- The video discusses the importance of caring about and spending time with early stage customers to learn about their problems and how to solve them.
- The example of Airbnb is given, where the founders took the time to help hosts improve their property photos, even though it was not financially beneficial for the company.
- The founders of Brex also prioritized spending time with their customers to understand their needs and complexities, leading to the development of successful solutions.
- The importance of caring and building relationships with customers is emphasized, as it leads to a better understanding of their needs and the ability to provide valuable solutions.
- The personal experience of the video creator at Justin.TV and Twitch is also mentioned, highlighting the transformation in their relationship with users when they started talking and listening to streamers.

- The founders of Twitch, Emmett and Kevin, had a strong technical team and were able to easily implement features that streamers requested, such as higher resolution streaming.
- Streamers also asked for help in making money, even if it was a small amount, and the founders were surprised by their gratitude for even a $20 monthly check.
- The core learning of Twitch was that if streamers could make money and quit their jobs, they would create content that millions of people wanted to watch.
- The founders emphasized the importance of personally caring about customers and their needs, rather than relying on reports or data science teams.
- Money is not the key factor in gaining insights from customers, and having more layers between the founders and customers can hinder learning.
- The takeaway is that caring about customers, spending time with them, and making them feel special can greatly accelerate learning and understanding of their problems.

YC partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how spending real time with your users can unlock insights and growth. 
Hear the stories of how Airbnb and Brex built billion-dollar companies by forging genuine connections with customers. Learn why having too much money and too many people can actually slow down learning. And discover how to accelerate insight into your product by making your users feel special. 
Successful startups don’t just build technology – they solve human problems. The key is listening to the people who really matter: your customers.

Apply to Y Combinator: https://yc.link/DandM-apply
Work at a Startup: https://yc.link/DandM-jobs

Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 
00:00 - Intro
00:30 - Having a Plan
01:15 - How to Learn
01:39 - Empathy for Users
03:01 - The Gold Mine
04:29 - You Can't Fake It
05:18 - Brex Pivot
06:47 - The Edge Cases
07:33 - Caring More Than 0
08:18 - It's Complicated
09:17 - Turing It Around
09:55 - Starcraft
10:23 - Asking What They What
12:49 - It's Easy to Not Care
13:20 - Caring = Learning
14:17 - Takeaways

And some point during this coffee session, the guy was like, Hey,

For all of my thoughts, all of my everything.

Hello, this is Michael Seibel with Thoughts & Caldwell.

And today we want to talk about our secret for learning as much as possible from your early stage customers.

1 of the things that we have to fight a lot for these founders, early stage founders, we had to fight Is this idea that when we're started the company, we understand the problem really well, that we're trying to solve, we understand the customer really well, and we understand the solution really well.

We know, you know, we have our next 10 year plan all lined up.

And why would you start a company if you didn't have the plan?

Overconfident foolishness is a key part of doing anything ambitious in life.

You got to start there and then immediately switch.

But you only switch after you burn the bridge behind you.

to be a part of long, quitting is not an option before you realize you don't actually know too much.

And then at that point, you have to learn.

And 1 of the things that we've seen, and we'll give some examples today, is that the fastest way to learn what you need to know, both about the problem and how to solve it, is to care about your customers.

If you care about your customers, and then as a result, you spend time with your customers, you can really learn what their problems are and how to solve them so much faster.

You know, 1 example, and we talk about Airbnb a lot, but 1 example that came up when they most recently spoke to the bash that really clicked in my mind was they retold a story about how they were emailing their hosts and they saw their hosts had horrible photographs on Airbnb and they knew their hosts were listing their properties on other sites and they had horrible photos there too.

And They said, okay, we're just going to help them get better photos.

We're just going to help them get better photos.

And I think what was interesting about that was that they knew that those hosts were going to use those photos in other places.

They knew that like maybe their company was going to be dead in 3 months, right?

And they knew they were kind of losing money on the deal.

And they're like, you know, those photos suck.

And it's kind of human nature that if you do something nice for someone, they'll appreciate it.

They trust, like you establish some trust when you break down the barriers between yourself and the folks you're trying to serve and do something nice for them.

And they weren't like, here's your invoice.

And I think what was interesting was that when Joe tells this story, he talks about 1 host who, after they took all the photos and they arranged the lights the right way and they showed him photos like, oh, the place looks great.

The host was like, hey, do you wanna sit down for coffee?

And it was so funny because that was the moment in the story where I was like, a lot of founders would have said no.

A lot of founders would have been like, I have someone else on the list.

I'm just doing this to try to make my website better.

I'm actually kind of pissed that like you have shitty photos on my site.

And as he tells that story, he learned that that host had been renting out his apartment for I think 10 years.

And throughout the process of learning how to do it, he had taken notes in this notebook.

And some point during this coffee session, the guy was like, hey.

Do you want my notes on being a host for the last 10 years.

Yeah, for all of my thoughts, all of my everything.

Yeah, and what was so funny was that, that whole process, that whole thing of learning what he probably couldn't have learned if he had talked to a hundred hosts casually, he got by caring about 1 host.

That learning never happens if you don't care.

Yeah, we always, we talk about these guys a lot, but you know something that you can't fake that they always do?

Is they remember the names and the life stories of their first customers.

Like when they talk about the original Airbnb, they weren't like, yeah, we hid behind our keyboards and we bought some Facebook ads.

We put out a landing page and we spammed some people and they signed up and you know, we scraped VR.

No, when they tell the story, it's a story about people.

And they know all their names and they keep in touch with all of their original hosts and the people that stayed with them

In many ways, they didn't have many other advantages.

Talking before, you were saying that the Brex folks have figured this out

We've spoken about the Brex pivot in various other contexts.

And so folks know they started with an idea that was like, hey, VR is the future.

They had the sense that that was what a startup should be, is whatever the current zeitgeist of what's popular.

And the issue was, I don't know where to begin.

They were programmers, but they had only worked on FinTech stuff before.

They didn't really understand the use cases.

They weren't really sure why the other products weren't good enough.

And then they tried a couple of ideas, again, you know the story.

But at the end of the day, they really understood other founders, other people in the YC batch.

And once they got the idea for Brex, it was very clear what to do next, which was to talk to the people all around them in YC, literally in this building we're in right now, and ask them stuff like, oh, do you have a credit card?

And then they were able to spend so much time with these customers, understanding the complexities of what they're trying to do, they can very quickly ship the product.

And again, let me give you another example for them is, a lot of folks that have companies in different countries or employees in different countries, there's all this complexity that you get if you're not American and your company's not American and your employees aren't in the United States.

And these guys are building all the software now to this day, which involves really going deep and caring about all those edge cases.

What's funny is they can be their own guinea pig on this stuff.

If they weren't founders, if they hadn't gone through this themselves, it'd be much harder to hire some PM at a big company to build all these solutions.

What I love about this story is that while they were in the YC batch and they were asking people, do you need this?

They were finding people who were getting screwed, right?

Yeah, there's no like fill out extra forms.

And so like, what I loved about it was that their product didn't even have to be amazing to start because the alternative was nothing.

When you're competing with literally nothing.

Oh, and it's like, it's like the perfect example of the big company not caring.

It's like, I don't care so much that you just can't use my product at all.

And like all they had to do was care more than that, right?

More than no, like we'll figure out how to make it work for you.

And I think that it always just comes back to this, like, those founders in the batch loved those guys.

Well, their customers were their friends.

And they genuinely knew the stories of their customers and cared.

So I would say the last story on this was a story I experienced at Justin.TV and Twitch.

And I would say, to be honest, right, we experienced both sides of this.

In the early part of the story, we had a very troubled relationship with our users.

On 1 hand, they were streaming content on our site and we had a lot of traffic, and we were able to monetize traffic a little bit.

But on the other hand, they were streaming content they didn't have the rights to.

Like we could get sued, we were getting sued, like all kinds of issues.

We had a really complicated relationship with our customers.

Or people in chat saying bad things, right?

And so for a lot of the time, we had this really complicated relationship with our users.

And then I think that really changed when Emmett and Kevin started talking to streamers, right?

The way the story goes is that, you know, some people started streaming StarCraft II, Emmett was a big StarCraft fan, and he just loved watching this stuff.

And he started talking to the streamers, and like, not sending a mass email to all streamers.

He literally reached out 1 by 1 with Kevin.

And if you're a streamer at Just2TV at this point, Just2TV is like 5 years old, and you're on a phone call with like the CEO and the COO.

And they care about your like StarCraft channel?

Emmett could kill me with every race in Starcraft.

So, Emin and Kevin get on the phone with these streamers and basically just asking them what do they need.

And I think that what was funny is that the streamers tested them a little bit.

The first things they said were things like, well, can you let me stream in higher resolution, right?

And you know, it was funny because talking to Emin and Kevin afterwards was like, yes, in fact, that's 1 of the easiest things.

They thought that people would be asking for all this really hard stuff.

What they asked for was embarrassing because it was so obvious and easy to implement.

It's just that they never bothered to ask.

And actually, it was even more insidious than that.

For these users that we had a complicated relationship with, increasing the bit rate of their streams increased our costs.

That was kind of a negative feedback loop.

And, but for these folks, like there was no issue with their content.

There were no rights issues and so on and so forth.

And hilariously, because we had a really strong technical team and technical founders, we built our own video system.

Like, yeah, it was probably settings file.

It was like the easiest thing in the world.

And so, bam, we had that feedback loop of like, they asked for something, we called them 2 days later, we built it, oh, mind blown.

And then after a couple of conversations, they started teasing this idea, it's like, can you help us make money?

And once again, Kevin and I were like, not a lot of money.

Like, so, like how much money do you wanna make?

And once again, I mean, it was like, really?

Like, and they would do the math on some channel and be like, well, if we split the ad revenue with you on this channel, we could send you a check for $20 a month.

And the people, the streamers were like, that's amazing.

That's, that's okay, well, You know, and I remember back in the day, like Kevin would handwrite and mail the checks.

And so to me, it was just like the third example of putting yourself out there 5 years in, not in the beginning, 5 years in, caring about that customer, asking what they want.

And then you start learning, oh crap, the core learning of Twitch was if you could help these streamers make money and they could quit their job and stream the content that they love, they will make stuff that millions of people want to watch, right?

That was the core learning and The only reason we accomplished it was because Emmett and Kevin called them and gave a shit.

That story could have been, they asked the PM to go do a report.

Go do a survey from your data science team.

Or you asked your investors to go do a report, go do some data science.

Like think about the million different ways they could have not personally cared enough to get on the call.

Yes, and everyone around them would have been okay with it.

Those all sound more professional, right?

And so I think what's interesting about all 3 of these stories is that they all start with just caring.

About the people using your product or wanting to use your product or having a problem.

And so much value was created, so much learning happened so quickly.

And we see so many founders that are just flailing, putting so much effort and not getting results.

And it's like, if they were just doing these things.

I think a lot of folks think you need more money to get these insights.

And again, I think what we're saying is, maybe less money would help getting these insights.

In fact, if you think about doing these things with a

lot of money, that's how you get to the, let's hire a, let's have many people between me and the customer.

The better we'll do, the smarter, the more we'll learn, the more people we can talk to.

All right, so the final takeaway here is that if you really want to accelerate your learning, care about your customers, go talk to them, go spend time with them one-on-one, and you'd be surprised at, 1, how special they'll feel, and 2, when they feel special, how much they can help you learn about their problems and how to solve them.


Speaker 0: And some point during this coffee session, the guy was like, Hey,

Speaker 1: oh, you want my notes? You want a sip?

Speaker 0: Would you like a goldmine? Yeah.

Speaker 2: For all of my thoughts, all of my everything.

Speaker 0: Hello, this is Michael Seibel with Thoughts & Caldwell. And today we want to talk about our secret for learning as much as possible from your early stage customers. 1 of the things that we have to fight a lot for these founders, early stage founders, we had to fight Is this idea that when we're started the company, we understand the problem really well, that we're trying to solve, we understand the customer really well, and we understand the solution really well.

Speaker 3: Yeah, we have it all figured out, right? Day 1, we nailed it. We know, you know, we have our next 10 year plan all lined up.

Speaker 0: And why would you start a company if you didn't have the plan? Like if you didn't know, right?

Speaker 3: It's true. Overconfident foolishness is a key part of doing anything ambitious in life. So I do. You're right. You got to love that.

Speaker 0: You got to start there and then immediately switch. Maybe we don't know anything. Is that possible? But you only switch after you burn the bridge behind you.

Speaker 3: Yeah, but you can't quit. Yeah.

Speaker 1: You have

Speaker 3: to be a part of long, quitting is not an option before you realize you don't actually know too much.

Speaker 0: And then at that point, you have to learn. And 1 of the things that we've seen, and we'll give some examples today, is that the fastest way to learn what you need to know, both about the problem and how to solve it, is to care about your customers. If you care about your customers, and then as a result, you spend time with your customers, you can really learn what their problems are and how to solve them so much faster. You know, 1 example, and we talk about Airbnb a lot, but 1 example that came up when they most recently spoke to the bash that really clicked in my mind was they retold a story about how they were emailing their hosts and they saw their hosts had horrible photographs on Airbnb and they knew their hosts were listing their properties on other sites and they had horrible photos there too. And They said, okay, we're just going to help them get better photos.

Right? We're just going to help them get better photos. We're going to email them. We're going to go to their homes. We're going to give them better photos.

And I think what was interesting about that was that they knew that those hosts were going to use those photos in other places. Right? They sure did. They knew that like maybe their company was going to be dead in 3 months, right? Yep.

Speaker 3: And they knew they were kind of losing money on the deal.

Speaker 0: Because they flew. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They 100% losing

Speaker 1: money on the deal.

Speaker 3: Didn't pencil out.

Speaker 0: Yeah, didn't pencil out. But they did it anyways. And they had empathy for the users. And they're like, you know, those photos suck. This is something we can solve for them.

And it's kind of human nature that if you do something nice for someone, they'll appreciate it. They remember it. They help you.

Speaker 3: They trust, like you establish some trust when you break down the barriers between yourself and the folks you're trying to serve and do something nice for them. Who knew? Something valuable. Who knew? And they weren't like, here's your invoice.

Yeah, no, no, no, No.

Speaker 0: And I think what was interesting was that when Joe tells this story, he talks about 1 host who, after they took all the photos and they arranged the lights the right way and they showed him photos like, oh, the place looks great. The host was like, hey, do you wanna sit down for coffee? And it was so funny because that was the moment in the story where I was like, a lot of founders would have said no. Yeah. A lot of founders would have been like, I have someone else on the list.

I'm just doing this to try to make my website better. I don't really like you. I'm actually kind of pissed that like you have shitty photos on my site. So like, I got what I need. I'm getting out of here.

And Joe actually cared about his users. And Joe was like, sure. And as he tells that story, he learned that that host had been renting out his apartment for I think 10 years. And throughout the process of learning how to do it, he had taken notes in this notebook. And some point during this coffee session, the guy was like, hey.

Speaker 1: Oh, you want my notes? You want a subpoena?

Speaker 0: Do you want my notes on being a host for the last 10 years. It's like, would you like a goldmine?

Speaker 2: Yeah, for all of my thoughts, all of my everything.

Speaker 0: And Joe's Loon. Yeah, and what was so funny was that, that whole process, that whole thing of learning what he probably couldn't have learned if he had talked to a hundred hosts casually, he got by caring about 1 host. Those moments never happen. That learning never happens if you don't care.

Speaker 3: Yeah, we always, we talk about these guys a lot, but you know something that you can't fake that they always do? Is they remember the names and the life stories of their first customers. Like when they talk about the original Airbnb, they weren't like, yeah, we hid behind our keyboards and we bought some Facebook ads. We put out a landing page and we spammed some people and they signed up and you know, we scraped VR. No, when they tell the story, it's a story about people.

Yes. And they know all their names and they keep in touch with all of their original hosts and the people that stayed with them

Speaker 0: to this day. And they just cared more. And you can't fake that. In many ways, they didn't have many other advantages. No.

They didn't have many other advantages. So that's Airbnb. Talking before, you were saying that the Brex folks have figured this out

Speaker 3: a little bit too. What's the other story? We've spoken about the Brex pivot in various other contexts. And so folks know they started with an idea that was like, hey, VR is the future.

Speaker 0: I guess let's make some VR headsets. Hype-y, scene-ster idea of the moment.

Speaker 3: Yes. And it makes sense. They had the sense that that was what a startup should be, is whatever the current zeitgeist of what's popular. Fair. And the issue was, I don't know where to begin.

They didn't know a ton about that. They were programmers, but they had only worked on FinTech stuff before. They didn't really understand the use cases. They weren't really sure why the other products weren't good enough. Like it was just basically DOA.

Speaker 0: It's a complete mess. It was a mess.

Speaker 3: Yes. And then they tried a couple of ideas, again, you know the story. But at the end of the day, they really understood other founders, other people in the YC batch. And once they got the idea for Brex, it was very clear what to do next, which was to talk to the people all around them in YC, literally in this building we're in right now, and ask them stuff like, oh, do you have a credit card? Oh, you don't, cool.

Do you want to use our thing? Okay. And then they were able to spend so much time with these customers, understanding the complexities of what they're trying to do, they can very quickly ship the product. And again, let me give you another example for them is, a lot of folks that have companies in different countries or employees in different countries, there's all this complexity that you get if you're not American and your company's not American and your employees aren't in the United States. Yes.

Right? Yes. And these guys are building all the software now to this day, which involves really going deep and caring about all those edge cases. And it's because they employ people. What's funny is they can be their own guinea pig on this stuff.

Yes. There's no way you could fake that. If they weren't founders, if they hadn't gone through this themselves, it'd be much harder to hire some PM at a big company to build all these solutions.

Speaker 0: What I love about this story is that while they were in the YC batch and they were asking people, do you need this? They were finding people who were getting screwed, right? It was like, oh, you're under 25. Yes, you can't get a credit.

Speaker 3: Sorry, no can do. Yeah, there's no like fill out extra forms.

Speaker 0: It's like completely getting screwed. Oh, you're not from America. That's a no. Sorry, You don't have a credit. You can't get it.

And so like, what I loved about it was that their product didn't even have to be amazing to start because the alternative was nothing. Yeah. When you're competing with literally nothing. Oh, and it's like, it's like the perfect example of the big company not caring. It's like, I don't care so much that you just can't use my product at all.

And like all they had to do was care more than that, right? More than no, like we'll figure out how to make it work for you. And I think that it always just comes back to this, like, those founders in the batch loved those guys.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, their customers were their friends. There were people they knew. Yes. And they could relate to them.

They could talk to them. They would go out to dinner with them. And they genuinely knew the stories of their customers and cared.

Speaker 0: So I would say the last story on this was a story I experienced at Justin.TV and Twitch. And I would say, to be honest, right, we experienced both sides of this. In the early part of the story, we had a very troubled relationship with our users. On 1 hand, they were streaming content on our site and we had a lot of traffic, and we were able to monetize traffic a little bit. But on the other hand, they were streaming content they didn't have the rights to.

Speaker 3: They didn't have the rights to. It was like soccer, sports,

Speaker 0: movies, TV. Boxing, I think. Boxing was big. UFC. Hi guys.

They liked us. It was very popular. Very popular. And they were creating problems for us. Like we could get sued, we were getting sued, like all kinds of issues.

We had a really complicated relationship with our customers. And even just the UGC content, right? Or people in chat saying bad things, right? It was like, for a lot of the time... They only said nice things.

No, no, no. Sometimes you say bad things in chat. And so for a lot of the time, we had this really complicated relationship with our users. And then I think that really changed when Emmett and Kevin started talking to streamers, right? The way the story goes is that, you know, some people started streaming StarCraft II, Emmett was a big StarCraft fan, and he just loved watching this stuff.

And he started talking to the streamers, and like, not sending a mass email to all streamers. Do you like streaming video games? Yeah, do your streamer 257. Like, you know, like weird, but yeah. He literally reached out 1 by 1 with Kevin.

And if you're a streamer at Just2TV at this point, Just2TV is like 5 years old, and you're on a phone call with like the CEO and the COO. That's pretty cool, right?

Speaker 3: And they care about your like StarCraft channel?

Speaker 0: Yes, your StarCraft channel. What did

Speaker 3: they play? Were they like, is Emmett

Speaker 0: a Zerg guy? Here's the problem.

Speaker 3: Is he a Protoss guy?

Speaker 0: Emmett could kill me with every race in Starcraft. Okay. So I don't even know his favorite.

Speaker 3: We should ask him.

Speaker 0: Yes, I was like a Zergling rush guy. Okay. Emmett figured out in 4 seconds. And then just had infinite ways.

Speaker 3: I would play Terran back in the day. That's really, yeah. Siege tank, I don't know. Anyway, carry on with this. Sorry, sorry.

Speaker 0: Yes, yes. So, Emin and Kevin get on the phone with these streamers and basically just asking them what do they need. And I think that what was funny is that the streamers tested them a little bit. The first things they said were things like, well, can you let me stream in higher resolution, right? And you know, it was funny because talking to Emin and Kevin afterwards was like, yes, in fact, that's 1 of the easiest things.

Yeah, like let me break this down.

Speaker 3: They thought that people would be asking for all this really hard stuff. What they asked for was embarrassing because it was so obvious and easy to implement.

Speaker 0: So easy. It's just that they never bothered to ask. Never bothered to ask. And actually, it was even more insidious than that. For these users that we had a complicated relationship with, increasing the bit rate of their streams increased our costs.

Yeah. That was kind of a negative feedback loop. And, but for these folks, like there was no issue with their content. It was perfectly fine. There were no rights issues and so on and so forth.

And hilariously, because we had a really strong technical team and technical founders, we built our own video system. Changing the bit rate was like a number.

Speaker 3: Like, yeah, it was probably settings file.

Speaker 1: We start the website.

Speaker 0: It was like the easiest thing in the world. And so, bam, we had that feedback loop of like, they asked for something, we called them 2 days later, we built it, oh, mind blown. And then after a couple of conversations, they started teasing this idea, it's like, can you help us make money? And once again, Kevin and I were like, not a lot of money. Like, we are barely alive.

Like, so, like how much money do you wanna make? And there was like, any money. And once again, I mean, it was like, really? Any money? Like, and they would do the math on some channel and be like, well, if we split the ad revenue with you on this channel, we could send you a check for $20 a month.

And the people, the streamers were like, that's amazing. And I was like, really? That's, that's okay, well, You know, and I remember back in the day, like Kevin would handwrite and mail the checks. And so to me, it was just like the third example of putting yourself out there 5 years in, not in the beginning, 5 years in, caring about that customer, asking what they want. And then you start learning, oh crap, the core learning of Twitch was if you could help these streamers make money and they could quit their job and stream the content that they love, they will make stuff that millions of people want to watch, right?

That was the core learning and The only reason we accomplished it was because Emmett and Kevin called them and gave a shit.

Speaker 3: Yeah, because think about it. That story could have been, they asked the PM to go do a report. Exactly right. Go do a survey from your data science team. Or you asked your investors to go do a report, go do some data science.

Like think about the million different ways they could have not personally cared enough to get on the call.

Speaker 0: Yes, and everyone around them would have been okay with it. Those all sound more professional, right? Yeah, Get a real report, you know? Yeah. And so I think what's interesting about all 3 of these stories is that they all start with just caring.

Just giving a shit, right? About the people using your product or wanting to use your product or having a problem. And so much value was created, so much learning happened so quickly. And we see so many founders that are just flailing, putting so much effort and not getting results. Yeah.

And it's like, if they were just doing these things.

Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's not a question of money. I think a lot of folks think you need more money to get these insights. And again, I think what we're saying is, maybe less money would help getting these insights. But you see what I'm saying? It's almost like Money's tangential.

Speaker 0: Money's tangential. In fact, if you think about doing these things with a

Speaker 3: lot of money, that's how you get to the, let's hire a, let's have many people between me and the customer. The more layers there are between.

Speaker 0: The better we'll do, the smarter, the more we'll learn, the more people we can talk to. All right, so the final takeaway here is that if you really want to accelerate your learning, care about your customers, go talk to them, go spend time with them one-on-one, and you'd be surprised at, 1, how special they'll feel, and 2, when they feel special, how much they can help you learn about their problems and how to solve them. Dalton, great to see you, man. Thanks.

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Secrets You Can Learn From Your Customers