Most good founders that I know at any given time have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.

In general don't start a startup you're not willing to work on for ten years.

We've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies and the ones where the investors do the best... end up giving a lot of stock out to employees- year after year after year.

One of the pieces of advice that we give at YC is: try to work together on a project rather than just doing an interview.

To get the very best people- they have a lot of great options, and so it can easily take a year to recruit someone.

In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.