YC advice that stuck: describe your startup with verbs, not nouns
garrytan · x · 2026-10-01
Garry Tan resurfaced a founder's retrospective on the most valuable YC advice: explain your company using verbs instead of nouns.
The founder first pitched as "reinventing the cloud for AI" and watched investors glaze over. Reframing it as "developers bring us their code and we run it so they don't manage their own infra" clicked instantly.
The lesson: people understand verbs, not labels — and nobody buys or invests in what they don't understand.
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