Life update: dropping the "Visiting" — I'm joining @ycombinator as a General Partner 🤩 YC was my first choice as a founder in 2019. Seven years later, I'm choosing it again. This past year, I got to come full circle: working with founders through the W26 and S26 batches, helping them turn early ideas into products people love. I'm incredibly excited to keep finding founders and helping them build the iconic companies of this generation 🔥

# Your only job during YC Demo Day S26 is a month away and we're out here running. The YC batch is probably the highest leverage three months on a startup journey. For many founders it will even turn out to be the highest leverage time of their lives; it certainly was for me when I went through the W20 batch with my startup Cron. Our motto at YC is "Make something people want." You know you are doing that if your startup is growing significantly week-over-week. We share a lot of advice with founders how to do that. But if I had to distill the essence of YC advice down to the activities themselves, it’s this: > Build product; talk to users. It sounds simple, but it's not easy. While it's two activities, they're two halves of a single loop. First, you need something for people to react to. Just showing up and asking questions is an interview, not true customer discovery. People are more likely to tell you the truth about their problems when showing the wrong thing, than showing nothing. Then you take the learnings, rapidly incorporate them into the latest product iteration, and show it to your users again. Back and forth. Along the way you launch; product meets market, and the loop spins ever faster, until the gears hopefully click. Done in earnest, this process takes everything out of you as a founder. You might wonder what this has to do with running. I omitted a third activity that I believe completes a founder's only job: > Build product; talk to users; and look after yourself. This is it. In recent years, PG himself mentioned some version of the third activity. Here it is joined for posterity. You can only spin the pre-PMF loop as fast as required when at your best. And you're only at your best when you're in good mental and physical shape. However you achieve this, is individual. PG's flavor of it might have involved eating healthy (if you know him, rice and beans, likely). My version of it is running, and that's why I've been taking founders on that weekly run from the YC office.