea-clipboard-health" class="mt-2 block"><p class="text-3xl font-semibold text-gray-900">Pivoting to a billion-dollar idea: Lessons from Clipboard Health founder Wei Deng</p></a><p class="text-md py-2 text-gray-500">by <a href="/blog/author/greg" class="text-blue-500 hover:underline"><span class="">Greg Kumparak</span></a><span class="ml-4 text-sm font-normal">3/6/2024</span></p><p class="mt-3 text-base text-gray-800">Many of the greatest companies in YC’s history pivoted along the way. Here's the story of how Clipboard Health founder Wei Deng found an idea worth over $1B.</p><div class="mt-4"><a class="inline-flex text-sm font-medium text-blue-500 md:text-base" href="/blog/pivoting-to-a-billion-dollar-idea-clipboard-health">Read More <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor" aria-hidden="true" class="mx-1 h-6 w-6" width="1.25em" height="1.25em"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M13 9l3 3m0 0l-3 3m3-3H8m13 0a9 9 0 11-18 0 9 9 0 0118 0z"></path></svg></a></div></div></div></div><div class="flex flex-col overflow-hidden rounded-lg"><div class="mb-6 mr-6 flex flex-1 flex-col justify-between"><div class="flex-1"><a href="/blog/the-10-year-overnight-success-story-of-casetext" class="mt-2 block"><p class="text-3xl font-semibold text-gray-900">The 10-Year “Overnight” Success Story of Casetext</p></a><p class="text-md py-2 text-gray-500">by <a href="/blog/author/greg" class="text-blue-500 hover:underline"><span class="">Greg Kumparak</span></a><span class="ml-4 text-sm font-normal">11/15/2023</span></p><p class="mt-3 text-base text-gray-800">How did Casetext evolve into one of the biggest AI success stories? YC's Garry Tan talks with Casetext co-founder Jake Heller to find out</p><div class="mt-4"><a class="inline-flex text-sm font-medium text-blue-500 md:text-base" href="/blog/the-10-year-overnight-success-story-of-casetext">Read More <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor" aria-hidden="true" class="mx-1 h-6 w-6" width="1.25em" height="1.25em"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M13 9l3 3m0 0l-3 3m3-3H8m13 0a9 9 0 11-18 0 9 9 0 0118 0z"></path></svg></a></div></div></div></div><div class="flex flex-col overflow-hidden rounded-lg"><div class="mb-6 mr-6 flex flex-1 flex-col justify-between"><div class="flex-1"><a href="/blog/design-review-tips-for-increasing-conversions" class="mt-2 block"><p class="text-3xl font-semibold text-gray-900">Design Review: How to convert more visitors into customers</p></a><p class="text-md py-2 text-gray-500">by <a href="/blog/author/greg" class="text-blue-500 hover:underline"><span class="">Greg Kumparak</span></a><span class="ml-4 text-sm font-normal">10/26/2023</span></p><p class="mt-3 text-base text-gray-800">Getting people to visit your startup’s website is just step one. Getting them to actually sign up or buy something is a whole different challenge — and it’s one where good design is crucial. Join YC's Aaron Epstein and Pete Koomen as they share tips for turning more visitors into actual customers.</p><div class="mt-4"><a class="inline-flex text-sm font-medium text-blue-500 md:text-base" href="/blog/design-review-tips-for-increasing-conversions">Read More <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor" aria-hidden="true" class="mx-1 h-6 w-6" width="1.25em" height="1.25em"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M13 9l3 3m0 0l-3 3m3-3H8m13 0a9 9 0 11-18 0 9 9 0 0118 0z"></path></svg></a></div></div></div></div><div class="flex flex-col overflow-hidden rounded-lg"><div class="mb-6 mr-6 flex flex-1 flex-col justify-between"><div class="flex-1"><a href="/blog/office-hours-yc-productivity-tips" class="mt-2 block"><p class="text-3xl font-semibold text-gray-900">Office Hours: YC’s Group Partners share advice on actually getting things done</p></a><p class="text-md py-2 text-gray-500">by <a href="/blog/author/greg" class="text-blue-500 hover:underline"><span class="">Greg Kumparak</span></a><span class="ml-4 text-sm font-normal">10/6/2023</span></p><p class="mt-3 text-base text-gray-800">For this episode of Office Hours, the Group Partners are talking about productivity — what works for the founders they help, and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t. </p><div class="mt-4"><a class="inline-flex text-sm font-medium text-blue-500 md:text-base" href="/blog/office-hours-yc-productivity-tips">Read More <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor" aria-hidden="true" class="mx-1 h-6 w-6" width="1.25em" height="1.25em"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M13 9l3 3m0 0l-3 3m3-3H8m13 0a9 9 0 11-18 0 9 9 0 0118 0z"></path></svg></a></div></div></div></div><div class="flex flex-col overflow-hidden rounded-lg"><div class="mb-6 mr-6 flex flex-1 flex-col justify-between"><div class="flex-1"><a href="/blog/design-review-mobile-apps" class="mt-2 block"><p class="text-3xl font-semibold text-gray-900">Design Review: Building a better mobile app</p></a><p class="text-md py-2 text-gray-500">by <a href="/blog/author/greg" class="text-blue-500 hover:underline"><span class="">Greg Kumparak</span></a><span class="ml-4 text-sm font-normal">9/1/2023</span></p><p class="mt-3 text-base text-gray-800">There’s a lot to think about when designing mobile apps, where seemingly small details can have a big impact. Viewers have been asking for a mobile-focused episode of Design Review — and here it is!</p><div class="mt-4"><a class="inline-flex text-sm font-medium text-blue-500 md:text-base" href="/blog/design-review-mobile-apps">Read More <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24" stroke-width="2" stroke="currentColor" aria-hidden="true" class="mx-1 h-6 w-6" width="1.25em" height="1.25em"><path stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" d="M13 9l3 3m0 0l-3 3m3-3H8m13 0a9 9 0 11-18 0 9 9 0 0118 0z"></path></svg></a></div></div></div></div><nav class="flex items-center justify-between border-t border-gray-200 py-3" aria-label="Pagination"><div class="hidden sm:block"><p class="text-sm text-gray-700">Showing <span class="font-medium">1</span> to <span class="font-medium">10</span> of <span class="font-medium">18</span> total posts</p></div><div class="flex flex-1 justify-between sm:justify-end"><a href="" class="relative ml-3 inline-flex items-center rounded-md 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