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I bet 80% of people reading that list are thinking: This describes me perfectly.
That fifth item, like the post originally mentioning as something that dooms startups, gets me every time. Having a solid co-founder seems to be the hardest part, and honestly, it helps with all the others. It helps you be more flexible since two people can see things more ways. Gives you more imagination by the same route. It helps you be more determined since one can pull the other up if he/she gets too demoralized…
1. How do you judge whether co-founders are good friends? I'm guessing a simple "how long have they been working together" test is a good indication, but anything else?
2. What level of feedback do you usually give teams that didn't make it? Especially teams that got to the interview stage but didn't make it through? I'm wondering if you've ever told a team your suspicions that they're not good enough friends (I'm assuming if you did, you phrased it better than that.)
It would be really awesome if YC put on some type of match-making event for single founders to find co-founders in person. Like a speed dating event for startups.
Wish I knew about the emphasis about hacking a system question and I would have elaborated on my application.... Although it is a difficult question to put emphasis on IMO because it also makes you in a way "reveal" your bad morals... which I am sure many people don't feel comfortable doing. Why would you ever want to openly admit you beat ie. cheated a system be it government, academic, or private? Not to imply that…
Right. Like I started forging the report cards I gave to my parents starting in 8th grade. I'm not proud of that. Would I really put that on an application?
We built a decent product in roughly 6 months, and began engaging with enterprise customers. 6 frustrating months of trade shows / cold calls / presentations later, we had a couple of potential customers but things seemed way too stagnant; their intent to purchase just wasn't apparent.
We were running low on cash and the first visible cracks in our patience were emerging, but we stayed put. And that's probably because we've known each other for over 5 years and each of us didn't want to let the others in the team down.
And then suddenly a month later we received our first purchase order. Okay, it wasn't exactly sudden - we'd followed up a million times with the client and iterated on the product each and every time. But nothing else had changed, we hadn't done anything significantly different in that one month. And that had us convinced that patience can be a real virtue.
We've not exactly dug ourselves out of a hole yet, but we're getting there (with several promising leads in the pipeline) and more importantly, a repeat order as well as a testimonial from our first customer.
EDIT: Just in case you thought the story above was manufactured, here's the a link to the testimonial [PDF]
http://creativeriot.com/resources/[Enpower]%20CoreLogic%20-%...
I bet 80% of people reading that list are thinking: This describes me perfectly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Like I started forging the report cards I gave to my parents starting in 8th grade. I'm not proud of that. Would I really put that on an application?
I have no idea what Y Combinator thinks about the answer to that question. But if Paul asked me to help out by reviewing some applications, I'd probably send you an email asking how that was to your advantage.
Take it as you will. My personal take is that, if partnership (among several founders) is really strong (friendship from this essay) - then it's certainly better than doing it alone - backed by high profile success stories. On the other hand, I've seen too much companies fall apart because of the partnership - not their business (I have two personal experiences with it).
Question is how do you judge a friendship among founders? Can you spot the weakest link?