the end of 1996, Viaweb had attracted only seventy customers, but this reflected Graham’s dictum of “get big slow.” With few customers, he and his two colleagues were able to make improvements to the software much more easily.10

So they’ve got to offer you all terms that sixty-two out of sixty-three of you don’t deserve, to make sure that they get the Dropbox, whoever it is.” The Start Fund’s investors knew that they had to offer terms that were literally irresistible. “If they had made their terms just a little bit harsh, in any way,” Graham says, “there’s a

the distinctive features of its operations—such as the absence of hierarchy and titles among partners—and

“Launch Fast” is Paul Graham’s mantra. Move from the idea to a minimally functional product as quickly as possible. Only by getting a product into the hands of customers, even if the product is only a prototype, is it possible to know what customers want.1 Launching fast is how to make something people want.

The essential nature of a startup is not that it is a new business but that it is a new business set up to grow very quickly—in Paul Graham’s phrasing, it must be “designed for scale.”1 Thus, a programmer who decides to open a consulting business to help clients build Web sites is starting a small business, not a startup.

Taggar says that as he thinks about earlier examples of YC startups that tried a new product release or something else that had caused worry and anxiety before it was introduced, he cannot think of a single instance in which the outcome was “unfixably bad.” He reminds them that experiments offer an opportunity to learn from users. “You try out

“Here’s how to generate new ideas. Three things. One: founders are target users. Two: not many people could build it, but founders are among them. Three: few people realize it is a big deal.”

If you want to, you can spend all of your time refactoring your code or rewriting how you deal with database seeks or something—you could do that and that would be ‘work,’ in some sense of the word. But it wouldn’t be work in the sense of getting you new users or anything that was actually important.”

They offered a $150,000 investment to every one of the forty-four members of YC’s winter 2011 batch. The venture capital world had never seen blanket approval of so many companies in one fell swoop.