211–220 of 317 posts
How does YC feel about funding seed stage projects that have to test market before actual growth? I'm currently CTO of a new distributed entertainment platform, and the investors we're talking to all want us to grow now. Conservatively, we feel if we seek growth now we'll be in some minima of quality that is too similar to competing products and not actually different enough to be sustainably disruptive. We ideally w…
Is there any appetite at YC for a non-profit that is pro- Trump and plans on working with the new POTUS to further his agenda?
From the perspective of a non-profit, it's probably less likely because the argument is probably less "invest and see what thrives [so we can make money off anything that makes money]" and more "help craft the world in our image". While YC is, in general, pretty good about staying above the partisan fray (even if they do clearly prefer left-wing policies), I think they'd have a harder time supporting a non-profit whose beliefs and/or values they didn't feel properly aligned with their own. I'm not sure what the value proposition in that would be for them.
Personally I'd be worried that YC would even accept a pro-Trump founder. It was nice that they didn't shun Thiel despite public pressure, but they did feel the need to write a blog post justifying his presence and disavowing his political beliefs. One has to wonder how far they'd be willing to go for a lowly founder whose tweets, Facebook posts, or HN comments didn't mesh with the party line.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest - it was impossible early on to see how Justin.tv (a guy wearing a camera on his head 24/7) or Airbnb (airbed rental) could turn into billion dollar companies. Often times we invest in great teams and just see what they can do. Remember hindsight is 20-20.
Don't you think the web is maturing and consolidating quickly and there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for a guy with a camera to build a billion dollar business?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest - it was impossible early on to see how Justin.tv (a guy wearing a camera on his head 24/7) or Airbnb (airbed rental) could turn into billion dollar companies. Often times we invest in great teams and just see what they can do. Remember hindsight is 20-20.
Don't you think the web is maturing and consolidating quickly and there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for a guy with a camera to build a billion dollar business?
Chat & Direct Messaging: Unix Talk, IRC, SMS, Jabber, XMPP, Snap, slack, etc.
Message boards: Usenet, gopher, BBS, Wiki, Blogs, Myspace, Facebook, etc.
You can literally look at almost any web technology, and it seems to be constantly reinvented, improved, and updated. It seems likely that the tools of today will necessarily evolve, at the hand of new upstarts.
Which pairings of personality type and role works better in your experience for YC applications?
Can you provide some info on how does YC support hardware startups? More specifically, what is a good stage to apply? We are working on building a demo-quality HW prototype, with the ETA of ~6months. That means we will not be focused on growth, but on tech development. Should we wait until we have a working system and apply to YC when we are ready to scale and grow it (this is our current thought).
You want to join YC because you want the money and investors, but your product isn't ready yet so what's the money for? If you only need to pay your own living costs and small development costs for R&D, maybe you should look for an angel investor and a pre-seed round. Speaking of, there's a void in the VC market for funds that invest in the R&D stage like this.
I agree with you that there is a void in R&D stage VC funds.
Like a company trying to make something as disruptive as Pokemon Go, which required quick scale and reached a massive audience in a very short time.
Does YC typically invest on startups that may possibly have overlapping market segments? For example Boom Aero focused on supersonic and another startup applies to YC with subsonic aircraft. From what I read typically VC firms usually don't fund two companies as such example.
Q: Will you fund multiple startups working on the same idea?
A: Yes. If you fund as many companies as we do it's unavoidable you'll end up with some overlap. Even if you tried not to accept competing companies, you'd still get overlap because startups' ideas morph so much. The way we deal with it is that when two startups are working on related stuff, we don't talk to one about what the other's doing.
In practice it has not turned out to be a problem, because most big markets have room for several slightly different solutions, and it's unlikely that two startups would do precisely the same thing.