- Kevin Hale and Kasser, partners at Y Combinator, discuss the different types of office hours at YC.
- They mention group office hours, individual office hours, investor office hours, and company office hours.
- They emphasize the importance of being concise and clear during office hours.
- They advise startups to know their numbers, come with a specific problem in mind, and show progress since the last office hours.
- They then have an office hour session with a startup called Zilify, which profiles small and medium-sized companies to attract talent.
- Zilify is more focused on onboarding companies than attracting candidates.
- They have 12 companies on the site but have not placed any students yet.
- The biggest challenge for Zilify in the next 3 months is getting students to sign up and engage with the platform.

- The focus is on getting a small number of high-quality applicants
- Currently targeting personal networks and attending career events to find students
- The first 12 companies were obtained through personal networks and client recommendations
- Need to find a clear differentiator and communicate value proposition to students
- Concerns about the authenticity of company culture and the need to attract cool companies
- Education is a key challenge in getting students interested in non-traditional job opportunities
- Need to ensure that the companies on the platform are not "lame" and have quality
- Currently using a time-intensive process to assess companies and their culture
- Need to identify metrics for assessing companies and communicate reasons for rejection
- Limited time for individual office hours, but would like to continue the conversation
- The site needs to effectively communicate the value proposition to companies and students
- Next startup is Vuzi, a platform for making the physical world easier to understand for retailers.

- The company installs sensors in retailers' stores to track customer movement and provide statistics.
- They use Wi-Fi sensors and footfall counters to detect customers.
- The company's product is targeted towards mid to large size businesses in the retail industry.
- The retailers are interested in knowing the percentage of visitors who were outside and then entered the store, as well as the amount of time customers spend inside.
- The company has four paid pilot customers and is focused on sales and account management.
- The challenge is that some retailers already have analytics in place or lack the resources to analyze the data.
- The company's pricing model is based on the size of the location.
- The pilots are still in progress, and the company aims to provide clear ROI to convince retailers to continue using their product.

- The speaker discusses a company called ScreenPush, which is a screenshot collaboration tool.
- The speaker criticizes the website's lack of clarity in explaining what the company does.
- The speaker goes through the sign-up flow of the product and provides feedback on its usability.
- The speaker mentions that the website design is visually appealing and compliments the copywriting.
- The speaker encounters difficulties in understanding the purpose of certain features and navigating the sign-up process.
- The speaker concludes by mentioning the need for clearer communication and providing clues for users to understand the product's functionality.

- The speaker discusses the process of checking and improving an app.
- They emphasize the importance of getting feedback from people who are not familiar with the product.
- They highlight the need to address fundamental problems and make improvements in every aspect of the app.
- The speaker concludes by thanking the audience and announcing a break.

- Kevin Hale and Kasser from Y Combinator discuss different types of office hours at YC, emphasizing the importance of being concise and clear.
- They have an office hour session with Zilify, a startup focused on onboarding companies and attracting talent.
- Zilify's biggest challenge is getting students to sign up and engage with the platform.
- They are currently targeting personal networks and attending career events to find students.
- Zilify needs to find a clear differentiator and communicate their value proposition to students.
- Education is a challenge in getting students interested in non-traditional job opportunities.
- They also discuss Vuzi, a platform for making the physical world easier to understand for retailers.
- Vuzi installs sensors in retailers' stores to track customer movement and provide statistics.
- The challenge is convincing retailers to continue using their product and providing clear ROI.
- They also mention ScreenPush, a screenshot collaboration tool, and discuss the need for clearer communication and usability improvements.
- The importance of getting feedback and making improvements in every aspect of an app is highlighted.

Talk at Startup School Europe 2014 at The Brewery in London

Co-founded a company called Wufoo, online forum builder.

Ran that company for about 5 years, and I was acquired by SurveyMonkey back in 2011.

My background is in product development, user experience design, and customer support.

Quick history is I went through YC in winter 11.

And Talkman lets consumers send messages to businesses and vice versa.

We were acquired by Google, coincidentally, on the exact same day as Wufoo.

So that's an interesting fact for me and Kevin.

My experience is actually similar to Kevin's.

I would say product design is kind of what I'm good at.

So office hours are a big part of what YC is.

And there are kind of 4 different types of office hours.

There are group office hours in the sense that when you're a startup, you actually are sub broken into many groups at YC.

And Kevin and I have group office hours with small groups every Tuesday, and this is the case with all the partners.

The group office hours serve as a way to see what you as a startup are doing versus the other startups in terms of the tempo as you're going through YC, what you should be working on, what problems you're facing, and you really realize, I think, as a founder in group office hours, that your problems are actually not just unique to you.

They're actually very similar to other companies.

That's what we're gonna try to emulate here.

It's individual partners sitting down with companies.

We do a lot of individual office hours every week, hundreds of them.

That is really the heart of office hours and when people refer to office hours, that's usually what they're talking about.

There's 2 other types of office hours worth mentioning.

So Alfred and I actually did office hours when we were going through Talkman.

So investors come to YC, we pair them up and literally go through what the company is in short meetings.

And then there are what we call company office hours.

And Very tactical things like how to you know problems with the App Store or AWS or whatever it might be Rackspace Heroku, etc So today we're gonna do individual office hours give you guys a little bit of a peek of you know, what happens at YC

So these are obviously gonna be a little bit different than actual office hours

ones that we do at YC, they tend to be a lot longer.

We only have 10 minutes with these startups.

And we usually have a ton of context because we've been working with these startups over time.

So a lot of people might think that office hours, like the way you've probably seen them before, are like pitches, but that is not actually the way we run them.

We already have a lot of understanding of what the startups working on and so usually our office hours are very tactical, very focused on very solving very specific problems with them and so we might not get into that today but letting you know that's how things are gonna be a little bit different.

don't have 800 people watching, so that changes the dynamic a little bit.

The other thing is, I want to talk a little bit about, if you get a chance to do office hours either with YC Partners or other notable investors, There's some things that I would highly recommend to you, so both for the startups that we're about to meet with, but also for you guys out there, if you go talk to us later today or with other investors down in the future.

Because office hours tends to not be like pitches, which is where I would recommend you focus on being concise and clear, in regular office hours where you're having a relationship with an investor, what we want to know is very quickly to get to the problem at hand.

We're talking with a startup and they have, We ask questions about retention, their users, and all this stuff.

And they just don't know where they stand.

And it makes it very difficult for us to diagnose their problems.

The other thing is, come to do office hours with a specific problem in mind.

Investors don't really like sitting around and shooting the shit, or at least not the good ones.

So we'd like to be able to say that you have something specific, some problem that you want identified or solved, and then we'll brainstorm with you during that, or we might have a connection that might be able to help solve that problem for you.

And the last thing is, if you're having an office hours with someone and it feels like deja vu from the last time you talked to them, or you're repeating the same numbers over again, still working on the exact same problems, know that that is a problem to us.

So try to focus on when you have office hours, that you've done a lot of things based on the feedback from beforehand, or you have reasons why those things didn't work, and come to us with new sets of problems, rather than hashing over the same things over and over again.

This is really, this is really turning into a variety show.

You guys are gonna have to do some tricks afterwards.

We profile high-growth, exciting, small and medium-sized companies to leverage their company culture and employer brand as a competitive advantage.

So we build online profiles using photos of the office, videos of the employees and understanding what it's like to work there.

To help them attract great talent so talent can self-select.

I mean, they tend to be companies that don't have a lot of money to recruit.

So part of the problem was when we were at university, obviously, we're focused on the junior level market.

And the large corporates have such a big employee brand and suck in so many talented graduates.

But all of these small companies that need great people just don't have that employer brand to leverage.

So whilst they don't have a huge recruiting budget, they do have a great company culture and they are an attractive place to work.

But for the average job seeker coming out of university, they don't know these companies exist.

So I mean, if we did startups, 1 of the first things you would see when you see a job board is, do you actually, are there other companies on there that are relevant?

How do you get kind of these early adopters to actually sign up?

Because the first thing I'm looking at is I don't want to waste my time posting across 15 different sites.

So what's the incentive for that early stage company to actually?

So company culture is quite a popular topic at the moment with companies like Buffer showing how important it is to leverage their company culture.

So as an example, they profile their company culture quite widely themselves and on average get 400 applicants per job.

So the impact of showing your company culture is really valuable.

So actually when we go to chat to companies, that's something they understand quite well.

So from our perspective, it's just a great way for them to show that off.

So this is the way I sort of see it as a straight up sort of marketplace sort of play.

And whenever we're dealing with startups that are creating marketplaces, usually they have like 1 side of the marketplace like sort of solved, right with some kind of deep insight, or they have something they figured out so they can focus all their time on the other side of the marketplace.

So I think we're definitely more focused on the company side.

On the candidate side, you know, our strategies are just kind of with our networks, leveraging the student societies on campuses.

but which 1 do you feel like you have solved that you can focus on the other?

So actually onboarding companies has been a lot more simple than candidates.

The misconceptions of startups and SMEs with junior level talent is quite large in terms of what they think it would be like, what career progression is there.

So actually solving that side is quite difficult, but the companies really understand why they want to show off what they what it's there for and how they can attract talent.

The thing is, like for these types of businesses, like signing up companies, usually not that difficult because the companies don't pay you up

front for the first or second or third posting.

But if there isn't traction, I think that we

Okay, and because you convince them that we will help highlight your subculture.

And as a student, why would I use this job board and any other 1?

It seems somewhat more limiting than, and again, the same thing, right?

You don't want to post across multiple products.

Sure, so obviously if you're a university graduate looking at jobs, usually you just get a standard job advert and that doesn't tell you anything about what the company is like.

So you can get 2 very similar job adverts, but actually the companies behind them can be very, very different.

So what we do is we, as Lauren said, we go with photos of the office, kind of video interviews with the current employees, information about the company culture

How many companies do you guys have on the site?

Okay, and how many students have you guys actively placed?

We've had candidates go through to interview.

How long have you guys been working on this?

So we went live about a month ago with all our companies on there.

So we've just been driving candidates through.

you think's gonna be the biggest challenge in the next 3 months in terms of, I guess I'm a bit skeptical that students are just going to rush in to sign up for a job site.

And actually, we found quite high engagement.

So we had a candidate go through to interview and haven't had the results yet, but they looked through all the different jobs and there was 2 companies that they had a background user experience, they were quite interested in that area.

They compared both and came to us and said, I don't think I fit in this company, but I'm pretty sure I definitely fit in this 1.

So for us, that's a great way to understand how they're looking at it, the depth of information and actually to give some context.

I feel like right now your only job is not to onboard any more companies but you place some employees obviously.

The big thing is what are the students saying?

How many students have actually gone in and filled out applications?

So at the moment, a vanity metric would be how many people are coming to the site.

But as you said, our focus is just to get a very small handful of very high quality applicants and get them through.

I think right now you're just trying to like try to figure out what sticks, right?

So like how are you finding even your students?

How are they even knowing about you guys?

I feel like you want as many students to be aware of you.

So well yeah, I mean currently we're just targeting our personal networks.

So you know people are coming to us saying you know we need a job, what kind of companies have you got?

And then we can show them the profiles and they...

And we're at sort of careers events, so with the universities and the advantage as well is...

How did you guys get the first 12 companies?

So the, well, the most recent 2 we've got through client recommendations.

So they've said, you know, part of their value is in marketing their companies as well.

So raising their awareness, so getting their brand out there.

And that's what's made them recommend us on.

So that's part of what we're looking at as well.

And then just building in options to share the companies and show that sort of viral loop.

So beyond the original, you know, so let's go back to the actual applicants.

Beyond your friends and people at your uni, how are you going to kind of communicate this value proposition?

Because I think saying like, oh, there's great culture in these companies.

So that's more of our pitch towards companies.

have students that are just saying like, looking at the profiles and going like, yeah, this looks like good culture?

And how do you differentiate if you have 12 companies that are all saying that they have good culture.

So it varies, I guess, you're sort of looking for what makes people want to stay, what are the people like you're sitting next to.

So rather than just sort of company culture, which is the sort of overarching term we use, I guess a lot of what we're looking at is do you want to sit next to that person every day?

What context do you want to hang out with?

I'm worried about right now is you have done a really good job at building a company branding service, but that job marketplace

I think right now you've got to talk to more students about are the pages actually effective at making the companies feel good about themselves because they were like, well, we look pretty lame before these guys came and made us look good with these sort of landing pages, right?

So the punchline, I mean, you don't want these companies to be enthusiastic for you just because you came and shot their offices and you did individual sales.

And founders do sales, they're very effective.

But as you go to that next 100 or 200 companies, there isn't a, at least to me, and this is, you know, short, and this is strange, because usually we'd have talk for hours, It's strange to, it's hard for me to identify a very clear differentiator.

And I think what Kevin is saying is talking to students because I think if a lot of students are there, companies will show up.

So, so what, you know, what is the kind of value, what's going to drive students to

The other thing I'm worried about is like culture.

It's 1 of those things that people, once they sort of experience the company firsthand, it's gonna be authentic or not.

It doesn't matter what you sort of say on the website, once they go in there for the job interview, the students are gonna know whether that company is lame.

Like, maybe the focus is like, these companies are too lame to make this marketplace sort of take off.

And maybe the first companies that you really need to help build out this other side of the marketplace is you've got to figure out, how do I get the really coolest companies out there?

Whether it's offering them services for free, right, to highlight their stuff and tell their story, as early on as possible, because the really good companies figure out how to do it for themselves.

The companies that have a hard time talking about how we're cool, they were already going uphill to begin with.

Yeah, so in a normal office hours, we would say, let's talk next week after you talk to X number of students and we just validate that or even in those conversations with students you can figure out what is actually relevant to students.

I think in this audience and we assume that culture is like a super critical thing but maybe to students that just isn't.

And it's just a hypothesis that we have that isn't really validated by the market.

I think it's a good example of an idea, I think it sounds great, I mean, first time you look at it, you're like, oh, this actually makes a lot of sense.

But it's very intellectually seductive, and that's not a great thing, because you actually don't know, There isn't somebody who woke up today and said, you know what I'd really love?

A job site which highlights company culture so I can choose a company to work at.

And that's a big fear that you actually build something that people actually don't want, even though it sounds like something that people would want.

So changing gears just a little bit, have you considered like actually building this for just regular job seekers in general?

Well I mean our focus was the junior job market purely because obviously that's the kind of market that we knew and that's how we experienced it firsthand.

And my understanding of junior job market would be like, why not do hourly employees like the Taco Bells of the world?

Is there a reason that you specifically chose kind of startups other than maybe your own interest?

I mean, it's very much the kind of high growth, high performing SMEs, purely for the fact that, you know, graduates come out of university and they just have no idea what else is out there apart from the large professional services firms and they just don't seem to want to explore that.

I think a lot of it is down to sort of pressure from parents.

So we've done some research on that side.

Like if they're not actively searching out there, then the triggers for like getting them to come to your site are gonna be difficult.

You have to figure out like, how do I change the natural behavior

In the ideal scenario, like you already know there's this like latent demand and you're just gonna put a hose on it and extract that value.

And so I think what Kevin means there is, yeah, like maybe actually students only want to go to professional firms or do something else.

Maybe actually they don't want to work for startups and they don't want to work for high growth SMBs.

For example, we did an office crawl where we had a load of companies.

We took a group of students around to look inside.

We had a number of students who said, I was only applying to the structured graduate schemes

I only want to look in these small companies.

I didn't even know these existed in my own city.

So you're saying the biggest problem is education right now?

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Office Hours with Kevin & Qasar