Make Things People Want: What 600 YC Startups Taught Gustaf Alströmer

Alströmer, who joined Airbnb in 2012 and started its original growth team, says almost everyone he asks has never found a workplace as good. Airbnb did not feel like a normal job to him. It felt like a group of friends working on a shared project, and the alumni bond still reminds him of close social ties more than of coworkers.

He credits the founders' care about who got hired. The team looked for people who were truly excited about Airbnb rather than just holding an offer, and they ran culture interviews to probe motivations and match core values. The early product team was also unusually diverse, with many former founders among the first dozen or so PMs, which he thinks shaped how decisions were made.

He adds an honest caveat: Airbnb also had a business model so strong that the company itself was hard to fail, even if individual projects did. That gave the team room to take risks that most companies cannot afford. The Airbnb founders also tried to recreate YC inside the company, with demo days and isolated new products that started by doing things that don't scale.

Asked about Elad Gil's view that starting a company is an act of desperation, Alströmer says he sees most founders starting from a positive place. What matters is that they have a real answer to why they are doing it, one that survives four years in with no money left. A market niche is not that answer.

In his experience motivations range from solving a technical problem to proving oneself, to wanting to change the world or simply to build a big company, and none is reliably better than another. Over time the motivation shifts to the satisfaction of running the company itself. YC does not really screen for it, but uses office-hour questions to help founders, and co-founders in particular, articulate it, which also helps with conflict resolution.

He does discourage one group: people who see a startup as a career step. If it works, it becomes your whole career for around ten years, and if it fails it is not something to put on a resume. He also warns that those with heavy financial, family or relationship constraints should think twice, because startups are as hard when they succeed as when they fail.

YC runs one-on-one office hours and group office hours. In the individual sessions, Alströmer skips updates and strategy and asks one question: what is holding you back from moving faster? That forces a founder to name a goal and find the real bottleneck, which they often do not know until the conversation probes it.

Group office hours put six or seven startups in a room for several months. Alströmer says starting a company is lonely, since you cannot unload on employees or lean on investors, but other founders are in the same boat. Hearing others describe their broken parts helps founders feel motivated and see how similar problems get solved.

The groups also add accountability. Each founder is asked what their goals were for the last two weeks, whether they hit them, and what the goals are for the next two. Founders are competitive and do not want to return with nothing learned. His tip is to make this real: laptops and phones on the floor, pen and paper, ideally in person, and never ask a founder "how's it going?"

Alströmer distills the most common startup failure to a single cause. Founders do not talk to customers, so they do not know what matters, so what they build does not matter either. Early YC is largely spent pushing founders to say what conversations they have had, what software prospects use and pay for, and how intense the problem is.

The second mistake, within YC, is simple fear of talking to customers. Technical people often believe software solves everything, and they dread rejection. But about 90% of any customer group are not early adopters and are not incentivized to take risks, so a founder must reach roughly ten people to find one who will get on a call. He also notes that outside investors' validation is easily confused with product-market fit, which is why YC reminds everyone on day one that none of them has it yet.

Lenny cites Paul Graham asking the Airbnb founders why they were talking to him instead of their customers in New York. Alströmer agrees that the founders' trips there were the origin of "Do Things That Don't Scale," and says the volumes surprise people: you may think five conversations, but you need 25 to 50. Those same conversations tend to become your first customers, so you are already doing sales.

To get past the fear of rejection, Alströmer asks founders to remember their own behaviour. We all sign up for services and forget them within a year, without feeling any hatred for them. The most common reaction to a startup is not dislike but indifference, which also means you usually get a second chance when you come back with improvements.

He adds that rejection should be read in the context of early adopters, since a narrow solution to a specific problem will always interest only a few. Even Airbnb began with air mattresses and staying in someone's home while they were present, which was not the full product. A few early adopters dug in anyway, and much of the later product was unknown at that point.

On measuring how painful a problem is, he draws on his YC Startup School videos on talking to users and on sales. Asking people whether something works for them yields polite answers, because they may not know how bad their workflow is. Watching them do it, for example someone repeating the same Excel steps a million times, reveals the true pain, and he says a screen-share walkthrough of their daily routine is the best method. For EV charging startups his advice was to rent an EV and try the non-Tesla chargers, which he calls "garbage."

Alströmer says a non-technical founder first needs to value engineering. He recalls a friend's line that thinking you just need an engineer is like saying "I have an idea for a song, I just need a musician." Offering a prospective engineer 10% of the company against your 90% signals that you do not value the work.

To find a technical partner, he suggests using YC's co-founder matching or simply asking the best technical people you know. Many will say no, but some have been waiting for someone to ask. You want a co-founder rather than a hired team because so many decisions and iterations are technical, and a product is never finished the way a service project is.

He cannot recall a startup that succeeded with a contracting firm building the whole thing, because you cannot spec your way to a great product. Non-technical founders who succeed usually build an engineering team that feels like a founding team, often with equity. Lenny mentions Calendly's Ukrainian dev team, and Alströmer notes that in Eastern Europe founders often contract full time while building a startup on the side. He also says many founders simply learn to code themselves, which is not much harder than it sounds.

Asked for the common traits of successful companies, Alströmer says it comes down to the founders. They are determined to win, and their internal motivation is infectious, which helps them build strong teams. They are also technical enough, they talk to users and move quickly without waiting for permission from investors or YC, and they communicate complicated ideas clearly.

Communication, he says, is tied to storytelling and to enjoying fundraising, and it is what motivates people to follow a founder. Lenny recaps the list as will to win, technical ability, customer focus and communication. Alströmer adds that the true outliers have something extra that cannot be listed, noting that investors turned down Airbnb because its idea was not logical to most people.

He is candid that YC is not good at predicting which company will be a monster hit. What it is good at is knowing what failure looks like, and telling founders directly which mistakes will sink them, so that if they fail it is in a new way. The best indicator during a batch is that each office hour brings fresh topics because the last problems are already solved, and weekly or biweekly progress, like a 10% weekly growth curve, beats talk of hot markets or investor interest.

Lenny runs through a list of founder spectrums, and Alströmer rejects most of the framing. On speed versus quality, he says founders asking whether to prioritize growth or retention are really asking permission to skip one. Quality to him means what customers find valuable, so moving fast by talking to customers is how you reach it.

On confidence versus humility, he says founders need both. Early on, projecting confidence is critical because many people doubt you and no one else will project it for you, and it is part of motivating the team and investors. But he adds that you cannot inspire people without humility either.

On execution versus strategy, he has a strong view. Strategy comes from business school and the corporate world, whereas a small startup can only do one thing at a time, so priorities are a list with one item on top. Talk of strategy often signals that a founder does not understand their priorities. On decision-making style, he says small teams cannot be autocratic, but they do need an agreed process and must stick to it, and on product versus distribution he says that caring about the product means caring about what customers value, with scalable distribution mattering once something works.

Alströmer helped push YC toward climate tech. The second YC request for startups on the topic, which he wrote, focused on carbon removal, and YC has now funded more than 130 companies in the area. His central point is that climate is not a nonprofit pursuit: governments and the world have decided to change the energy system, so trillions of dollars will move from carbon-emitting activities to clean ones.

He recalls whiteboarding with Diego of Pachama in 2018, when the term climate tech barely existed and investors still carried scars from the 2008-2010 cleantech bubble. That has reversed, and the flow of new investors is as big as any trend of the last two decades. He and David Rusenko recently wrote an updated request for startups listing about 25 directions, aimed at people who want to work on climate but lack a specific idea.

He agrees with the view that regular PM skills carry over, and says founders have succeeded both with and without domain expertise. He sorts the field into decarbonizing and carbon removal, and gives examples: Seabound and Fleetzero in shipping, Unravel Carbon, Carbon Chain and ANAI in carbon accounting, Enode and Static for EV charging and home energy, and Heart Aerospace and Right Electric in electric aviation. Visiting the Heart hangar, he says, was a different feeling from any SaaS office.

Alströmer names two things that went well in the last year or two. The first is politics: the US Inflation Reduction Act, which he describes as a climate bill that incentivizes onshoring of the green supply chain across carbon removal, home energy and heating. It has been strong enough that Europe now feels pressure to counter it after seeing some battery makers choose to build in the US.

The second is that corporations have become real customers. A few years ago a Fortune 100 company would send a founder to someone with no power to decide. Now companies that promised shareholders and governments to cut emissions arrive with paid contracts and even investments, because they do not want to be the Toyota to Tesla.

His advice is to focus on B2B customers, since you do not need to convince everyone that climate change is real, only enough corporations to change their habits. He argues that this kind of company is more impactful than campaigning, because even people who accept the problem do not know what to do about it, while founders do.

His top book recommendation is The 100% Solution by Solomon Goldstein-Rose, which he gives to anyone worried about climate change. It lays out the solutions in detail from an optimistic angle and counters the sense that everyone is doomed. He also mentions enjoying Emily in Paris and Everything Everywhere All at Once.

His favorite question to ask applicants is what they have accomplished on their product since they applied to YC, which usually means a month or two earlier. The hoped-for answer is a list of things done, not preparation for the interview. For applying, he points to YC's hour-long video on how to write a good application and suggests asking alumni what mattered.

He closes by saying you do not need to know anyone at YC to apply, since all applications are read equally and the aim is that anyone can become an insider without connections. He points listeners to the YC Startup School videos on growth, sales and talking to customers. A light aside on Sweden covers why Swedes do not necessarily feed guests, which he links to a strong sense of individual responsibility.