- The speaker provides advice on finding and choosing designers for startups.
- They suggest that at the pre-seed, seed, and pre-A stages, a co-founder is necessary, along with some consulting. By Series A, the first hire should be considered.
- Various websites, such as Dribbble, LinkedIn, Behance, and AIGA, can be used to find designers.
- Design schools like CMU-HCI, NYU, MIT, RISD, Parsons, and Stanford are recommended for hiring full-time or contract designers.
- Individual consultants can be found through networking and job boards like 99designs and Fiverr.
- Design firms can be difficult to find, but directories and referrals can help.
- Play-Doh Design, a company that recently graduated from YC, is recommended.
- Attracting designers to startups can be done through content marketing and social media.
- When interviewing designers, phone screens and in-person interviews should focus on communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and alignment with the founder's vision.
- Qualities to look for in designers include empathy, listening skills, and a user-centric approach.
- It is recommended to seek the input of a design leader or trusted friend when making final hiring decisions.

- The speaker recommends a list of books and links for becoming a good designer.
- The importance of an About Us page for startups is discussed.
- Tips for asking questions to understand users better are given.
- The speaker admits to not using prototyping much but acknowledges its value.
- The difficulty of finding a solution when the problem is known is discussed.
- The advantages of maintaining distance from users and the public are mentioned.
- Controversy can be powerful for certain companies.

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/41

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

Now's the super practical section of how to find and choose designers.

I'm happy to answer questions afterwards about it.

But, you know, the basic questions we always get asked is, you know, well, when and how?

The reality of it is there are so many ways to answer this, but this is just super boilerplate advice.

It's that pre-seed, seed, and probably pre-A, you still need a co-founder probably to do it, and then you could probably get by with a little bit of consulting.

By series A, You should probably, unless you truly have nothing that has a user-facing element, which is rare.

I mean, even developer APIs today, I would argue that you need a developer API designer who sort of runs through this whole process, but just for a developer experience.

That's make or break for you know even highly technical products.

You know that's when you should really start thinking about your first hire and then you know buy Series B.

What you really should think about is how do you hire a team?

A lot of people reach Series B and they're actually, you know, they're still at the first hire stage and the difficult part is if you actually have 10, 15 engineers and you're trying to hire that first designer and you don't have, you're not gonna hire a team, that's actually like a little bit of a nightmare for a designer to work at, which makes sense actually.

To be the only person on that whole team in charge of design and you versus 20 engineers is a very scary thing for a designer.

So this might be a little outdated, but this is sort of what I've always used in the past.

They're just websites online to sort of find designers.

So Dribbble is this incredible portfolio.

Look for companies in your space that have done design very, very well, and you can just very point blank start reaching out to them.

Behance, Crop, I mean all of these are websites that you should just go check out.

AIGA even has a little database of member designers on there.

When I'm thinking about hiring people directly for a full-time role or even for contract, there are a bunch of schools that have worked well for me.

CMU-HCI, NYU, MIT, RISD, Parsons, Stanford.

And frankly, there are so many incredibly good designers who have never been to a design school.

In terms of finding consultants, there's really 2 paths here.

So you know, it turns out there are a lot of people who you can kind of use this as a way to recruit them.

So Some of the best folks, they actually really like to work on a lot of different projects all of the time.

And there's actually a very large pool of individuals who are basically individual consultants.

And they're hard to get, and you might have to email a lot of them, but you can reach out, you can hire them as consultants, and if there's a really good fit, that could be a way to get to know them to come on board.

A really cool trick that I've heard for people who just need low-cost, like logo design, visual design, There's actually an incredible number of people out there in the world who are not first world designers.

And they're totally available on 99designs, Fiverr, I think this is not, you know, there are probably a bunch of other places like that.

The trick that I've heard that you could use is you can actually take your job, put it on 1 of these job boards and then don't just do it for 1, don't just hire 1 job, you could hire 20 jobs and then look at the output of those 20 different people and then personally befriend the person who does some of the best work.

And you'll find people all around the world, Philippines, Thailand, Eastern Europe, everywhere, I mean Africa, Asia, Europe, even in the United States people who are incredibly talented who actually, but they're just starting out in their careers or they don't know how to actually get great jobs and you could be that way that they learn about startups.

The difficulty with design firms is you kind of have to find 1 that is willing to work with startups and many of them, the bread and butter for the best design firms truly is working with Fortune 500 companies for outrageous sums of money.

So it can be very difficult to find ones that will work with startups.

You know, Vigette Labs is the 1 out of DC that I use the most but there are giant directories and frankly referrals are sort of your best bet.

And then I want to call out a company that just graduated from YC a few weeks ago called Play-Doh Design.

I think that they do a very, very amazing job.

So how do you actually attract a designer to work at a startup?

And you know really sort of the ideal at Series A or even where you're at right now is like if you are a truly a consumer focused company you kind of need a co-founder on there who can actually run this for you.

But later on, especially, you know, and if you're a 3 or 4 person team, you can usually find 1, ideally, unicorn to come join and give them a much more senior role.

But once you do have a larger team of 5 to 10 engineers, it gets really scary for a designer who's used to working with teams, working for a design firm or working at Facebook or 1 of the large tech companies.

They're used to sitting with other people who spend all of their time thinking about all of the things that we were just talking about with wireframes and users and personas.

And so it can be incredibly scary for those designers to come and work for you much later stage if you don't plan to hire a team that is diversified, that it just gives them a really good day to day.

And then at the end of the day, being able to be very crisp about what those roles are, that's the other part of hiring a team that's incredibly important.

It's going to be very, very hard to find a unicorn, but often you can break it down by the exact things that I mentioned.

They're incredibly good PMs who have great resumes, who have great backgrounds, who, you know, that's 1 coherent role.

Interaction designers, sometimes they can't make things that are pretty, but they are incredibly empathetic.

They're able to think through, you know, they're great writers, they're incredible communicators, and that's what you would look for in that role.

And finally, visual design, that's probably the part that is, you know, it's often stands on its own, it doesn't have to, and so it's just a different skill set.

And then really quickly, I mean it's actually very effective for start-ups who want to hire design teams to actually write about it.

And, you know, if you're all engineers but you're already thinking about this and talking through a lot of the terms that I was talking about, well, that's a culture fit for designers because, you know, that's basically what they want.

They want executives or workplaces or founders who understand and speak their language.

And so that's why I encourage you guys to be very open with do-it-yourself, to do it, to understand these things, because even if you don't do it down the road, you're actually far better at evaluating, managing, and working closely with people who do and who are very good at it.

How do you actually interview these designers?

At the end of the day, it's actually, no matter how beautiful a portfolio is, it's just so hard to work with people who have sort of their own vision that cannot communicate.

And so the phone screen is really all about great communication skills.

I think that that's incredibly essential.

And then when they actually come and meet you and the team, you know, actually have them walk through the hard decisions, the trade-offs.

Like we spend a lot of time about product design.

You want to see exactly that kind of thought about personas, about prioritization.

Because there always are in every type of product you could design.

And finally, I recommend whichever founder has been doing the design or the product, you've already been solving problems that you might have.

So the key thing there is if you've already spent your hundred to thousand hours thinking about a given problem, it's the best for you to actually spend time walking through a candidate over and over again, and just to make sure that you think through these things the same way that they do.

So, you can read this later, but you know, it's pretty straightforward.

You don't want people who are complainers.

You know, you want someone who's empathetic and listens to your needs.

It's usually bad for someone to talk about themselves a lot.

And so, you know, going back to the empathy point, that's incredibly important.

You know, the funniest thing that I like to use is when someone's, when I ask them a design question, if they just go to the whiteboard and just start drawing, they fail.

Because, wait, why didn't you ask about the users?

And so, you know, these are just guidelines.

You know, I, if you don't have a really good design leader on your team, I highly recommend that you go to a friend or someone who you do respect who can do this stuff to just be like sort of a final check before you do hire someone.

So, you know, these are a bunch of books that I sort of refer to throughout the talk.

This is far from comprehensive, but you know if you bought every single 1 of these books and read it front to back, you would be a pretty good designer.

I hear a bunch of Links that you should probably read afterwards too.

Taste for Makers is 1 of these PG essays that I think not a lot of people talk about, but it's incredibly timeless, so I highly recommend that.

And then these are links that are very specific about how do you write a PRD?

And then these other websites we just really, really like because there's so much there.

So thank you so much for spending, making it all the way to the end of this talk.

We made it through a hundred and 4 slides, so thank you for sitting with me.

I will leave you with just 1 final thought, and it's truly that, you know, what we're talking about with a startup, design is only 1 leg of this three-legged stool, and your startup, your startup success truly lies at the intersection of all of these things.

How important is it for early stage companies to incorporate about us or our story section in early concept clients?

So the question is, how important is an about us page?

I mean, you know, this isn't necessarily a design thing.

I actually really think it's important in that going back to our, you know, moment where we were talking about how alone we are in this, you know, sort of product, barren product landscape.

And the About Us page is the 1 place where you as founders can tell your story.

Like everyone is spending so much time trying to be incredibly, I mean they're trying to imitate Microsoft.

You should embrace how powerful it is that you're trying to do this thing.

And being a real human being, answering emails and putting your name on the website, I mean, I would argue that that's why, 1 of the big reasons why coinbase was so successful.

I mean Brian Armstrong very early on He was probably the only person in the whole bitcoin world who is willing to put their name You know the address like I mean just basic things to make it an incredibly real thing.

So I think about us is very important for your relationship with your customers, and that's not a design thing.

So later on in the talk, you were talking about understanding your users.

And early, you mentioned transport, like global transport, which had, I think, packetized transport decades before the TCP IP stack.

And engine efficiency is like 50%, while your car was only at 30% how do you ask questions that really let you accurately see your user?

Because a lot of times you know you might be doing a user interview and you feel like they're not really giving you the whole story.

Yeah so I guess the question is how do you actually, well, how do you properly ask questions to sort of get the story of your user?

You know, the hard part here is there's not really 1 way to do it.

I think it really does come back to being a good interviewer and thinking through, I mean, asking open-ended questions is actually a really good way to do it.

It's just, you know, tell me about your day.

And like, oh, you know, tell me, you can even seize on emotion because the best problems to solve are actually incredibly emotional ones.

Like those are a lot of very, very strong, you know, going back to, you know, I think Jeff might have taught me this actually, just purely that, you know, you really want to look for things that are hair on fire problems, things that actually get people upset.

Emotion can be an incredibly powerful and good thing.

So open-ended questions and look for emotion.

Hi, my name is Lawrence from Intersect and would you talk a bit about prototyping and maybe bonus question if you have, you know the problem but haven't found a solution in a long time and you have chicken and egg, how would you go about finding a solution?

Yeah, so first question is about prototyping.

And if you have something important about that, say.

I have not done a lot of prototyping, simply because I'm always in such a rush to get the code done that the second I know what I wanna build, I just build it, and then I ship it, and then I'll just do it live.

And so I haven't personally gotten a lot of use out of prototype prototyping, but I know that it's an incredibly valuable tool And that's just a weird weird 1 for me because I'm just always I would rather just ship the thing and have it be out there Yeah and then sorry the second question.

If you know the problem of the user, but you haven't found the solution, try to get an X maybe, how would you go about?

So the question is, if you know a problem, but you haven't found the solution.

The hard part there is like, it's not totally clear to me that design can solve it.

What you described maybe is either a business problem or a technology problem.

You know, it's sometimes there's a design problem if there's, you know, I don't know.

I mean, the hard part is these things are so squishy, right?

Like if it's a business problem, then you don't have distribution, people don't know they have the problem, you can't get in front of them.

Or if it's a technology problem, then it's like, I mean, Yeah, how do we actually build the thing?

And if we're not capable of doing it, then design can't solve it, right?

You don't know how to build to solve that problem.

How about you just keep building things until you get it right?

Are there industries where you think it's like keeping that distance between you and your users and you and the public is appropriate or it's like pretty hard to keep a spot or what?

The question is are there places where you should maintain your distance?

I mean It was a really big advantage for them to you know be out in the open I could imagine being if it's a Incredibly competitive, and if you want to be secretive there are cases where you don't want to be that open and that does happen especially for You know something that's easily copied or something that is incredibly enterprise focused, so it's not important for a lot of people to know about it.

Those are the main scenarios where I think secrecy turns out to be very important, but most people tend to err on the side of more secrecy than less.

The standard YC-ism around this that I very much believe is whenever you're creating something new you're not competing against all of the other people out there.

You're competing against like the back button.

And so to the extent that that's true, being as open as possible, getting as many people to know about you as possible, and being a human being and having that interplay, that's really good.

Do you think Hockford is a reason to do that?

I mean, it depends on the type of controversy.

1 of the funniest examples of me giving very bad advice and me being very relieved that the founder did not take that advice was a company called Soylent.

They were working on something totally different in networking equipment and I sat down with them in this room for office hours and they said, great news, we have this incredible, we have all of these orders, people love this thing, oh by the way we're going to stick with the name Soylent.

And I said, please, please don't call it that, do you know what that means?

And it turns out that the entire reason why they were able to get probably a billion dollars worth of earned free advertising, the reason why they have an incredibly powerful business today is purely because they found exactly the right kind of controversy.

90 percent of people who love food hear about it and say, this is terrible, I hate it.

In fact, they hate it so much they're at dinner and they're telling everyone they know about it.

And then 10% of people hear about it and they're like, oh my God, I need that now.

So There are cases where controversy can be incredibly powerful.


Speaker 0: Now's the super practical section of how to find and choose designers. We can get through this really quickly. I'm happy to answer questions afterwards about it. But, you know, the basic questions we always get asked is, you know, well, when and how? The reality of it is there are so many ways to answer this, but this is just super boilerplate advice.

It's that pre-seed, seed, and probably pre-A, you still need a co-founder probably to do it, and then you could probably get by with a little bit of consulting. By series A, You should probably, unless you truly have nothing that has a user-facing element, which is rare. I mean, even developer APIs today, I would argue that you need a developer API designer who sort of runs through this whole process, but just for a developer experience. It's incredibly valuable. That's make or break for you know even highly technical products.

You know that's when you should really start thinking about your first hire and then you know buy Series B. What you really should think about is how do you hire a team? A lot of people reach Series B and they're actually, you know, they're still at the first hire stage and the difficult part is if you actually have 10, 15 engineers and you're trying to hire that first designer and you don't have, you're not gonna hire a team, that's actually like a little bit of a nightmare for a designer to work at, which makes sense actually. To be the only person on that whole team in charge of design and you versus 20 engineers is a very scary thing for a designer. So this might be a little outdated, but this is sort of what I've always used in the past.

They're just websites online to sort of find designers. So Dribbble is this incredible portfolio. You can get a lot out of LinkedIn. Look for companies in your space that have done design very, very well, and you can just very point blank start reaching out to them. Behance, Crop, I mean all of these are websites that you should just go check out.

AIGA even has a little database of member designers on there. When I'm thinking about hiring people directly for a full-time role or even for contract, there are a bunch of schools that have worked well for me. CMU-HCI, NYU, MIT, RISD, Parsons, Stanford. This is really not a comprehensive list. And frankly, there are so many incredibly good designers who have never been to a design school.

In terms of finding consultants, there's really 2 paths here. 1 is to go ahead and find an individual. So you know, it turns out there are a lot of people who you can kind of use this as a way to recruit them. So Some of the best folks, they actually really like to work on a lot of different projects all of the time. And there's actually a very large pool of individuals who are basically individual consultants.

And they're hard to get, and you might have to email a lot of them, but you can reach out, you can hire them as consultants, and if there's a really good fit, that could be a way to get to know them to come on board. A really cool trick that I've heard for people who just need low-cost, like logo design, visual design, There's actually an incredible number of people out there in the world who are not first world designers. And they're totally available on 99designs, Fiverr, I think this is not, you know, there are probably a bunch of other places like that. The trick that I've heard that you could use is you can actually take your job, put it on 1 of these job boards and then don't just do it for 1, don't just hire 1 job, you could hire 20 jobs and then look at the output of those 20 different people and then personally befriend the person who does some of the best work. And you'll find people all around the world, Philippines, Thailand, Eastern Europe, everywhere, I mean Africa, Asia, Europe, even in the United States people who are incredibly talented who actually, but they're just starting out in their careers or they don't know how to actually get great jobs and you could be that way that they learn about startups.

Design firms, there are just so many. The difficulty with design firms is you kind of have to find 1 that is willing to work with startups and many of them, the bread and butter for the best design firms truly is working with Fortune 500 companies for outrageous sums of money. So it can be very difficult to find ones that will work with startups. You know, Vigette Labs is the 1 out of DC that I use the most but there are giant directories and frankly referrals are sort of your best bet. And then I want to call out a company that just graduated from YC a few weeks ago called Play-Doh Design.

Their URL is useplaydoh.com. You should definitely reach out to them. I think that they do a very, very amazing job. So how do you actually attract a designer to work at a startup? And you know really sort of the ideal at Series A or even where you're at right now is like if you are a truly a consumer focused company you kind of need a co-founder on there who can actually run this for you.

But later on, especially, you know, and if you're a 3 or 4 person team, you can usually find 1, ideally, unicorn to come join and give them a much more senior role. That'll be fairly important at Series A. But once you do have a larger team of 5 to 10 engineers, it gets really scary for a designer who's used to working with teams, working for a design firm or working at Facebook or 1 of the large tech companies. They're used to sitting with other people who spend all of their time thinking about all of the things that we were just talking about with wireframes and users and personas. And so it can be incredibly scary for those designers to come and work for you much later stage if you don't plan to hire a team that is diversified, that it just gives them a really good day to day.

And then at the end of the day, being able to be very crisp about what those roles are, that's the other part of hiring a team that's incredibly important. It's going to be very, very hard to find a unicorn, but often you can break it down by the exact things that I mentioned. They're incredibly good PMs who have great resumes, who have great backgrounds, who, you know, that's 1 coherent role. Interaction designers, sometimes they can't make things that are pretty, but they are incredibly empathetic. They're able to think through, you know, they're great writers, they're incredible communicators, and that's what you would look for in that role.

And finally, visual design, that's probably the part that is, you know, it's often stands on its own, it doesn't have to, and so it's just a different skill set. And then really quickly, I mean it's actually very effective for start-ups who want to hire design teams to actually write about it. Content marketing works extremely well. Social media works incredibly well. And, you know, if you're all engineers but you're already thinking about this and talking through a lot of the terms that I was talking about, well, that's a culture fit for designers because, you know, that's basically what they want.

They want executives or workplaces or founders who understand and speak their language. And so that's why I encourage you guys to be very open with do-it-yourself, to do it, to understand these things, because even if you don't do it down the road, you're actually far better at evaluating, managing, and working closely with people who do and who are very good at it. How do you actually interview these designers? Well this is typically what I recommend. Do a quick phone screen.

At the end of the day, it's actually, no matter how beautiful a portfolio is, it's just so hard to work with people who have sort of their own vision that cannot communicate. And so the phone screen is really all about great communication skills. I think that that's incredibly essential. And then when they actually come and meet you and the team, you know, actually have them walk through the hard decisions, the trade-offs. Like we spend a lot of time about product design.

You want to see exactly that kind of thought about personas, about prioritization. What are the difficult trade-offs? Because there always are in every type of product you could design. And finally, I recommend whichever founder has been doing the design or the product, you've already been solving problems that you might have. So the key thing there is if you've already spent your hundred to thousand hours thinking about a given problem, it's the best for you to actually spend time walking through a candidate over and over again, and just to make sure that you think through these things the same way that they do.

So, you can read this later, but you know, it's pretty straightforward. You know, think about design. You don't want people who are complainers. That actually is pretty common. You know, you want someone who's empathetic and listens to your needs.

It's usually bad for someone to talk about themselves a lot. And so, you know, going back to the empathy point, that's incredibly important. You know, the funniest thing that I like to use is when someone's, when I ask them a design question, if they just go to the whiteboard and just start drawing, they fail. Because, wait, why didn't you ask about the users? Who's it for?

What's the problem? And so, you know, these are just guidelines. There's so many ways to interview. You know, I, if you don't have a really good design leader on your team, I highly recommend that you go to a friend or someone who you do respect who can do this stuff to just be like sort of a final check before you do hire someone. So, you know, these are a bunch of books that I sort of refer to throughout the talk.

This is just a starting point. This is far from comprehensive, but you know if you bought every single 1 of these books and read it front to back, you would be a pretty good designer. Maybe. I hear a bunch of Links that you should probably read afterwards too. Taste for Makers is 1 of these PG essays that I think not a lot of people talk about, but it's incredibly timeless, so I highly recommend that.

And then these are links that are very specific about how do you write a PRD? What's your first wireframe? And then these other websites we just really, really like because there's so much there. This field is incredibly deep. So thank you so much for spending, making it all the way to the end of this talk.

It's an hour and a half, 90 minutes. We made it through a hundred and 4 slides, so thank you for sitting with me. I will leave you with just 1 final thought, and it's truly that, you know, what we're talking about with a startup, design is only 1 leg of this three-legged stool, and your startup, your startup success truly lies at the intersection of all of these things. So thank you so much. Thank you for spending time with me.

I know that was a lot.

Speaker 1: How important is it for early stage companies to incorporate about us or our story section in early concept clients?

Speaker 0: So the question is, how important is an about us page? I mean, you know, this isn't necessarily a design thing. I actually really think it's important in that going back to our, you know, moment where we were talking about how alone we are in this, you know, sort of product, barren product landscape. You know, You just feel so alone. And the About Us page is the 1 place where you as founders can tell your story.

Like everyone is spending so much time trying to be incredibly, I mean they're trying to imitate Microsoft. They're trying to be Google, right? You should embrace how powerful it is that you're trying to do this thing. And being a real human being, answering emails and putting your name on the website, I mean, I would argue that that's why, 1 of the big reasons why coinbase was so successful. I mean Brian Armstrong very early on He was probably the only person in the whole bitcoin world who is willing to put their name You know the address like I mean just basic things to make it an incredibly real thing.

So I think about us is very important for your relationship with your customers, and that's not a design thing. Yes?

Speaker 1: So later on in the talk, you were talking about understanding your users. And early, you mentioned transport, like global transport, which had, I think, packetized transport decades before the TCP IP stack. And engine efficiency is like 50%, while your car was only at 30% how do you ask questions that really let you accurately see your user? Because a lot of times you know you might be doing a user interview and you feel like they're not really giving you the whole story.

Speaker 0: Yeah so I guess the question is how do you actually, well, how do you properly ask questions to sort of get the story of your user? You know, the hard part here is there's not really 1 way to do it. I think it really does come back to being a good interviewer and thinking through, I mean, asking open-ended questions is actually a really good way to do it. It's just, you know, tell me about your day. And like, oh, you know, tell me, you can even seize on emotion because the best problems to solve are actually incredibly emotional ones.

It's like, I get frustrated when blah. Or I get mad when blah. Right? Like those are a lot of very, very strong, you know, going back to, you know, I think Jeff might have taught me this actually, just purely that, you know, you really want to look for things that are hair on fire problems, things that actually get people upset. Emotion can be an incredibly powerful and good thing.

So open-ended questions and look for emotion. Yes.

Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Lawrence from Intersect and would you talk a bit about prototyping and maybe bonus question if you have, you know the problem but haven't found a solution in a long time and you have chicken and egg, how would you go about finding a solution?

Speaker 0: Yeah, so first question is about prototyping.

Speaker 2: And if you have something important about that, say.

Speaker 0: You know, I have a confession to make. I have not done a lot of prototyping, simply because I'm always in such a rush to get the code done that the second I know what I wanna build, I just build it, and then I ship it, and then I'll just do it live. And so I haven't personally gotten a lot of use out of prototype prototyping, but I know that it's an incredibly valuable tool And that's just a weird weird 1 for me because I'm just always I would rather just ship the thing and have it be out there Yeah and then sorry the second question.

Speaker 2: If you know the problem of the user, but you haven't found the solution, try to get an X maybe, how would you go about?

Speaker 0: So the question is, if you know a problem, but you haven't found the solution. The hard part there is like, it's not totally clear to me that design can solve it. What you described maybe is either a business problem or a technology problem. You know, it's sometimes there's a design problem if there's, you know, I don't know. I mean, the hard part is these things are so squishy, right?

Like if it's a business problem, then you don't have distribution, people don't know they have the problem, you can't get in front of them. Or if it's a technology problem, then it's like, I mean, Yeah, how do we actually build the thing? And if we're not capable of doing it, then design can't solve it, right? You don't know how to build to solve that problem. Okay, Gary.

Yes.

Speaker 2: How about... How about you just keep building things until you get it right?

Speaker 0: Do what Jeff said. Over here, yes please.

Speaker 3: Yeah, you talked about point bases. Are there industries where you think it's like keeping that distance between you and your users and you and the public is appropriate or it's like pretty hard to keep a spot or what?

Speaker 0: The question is are there places where you should maintain your distance? I can't think of any at the moment. There probably are. I mean It was a really big advantage for them to you know be out in the open I could imagine being if it's a Incredibly competitive, and if you want to be secretive there are cases where you don't want to be that open and that does happen especially for You know something that's easily copied or something that is incredibly enterprise focused, so it's not important for a lot of people to know about it. Those are the main scenarios where I think secrecy turns out to be very important, but most people tend to err on the side of more secrecy than less.

The standard YC-ism around this that I very much believe is whenever you're creating something new you're not competing against all of the other people out there. You're only competing against obscurity. You're competing against like the back button. And so to the extent that that's true, being as open as possible, getting as many people to know about you as possible, and being a human being and having that interplay, that's really good.

Speaker 4: Do you think Hockford is a reason to do that?

Speaker 0: Question is controversy. I mean, it depends on the type of controversy. 1 of the funniest examples of me giving very bad advice and me being very relieved that the founder did not take that advice was a company called Soylent. So they came in through YC. They were working on something totally different in networking equipment and I sat down with them in this room for office hours and they said, great news, we have this incredible, we have all of these orders, people love this thing, oh by the way we're going to stick with the name Soylent.

And I said, please, please don't call it that, do you know what that means? Haven't you seen the movie? And it turns out that the entire reason why they were able to get probably a billion dollars worth of earned free advertising, the reason why they have an incredibly powerful business today is purely because they found exactly the right kind of controversy. 90 percent of people who love food hear about it and say, this is terrible, I hate it. In fact, they hate it so much they're at dinner and they're telling everyone they know about it.

And then 10% of people hear about it and they're like, oh my God, I need that now. So There are cases where controversy can be incredibly powerful.

Speaker 1: That's so, stop it there, sorry.

Speaker 0: Thank you

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Design for Startups by Garry Tan (Part 2)