Quotes from Michael Seibel

I had a basic plan for my life. The plan was - 20s: make money; 30s: have family; and 40s: run for something and do politics. When I retired, I wanted to be a teacher.

If someone who's passed on your company as an investor offers you to make introductions, that's kryptonite. Don't touch that.

New York is my favorite city to visit because there is always something to do, someone to meet, and something to discover.

I wanted a simple one-bedroom apartment that would impress people when they walked in but that was otherwise extremely comfortable and useful.

I don't understand how you can have product-market fit and not a lot of people wanting your product. The two go hand-in-hand.

People think they need to hire someone to do their PR, but 99 percent of PR in the early stages is stuff you can do yourself. It's just like business development - there's the warm-up intro, followup to build relationships, then add something of value.

My goal is to make the process of taking and watching videos as easy as it is for photos.

People are carrying around smartphones. They have a video capture device in their pockets twenty-four/seven.

The first time I went through YC, it was smaller, and the founders were younger. The advantage of that was that the set of founders who were older than us had really seen the Web 1.0 meltdown. They brought that knowledge to us.

Finding entrepreneurs from diverse and international backgrounds is a top priority for us at Y Combinator.

I believe tech should be a core skill of a tech company.

The best advice for a first time CEO is make sure you have built a strong technical founding team, and then launch!

I've seen every idea. Ideas are irrelevant. You are judged on execution, and the number 1 way to prove that you can execute is by executing.

Academically, I think things kicked off pretty late for me. I was kind of one of those kids who was in half honors, half regular. I was like a history/science kid, which was always weird. Around tenth grade or eleventh grade, everything started coming together.

Live broadcasting was something only done by the rich news organizations. So when you bring it to the masses, the public gets really excited.

I tell founders all the time, 99.9 percent chance of failure.

The first thing I learned is that campaigns are about money. I had this romantic idea that campaigns were about law and debates and so forth, which is just not true. It's about money.

If you're a documenter, you're taking a video of something in the real world you want to capture. If you're a director, you're trying to create something in the real world.

Everyone appreciates good food.

I think there are two challenges - and one challenge is how to diversify the workforce in the technology industry, and the other challenge is how to diversify the people who are starting companies.

After reading the Elon Musk book and getting a Tesla - he is at the top of my list of inspiring founders.

The number one problem companies have during the Y Combinator interview is that a minute into the interview, we don't know what they do. It's the same problem with the application. You might think we're experts, but you still have to explain it to us.

There is a directory where you can explore every single person who has gone through YC and a private forum that only founders can participate in.

A funny thing happens when you go to another country or invest in a company from another country. Suddenly everyone in that community realizes that YC is for them, too.