I'm here with Aaron Harris, a partner at Y-Combinator,
one of the best accelerators around the world.
Before joining Y-Combinator, Aaron was founder of Tutorspree,
an online service that connected tutors and students.
Thank you for joining us.
>> My pleasure, thanks for having me.
>> So let's start with a personal question.
How did you come up with the idea for Tutorspree?
Well, it was actually initially my co-founder Josh's idea.
He had this thought that we were going to build an online platform for
people to buy and sell their time, and that kind of lent itself to tutoring.
And the first way he pitched it to me was,
it's this online platform that will buy and sell time in any way.
I said, that's a stupid idea, because it just sounded too broad and general.
As we started thinking about it, the thing we realized
was that tutoring was kind of a perfect fit for what we were talking about.
I had tutored in high school and in college, I'd had tutors.
I had a lot of friends who are professional tutors.
We kind of talked to them about this idea,
we started uncovering these things that they actually needed.
And that's what influenced us to sort of,
I guess, iterate our way towards what Tutorspree became over time.
>> You think this is common for every founder?
Do funders in Y-Combinator, this is how to do it?
>> It should be.
It isn't necessarily always.
Sometimes people come to us with ideas that are kind of made up.
We call them sometimes solutions in search of problems,
where people just have this really interesting technical idea that
doesn't actually relate to any problems.
But I think the best ideas tend to come from problems that people
themselves experience.
So in that way I actually think Tutorspree probably wasn't
the best idea we could have done.
I wasn't a professional tutor, neither were my co-founders.
So there were things that we didn't quite understand.
We also weren't parents which was kind of our target market.
We didn't have kids go through the process.
So while we learned a lot through customer conversations and
watching how people acted, I think we missed things.
>> So how do Y-Combinator companies come up with their idea?
>> I don't think there's any one, single way that founders come up with the idea.
But there is a common thread between the best of them, which is that people
are solving problems that they have, problems that they really understand.
I think Dropbox is a great example of this,
where Drew got annoyed of carrying files around on a USB stick, right?
It's crazy, you have one on your keys.
It's a crazy way to carry files around in a world where we have the Internet
and cloud storage.
Now, in 2005, 6, 2007 when he was starting this,
remember, this concept didn't exist.
When I first got my Gmail account, I had to know the Gmail beta in 2005.
I used it as cloud storage.
I just realized this today,
I was thinking like when was the first time I used cloud storage?
I would send copies of my thesis to myself, right, from my Harvard address,
just so I had a copy somewhere in case my computer crashed or
in case I needed to print it up.
That's such a silly thing to do.
Email is not designed for that.
But that was the only way really to do, so
he said I'm going to go one step further and Dropbox was born.
>> Right. And what do you look in when you look
at applications to Y-Combinator?
What do you look in, in terms of ideas?
>> In terms of the idea or the founder that we want to accept?
>> Yeah.
>> So, our thinking on this, I guess, my thinking on this has changed over time,
and I think the same is true of my partners.
I think we used to say that founders were the only thing that mattered.
Idea was important, but mostly as an informed founders.
A lot of other people will tell you it's all about the idea.
I think all these things are probably too clear cut, or
it's not that black and white.
I think you need both founders and ideas.
Because if you just take founders who seem really great but
they don't have good ideas, they're probably not great founders.
because great founders have ideas of what they're going to work on.
And if you take something that just seems like a really great idea and
the founders don't seem great,
they're probably not going to be able to execute it.
So I wish I had a clean answer but the truth is, it's both.
And so we're looking for founders who seem really great and formidable.
And the truth is, we're not looking necessarily for
the most intelligent founders, because that's actually not the thing.
It's not pure horsepower.
It's not intellectual horsepower.
It's are you smart enough to get this done?
But more importantly, do you have the determination and
the drive to just go through brick wall after brick wall to do it?
Because let's face it, you're going to screw up again and again, and even if
you don't screw up, things aren't going to work out the way you wanted.
And if you can't go through that, you're in trouble.
On the other hand,
if your idea is something that has no chance of being a large business,
It doesn't matter if you're the most determined founder in the world.
It's not going to go anywhere.
>> Right.