Top 25 Michael Seibel Quotes

A lot of times when you’re an investor, it’s very easy to lean back and say, ‘Well, people should come to me in Silicon Valley.’ YC has the opposite opinion.

Never put the investor in the ultimate position of power.

When someone posts a Socialcam video, all of their followers get an instant notification.

I believe tech should be a core skill of a tech company.

Convince the investor that you guys are moving fast and that this isn’t some long slog… you’re thinking about it like a startup where you can move fast and make mistakes.

Academically, I think things kicked off pretty late for me. I was kind of one of those kids who was in half honors, half regular. I was like a history/science kid, which was always weird. Around tenth grade or eleventh grade, everything started coming together.

I usually fall asleep between 11 P.M. – 1 A.M., and I wake up between 6:30 A.M. – 8:00 A.M.

If you can’t hire someone smarter than you, do it yourself.

Socialcam shares Autodesk’s mission of helping everybody imagine, design, and create a better world.

The best advice for a first time CEO is make sure you have built a strong technical founding team, and then launch!

There is a directory where you can explore every single person who has gone through YC and a private forum that only founders can participate in.

One thing I like to tell founders is the more you talk, the more you have an opportunity to say something that people don’t like. Talk less, and it will probably be better.

New York is my favorite city to visit because there is always something to do, someone to meet, and something to discover.

A funny thing happens when you go to another country or invest in a company from another country. Suddenly everyone in that community realizes that YC is for them, too.

I wanted a simple one-bedroom apartment that would impress people when they walked in but that was otherwise extremely comfortable and useful.

One of the things that’s so interesting when talking to minority founders specifically is that there is really a knowledge gap in understanding what the risk-reward profile is for doing a startup.

I was the CEO of Justin.tv, and my cofounders were senior engineers there. We came up with the idea at Justin.tv in the fall of 2010.

Investors like to hear that you’re in a multi-billion dollar market.

When I think about unique insight, what I think about is here’s your opportunity to tell me something that I don’t know.

The number one problem companies have during the Y Combinator interview is that a minute into the interview, we don’t know what they do. It’s the same problem with the application. You might think we’re experts, but you still have to explain it to us.

I think there are two challenges – and one challenge is how to diversify the workforce in the technology industry, and the other challenge is how to diversify the people who are starting companies.

The first time I went through YC, it was smaller, and the founders were younger. The advantage of that was that the set of founders who were older than us had really seen the Web 1.0 meltdown. They brought that knowledge to us.

At its core, what’s amazing about YC is you don’t have to work to get in. You don’t have to know anyone, so there isn’t some type of old boys’ club.

If you’re a documenter, you’re taking a video of something in the real world you want to capture. If you’re a director, you’re trying to create something in the real world.

Startups are often best at solving the personal problems of their founders. The more diverse the founders, the more types of problems can be solved – and the more people who will be positively impacted by technology.