#143 - Startup School Week 2 Recap: Michael Seibel, Adora Cheung, and Ilya Volodarsky

We've cut down the second week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast. First, a lecture from Michael Seibel . Michael is CEO and a partner at YC. His lecture is about How to Plan an MVP . Then, a lecture from Adora Cheung . Adora is a YC partner and a cofounder of Homejoy. Her lecture is about How to Set KPIs and Goals . Last, a lecture from Ilya Volodarsky . Ilya is a cofounder of Segment. His lecture is about Analytics for Startups . Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year. Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ *** Topics 00:00 - Intro 00:43 - Michael Seibel - How to Plan an MVP 1:25 - The goal of a pre-launch startup 3:10 - Iterating vs pivoting 3:59 - Lean MVP 5:06 - Heavy MVP 6:19 - Launching 7:35 - Learning is easier with an MVP 8:07 - How to build an MVP quickly 10:17 - Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals 11:51 - What are the right KPIs to set? 15:50 - Revenue or active users 16:28 - Why choose active users? 18:55 - Biotech or hardtech KPIs 20:25 - Secondary metric 21:25 - What if you haven't launched? 22:20 - Setting goals 23:47 - How fast should you grow? 25:13 - Defining your own goals 28:40 - Tracking progress 30:27 - Ilya Volodarsky - Analytics for Startups 30:46 - Why analytics? 31:36 - Funnel 32:51 - Collecting data, analytics, and data flow 34:16 - Metric - Signups per week 35:28 - Metric - Retention cohorts 36:30 - Which metric to pick? 36:57 - Have I reached product market fit? 37:27 - Metric - Revenue 37:51 - Dashboards 38:35 - Advisor updates 39:01 - The startup stack 42:13 - Recommendations for the MVP process