There are exceptions of course, but most companies start with a great idea - not a pivot.

AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.

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.

When lack of structure fails, it fails all at once. What works totally fine from 0-20 employees, is disastrous at 30.

These all sounded really bad, but they turned out to be good. If they had sounded really good, there would have been too many people working on them.

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

The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. They get things done really quickly.