Comment by wtvanhest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtvanhest | Hacker News Reader

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> Given that the article is titled "Later Stage Advice" and it says things such as switch from not caring at all about marketing to caring about it a little bit once the product is working I think Sam's advice is properly qualified.

There are probably less than 20 YC companies that have reached the point where this advice is valid. Zenefits, Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe etc.

The others never needed this advice. The nightmare scenario for employees is getting stuck at a company without true product/market fit that just sort of has it, then watching the founders justify following this advice because they have raised enough money to get to 30 employees without ever having true product/market fit.

> The cases where a company is so compelling and viral that there is a clear path to scaling are the exception.

IMO, this advice should only apply to the exceptional companies.

> For every Instagram there are probably 1000 companies that are still considered successful by their founders but at a smaller scale or slower pace. Startups are hard.

Those companies should stay small with no formal management structure and most should not follow the advice in the post, even if they have scaled.

I think the OP's point is that product/market fit is overlooked so often by founders and teams. No matter what, it should always be the true focus of the business. The number of companies that need the advice in this post is so small that YC should just write it as a personal email to founders.

> The number of companies that need the advice in this post is so small that YC should just write it as a personal email to founders.

I think that a large portion of The Macro's purpose is content-marketing for YCombinator. It's a taste of the advice that you will get, personalized, if you take funding from them. The point isn't necessarily to help later-stage companies (although this is a beneficial by-product), it's to convince later-stage companies or early companies that hope to get to the later stage to apply to YC so that they can get the personal emails to founders with more tailored advice.

My comment is more about backing up this point from the OP:

> IMO, sama is wrong to suggest founders take their eye off the product ball at all (even just a little) until they are 1000% sure they've built a machine that will scale, and now all they have to do is scale it.

Founders are adults and part of being a founder is knowing what advice to take. That said, I think someone at YC may agree that this advice is generally bad for a lot of early founders to follow. The reason I was backing up the OP is that he/she was stating that you should be 1000% sure you have product/market fit before following any of the advice in the post. Simply having the right number of employees or making some revenue are not enough.

My point is kind of nuanced. In general, I think YC puts out the best information for founders of all early stage companies/startups.

> There are probably less than 20 YC companies that have reached the point where this advice is valid. Zenefits, Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe etc.

This advice is useful to basically every startup that has raised an A round, or is >= 10 people. That list is significantly larger than 20.

Management and HR problems start significantly earlier than Stripe size (200? 300?). They start at around 10 people, and this article matches my own experiences with useful advice to founders.

> most should not follow the advice in the post, even if they have scaled.

Which part, precisely is flawed? Frequent, clear communication and proper delegation are almost so true as to be tautological. Most founders don't go wrong because they don't agree that these are valuable, they go wrong by forgetting to do them.

I may not have articulated my point very well.

I think Sam does a nice job by explaining:

>There is very little management in the beginning, and that actually works well. When there are fewer than ~20 employees, most companies have everyone report to the founder. That’s optimal in the early stage.

And throughout the article he makes the point to caveat his advice by saying it doesn't apply to small companies. That is really solid and is kind of the difference IMO between advice YC gives and most other startup/business advice.

Where I think (and I believe the OP thinks) that this article could be strengthened is in the beginning by reiterating how important it is to make sure the company has product market fit before addressing any of the advice in the article. YC does a nice job of hammering that in many other posts.

I can visualize some of the founders I know seeing this post and saying to themselves... Great, I'm at 19 people, now I just need to get to 20, then I need to hire HR. When in reality, they don't have full product market fit and should be focusing on that.

My guess is that someone at YC is reading my post here and saying... "All that goes without saying". But, it is such a common mistake that I don't think it goes without saying.

At the end of the day, the article is valuable. I just wish that product/market fit had been hammered as the standard instead of headcount.

Your clarifications help, thanks.

> I can visualize some of the founders I know seeing this post and saying to themselves... Great, I'm at 19 people, now I just need to get to 20, then I need to hire HR. When in reality, they don't have full product market fit and should be focusing on that.

Yes, if you're not at product/market fit, then as a business getting to product/market fit is probably the most important thing. However, people problems always crop up when you have people involved, and your people problems will be largely uncorrelated to whether the business has product/market fit. (It's not likely that you will have fewer people problems because the business doesn't have PMF).

The article could probably be made more clear that this isn't a 'list of things to do after you're successful', it's more a 'common failure patterns we see in companies with headcount > X'. And of course, there's the unstated advice, which is 'try to avoid having large headcount until after PMF'.

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