David Lee’s YC Keynote + Larry Chiang’s Notes on that Keynote

By Larry Chiang

I heard a few things I know no one else did.

/1/ Do what David’s father did. I bet he self funded that fortune cookie startup. I’ll be he took orders for machines and cookies even before there were cookies or machines. No way does a Taiwanese engineer fundraise 500k, makes a machine and then goes out for sales orders. I’ll bet David’s father double-dipped by working his Fortune 500 job at Alpha and at night, worked his fortune by making a fortune cookie machine. His “innovation” was addendum’ing some smiley face(s) to fortunes cookie

/2/ In entrepreneurship, we write our own fortunes… …on a post it note. Of course you go to a party with a list of people you wanna meet. So, in entrepreneurship, we write our own fortunes

/3/ WHAT WOULD RON CONWAY INVEST IN. SV Angel’s investment thesis is a form or fortune cookie.

/4/ Slide one: “The Team” Every VC loves pre-existing teams. So please begin formulating your team now and keep it together for your first two CS projects… Your first two Silicon Valley internships…, and your first job. Then jettison together

/5/ Motivational listening. Just google that. Googling that helps you understand…

/6/ “You don’t need to be that charismatic.” You just need to listen.

/7/ VCs wanna pattern recognize Let them. Think of them as beautiful, shallow women with no engineering degree and zero domain expertise EVEN WITH AN ENGR DEGREE. Their lack of tech knowledge opens up their brain to be intuitive. Their intuition helps them do pattern recognition.