

Matt Maroon: Advice for Would-Be Y Combinator Founders - toffer
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=247

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tipjoy
You mention the necessity to have 2-3 cofounders, as does Paul in his "why to
not not start a startup." In a 2-person startup, do you think both people need
to be software developers? I'm an interaction designer, and so although I do
the HTML and CSS, my real contribution to the team is my focus on the
personas, the design, and the user experience, while my partner focuses on the
implementation. So far, things have been moving along at a nice clip, but I'd
like to hear your take on this issue. (Note I didn't use the term 'hackers'
because although I don't code, I would consider myself someone who works to
"design beautiful software.")

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pg
Not all the founders have to be hackers. You just need at least one person who
can hack, and at least one person who can deal with people (including
investors and customers).

Three kinds of design ability are needed: product design (what does it do?);
software design (how does it do it?); and graphic design (what does the site
look like?). Somehow between them the founders have to cover the first two.
Graphic designers can be hired, though it's better if the founders can do that
too.

The ideal configuration would of course be a group where all the founders had
all these skills. Haven't seen that yet, though.

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jsjenkins168
I'll add one more... Don't get stressed in the interview if they criticize
your idea! They may seem a bit negative towards you but its their job to take
a critical angle.

In other words, be cool and dont take stabs at your idea personal. Chances
are, the comments they're making turn out true anyway so heed the advice.

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mattmaroon
Agreed. I was planning on putting that in tips for interviewees since you
don't get any feedback until then.

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rms
It wasn't feedback on the idea, but I got a call from Jessica and an email
from Paul trying to estimate if we were truly prepared to do this as
undergraduates.

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drusenko
i think we were asked 3 or 4 times in a row if we were really going to go with
it, as undergrads...

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jl
I must have asked 3 out of 4 times - I didn't want you to miss getting your
degree when you were so close!

~~~
drusenko
completely understandable, of course!

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martin
"For instance Zenter, which is obviously much more suited for integration with
an online office suite like Google's than as a standalone business"

If there's no potential for a business based around presentations, somebody'd
better get on the horn with WebEx and let them know. (Then again, they're
probably still too busy counting the $3.2bn from their Cisco acquisition to
notice.) PowerPoint is huge in medium/large companies, and the tools available
for delivering PPT presentations remotely still suck. And aside from providing
awesome presentation design functionality, Zenter would've absolutely given
WebEx a run for its money on the presentation delivery side.

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immad
I think Matt was just making a point using Zenter as an example. For zenter to
go the webex route they would have had to add a lot more functionality, but it
was obviously possible.

~~~
martin
Of course, but just taking PPT and porting it to the web feature for feature
would be pretty silly. The reason I always thought Zenter was a shoo-in was
that there were obvious great, monetizable things they could do with
presentations that a desktop app could never hope to do -- and during chats
with them, it was quite clear they recognized this.

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aquateen
Regarding the number of founders, YouOS springs to mind as a 4-person team. I
thought I read PG say he funded a few individual founders this last round?

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pg
We've funded a few startups with 4 founders. I think there's one in the
current batch (though only 3 came to Cambridge). Heysan was not one though;
they only had 3 people when we funded them.

There's one single-founder startup in the current batch. He just posted an ad
for another person:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33472>

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ALee
Thanks for the advice Matt. (Better late than never)

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drusenko
congrats on the wedding!

~~~
mattmaroon
Thanks!

