111–120 of 144 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't it defeat the purpose of YC if you have to raise enough money to pay yourself market salary before you can enter the US to participate in YC?
I think you misunderstand. It's easy to get in to the US for 3 months, so getting to YC isn't hard. Then you raise, and raising helps you stay long-term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're a YC startup going through the visa process right now. Once you raise enough to pay yourself market salary, the situation transitions from "impossible" to "annoying and long". So focus on the product, then on funding and/or revenue: the rest will follow.
I've heard about a startup that had to relocate to London after the YC 3 month phase and then wait a substantial time for the INS to work out their papers. That sounds like it could break a company?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're a YC startup going through the visa process right now. Once you raise enough to pay yourself market salary, the situation transitions from "impossible" to "annoying and long". So focus on the product, then on funding and/or revenue: the rest will follow.
I've heard about a startup that had to relocate to London after the YC 3 month phase and then wait a substantial time for the INS to work out their papers. That sounds like it could break a company?
Has anyone here on HN got into YC from London?
seriously?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps, but not necessarily; the YC project is about going big, ultimately -- after all, that's the only way YC is going to make some money. It is possible to bootstrap a company in such a way as to plateau out at, say, 3 people, each of whom gets a decent market salary. However, that company may not have further room to climb for various structural and/or marketing reasons, lack of appropriate connections, funding…
I wasn't so much thinking about the funding provided by YC; but rather that if you've reached a stage where you can raise enough funding to hire yourself into the US, the fact that YC provides connections to angels and VCs is probably not tremendously useful.
As pbiggar points out above, there's no problem (at least for EU citizens) getting into the US for three months of YC - it's staying there long term that's hard.
It's a bit misleading to call these events "dinners" though, because they last half a day. People start to show up for dinners around 6 pm. This seems wrong, unless the YC dinners conclude at 6 AM.
I meant half a waking day, cperciva. When someone says "I spent half a day trying to find that bug," they don't mean 12 hours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is accurate parse as written. I think the even more dramatic conclusion suggested by Lean Startup is it is probably max(y1..yN)*C^(90/x), where y1 is the utility of your first idea and x is average number of days it takes you to learn one important thing (a full cycle through the idea, implement, measure, conclude loop). Scary stuff starts happening in any business when you take the limit as x approaches zero. (…
Can you put that in the English? I am too tired to make sense of that math. I hope you do not think I am stupid for not immediately seeing the point of many seembols.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard about a startup that had to relocate to London after the YC 3 month phase and then wait a substantial time for the INS to work out their papers. That sounds like it could break a company?
Yes, I was wondering about the YC process as being involved in a London start-up, the dream is obviously to take it to YC and the Valley. Has anyone here on HN got into YC from London?
How about anonymizing it by removing the names of the startups/founders before publishing ?
Thanks for the insight Paul. As an outsider, it's quite interesting to understand how (successful) startups get formed. It's funny that in my field (economics/finance) we treat startups as black boxes, and we have no clue about how they work. We argue that they are "crucial to the economy and to growth", but yet we haven't made any progress at understanding [1] them. Do you guys think that we (academy) have any chanc…
Paul was interviewed at CrunchUp this summer, and he briefly talked about what they have learned works and doesn't work. The video can be found on TechCrunch. - 2 founders is best - founders should have known each other for a while before starting the company - team is much more important then idea