Andrew Beckman

YC application tip: never ask a YC founder you don't know to recommend you. It should be somebody who worked with you or knows you well. YC is much more interested in a person rather than the idea they're applying with. You can change the idea, but not the person.

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How to pitch: The company has zero traction —> “We’re early” You only have 2 customers —> “We’re working with design partners” You currently have no revenue but hoping some pipeline finally closes —> “we’re on track to exit this year at $3M ARR” You’re in the natural kill zone of a FAANG —> “We view them as partners rather than competitors” There’s no way the tech can actually work —>“We’re manifesting the future” And of course: One of your developers uses Co-Pilot to write some front end code —> “We’re an AI company”

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Someone asked me how to move from SW to HW / robotics as a kickass builder excited to jump in. Love it! My response: robotics needs more great SW leaders who treat HW like a commodity, figure out a huge market need / GTM path, then pull in a team to unlock that.  With a SW mindset and SW architecture thinking. A lot of MechEs in love with their tech and the HW.  The HW is commodity - hard but commodity - and SW is where the interesting stuff is.  Simpler is better.  Most important is problem selection.  That is where you make / break the company and idea. And yes - there is HW innovation to be had - and I love folks doing that and doing it well. But there are far, far more opportunities for automation and problem solving with huge value creation now, with basically commodity OTS HW and SW. Choose problem, assemble solution, kick butt.

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Alexey's growth eng class is an awesome and refreshingly different approach to accelerating growth teams. I spoke last year and cohort had incredible talent, and Alexey really brought out what problems growth teams concretely face when getting wins. Take Alexey's class!

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Founders/CEOs/COOs/CTOs: if you're seeing downtime, defects, and delays… and have been hearing that "we're fixing this internally" but haven't seen much progress… Bad news: You might NEVER see progress. You're in the "quality trap." Here's what's REALLY happening (and what to do about it): 1 - Your testing team is overloaded Maybe you have existing testers; maybe engineers are doing their own testing. No matter what: They are behind. And playing "catch up" in testing is insanely difficult. Almost impossible, unless you radically scale the team. (And even then, it's almost impossible to make fast progress. a.k.a. diminishing returns) 2 - Your engineering leadership doesn't want to allocate more budget to testing. They probably feel like investing in QA and testing is directly competitive to hiring more engineers and build more product. They feel like they're currently understaffed to meet the roadmap goals. AND they feel like bringing you additional budget requests for new testing ideas could be a big risk. What if you say, "Why should you get MORE budget if you're not effectively shipping good software with your existing budget?" When you're in the quality trap… the stress prevents you from making bold, necessary moves. – SO WHAT? YOU, Founder/CEO/COO/CTO, have to bring them new ideas; don't expect them to bring YOU new ideas. My biased recommendation is to look into AI-powered QA services, that can plug in and take a lot of the testing load off your team. If YOU suggest they look into this, and tell finance we need to budget for this, it will happen, and you'll escape the quality trap. If not, expect more of what you've been getting.

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As of last week's Scheduling launch, Fillout now competes with: Calendly: $3B valuation, 700 employees Formstack: $425M valuation, 250 employees Typeform: $1B valuation, 500 employees Seems daunting, but our lean team structure is actually our biggest advantage. We get to offer a 100x better free tier and still run a fast-growing, cash-flow positive business. Plus, no bureaucracy stopping us from shipping features that solve customer problems. The real question is: who do we take on next? 😁

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