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You've got YC one-itis. There are a zillion other places to raise money. Any one funding source says no 98% of the time, it has nothing to do with you. -a 55 year old founder who just raised a $20M Series A
From what I've read, YC also has a preference for companies with multiple founders. So being a solo probably didn't help.
He says as much in his post : > An established bias against solo founders And it is an age discriminator. It gets a lot harder to get a team together after a certain age. Peers already have obligations.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/27/super-founders-median-age-of...
You've got YC one-itis. There are a zillion other places to raise money. Any one funding source says no 98% of the time, it has nothing to do with you. -a 55 year old founder who just raised a $20M Series A
The most surprising thing is that angels appear to be semi-excluded now. I don’t have anything more than two datapoints:
1. That angel who reached out to me
2. The fact that the YC investor demo day application explicitly excludes angels.
Of course, #2 is misleading. You can certainly submit an app as an angel. You just can’t fill out >5 of the fields, because they begin with “If you represent an investment firm…”
The takeaway for me was, ironically, there may be an opportunity for angels to band together and take some risks. YC is all about risk analysis. If they don’t want to risk it on a 58yo solo founder with satellites in orbit, perhaps others will.
But you’re right about YC one-itis. Right now it’s hard to see any alternatives. They do exist, though.
EDIT: By the way, a word to OP: don’t take rejection so hard. (http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html helps with this.) One of the key features of YC is that they invest in people who look like a good bet. As I was reading though your post, I couldn’t help but think that pivoting a few times may not be a good bet. It’s true that startups do pivot, but not having a clear idea of who your customers are is also a warning sign.
As someone else said, put some contact info in your profile. You’ll get dozens of people reaching out to you from this thread if you hurry.
Of course, you could be right about the discrimination aspect, which is different. In that case, rejection would be personal.
My question is: if there exists some correlation between a protected class and some other variable X, is it moral to select based on X?
What happens if X is highly predictive of some conventional success metric (e.g. ability to raise a series A)?
Things that come to mind: redlining, use of zip code in credit score prediction, etc. If we deem these immoral, is the implication that we should perform selection within protected classes, and within non-protected classes (e.g. p(X|is protected class)), and guarantee equality of outcome (or non-discrimination of protected classes based on X)?
Note that I'm not saying YC was doing this - might just be standard unconscious bias.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't YC started explicitly to select drastically younger founders at a time when the prevailing narrative was that startup founders should be generally around 30 for optimum likelihood of success? Given that history, how should we interpret this critique? Has YC failed to evolve alongside the shift in its perception in the startup world?
I agree with OP's point on the inherant age discrimination within technology, I say this because I was once a biased younger human who didn't have the life experience to understand the other side.
I remember saying "software is a young man's game", I cringe at times of the hubris of the earlier me, it's really funny how time works.
Now I'm an executive as opposed to a hotshot programmer, with the responsibility to help lead a team of diverse humans. I marvel at the brilliance of some of the talent that is emerging in the software space and yet I wonder if we aren't doing enough to teach ethics and help humans address their biases earlier.
But we idolize the hackers who burn through their days and nights converting caffeine, beer, snacks to functional software and hardware.
Even Elon Musk slept on the assembly line of the Tesla plant, so it's not like executives are liberated from this self immolation.
As for those who self-fund or are solo founders in general, you've got a hard road ahead of you, finding those early believers (co-founders) is mega important, I've never been able to make something of serious consequence without a team of hardworking humans to help. When the startup days are hard, they are there to cheer you up, when you're crushing it, they're celebrating the wins. I will say that the best companies are a team game.
OP, I really wish you the best of luck, reachout if you ever wanna, it's nice to vent.
My father-in-law holds degrees from Stanford and Harvard, and has similarly struggled to find a job as he's grown older. When I referred him to an open position at my company, his un-edited resume matched almost perfectly, but the recruiter called him "too operational" -- and obviously had not dug in to who he was. I didn't push it but it seemed that his gray hair visible in his LinkedIn profile was a put off. I can'…
Bias, plain and simple.
>YC evaluators are explicitly biased. There is such a thing as unconscious bias. We know and understand this in the racial domain.
Yes they are, everyone is, it's the way of it.
Yes they know who they want to give their money to. In the end like anyone else, whether it's a job interview or applying for grants, which I have done, or applying for seed funding, who you are compared to the values of the people you are applying to matters.
You can be 110% qualified and not 'fit the culture' and be rejected. It's just the way of life and something everyone really should just accept because it will never change.
You can and will be rejected from things in life because of things you cannot change and sometimes you will have no idea why and you will never get an explanation. Or, if you're lucky, you will get an explanation that essentially amounts to 'I dunno I just don't like the cut of your jibe.' That's life for ya though.