 Hi everyone, I'm Kat Manyalek, and I'm a partner at Y Combinator. So at YC for those of you who are not super familiar with us, we fund startups. Since 2005 we've funded about 1,500 companies and 3,000 founders. And in the last batch about 40% of the companies that we funded were from outside the US. So I'm excited to meet a lot of you here today who are pitching your startups, and I hope you'll apply to YC. So these are some of our alumni. We have Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, Cruise. We've funded our companies now have a combined valuation of about 85 billion dollars. And actually Reddit is the reason why I am here today and why I am at Y Combinator. So to give you a little bit of background on myself, before YC I worked at Wired Magazine. And then after that I was a chief of staff to Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit. Reddit was in the very first batch of YC. It was the very first company to get acquired at Y Combinator. And essentially I learned, I worked with Alexis on his fund and nonprofit. And what we ended up doing is we helped a lot of his portfolio companies pitch and figure out how to build their communication strategy, how to launch. We worked with hundreds of companies and I learned not only about community building from Alexis and he's one of the best in the world. Reddit is now one of the top five sites in the U.S. But is also a great startup storyteller. So that's what I'm going to talk to you a little bit about today. I'm going to talk to you about how we advise our companies at YC to pitch, to pitch VCs, to pitch you know, press, to pitch people who get pitched tens, if not hundreds of times a day. How do you pitch a company in a way that is going to be viral, that is going to be compelling, that'll stick in investors' heads? So I just got out of reading, you know, YC gets about 7,000 applications per batch. So we read hundreds and hundreds of applications every six months. And so I'm just coming off of reading a lot of pitches. So this is all very fresh. And so let's, so to give you a little bit of background on what I do at YC today, part of it is outreach. And that means outreach to potential applicants, getting more of the best people from around the world to apply and join the program. Then while the companies are in YC, I help them a lot with this sort of stuff, with figuring out how to tell your story, how to tell your story to press, pitching them, getting them launched. And so let's talk about how to get your pitch and how to make it viral. So in Silicon Valley, we often obsess over this number. We often think about how do you get to a billion dollars, a billion, you know, customers. How do you impact a billion lives? Well, more often than not, you know, the truth is at the beginning, no one cares, except your mom. And maybe my mom, that's my mom. And so at YC, we often focus on this number. We focus on a hundred. How do you get your first hundred users? And one of our partners, Paul Buhite, who's the creator of Gmail, likes to say, you should focus on building something that a hundred people love versus a thousand people just kind of like. Because those hundred first people who love you will become your evangelists. They'll kind of talk about what you're building. They'll talk about it. They'll become your viral sales force for you. And so let's talk a little bit about what you have to do to get those first hundred people that absolutely love you. And I'll just go over two things since we only have a little bit of time. I'll go over one, clarity of vision and how to communicate that. And then two, I'll tell you the real key to making something that people love. And so first, let's talk about clarity of vision. So clarity of vision is really important because a clear idea is the foundation for growth. So we believe a person who has thought deeply about an idea can explain it clearly and succinctly. They can explain it in a way that a five-year-old can understand, in a way that a five-year-old can describe what you're doing. And so they use less words. They can explain these concepts, complex concepts in a simple way. And so basically this is so important because you're going to have to communicate as a CEO or founder of a company this vision in order to recruit co-founders and investors, users, employees, and shareholders. You're going to be having to do this for the vast majority, for the entire life of the company. And it's also really important. It's necessary to make it really, really easy for people to, sorry, having to go back, for people to talk about what you're doing. Because when people sit around, if you think about some of the best companies or the companies that you use every day, think about how you learned about Snapchat or Facebook. More likely than not, you learned about those products through friends, through hearing them from friends or family or people that you came across talking about something that they were excited about using. So when people sit around their dining table, it should be you and your company and your app that they're talking about. They should be able to deliver your short pitch for you. And so you don't naturally have to be good at pitching your company. The vast majority of the founders that we talk to, it takes the months to really hone the messaging and to get it down to just one sentence that can compel someone to invest in them or to write a story about them. So here's how we think about starting to craft that memorable pitch. So first, we recommend men that you lead with what, not with why. And this might seem counterintuitive because if you think about storytelling, we like to tell stories chronologically. So a lot of people like to start with how they came across the problem that they're solving and why the problem is so big. And the reason that many of you do this is that because you're all very ambitious people, you want to solve these big problems that are plaguing the world and you're really excited about why. But here's the problem. If you've already gotten 30 seconds into a pitch and you're talking about the problem and I still don't know what you or your company does, I've zoned out. So for example, someone will say, my mother was a small business owner and I saw her spending 30 hours per week, like blah, blah, blah. And you've already zoned out. I have no idea what this company does. And so I would recommend starting with one sentence that tells your audience what it is you're doing and then you can give them more backstory once you have them hooked. So here's a second problem that I come across pretty much every day is meaningless jargon. So this is a tweet from a former partner Gary Tan who used to work with and he's expressing a pain that I feel acutely. He said, meaningless jargon is the number one issue I spend time trying to fight when helping startups. We read so many pitches that have zero informational content in them. So for example, here's an actual startup pitch. IndieCloud is a know-how and synergy platform. Don't say shit like that. This has zero informational content. You have no idea what IndieCloud does. So IndieCloud, one way that you can tell whether your pitch is good is if someone in the audience has some idea of how they might replicate the idea that you're trying to communicate. So IndieCloud as a know-how synergy platform could be something like Slack. It could be something like a sauna. It could be one of thousands if not millions of products out there. And so what you want to do again is to try to communicate an idea that your audience or even your audience of one can figure out how to replicate in their head. And so this is another thing that I recommend you not do. Ramble. If you make it 30 seconds and there's a long preamble, you've already zoned out. So here is the actual pitch that Airbnb used on their YC application. We built the first online marketplace that lets travelers book rooms with locals instead of hotels. That's pretty straightforward. It's descriptive. There's no jargon. There's no long preamble. You can tell what they do. You have a sense of what you need to build to replicate this. I think it's a really tight description. And so for us when we're reading applications, we're reading hundreds if not thousands of applications, we have to understand in that first sentence what it is you do or we sort of lose focus. So here's an example of a company that went through Y Combinator last year. Calor is the Fitbit for dairy cows. So I found this one when I was looking through applications super compelling. And so one of the things that I would say is it's pithy, it's short. And one of the things that you want to do is when you're pitching your company to someone, you want to look them in the eye and you want them to follow up with a question. So when I saw this, I was like, I have so many questions. I was like, why do dairy cows need to track their health? And why does anyone need to monitor it? And how big of a market is this? How big of a problem? And so that's what you want to do with your short pitch. You want to hook someone. You want to compel them. You want it to be short enough for them to follow up. You don't need to give them all the answers up front. You want them to come at you with the questions. And so here you can sort of understand what is, you know, the problem they're trying to solve and who they're trying to solve it for, which is the main thing you want to get across in this pitch. And so some people ask me whether this X for Y construction works. And by that I mean X for Y being Uber for X or Airbnb for X. Some people say, should I not use sort of this analogy because it's cliched or overused? And let's be honest, like we've all heard too many pitches for Uber for X, right? Everybody's heard like everyone's like doing like Uber for X or, you know, Tinder for X. And so it is oftentimes or maybe perhaps most times overused. But there are some good reasons to use this X for Y convention. And so here, for example, is a YC alum that went through last year. Right Electric is Boeing for electric airplanes. They describe themselves as Boeing for electric airplanes that I feel like that paints a pretty clear picture of what they do. And it uses very few words. And so I think that it's, it works like the X for Y analogy. If it is the best way to paint a clear picture of what you're building really quickly, I think it makes sense to use it. But you know, and here are some rules, if you're thinking about calling yourself the X for Y, the Boeing for electric airplanes, if you're using this construction, here are some of the rules you should follow. X should be a household name, something that is universally recognized. So, you know, whether it's Facebook or Boeing or, you know, a large major, ideally billion-dollar company, it should be fairly obvious, secondly, Y would want X. So for example, another company that went through YC last year was Salesforce for churches. Like that, you know, churches to me, that seems like a really, you know, huge market, which is number three. And it also seems fairly reasonably obvious why churches would want to track all of their, you know, all the people, their constituents essentially. So it should be fairly obvious why Y would want X and it should be clear that Y is a huge market. So here's one that I didn't love that went through YC last year. Originally, they called themselves Buffer for Snapchat. So Buffer is a company that's doing reasonably well, but I, you know, most people, it's not a household name. So if you have to Google Buffer, if you have to Google the, you know, X, then that's, I don't think, a clear enough picture that you're painting. And it's not a good reason to use this construction. And so to review, the best short pitches are descriptive. They're conversational. You don't use any jargon. There's no long-winded preamble to get to the point. And it's concise. And so now that you sort of know how to build a great short pitch, I'll talk to you about the real secret to building something that people really want to talk about and are excited about. And that's essentially making something people want. That's YC's motto. And so that's one of the things that we really focus on at YC is, are you actually making something people want? And basically, the way that you know that you're building something people want is actually building a product, even the very first early version of it and getting it out to users. That's, those are the two things that we say you should be doing during the YC program, the only two things, building products and talking to users. And so what you'll want to do is get that early product into people's hands and watch people actually use it. Sit down with them, offer people in a random coffee shop, offer to buy them coffee if they'll look at your product. Do anything you can to get some actual real strangers using your product, rather than your parents or your friends, because they're probably not going to be that honest with you. So this is going to be obviously manual at first, talking to users, but as a startup, as a startup founder, you have, that's one of your superpowers. You can do a lot of things manually that big companies don't have time to do. So let's see where we're at. So to recap really quickly, as I was saying, a clear idea is the foundation for growth and communicating that as simply as possible so that anyone can understand it and pitch it for you, pitch it back to you, is the way to like lodge yourself into people's brains. And then second, of course, is you should make something people want. And so now I'm happy to take any questions. And I'm Kat Mnialek, I'm a partner at YC. And if you have any questions that I don't have time to get to today, my email is here and you're welcome to email or tweet at me. Thank you so much, Kat. Thanks. So just for the process, we have Slido and you can choose the questions in front of you. If we run out of questions, we have a catch box which we will throw at you if you have a question and we get to it, you can raise your hand. But only after that. Oh, okay. What is the best pitch I've seen and why? There's so many. I'm like cycling through hundreds in my head right now. And so I'm going to tell you a few that just jumped out at me. It might not be the best of all time, but the ones that jump out at me, so Calller, I think about, which is the Fitbit for cows, is one that I loved in an application just because I had so many questions. I didn't realize that was a market. One I saw that also went through YC, called themselves the Palantir for Potatoes. Basically, they were building a tool that helped farmers track all their analytics and data. And one that I love is a company that pivoted. They were originally in YC building a blood pressure monitoring app. And then they, during the batch, they launched something. And their short pitch was, if you text this number, will make anything happen like magic. And they were called magic. And overnight, someone, their friend, they just gave this number to friends and family. And one of their friends posted it on Reddit. One of their friends posted it on Hacker News. And overnight, 40,000 people signed up for their service and started texting that number. And so it was a short pitch. It was clear what they did. It was obviously tapping into something that people really, really wanted. Because overnight, 40,000 people signed up. So that to me, those are sort of the three that randomly occurred to me right now. So what is the future of pitching? So any new tools? So tools in terms of building pitches, I don't have anything for you. But one thing that I will recommend is that YC, when we have companies launch, we a lot of times we'll have them launch on Product Hunt as one of their very first times they're launching to a community online. And Product Hunt, honestly, it's basically a Reddit for products. So every day you can go on producthunt.com and see some of the top products from around the world that are launching. And people upvote the question, or people upvote the products. And you can kind of talk to the founders and do a Q&A. And so they, sometimes the founders will sort of test their pitch out on that community and iterate based on their feedback. And what's interesting is that if you have a product that people can sign up for, if you have something that is self-serve, it converts, Product Hunt has converted better for many of our startups than TechCrunch or like any press. So it's a friendly community. It's a way to sort of test out your messaging on a friendly community of other founders and makers and some investors are in there too. Let's see. So sometimes good speakers are not good pitchers. What's the difference? Oh yes, we get a lot of founders who come in and they are like reasonably good speakers. And they're compelling presences. But they're not always good pitchers because you have to sometimes, you know, as I said, sometimes they're very ambitious people wanting to solve big problems. Sometimes they ramble. Sometimes they'll go on and on about the particular problem they're solving, especially if they're deeply technical. They'll get into a lot of really deep technical jargon or a lot of folks that we've worked with who are in the hard sciences, biotech. We'll use a lot of very, you know, scientific or technical jargon that the vast majority of the world can't understand. So even if they're compelling speakers, you still have to sort of work on a pitch that anyone can kind of repeat and work with you. Anyone can understand. All right. Cool. Thank you so much. That's it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is amazing.