I am an outsider to this site. Found it trying to find something like reddit was around Mt Gox timeline. Posted my Startup to this forum. Never got much traction. 6 months later though Acre.com started much better funded than I. Is Acre a YC startup? Now i just follow on and read. aka old scool reddit lurking
Y Combinator Failed Startups
121–130 of 197 posts
Re: Y Combinator Failed Startups
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
She railroaded our YC interview for having a similar model (albeit in a different vertical) simply because she failed, so naturally we would also fail. Aaron Harris, another failed entrepreneur turned YC partner, has routinely done the same I've heard. We're now 2 years later pushing $2M ARR profitably and about to raise our Series A. YC not taking 7% of our company was the best thing that ever happened to us. YCombi…
There's a phenomenon I've noticed in job interviews where the interviewer will in a sense torture the interviewee if it's a domain that the interviewer has expertise in, asking needlessly complex questions as if to grandstand and show off. It becomes theatrical and I can only attribute that to some level of sadism- or narcissism-like traits. I am not impugning Adora's motives here just commenting on my own experience…
Some mutant form of bikeshedding.
Re: Y Combinator Failed Startups
#123How can you make a list of failed yc companies and not mention homejoy? $66m raised, bad operations, bas unit economics, lawsuits and an abrupt shutdown. All of that after being the calley darling for so long.
I used HomeJoy once, a student showed up and said "Wow your house looks pretty clean already, I'm not sure what I would even do". My apartment was tidy, but it wasn't clean (at least by my standards)
So your point is that you are unable to articulate what your standards are?
Re: Y Combinator Failed Startups
#124Anyone else thought that the list of failed startups starts with NerdPilots? That ad is a little misplaced.
Yeah, the ads were pretty intrusive in this article. Still got us all to engage, though! Some content marketer is happy today.
Right, we all associate them as a failed startup. Great marketing!
Re: Y Combinator Failed Startups
#125How can you make a list of failed yc companies and not mention homejoy? $66m raised, bad operations, bas unit economics, lawsuits and an abrupt shutdown. All of that after being the calley darling for so long.
Don't forget this legendary post from the CEO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956
Re: Y Combinator Failed Startups
#126Worth noting that the proximate cause of death is often times largely uninformative as to why the startup actually failed. Most failed startups fit into the following timeline: was burning more money than it was making => failed at raising more money => did a round of layoffs / cost cuts to get economics under control => couldn't right the ship and shut down / did a fire sale or acquihire But, the above timeline does…
One of the best talks I had was a two hour discussion of this very topic with John Walecka. John had invested in Freegate and we were discussing risks and why things failed.
He helped me understand both the concept of 'stacking risk' (where the startup is taking on more unknowns than it should) and 'over burning' where a startup attempts to hire itself into shortening its schedule which not only fails but exhausts needed capital.
To this day I never hire an engineer if I cannot write down EXACTLY what they will be working on and how it will help the schedule. Even if they are a "super star", if I don't have something for them to do that will check off things that are currently on the path to the next milestone, no offer.
Whenever I've watched over hiring from inside or outside it tends to end badly.
Re: Y Combinator Failed Startups
#127> suspicions uBiome was billing its client’s medical insurance providers multiple times without the prior knowledge or consent of their clients
> Growth-hacking on the wild-west which is the internet is one thing, but when you try to use similar tactics in traditional, heavily regulated industries in developed, heavily regulated markets - that’s a recipe for disaster.
Was this growth-hacking or outright fraud? Are those the same thing?
Re: Y Combinator Failed Startups
#128I don't get the last section, where you just name 4-5 small "failed" startups. For most of them, you don't even have any real insights! Why pick on them, for no reason? They didn't do anything unethical, and most didn't seem to even raise a Series A. You have no clue why they failed; you just speculate... and you don't just name the companies, you call out random founders by name. These people put themselves out ther…
I have to agree. It feels like punching below the belt. The only reason why you know that the smaller startups have failed is because the founder has humbly written up a writeup on what went wrong and lessons learned, in the hope that it'll help others. By including them, the article is functionally punishing them for being open about their mistakes.
Maybe for larger companies this is debatably okay, because there's diffusion of responsibility. But to call out a startup with one or two founders who have been shouldering the weight of the startup? Who wrote a post because they wanted to be helpful, and now they're being publicly shamed? Come on
Re: Y Combinator Failed Startups
#129How's Y Combinator doing these days? Many smaller base hits, a few home runs, or striking out? I don't follow the VC world much.
Just this week:
- Momentus: $1.2B IPO (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/07/momentus-the-latest-space-st...)
- Segment: acquired for $3.2B (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735414)
- MessageBird: reached a $3B valuation (https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/08/messagebird-series-c/)
More generally:
- 15-20 YC companies are now worth $1B or more.
- 100ish YC companies are now worth $100M - $1B. A good number of those (and others currently worth less than that) are growing very rapidly and will likely reach unicorn status in the next year.
So it seems like one can reliably expect 2-3 unicorns to come out of each YC batch. Those 2-3 unicorns likely more than make up for the costs associated with running each batch (including all of the ~$150K investments). Seems quite good to me.
Admittedly, there hasn't yet been a Google/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft-scale company that has come out of YC yet. I think it's only a matter of time until that happens -- anecdotally it seems like at least a handful out of the recent batches could become massive home runs, as well as other more established companies like Stripe that seem to be growing quite well.
Re: Y Combinator Failed Startups
#130It's very unfortunate The Buttermilk Company closed down. I was looking for them recently and found the founder's posts about how stressful it was to run. Does anyone know any similar products out there?