Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean? Those companies were all successes
Exactly! They failed to see the value in any of them.
To be fair it's almost like gambling.
Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit
71–80 of 85 posts
Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit
#72Would love to see the anti portfolio list of YC.[1] FWIW - We have been rejected 3 times from YC over the last 3 years. We did not take it personally as OP said, put our heads down and got working on our startup. After lot of hard work, setbacks and near death experiences, we are now currently growing ~10% MoM and generating millions in ARR. YC or any other investor/accelerator should never be the make or break thing…
Well said because the inverse is true as well. So many of the startups YC has funded either died a relatively short death, stagnated towards a long-death or eventually were acqui-hired in some shape or form. Just because you got into YC simply does not mean that the business you're starting is somehow more or less likely to succeed than one that didn't. At best, you might be able to increase your chances of success but that in no way happens without you pressing your foot on on the gas so hard it almost breaks.
Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going through the exercise alone, regularly - say twice per year - is extremely valuable, without needing to actually submit or save the answers in the application form they provide. The questions are nicely structured and hit on important points.
I hate ycombinator comments like this. Now I need to go procrastinate by writing a tool where I can go through the YC application every quarter.
Every quarter is a perhaps a bit excessive unless things are changing quickly. If you use a calendar, it takes a few minutes to just add a reminder at certain dates. Or I always just get reminded when I see YC posting about it.
Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit
#74I have a related question. I had an idea many years ago and I've poked at it irregularly since. I have kids and I've already had one startup fail, so I just kind of slow-rolled this one. I still believe the idea has merit, so I keep poking at it here and there. I spent money on design work and it's incorporated, but I don't have a partner or support mechanism. I had a BizSpark account, but I "graduated" in February,…
How does this beat the results you would get from Google search?
Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the distance between YC and the next best incubator is measured in light years (imo)
I suspect YC has become similar to the Ivy League schools, in that its primary value is in signaling and networking, rather than the education itself.
Ironically this makes the whole thing very un-entrepreneurial. People ‘studying for the test’ to compete to get in. Almost employee/herd like. You cannot be upset about not getting in, or at least minimise the time you’re upset, give it 5 minutes and get back to work.
Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment echos a conversation I was having with my wife the other day as she was reading me bits from Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Book by Angela Duckworth. As you might infer from the title the thesis is that Grit is a very powerful force. My comment in our discussion was that this whole body of social science research and life/career advice comes into conflict with other bodies of advice about cu…
There are some examples of people plugging away on a 'failed' project for decades and eventually striking it rich.
Indeed, and that is the lure. And, when we read stories like that we get motivated to press on and never give up. But who writes the stories of someone who worked on a failed project for 20 years and never got anywhere? If we persist what are the odds that we will be the one for whom it works out?
The question of when to persist, how long to persist and how to pay the bills while you persist are very personal to me.
In 2000 I and a friend did research and the very beginnings of development on a semantic analysis technique that was notably better than anything we could find at the time including from Google and other search engines. But we couldn't find money fast enough and we both had families to support so we went our separate ways and did other things that were more commercial.
About 7 years later VCs started funding similar technologies. And, somewhere around 2010 to 2013 technology seemed to have caught up to where we were at in 2000.
So should we have persisted? It kind of seems like we should have. But, I have seen enough of life to know that sometimes a group of people have a lot going for them, winning awards, raising funding, rolling out product and still end up running into a roadblock on the way to commercial success that sinks them.
Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit
#77I'm very interested to see statistics on "% of people from the US who were accepted" vs. "% of people from other countries who were accepted", divided by country. YC's general statement "29% of the companies were from outside the US" is not equal to my question. I feel the bias somewhere here. Non-native speakers have much harder times because of different basic things like the language barrier, but something tells me that the US-based people are in priority.
Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit
#78I'm very interested to see statistics on "% of people from the US who were accepted" vs. "% of people from other countries who were accepted", divided by country. YC's general statement "29% of the companies were from outside the US" is not equal to my question. I feel the bias somewhere here. Non-native speakers have much harder times because of different basic things like the language barrier, but something tells m…
That's much more upsetting than rejection itself. You can make some garbage like Juicero, and, being located in the US, still get investments and some knowledge. And for outsider countries, as there are no adequate investors, YC can provide much more impact.
Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit
#79We applied to YC once and were rejected. Didn't take it personally but since we were in a very early stage, we dropped the idea. I've personally found the YC application extremely gratifying to write. It does help you answer those key difficult questions that you'd have otherwise glossed over because of complacency or over confidence. What I've thought of doing is to fill the YC application for the next idea that I g…
This cycle's app I did in 3 hours. I opened the apply site at 8am, filled it out in order, did not go back and revise, turned on my iphone and talked for 60 seconds, and then submitted. It was the best app I've ever done. (Rejected) The lesson is that if it takes a month to write a pitch, that means I don't understand my business at all and have a long way to go.
Re: Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit
#80There's something that was in the original rejection letter from the Summer Founders Program that should ring true in the mind of everyone rejected: 'It's quite likely, in fact, practically certain, that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email making fun of us; we want to learn from our mistakes.' Granted, this year it's been replaced with t…
It's worth noting that both 500Startups and Techstars exist, and are probably the closest things to YC that aren't YC, if you're looking for something like it.
Is TechStars still doing 20k + a convertible note? That is a fundamentally unserious offer