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What Happens At Y Combinator

ycombinator.com

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Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#131

Post by fredliu »

Great article! (it surprised me that I read the whole article in one shot without evening noticing it was that long!)

One question (maybe a bit sensitive): all the glory of successful YC startups aside, what are the "failure rate" for YC funded startups? What situation would you consider a "total fail", if that ever happened?

And another related question is based on which criterion would you consider a YC graduate successful? user base? the amount of money raise? financially break even? profitability?

thanks.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#132

Post by eru »

pbiggar wrote: post #108
cperciva wrote: post #73

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.

Is it also easy to get into the US for 3 months, and work legally? What kind of visa (or visa-less thingy) would you use?

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#133

Post by maxawaytoolong »

eru wrote: post #132
pbiggar wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it also easy to get into the US for 3 months, and work legally? What kind of visa (or visa-less thingy) would you use?

What do you mean by "work legally?"

If you mean do a program like YC, it's fine. The reason it works in this situation is because you aren't making any money. The INS does not care if you are "working" if you aren't actually making any taxable income.

If you mean draw a regular salary, it's harder to do that legally but I have a friend in France who runs a 1-man consulting firm that does short term contracts in the USA and he's figured it out. I don't think it was easy in terms of "no work" but it was just filling out a bunch of paperwork.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#134

Post by eru »

maxawaytoolong wrote: post #133
eru wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it also easy to get into the US for 3 months, and work legally? What kind of visa (or visa-less thingy) would you use?

What do you mean by "work legally?" If you mean do a program like YC, it's fine. The reason it works in this situation is because you aren't making any money. The INS does not care if you are "working" if you aren't actually making any taxable income. If you mean draw a regular salary, it's harder to do that legally but I have a friend in France who runs a 1-man consulting firm that does short term contracts in the U…

Thanks for enlightening me!

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#135

Post by eru »

patio11 wrote: post #117
TheSOB88 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The value of your business is the value of your best of several products times a multiplier. You apply the multiplier once for every time you have a good idea. The number of good ideas you can have in ninety days is 90 divided by the number of days it takes you to prove an idea is a good idea."

... or prove it is a bad idea.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#136

Post by eru »

smountcastle wrote: post #22

"At the end of Demo Day what the startups usually have is a bunch of potential leads. Our default advice is to do a breadth first search, weighted by expected value. ... There are a few investors for whom it should be zero, and we can tell startups about those too." Interesting. If you know beforehand that those investors' expected value is 0, why invite them?

> Interesting. If you know beforehand that those investors' expected value is 0, why invite them?

Just a speculation: Different investors may also have different values to different companies.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#137

Post by eru »

barry-cotter wrote: post #121
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #119

If we broadcast or even recorded the talks, the speakers would clam up. How about anonymizing it by removing the names of the startups/founders before publishing ?

It took less than an hour for someone to figure out the Partner and Venture Firm Steve Blank was referring to in his post that was approximately called "You're Just the Founder". Now admittedly he tagged the post with the name of the company so it was easier, but still. Anonymising information while leaving it usable is hard to the point of (near?)impossibility

How about recording (with permission), and asking in a few years time whether you can publish it? Some issues just need to cool down.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#138

Post by pbiggar »

maxawaytoolong wrote: post #133
eru wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it also easy to get into the US for 3 months, and work legally? What kind of visa (or visa-less thingy) would you use?

What do you mean by "work legally?" If you mean do a program like YC, it's fine. The reason it works in this situation is because you aren't making any money. The INS does not care if you are "working" if you aren't actually making any taxable income. If you mean draw a regular salary, it's harder to do that legally but I have a friend in France who runs a 1-man consulting firm that does short term contracts in the U…

You are allowed into the US for business on the visa-waiver or the B1 visa (which is easy to get and is the default for non visa-waiver countries I think). But you can't _work_ there. It's a subtle distinction, and I suspect it relies on how the immigration official is feeling that day. Meetings, conferences, meeting investors, networking, etc, are all OK.

Doing the job you normally do isn't allowed, but it seems like it's pretty obvious that people do that.

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#139

Post by ekanes »

pg wrote: post #23
smountcastle wrote: post #22

"At the end of Demo Day what the startups usually have is a bunch of potential leads. Our default advice is to do a breadth first search, weighted by expected value. ... There are a few investors for whom it should be zero, and we can tell startups about those too." Interesting. If you know beforehand that those investors' expected value is 0, why invite them?

It would be too much of a deliberate affront to refuse to let them even attend. And not all the leads startups have are from the audience at DDay. Since there are so many investors here, they often get introed to investors before DDay through some other connection. Also, zero is probably an overstatement. It would have been better to say epsilon. Because most of these investors I would take money from if the alternat…

A gentle request; I think it'd be better to call it DemoDay or something other than abbreviating it to DDay. (I know you mean no disrespect, it's an easy shorthand...)

Re: What Happens At Y Combinator

#140

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

robg wrote: post #31
pg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No others are quite as bad. We'd be dubious about startups building stuff for the government, for example, because there is such a horrible mismatch between startup culture and government culture. But we'd still fund a startup building stuff for the government if they weren't naive about what selling to the government would entail.

Thanks and agreed. I'm surprised I haven't seen many (any?) medical applications from YC companies given the margins available over consumer applications. Do you think it is the uncertainty of the FDA regulations or just a space that Silicon Valley doesn't tend to mine as frequently? Make something patients want is particularly alluring to me.

I'm a software dev. for a medical device company and when I read pg's comment about the mismatch between startup culture and government culture, the first thought I had was "add medical to the list."

The medical device/software field is certainly interesting, exciting even at times, but it progresses at an absolutely glacial pace for the most part. You're dealing with slow, conservative institutions (hospitals, etc) and government agencies. Unless you hire people specifically to deal with those soul-crushing interactions, you'll probably want to shoot yourself.

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