I'm in the final weeks of Y Combinator, and the summer has been an incredible learning experience. Through the process, I've learned how to be a better coder, better designer, better marketer, better deal-maker, and an all around better person. But the one thing that made the biggest difference was just having more self-confidence in what I think is right instead of just listening to the advice of grown ups. As Paul Bucheit said at Angel Conf, a good founder may hear lots of conflicting advice and ultimately say to oneself "no, I actually think I'm right."

And this summer, I can honestly say that I've finally acquired that ability to say "no, I actually think I'm right". Without self confidence...

1 - inDinero would be competing head-on with QuickBooks, trying to replace it as the premiere accounting system. Ends up that nobody likes accounting software, and I'd go insane working on a product that I didn't love. Multiple successful founders urged us to go in this direction while we were still building out our product, because they couldn't understand why someone would want to use a dumbed-down finance product. And it's pretty difficult to speculate what customers will and won't like before you build the product, so we decided to take the lean startup approach and release the first crappy product that we were able to build. Can you imagine inDinero being an accounting solution?

2 - inDinero would be focussing on marketing and user acquisition before finding happy, passionate customers. In hindsight, that would have been a huge mistake, but it was hard to tell at first if the bigger problem was marketing, or if it was product. Only after you find happy and passionate *paying* customers do you realize how bad your product was before. When starting the company, people would often tell us how great our product team was, but how none of us had a background in sales/marketing, and that we should focus on that. But since I think 100X more about my business than any potential investor does, I can quickly tell that businesses that think they have a marketing problem actually have a product problem. And our friends at FreshBooks.com reassured me that they just focussed on making the product great long before thinking about user acquisition, and it's served them well. And I respect that, because FreshBooks is one of few companies in our space who "gets it".

3 - inDinero would be raising money at a significantly lower valuation than what is actually market-rate for the company. Grown-ups typically advise young entrepreneurs to settle on what will clearly be a fair deal, and my personal opinion is that fund-raising should be the first test to train your deal-making abilities. Settling at a "fair" valuation doesn't make any sense, especially for a founder who's trying to hone their negotiation skills. I spent a decent amount of time studying negotiation from books like Bargaining for Advantage, and it made me realize that honing these skills during the busiest weeks of the Y Combinator program won't be smart in the short term, but will ultimately be crucial if my goal in life is to be a world-class CEO. Therefore, I've ignored pretty much all advice on settling for a "lower than market-rate" valuation. The consequence: slightly less demand from investors, but a drastically higher price and significantly better outcome for the company.

If you're a first-time entrepreneur, be mindful that you'll have world-class entrepreneurs telling you what seems to be good advice. They'll assert with confidence why their advice is the best advice, but in the end, you need to decide what the actual right thing to do is. Listen to your instincts and never be afraid to tell yourself "no, I actually think I'm right."