- Week 4 of Y Combinator Startup School features Gary Tan and Kat Manialak discussing product design and public relations/content acquisition.
- Administrative matters are mentioned, including sending updates and addressing group issues.
- Gary Tan discusses the importance of design and provides an overview of product design concepts.
- Tan emphasizes the need for self-teaching and the integration of design with other aspects of building a startup.
- Design is defined as creating user-friendly and delightful products.
- Tan highlights the significance of design in successful companies.

- The speaker discusses the importance of design in inspiring companies like Apple and Leica.
- Design is not just about how something looks, but also how it works.
- Good design is minimalistic and focuses on functionality.
- Form should follow function, and empathy is crucial for understanding user needs.
- Building highly technological products is like throwing a great party, with a focus on welcoming and solving a specific problem.

The video discusses the importance of design and problem-solving in creating inventions. It emphasizes the need for empathy and prioritizing the needs of users and society. Different types of design, such as product design, interaction design, and visual design, are mentioned. The importance of finding individuals with expertise in these areas is highlighted. The video also touches on the product design process, including identifying problems, creating personas, and detailing features in a product requirement document.

- The speaker discusses the importance of a PRD document to outline the features of a product.
- They explain how Posturist allowed users to post by email without an account, which was a unique feature.
- Other important features included photo attachments, web gallery support, video support, and security measures.
- User research is emphasized as a crucial step in understanding user needs and developing specific personas.
- Prioritization is discussed as a key step in project management, with P0 being the core feature and P1 being the next important step.
- The speaker highlights the importance of a bug database and setting realistic goals to prevent delays in product development.
- Prioritization helps determine what features to focus on and what to cut if necessary.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of prioritization and clear requirements in product management.

- Prioritization is crucial in product design to ensure quality and avoid bugs in production.
- Interaction design involves understanding user goals and creating prototypes or wireframes.
- Interaction design is about giving commands and influencing users through direct language.
- Startups should use direct, personal voice and clear call-to-actions in their design.
- Strategies for interaction design include removing unnecessary actions and breaking complex actions into steps.
- It is important to be aware of existing design conventions and patterns rather than reinventing the wheel.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of using design patterns and stealing ideas from existing designs to create effective designs.
- They warn against using the wrong kind of pagination and mixing modalities in design.
- Visual design is about conveying important information and solving problems, rather than expressing oneself.
- The speaker recommends using contrast, closeness, and visual hierarchy to create effective visual designs.
- They caution against using unnecessary ornamentation and emphasize the importance of simplicity and substance in design.
- The speaker provides tips for creating layouts, including using padding and margin, lines, and boxes effectively.

- The use of grids and visual hierarchy in design can make it easier for users to understand and navigate.
- White space can be used strategically to direct user attention and explain what is going on.
- Minimal design techniques, influenced by Swiss design, can be effective in conveying information.
- Usability testing and customer support are important for creating a successful product.
- Usability testing can be done with wireframes to identify potential issues before coding.
- Customer support should not be ignored, as it can help address and fix long tail bugs and create loyal users.
- Creating a product that a small group of people absolutely love is more important than trying to please a larger audience.
- The design process is complex and involves various steps, including user research, usability testing, and customer support.

- Week 4 of Y Combinator Startup School features Gary Tan and Kat Manialak discussing product design and public relations/content acquisition.
- Gary Tan emphasizes the importance of design and provides an overview of product design concepts.
- Good design is minimalistic and focuses on functionality, with form following function.
- The video discusses the importance of empathy and prioritizing user needs in design.
- Different types of design, such as product design, interaction design, and visual design, are mentioned.
- The importance of finding individuals with expertise in these areas is highlighted.
- The video also touches on the product design process, including identifying problems, creating personas, and detailing features in a product requirement document.
- The speaker discusses the importance of a PRD document to outline the features of a product.
- Prioritization and clear requirements are emphasized in product management.
- Interaction design involves understanding user goals and creating prototypes or wireframes.
- Startups should use direct, personal voice and clear call-to-actions in their design.
- Visual design should prioritize conveying information and solving problems, using techniques like contrast and visual hierarchy.
- Usability testing and customer support are important for creating a successful product.
- The design process involves various steps, including user research, usability testing, and customer support.

Former YC partner Garry Tan, the cofounder of Initialized Capital and a design expert describes how to effectively integrate design into a product development process.

You can find the lecture transcript and slides here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/57

Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/

Welcome to week 4 of Y Combinator Startup School.

We have Gary Tan, who is my good friend, former partner at Y Combinator, the founder of Postress, the founder of Initialized Capital, which is what he's doing now, and an amazing designer who's gonna talk about product design and how to make that an advantage as you're building something people want.

And then following Gary, we have Kat Manialak, who is my current partner at YC, and Craig Cannon to talk about how you can use public relations and content to acquire users to improve the prospects of your company.

Before we get going I want to just mention a few rapid administrative matters.

If you miss an update, I know everyone's trying to get their updates in so that they can meet the graduation criteria.

For now, the easiest thing to do is to send your update in an email to StartupSchoolAtYCombinator.com.

just done a merge of a number of your groups.

Hopefully it goes incredibly smoothly for everyone.

And if, for example, there's a problem with your group, if there's no moderator, please let us know as soon as you can, again, to StartupSchool at ycombinator.com.

If for some reason you think you're in the wrong group, it doesn't work for some reason, let us know and we'll accommodate you to the best extent that we can.

If you haven't launched, we recommend that you launch, if you at all can.

That sounds, If that sounds like a broken record, it should.

I am hugely pleased to introduce Gary Tan.

Thank you, guys, for coming all the way out and spending time with me to hear about design and well, you know, frankly, design can be incredibly complicated and there's a lot to it, but in hopefully an hour, possibly a little bit longer, we're going to get through about a hundred slides.

So I try to cram down basically everything that I knew that founders would get wrong or run into problems with all the time.

And so it's not going to be super in-depth.

Think of this as more, these are the terms that you need to know, these are the basic concepts you need to know.

And, you know, personally, I am actually self-taught.

And so, you know, the first thing that I really wanted to start off with is actually I mean it's almost cliche to associate Steve Jobs with design but I think that this is 1 of the most important things.

If you're in this room or watching on the internet, you probably already understand this.

It's that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it.

You can influence it and you can build your own things that other people can use.

And Steve says, once you learn that, you'll never be the same Again.

And so the thing I really wanna underscore here is what is design?

It's about making and building these things that other people can use.

And if you remove 1 word from that sentence, It actually doesn't work.

And so what we're going to explore today is, you know, well, what is design?

We're going to go deep on both the concepts around product design, interaction design, and visual design, but we're also going to see tactically how do you actually do it yourself.

Even if you have no design background whatsoever, if you're a human being, if you're smart, if you can put yourselves in the shoes of other people, well you too can do it yourself.

And in fact, as founders, you probably need to.

And then finally, we're gonna walk through, well, when should you hire and how should you do it?

So I spent my 10,000 hours, actually, I was trained as an engineer, so I've never been to school for being a designer, but I taught myself, you know, whether it's books, learn by doing, I just always found myself not just in my code editor, but also in Photoshop, trying to dream up, trying to figure out what should it look like?

What should I be building before I actually put it to code.

So I've been a program manager, I was employee number 10 at Palantir, and then YC funded me back in 2008 with a company called Posterous, which we will actually use as an example for some of how I've thought about product in the past and how you might be able to apply that to your startup in the future.

And finally, I spent, you know, 10 batches working with companies, initially actually just as designer in residence.

So I sat here in this room doing office hours with more than a thousand founders just like you, just starting out, how do I build my first homepage, what's my first time experience, and then after that, what do I do next?

How do I build a design process, a product process?

And so what you're about to see is basically the distilling of those 10,000 hours.

1 of the things that I am most excited about when it comes to design is this ability to actually, you know, sort of put together the iconography of something that is very significant.

And so, you know, when I joined Palantir, it was just 10 people and we got to design this logo.

And 1 of my favorite things about it is this mix of both meaning and aesthetics and so on the face of it, 1 of the things I really wanted to do was sort of really underscore what Palantir was about.

And so, you know, at 1 level, this word mark, but with this specific logo, is actually a Palantir.

It's actually an orb on a pedestal from Lord of the Rings.

It let you see into your enemy's secrets.

So on a very literal level, it made sense.

But a more subtle level of this that was very important to us as we were building that company was that this is also a human reading a book.

And so 1 of the major themes of Palantir broadly is that we're at this moment in society where computers are able to help us understand the world around us in a much more fundamental way.

And so what a computer is is basically the infinite book and so that was just 1 example of where I've seen design actually, well, help put together a culture for a company and it's fun.

It's just fun to be able to translate all of these different pieces of a company and why we're here, what it's about, into something that can go on a t-shirt or on a hat, actually.

And so, really, really big disclaimer, I'm an engineer by training.

I never went to school formally for this stuff.

I was a founder, so I applied this just like you.

And so the things that I'm talking about today will be a hyper simplification.

You know, if we wanted to, we could turn this into easily a 10-week course just about each given section.

But instead, what I want this to be is a roadmap.

So you might hear these terms, there will be times in your startup, like perhaps now, perhaps tomorrow, that you'll want to actually start applying these things.

There's everything in the world that you need to know, it's out there.

And so, the computer is truly the bicycle for the mind.

And so, the other thing that I really want to underscore is, we talk about design as the singular thing on its own, but it truly is deeply integrated in this broader picture of how do you create great products?

It's not just design on its own, it's how design actually interfaces with all the other pieces of the pie.

So it takes great product management, in addition to that great design, and engineering, and customer support.

It's all of these things, and especially at your stage, don't box yourself in.

You have to know that you are the shepherd of your product, and you're going to have to do every single 1 of these things.

In a nutshell, it really is just these 2 very simple things to me.

It's just creating things for users that work well and delight them.

And those are 2 sometimes disparate things as we'll see.

Some of the most inspiring companies to me in the world, They have design as a very core piece of what they do.

And so, you know, can't talk about design without talking about Steve Jobs and Apple, obviously.

But the first misconception that is probably the most common misconception is that design is how it looks.

It truly is not merely how it looks, it is actually also how it works.

And that's why in the slides that are coming up, we're going to talk a lot about that process on how it works, what should it do, and what are the problems.

I just got my first Leica camera and I kind of can't believe I waited this long in my life to finally get 1.

But, you know, 1 of the really interesting things about Leica as a brand, it truly is this beautiful design, this incredible brand, but then it is also functional.

It's also about deeply the functionality.

Why is this thing better than all the other things that existed before it?

And so, a review from 1929 actually just straight up told you that.

A Leica at that time was basically magical.

It was, you know, 8 times lighter and, you know, 10 times cheaper.

It was an incredible machine for its time, and it's still a pretty amazing machine.

To other physical products as well, 1 of the great design inspirations for me and for a lot of other people out there is actually Dieter Rams, who built all of these very simple, incredibly beautiful products that were incredibly usable.

And 1 of the most important things that I think that he really showed us in his designs is that good design is actually as little design as possible.

And so that's a point that we'll return to several times in this presentation.

But the key thing here is how do you create things that are not burdened with non-essentials?

It really is about purity, about simplicity.

And just to drive it home, I mean, this is a guiding sort of force in sort of everything that, you know, we see in the marketplace today.

And, you know, Another thing that we'll get back to in this talk is actually simply the fact that there's very little totally new under the sun.

In fact, as designers, you probably shouldn't be spending too much time trying to be extremely novel because novelty is the opposite of functionality.

Earlier we talked about form versus function in the form of delight and works well.

These are sort of the 2 yin and yang, the opposing forces when you're trying to put together a design.

You know, we obviously always want something to be beautiful, want something to make you feel good, make the user feel good.

But at the same time, you know, And delight is also a part of novelty.

But at the same time, function is the thing that, you know, that's the stake.

That's, you know, If delight is a sizzle, then works well as a stake.

And so, part of the problem with form over function, and this actually happens even in the best products.

I'd like to call out Apple for its notch.

I mean, that is, you know, the definition of form over function.

I mean, this is a photo from their marketing website, and certainly it's incredibly novel.

Certainly it serves the purpose of a marketer to be able to have this very novel, different thing and to differentiate it from all of these other smartphones out there.

But in terms of function, when I'm watching a video, this is categorically worse.

Like, why am I, you know, I'm not here for the notch, I'm here for the content.

You might go to a restaurant later tonight, and it's a beautiful restaurant, incredibly well decorated, very, very thoughtful, incredible food, but you'll walk in and you'll sit down at this seat, and gosh, it's so romantic, but I really can't read my menu I can't even order like I you know this is again an example of form this idea you know well we want to make people feel like this is a romantic premium incredible experience but then if I can't even read the menu, why am I here?

I mean, 1 of my favorite books that I highly recommend that you read is Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things, and he basically has a whole chapter about this on doors that are incredibly beautiful but you have no idea how to use them and so this is you know 1 of the more absurd situations of like someone actually had a right pull on this thing because too many people were just, could not figure out how to use a door.

A door is 1 of the simplest things that you could possibly try to use.

But when you put form over function, if you put the wrong door, it's too elegant, it's not clear how you use it.

Well, that's, you know, missing the point.

And so, if you take a moment and try to think through, like why is it that we see, you know, form over function so much in, you know, the things we use, the products we use, just walking around in our daily lives.

And deep down, I really want to emphasize the 1 thing that frankly as founders I think you need to spend a lot of time on and that's empathy.

You know 1 of the things that I admired the most about my time both working at YC but also as a founder going through Y Combinator back in 2008.

It was that sitting down with Paul Graham, he would give us such incredible advice about specifically what are your users thinking?

And really being able to peel away the layers of like, you know, I know we're sitting in a room looking at this particular UI, but put yourself in the shoes of someone who has never seen this before.

And this is something we'll come back to again and again.

And 1 of the things that I put actually in my recommendations for design resources, and on its face it's kind of absurd, this is this Depression-era book written by Dale Carnegie, a self-help book.

But I actually think that it should basically be required reading for founders.

It's that 1 must actually become genuinely interested in other people.

You actually have to see their point of view.

You want to be able to be sympathetic, like understand what are their ideas, what do they understand, and you know, what do they actually want.

And you know, this goes back to YC itself, the first day you get into YC you get a t-shirt that says, you know, make something people want.

And I think, I don't know if they still do this, but do you still get a t-shirt if you get an exit that says I made something people want?

Maybe that's why I haven't gotten mine yet.

So 1 of the things that's really interesting about building highly technological products is that we often think about them as incredibly complicated, you know, machinery.

But the most useful mental model for me in what I've been doing is actually to not think of it as building a car or even building a website or writing software or anything like that.

It's actually about throwing the best possible party you possibly can.

And so if you think about great parties you've been to, there's no line, you're ushered right in.

A human being, ideally someone you know, someone who's very friendly comes to you and says, hey, welcome, I am so glad you're here.

And so, you know, that sort of politeness, that inviting, welcome nature, that thoughtfulness, that's something that you really have to keep in mind as you do your work as not just a designer but as a founder.

And the key piece here is actually knowing what problem you're actually solving, just being very crystal clear.

And this is sort of, if I'm starting to sound like a, sort of, if I'm repeating myself, I mean that in a nutshell is I think what you're going to get over and over again at startup school Is that really how do how do we be as crisp as possible about here's the problem that we need to solve.

And this is sort of the core tenet of design thinking as well.

And so part of the problem with not knowing what your problem is and going back to lack of empathy and going back to you know basically form over function is that if you don't know who that user is what their problem is then you are in danger of creating something like this so if you you know basically each of these do sort of talk about a particular problem, you know, they refer to a particular problem that someone might have, but if you buy any of these products and you have that problem you're trying to solve, now you have 2 problems.

If anything, each 1 of these, you know, each 1 of these inventions were created mainly to serve the central problem of the inventor, of the inventor wanting something to solve.

Again, like, you know, just to give more examples, this is the opposite of empathy.

This is something, this is you putting novelty, putting, you know, one's own interest ahead of your users, of society, of, you know, the people around you.

And so at the end of the day, if there's no problem, then There's no solution.

It ends up being designed for its own sake.

And design for its own sake isn't design, it's art.

I love art, but that's not what we're here for, actually.

It's founders creating things that people don't actually need.

We make stuff that we think we need and then actually it's not, you know, it's not better, it's not novel, it's not something that other people actually want and that's a problem.

It's no mistake that some of the most obvious examples of companies that are design-driven, they're actually hardware companies.

There are as many kinds of design as types of things that humans need.

Architecture is absolutely a form of design.

You know, communication design, being able to communicate something using data and iconography or maps or charts.

Furniture design, you know, a piece of furniture easily has all the same mechanisms as anything else that a human being might use.

Landscape design, how does someone go into a place, how do they use it, Where do they know where to go?

So how does this make me feel when this arrives at my doorstep if this is a gift?

And what is the form and function of each piece of this physical object, or transportation design.

Like a car is 1 of the most evocative things.

But for the people in this room, I think that these are probably the ones that are most relevant to you and we're gonna spend a bunch of time talking about that.

And so this is again an extreme oversimplification but the way I would break it down in terms of design for startups really is product design.

Interaction design, so how do we actually do that?

How do I actually create wireframes, create the flows, create the intermediate step between that and the pixel perfect, ready to go, ready to implement thing.

And the visual design actually really is about that last mile.

And, you know, part of the reason why we divide this up this way, you know, To be frank, the ideal is that you have a co-founder on your team who's able to do all of these.

And then if they can code, that's amazing.

If they can do business too, that's incredible, right?

And I'm sure there are a few unicorns in this room, as a matter of fact.

And certainly quite a few watching online.

So shout out to the unicorns in the room.

And so part of it is you will find very specific people who have experience and who are extremely good, usually at 1 of these things.

If you can find someone who's good at a few of them, you're really, really blessed.

And man, if you can find someone who can do all of those things, immediately make them a co-founder, but only if you've known them for a while.

So going back to the overall product process, I mean, there is sort of a sequential aspect to it.

In each of these, it really is a little bit of a water flow sometimes.

You really can't start interaction design without actually capturing requirements.

And then finally, of course, engineering.

Ideally, you're kind of in conversation all the way through, but engineering and actually implementation, often that is something that happens afterwards.

So let's dig in a little bit to product design.

And So what's funny is I'm cheating a little bit here.

So I am actually mashing product management into this.

But to me, I actually just can't do product without, I can't do the design process without doing this part.

And so it really is thinking about the business case.

What are all the possible ways to solve the problem?

And what's the actual priority for each of those parts?

I know this isn't exactly formally a part of design, I just don't know how you could possibly do design without doing this part too.

And you know, every single 1 of these things has a fairly specific deliverable.

And so in this case, you know, the deliverable here is a PRD, a product requirement document, or you know, you can also call it a spec.

And so the interesting thing is there's not really 1 way to do product design.

Just as you could call this product management.

And then some organizations sort of de-emphasize some of this stuff and they just call it project management.

But the project manager still actually has to think through all of these things.

So the labels matter less, the fact that you do them matters a lot more.

And so this is actually the actual content of my YC application from basically January of 2008, or I think it was February.

And so everything that, you know, you really do sort of have to start with a problem statement.

It's, you know, what we were trying to solve is this ability to post online.

We looked at online services at the time.

Blog platforms had been out for a while, but they're pretty stale actually.

And then we looked at email as sort of this universal way to get content online.

And we thought this is a novel, different way to actually do it.

And so 1 of the most valuable things that you can do once you have that problem statement is actually to think through who are these very, very specific people who have this problem.

And so I'm going to use Posterous as an example to walk you through personas.

And so personas are just 1 tool for designers or product people to think through who are these very very specific people and it's just a tool you know there's not really 1 way to do this either but this is what we did you know we thought about our users really as 3 different types David the dad is sort of 1 of them.

You know, we kind of want to identify them as specific human beings.

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Design for Startups by Garry Tan (Part 1)