Product Hunt and Cluster founders talk startups and serial entrepreneurship

Startup sages Brenden Mulligan and Ryan Hoover met up on a fall day in San Francisco, a known tech and innovation hub, where both are currently based. They began their conversation at South Park — at first glance, your average community park, complete with a swing set and benches. This spot holds significance for the startup world: It’s where Jack Dorsey hatched the initial idea — what he at first wanted to call Stat.us — for what would become Twitter.As Mulligan and Hoover sip coffee, they talk about their current projects and how they’re evolving. Mulligan had taken the concept of Cluster, his private group photo sharing app, and tweaked it to create a new, additional specifically tailored concept: Homeroom, launched two days prior.Mulligan explains the idea behind the startup, stemming from Cluster’s evolution. “When Cluster started about 18 months ago, it started as this app that basically allowed people who had been to an event together to share photos with each other when they got home,” he says. “In the typical sort of startup way, we’ve watched our users and adjusted the product to what people were using it for. Although the event use case is really strong, we’ve seen people using it for these longer purposes — we want to start an album for our kids, we want to post photos over the next 10 years of his life. So, it’s changed from an events app to a private social networking app,” Mulligan explains.This specialized usage case led to Mulligan’s brand new endeavor via Cluster Labs, Homeroom: A private app-and-web-based way for teachers to share photos with parents of the classroom.The conversation turns to Product Hunt, and its recent 6.1 million in funding. When Mulligan comments on Product Hunt’s success, Hoover explains that he’s been striving to scale wisely, despite the hype. “We’re growing, but we’re trying to grow slowly. The metaphor I use is when you’re at a dinner party and 10 new people come in, it changes the dynamic and it changes the conversation — one person at a time,” says Hoover.Talk of Product Hunt brings the conversation to their destination, an important space for Hoover: Y Combinator. Y Combinator, a Mountain View, California-based seed accelerator, provides financing for startups: Twice a year, they invest $120k between a number of startups in exchange for a small share of said companies (this number was 85 in the most recent batch). Just a few months ago, Hoover wrapped up a 3-month program at Y Combinator with Product Hunt.“People fight from all over the world to get into it,” says Mulligan, commenting on what he calls “the world’s most well-known incubator.”“What’s interesting about YC, is people ask me ‘was it worth it?’,” says Hoover. “Frankly, YC has not ended — even though the program is over, I still have access to the partners; I can schedule office hours with them. I have something like 1500 founders in the network that I can reach out to — it continues to provide value in other ways,” Hoover explains. As the pair explores YC HQ, where new ideas are being brought to life, they discuss serial entrepreneurship.Mulligan theorizes that people play to their strength, and that startup entrepreneurs thrive by creating. “I think for most people, people are really good at one part of a company’s growth; there’s very few entrepreneurs that are great the entire way through. Even the ones we might think would be — like Mark Zuckerberg — he brought Sheryl Sandberg in and she helped him get through a lot of things he could have never done on his own for the first time,” says Mulligan.“You look at the founders of Twitter and they’ve all sort of moved on and there’s someone with a much better business sense running that company because the other guys are much better at that early stage. Serial entrepreneurship is a thing we see because people know where they’re best.”