What makes great founders stand out?

One of the questions I get often during the batch at YC is what separates out a top 10% founder versus everyone else? When I started at YC, I didn't really have enough context to know. As a founder of my own company, of course, I had my own friends, but that was a relatively small sample size. Over the last 13 batches, I've gotten to interact with about over 2,500 founders.

And so I've been able to get straight slightly stronger opinion about what makes great founders stand out. The first thing that I'll say is great founders execute. And I'll be really specific about what that means. When I do office hours with a great founder and they say they're going to do something, two weeks later they've done it and they've learned something. And they do that consistently.

They they have the consistent ability to say what they want to do, do it, and then learn from that. That doesn't mean that what they wanted to do was correct. It doesn't mean they want to continue down that direction. But they never get stuck in the execution step. They never say, oh, I want to do this and then come back two weeks later and say, oh, we couldn't do it.

They always figure out a way to get some version of it done and then learn from it. The second thing and really derives from the first is formidable. They're formidable. One of the things that happens when somebody says they're gonna do something and then does it over and over and over again is that you learn that that person gets shit done.

And it's pretty intimidating to work with someone who's constantly getting things done. Not intimidating in a bad way, but intimidating in a way where they demand respect because they get shit done. And so when you talk to them you treat them with more respect. You treat their goals with more respect because you think they're more likely to accomplish them.

And you treat their task with more respect because you know they're going to do them. So the ability to execute creates formidable. Formitability is extremely important. The last one and one that I didn't understand until doing many many YC interviews is communication. I used to think that you could just execute well and not have to be able to communicate.

But the problem is that startups really require good communication. Communication with your users, communication with potential investors, with your co founders, with potential employees. In effect a founder always has to be talking about their business and getting people excited about it. The number one mistake I see founders making is they can't actually explain what their business does.

The best founders can in one or two sentences explain exactly what their business does and they can explain it to a customer, they can explain it to an investor, they can explain it to their mother, they could explain it to anyone of any level of knowledge about their industry. And they can do it without stumbling.

And I think that's ridiculously important because in order for you to get advice, investment to convince someone to join your company, they first have to understand what you do. And you would be surprised how many founders can't clearly explain what they do well enough so that they can start selling you on how you can help them or join them.

So once again, the three most important things I see that's separating out top 10% founders from everyone else is first ability to execute. Second, the resulting formidable ability. You've got to respect them more. And third, their ability to clearly communicate what they're working on. Now if I were to add a fourth bonus one, it would be and this is a little bit strange, but internal motivation.

Another way of saying it is that they don't get too discouraged when things go wrong. They stay motivated. Startup is a game where you're going to fail all the time. You're gonna make bad decisions all the time. You're gonna have strong hypothesis that turns out to be wrong. And there's a type of person who doesn't get discouraged even if they make the wrong move five times or five times in a row.

They stay passionate about the problem. They stay passionate about trying to find a solution. They keep on executing moving forward. Being motivated in the face of defeat or failure is an extremely important thing for a startup founder to be able to do. So I said three, but I cheated. It's four, execution, the formidable communication, and motivation.

Those are the things that look that make top 10% startups, startup founders stand out. One thing I didn't say was idea. It is usually very hard to tell whether at a very early stage company has a good idea. It's very hard. And so I never use idea to separate out great founders from anyone else because I'm not the arbiter of what a good idea is and I don't have perfect experience in every problem.

So whenever I kind of overthink, oh, is this a good idea or not, I can get stuck in my own head and I can also pretend that I know more than I do. So try not to focus on idea. Cheers.