Startups 

The best  problems  that  startups  can target are ones that are encountered more frequently. This is usually beneficial for two reasons. One is they encounter a  problem  on a more regular basis. It means that the customer is feeling the pain of that  problem  on a more regular basis and they'll be much more receptive to a potential solution. The second reason why you want to tackle a  problem  that people encounter on a more frequent basis is you'll get more chances to know whether your  product  is actually solving a  problem . 

Maybe you learn about  problems  with synchronizing of shared  work . Maybe you're both working on the exact same document at the exact same  time . How do you currently attempt to solve that  problem ? In general, the best  startups  are looking for  problems  that people face on a regular basis or that they're painful enough to warrant solving. This  question  can help confirm for you whether the  problem  that you're working on is actually one that real users feel is a pain point. It feels as something that they actively want to solve in their  life . 

And being good as I said you should think about broadly, be good and kind to yourself, eat well,  exercise , stay in control of yourself and your sanity because rolling back to what I said earlier,  startups  are hard, really hard. Be good to your  co-founders . One of the main reasons that companies fail is because co-founder  relationships  break down and founding teams break up. We funded a company in the summer of 2015 called Inner  Space  which has a lot of material on how to communicate well with your  co-founders  so this doesn't happen. But likewise, be good to your employees, be good to the people you  work  with. Choose a  culture  and  values  that are positive, make your company a happy exciting place to  work . You can always feel that vibe if you go into a successful company. Go into a company with 100 people where they are moving and they are going forward and they're creating something special, and you can feel it. And of course, be good to your customers, they pay the bills. They're the reason you do what you do, being customer-centric is always a recipe for success. Be good to your investors. They took a chance on you, and that will pay back in the  future  because you never know when you're gonna raise  money  again. 

We say this all the  time  at  Y Combinator ,  startups  are hard. The  books  written about  startups  talk about how hard they are. Well, there's no easy decisions. It's hard, and it's all-consuming, and it's the most wonderful thing in the world. PG wrote an  essay  where he quoted a founder saying it's surprising how much you become consumed by your  startup , you think about it day and night but it never does feel like  work . However, one of the constants of  startups  is that things will go wrong, things will go wrong with your  startup , they always do. It's almost the beauty of  startups . And you guys are the  problem  solvers in chief. The times I remember the most when I was at  startups  are where things went wrong and we found solutions. Even when I was by myself when I quit HP to start a  startup , I was lost, I didn't know what to do until I realized I needed to make something and I started coding and I started talking to customers. 

When I first came to  Silicon Valley  to  work  for the venerable company Hewlett Packard as a coder, I dreamed of starting a  startup . We used to go drinking Friday nights and talk about...well drinking was the important part and talking about  startups  was the second most important part, but that's what we did, we always talked about what our path would be, what our founder path would be. But we had no idea how to go about it. PG hadn't started  Y Combinator  yet. We couldn't go online to ask basic questions about how to start a  startup . Actually, there wasn't even online back then. Venture capitalists were these mysterious suits who only would talk to MBA's. We didn't know where to go. It actually took me 12 years to find my path to start my  startup . And that was my path and it worked out, but everything's different now.