Kat Manalac's Whale AMA

Manalac names several female-founded companies, including Simple Habit, a meditation app, Flex, which makes a tampon alternative, and Vote.org, which aims to increase voter turnout. She also recommends Homegoing, a novel that follows generations descended from two half-sisters born in Africa.

Manalac says the YC network stands out for how readily alumni offer advice and connections through Bookface, the internal founder forum. Her advice to founders is to put products in front of real users, ideally paying customers, and observe how they use them before spending too long polishing.

When reviewing applications, Manalac imagines what the world might look like if hundreds of thousands or millions of people used a product. She uses that future view to consider how an early version could develop over the next decade. She also mentions Australian-founded YC companies Proxy, which offers phone-based office access, and Go1, a marketplace for employee training and compliance content.

Manalac says a poor co-founder relationship can be worse for a company than going solo, and that disputes can kill promising startups. YC looks at how founders know one another and whether they have built or worked together before. Since disagreements are inevitable, founders should understand how they handle conflict as a team.