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Is Y Combinator worth the money?
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Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?
#2Happy to honestly answer any brutal questions you have!
Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?
#3Interesting quote:
Even when it came to fundraising, all the YC’s advice came down not to how to raise smarter and more, but to the fact that everyone needs to follow their simple framework, not try to shine too much, not try to choose the right words, wash off all the makeup, put on a gray uniform, and present dry facts—how much money customers already paid you, what the size of the market, if you count all the units you can sell, what you have actually built and what is working today. And this will always sound bad for anyone, it just can't sound good in the early days. And what actually works is storytelling, confident vision, committed revenue, and all these subtle things. It looks as if they are trying to make the selection process among 400 companies easier for the investors, and cover their own reputational risks, instead of trying to wrap each company in a beautiful wrapper and help it to raise easier.
Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?
#4Interesting quote: Even when it came to fundraising, all the YC’s advice came down not to how to raise smarter and more, but to the fact that everyone needs to follow their simple framework, not try to shine too much, not try to choose the right words, wash off all the makeup, put on a gray uniform, and present dry facts—how much money customers already paid you, what the size of the market, if you count all the unit…
I guess both perspectives seem completely rational to me. Why shouldn’t Ycombinator care most about viability and why shouldn’t startups care most about vision?
Each side needs to cater to the other a bit but ultimately this is just the difference between funders and builders.
Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?
#5I always thought the primary benefit of YC was the brand. It's like an Ivy League school for startups. The article suggested it didn't help much. Perhaps going too big has diluted the YC brand?
Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?
#6[dead]
Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?
#7Interesting quote: Even when it came to fundraising, all the YC’s advice came down not to how to raise smarter and more, but to the fact that everyone needs to follow their simple framework, not try to shine too much, not try to choose the right words, wash off all the makeup, put on a gray uniform, and present dry facts—how much money customers already paid you, what the size of the market, if you count all the unit…
I guess both perspectives seem completely rational to me. Why shouldn’t Ycombinator care most about viability and why shouldn’t startups care most about vision? Each side needs to cater to the other a bit but ultimately this is just the difference between funders and builders.
When a woman is pregnant, the fetus tries to grow as large as possible, while to womb/woman works to restrict growth.
Too much of either is not good, so perhaps the same is true here.
Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?
#8Heard similar opinions from other YC founders before.
I think any educational system will run into similar issues.
The problem is that the system takes over and becomes more important than the original goal of educating, coaching, helping. And instead it just becomes a conversions and return optimizer.
At the end the individuals don’t matter as long as the aggregate produces good enough results.
Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?
#9A recurrent theme I noticed is that a fully virtual setup (zoom calls, distributed companies in the batch) coupled with varied timezones lead to shallow interactions, weak bonds and no sense of community. Furthermore, if you are in a remote timezone (vs SF/NY) like the author, you will have even more trouble like ungodly meeting hours or very few fellows in the same timezone.
This is very similar to how I have experienced remote work as well. Just replace startups with individuals and the takeaways are still the same.
Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?
#10Interesting quote: Even when it came to fundraising, all the YC’s advice came down not to how to raise smarter and more, but to the fact that everyone needs to follow their simple framework, not try to shine too much, not try to choose the right words, wash off all the makeup, put on a gray uniform, and present dry facts—how much money customers already paid you, what the size of the market, if you count all the unit…
Or maybe they have learnt that investors due-diligence is about the hard facts and not sentiment?
Not everyone is a good story-teller either so to avoid the confounding charm factor, just be as boring and straight to the point as possible?
Which should also keep every startup of their batches on equal footing and hopefully mitigate the hype factor?
Not defending them, just me brainstorming about what could be plausible explanations for this.