YC is always doing a good job in educating people on startup things, and they truly inspire a whole generation of founders, including myself.
But still, most advices we could find online are too high level, too abstract, too philosophical. Yeah there’s a need for this type of things. But as a person who is thinking to quit his/her job to start a company, they may need more actionable advices and data points, e.g., how to buy healthy insurance, what corporate credit card to use, where to find design/engineering help, what specific tools to use for specific things & the cost... I wish there were such “trivia” advices when I started out 4 years ago. Of course, we can’t expect someone like pg or sam Altman to tell us what specific saas or api or health insurance to buy :) this kind of things can only come from people who fight in the frontline , while the memory / experience is still fresh.
Maybe I should write an ebook for these unglamorous advices , especially for people who don’t want to go the venture scale route :)
- [edit 2] when people make it and become successful entrepreneurs/VCs, they are teaching in startup graduate schools with their deep knowledge. But Where is the startup kindergarten/primary school to teach those things that college/graduate schools assume you already know?
The psychological term for this is the "curse of knowledge" [1]. This is why you can find the best information from "indie founders", people who are 5-6 steps (not 1000 like Altman) ahead of you and outline their experiences. I've been collecting/summarizing their experiences in a project I currently do on acquisition channels [2] and most of it is WAY more concrete than your-average-TechCrunch-article.
For example, for a company that had success with Google Ads (and they started with it 10 years ago), the founder probably forgot how it's like to be a beginner. When interviewed, they're likely to say more abstract things like "Make sure you have a good user experience". It makes sense, because these things work OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME. But your-average-founder simply wants to know what WORKS NOW, what keywords can he bid on, etc. This is where experiences from founders who got started months (rather than years) ago comes useful.
Ultimately a lot of the trivia doesn't really matter for your success or failure.
High level thinking combined with effort and luck are what helps you "make it" in my eyes.
If your tech startup should succeeds or fails in spite of the particular corporate credit you choose.
This is the same problem with youtubers who have 0 subscribers obsessing over what particular camera they need to buy, all while people are growing massive audiences with little more than a cell phone camera and a message that resonates.
Pretty sure GP is saying that making those decisions for which healthcare to get, which credit card to get, etc. take a lot of time away from high level thinking, and I’d have to agree.
If I understand, your argument seems to be “just pick any and don’t worry” or “only care about success, not the risks of having bad/no healthcare, bad credit cards, etc when your startup fails”
A youtuber debating what camera to get usually doesn’t impact their livelihood in the long run, healthcare, finances, and other aspects of running a business definitely can.
Trivia decisions aside, there are also seemingly trivia things that you just didn't even know you had to know or make a decision on. You don't know what you don't know, so having someone who had done it to guide a future entrepreneur on things beyond just high level guidance would be immensely helpful.
Part of me agree the attitude of "you should be able to figure out things on your own".
My point is that since some tools & trivia things really don't matter, we just need good defaults and move on to do things that matter. Where to find good defaults? You can ask around in your network, or figure out these things on your own. Or just pick whatever have good social proof.
Telling someone they don’t need health insurance is irresponsible, there’s plenty of things that can go wrong in your 20s, like a car accident. If they decided not to have that while running a startup not only would they potentially lose their first mover advantage, they’d be saddled in crippling medical debt. One’s health should always come first, you don’t appreciate it until you don’t have it.
I'm surprised private healthcare isn't more of a drain on the American economy. I often wonder how many businesses aren't started because of that cost.
It’s not a requirement to offer health insurance in the US. If you make someone an offer and it doesn’t Include health insurance, and they accept, and the individual mandate isn’t enforced anymore, then theres no additional burden on the company.
I’ve been offered jobs without health insurance and didn’t accept them. I’ve contracted for those companies as I’m my own company and have had a group health plan for myself and others/partners. Figure the premium can be $1000-1200/per.
Getting it is easy. You call a broker (usually for group plans you need to go through a broker), fill out a couple of forms, produce a few paystubs, apply, and enroll.
And sorry, this wasn’t SF proper, though when I managed a plan for 30+ employees in SF it was about $1500/per. That was high deductible with a roll-over HSA match. The broker was helpful in giving us a decent menu to choose from.
$1,500 for an individual HDHP is way on the high end, even for SF. Was the group full of 60 year olds? If it’s young people, it should be in the $500 range at most.
The pre-ACA rate was $250/month for one working person. ACA plus inflation doubled that to $500/month, which is out of the reach of flyover country blue-collar wages.
For planning purposes, use $500-$1,200/month for a young single person now.
Historically it goes up around 20% per year, so I'm sure HN readers can do the Rule of 72 in their heads and realize where this is going.
I often wonder about the impact of a private healthcare system on economic activity too. The truth is, we’ll never really know until there’s some sort of public option.
I know plenty of Europeans that are entrepreneurs who do well for themselves. The American attitude of the European system being incapable of producing anything meaningful because it doesn’t capitulate completely to corporate interests is overplayed. Just look at Arm and the U.K. for example.
> Telling someone they don’t need health insurance is irresponsible
Unless you're offering to pay it, I don't see how your opinion can be taken seriously. Most startups take about 7 years of runway, and at $500-$1,200/month for a single person, those startups won't happen.
being young, broke, and healthy helped me get my first company going without being distracted by decision fatigue because often times the decision was made for me.
having a handful of mentors who can tell you "you're asking the wrong questions, ask yourself X instead" saved me a lot of time early on.
I agree with you on all but health insurance. Catastrophic life events are uncommon, but they do happen. Any founder owes it to themselves and their company to be insured so they don't become bankrupt from medical bills or die because they're unable to get proper treatment.
I recommend a famous book about creating companies and running / growing successful
businesses called "The Hard Thing About Hard Things". The gist of it is, there is no recipe for success, no roadmap or checklist to follow. Due diligence and research / prep are one thing, but anyone requiring a "color by numbers" or "connect the dots" guide is, by definition, ill-suited for entrepreneurship.
One of the best books I have ever read. It taught me what it meant to be a product manager and how to be a professional at the workplace no matter what. I now refer to it almost every day while running my own start up which is three months old.
This is one of the problems we try to solve at Satchel (https://satchel.com/). We write long-form guides to help startups figure out the best tool for them to use.
Advice is on a spectrum from being so generic as to be common sense, all the way to understanding your precise situation and choices.
Things like health insurance and credit cards are far too specific for YC to put out as a generic guide. The size of your team, budget, where you're located, etc. all make a big difference.
Part of being an entrepreneur is figuring these things out, and I'll admit that choosing the "default" options was actually a negative for my last startup because it didn't provide what we needed. Doing the research is a good test for how well you'll be able to handle the rest of the details of running a business.
If you don't know where to look for this info, I recommend reading how similar companies (same sector, size, region) started and using what they use. Plenty of startup profiles out there on HN, techcrunch, angelist, producthunt, indiehacker and more. That's usually a good compromise to provide choices without too much research.
Start-up advice in one line: don't quit your day job.
Having a salary gives you the time to find customers, figure out market fit, and lay the foundation for a successful business. More than anything else it allows you to be patient, which is a virtue when starting a new business.
I've thought about writing the same type of book with a broader scope. HR processes, what is a PEO, types of insurance and how to shop for them, accounting/bookkeeping practices, importance of contracts, how to collect AR, how construction contractors bill and how to ask them to quote, overview of electronic signatures, retaining communications from the start, what is a payroll audit, etc.)
I'm sure there can be some other great advice in there about not spending too much on design upfront, using graphic design templates as much as possible, etc.
The reality is a lot of the stuff that can really bite you in the ass (PAGA lawsuits in CA) you only learn about when you're about to get reamed.
If you fail based on any of the "would be nice to know" items, you were never going to succeed.
Find another few founders, ask them what they use. Find another few who use the same, ask what they think. Repeat.
If you can't figure out how to hire, you're not fit for this.
There's really nothing to any of this that should be at all difficult relative to product/market fit, and the answers to all those other things change too often to be worth enshrining. "Ask other cofounders" is the trivial and 99% correct answer, so why complain that someone hasn't done that for you given that the data will be stale every 6 months?
But still, most advices we could find online are too high level, too abstract, too philosophical. Yeah there’s a need for this type of things. But as a person who is thinking to quit his/her job to start a company, they may need more actionable advices and data points, e.g., how to buy healthy insurance, what corporate credit card to use, where to find design/engineering help, what specific tools to use for specific things & the cost... I wish there were such “trivia” advices when I started out 4 years ago. Of course, we can’t expect someone like pg or sam Altman to tell us what specific saas or api or health insurance to buy :) this kind of things can only come from people who fight in the frontline , while the memory / experience is still fresh.
Maybe I should write an ebook for these unglamorous advices , especially for people who don’t want to go the venture scale route :)
- [edit 1] I had an old blog post on the tools / tech I used for my company: https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behin... it’s of course not the most optimal set of tools & tech; but they get things done :)
- [edit 2] when people make it and become successful entrepreneurs/VCs, they are teaching in startup graduate schools with their deep knowledge. But Where is the startup kindergarten/primary school to teach those things that college/graduate schools assume you already know?