To gain the trust of early customers, we initially targeted fellow companies in Y Combinator who were also new and had never paid themselves, which was a strategic move to build our initial customer base.

During Y Combinator, we learned the importance of talking to customers directly, not just through customer service.

Our first customer was a VC who ended up investing in us, and being part of Y Combinator helped us get meetings with many interested VCs.

The early days of Y Combinator were magical and pure; we focused on helping a small group of founders without distractions or negative scrutiny from the press.

At Y Combinator, we advise founders to focus on creating a product that 100 people love rather than something that 1 million people merely like, as those 100 passionate users can become your viral sales force.

When we started Y Combinator, many thought we were crazy, but we focused on helping a few founders and expanded from there.

Focus on building deep relationships with your first 1,000 users; this will help ensure your product truly meets their needs and can scale effectively.

Despite starting Y Combinator with the goal of helping a few entrepreneurs, we never anticipated funding a thousand startups, many of which have become very successful.

I co-founded Y Combinator, the first startup accelerator, which began with a hypothesis about what people wanted, and it turned out they did want it, leading us to fund over 1,800 startups valued at over a hundred billion dollars.