Andrew Miklas, a current visiting group partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of PagerDuty. Andrew shared his journey to product-market fit with PagerDuty, starting a venture fund with an old Waterloo friend, and his time both as a batch member and visting group partner at YC.

Here are a couple pieces of advice he has for aspiring founders:

1. Learning how to code is still vital if you want to go into tech - being able to accurately describe the product you want is a skill, and that skill is developed by writing code. A number of coders end up being excellent writers because they learn clarity of thought.

2. Without work experience, it is hard to generate startup ideas outside the scope of a student. Your ideas are often “tarpit ideas” - startup ideas that seem appealing but have been tried by many founders before with little success. It doesn’t take a decade of work experience either, it took Andrew four co-op experiences to find his idea.

3. You don’t need to work at a tech company. Working at a company where you gain experience and understand areas of the business that can be automated can lead to a strong idea. Andrew has seen people develop very successful startups after working in and out of tech.

4. On building an AI startup - If a product is built merely to compensate for a deficiency in an AI model, it likely will not have long-term viability as a business. He believes that a successful solution integrates AI as part of a broader system, not just as an isolated component. What truly makes a product endure is when it becomes the workflow mechanism for a specific type of job, serving not only as a tool but also as the central hub where information is stored—a system of records. This integration into the workflow is what sustains its relevance and value.

5. When angel investing and evaluating teams to back, a strong indicator of a good investment is leaving a meeting with a sense of having learned something new. If you walk away feeling smarter, with a deeper understanding of a particular aspect of the tech industry—or even the world—that’s a very promising sign.