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Is Y Combinator worth the money?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#251

Post by trevmckendrick »

jongjong wrote: post #250

Oh my, $150K for 7% equity sounds really good. I would offer 30% equity for that amount. I've been trying to raise $20K for the last 10 years and never managed though one time someone took pity on me and gave me $20K in cryptocurrency as a gift. I managed to stake that on a crypto project in such a way that it was soon generating me around $35K to $70K per year and I used the money to fund myself to work on a Decentr…

Can I please recommend w/ no ill intent that you take news courses of action if you've unable to achieve raising a relatively low amount of capital after 10 year?

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#252

Post by dang »

digging wrote: post #233
dang wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we low-quality people out in the regular world I understand how easily this feeling can arise. It may not be obvious but we spend a lot of energy on HN trying to mitigate it. I don't want a high-status-insider vs. low-status-outsider dynamic on HN. One thing I'd like to tell you is that as someone who came from little class privilege and a geographically provincial place, and had zero connection to the "Silicon Val…

maybe my brain is sleed-deprived but this doesn't feel great to me either. can we not be high quality people without those connections, regardless of how those connections might be made easier for the rare individuals who participate in YC?

Of course we can! And are.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#253

Post by satvikpendem »

acecreamu wrote: post #209
jawns wrote: post #156

At the very bottom, in a post-script: > The constant comparison and growth benchmarking triggered us to look differently at our business and we decided to wind up its operation right after the Demo Day. What happens in this scenario? YC gave them $500K in exchange for 7% of the business, and then they immediately shuttered the business? Did they get to keep the $500K?

We didn't take 375k in fact. In W22 batch they were optional, and would trigger MFN for many. As for the rest of money, we returned what has been left. That's why closing so rapidly - to be able to return more.

Why not take the 375k and/or pivot?

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#254

Post by satvikpendem »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #185
robocat wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC only invests in companies that aim big, and have a big opportunity. So you would have to lie to get them to invest, and they likely would catch you out lying. http://paulgraham.com/growth.html and http://paulgraham.com/mean.html gives you some idea (also see http://paulgraham.com/articles.html ). Giving 7%, but getting say 20% extra when you sell, could be financially sensible (depending on your other costs and be…

I have no intention of lying, I'd rather bootstrap or shop for other investors who don't have the same expectation of 'growth potential'. The YC model is.. it's own thing.. seems like in the current economy, they need every company to be a potential unicorn, which works out for them because they're doing it at scale, and the ones that deliver, deliver outsized returns. But possibly doesn't work out as well for the fo…

Why don't you look into bootstrapper friendly VCs instead?

TinySeed and Calm Fund come to mind.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#255

Post by twelvechairs »

rsp1984 wrote: post #90

Their logic can be understood: make a good product, and the rest will catch up. But in real life marketing and hype really matters, and when everyone does these things while you naively sit and code, they get an advantage in the market, and you get your cool product. I sometimes get the feeling, also by watching their public content on YT, that a lot of YC advice, especially w.r.t. what to prioritize, is from an era…

> every worthwhile niche seems to have 10-15 companies in it in no time

B2B in established industries can be much more open, though often requires a level of domain knowledge to enter.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#256

Post by jongjong »

trevmckendrick wrote: post #251
jongjong wrote: post #250

Oh my, $150K for 7% equity sounds really good. I would offer 30% equity for that amount. I've been trying to raise $20K for the last 10 years and never managed though one time someone took pity on me and gave me $20K in cryptocurrency as a gift. I managed to stake that on a crypto project in such a way that it was soon generating me around $35K to $70K per year and I used the money to fund myself to work on a Decentr…

Can I please recommend w/ no ill intent that you take news courses of action if you've unable to achieve raising a relatively low amount of capital after 10 year?

I already met many investors and millionaire founders. I even met 2 founders who are now billionaires and many others who went on to become multimillionaires. Nowadays most of them won't even answer my emails. One of the founders I met before they were successful (and who sold their startup for millions) won't even give me a $2000 per year support contract though they continue to use my open source project and ask me questions. I'm thinking I've been blacklisted. It doesn't make sense right?

Does it make sense that someone I met 10 years ago, was using my open source project as part of their startup and was having conversations with me every couple of months throughout the whole 10 years (they even let me log into their production system with 30K concurrent users to help fix a bug) and then went on to make millions won't even support my project with a $2000 a year contract?

Probably something weird going on. This is not just about one example, it's every now-successful founder I've ever met. Nobody talks to me and I did nothing wrong except build some products that work really well.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#257

Post by satvikpendem »

gamblor956 wrote: post #101

At least from the perspective of a potential customer, I now view Y Combinator as a red flag for a service provider, for a variety of reasons. The two big ones: YC companies try to "grow" too fast without any concern to the dynamics of how their market is supposed to work after they've achieved their targeted scale. The basic playbook seems to be: give stuff away for free until you kill the incumbents, then jack up p…

I don't see how this is specific to YC and not to other VCs too, unless you do mean to include other VCs too in your viewpoint.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#258

Post by dangoodmanUT »

YC has both transformed by company and saved my role as a founder. I'll be completely transparent and say I disagree with a lot of the sentiment. I'll do my best to briefly explain why.

From talking to many YC alumn, I've observed a strong correlation with business success and YC opinion. Every founder that is no longer operating within 2 years of YC has a generally negative sentiment. Others are quite positive. Not sure what biases are at play, but the correlation is clear.

As others have said, YC is what you make of it. I (S22) did not ever feel like I was getting cookie cutter advice from my GPs. When I talked to my partners, we really honed in on our issues specifically. Every time the GPs told us something they were right, whether it took me 10 seconds or 10 weeks to accept it. And to be fair the cookie cutter and repetitive advice they do give is because people generally don't listen if they just say it once or twice, and it's also REALLY important.

> Hiring is waste of time, paid advertising is waste of time, content is waste of time, talking to investors is waste of time, getting media coverage is waste of time.

This is dangerously oversimplified, these are all things that they suggest at various stages. Their advice for you depends greatly on your stage. Early on they told us paid placement is innapropriate. Later they told us it would be a great way to quickly validate changes and iterations. Depends on where you are and what you do.

Yeah YC makes fundraising orders of magnitude easier. Yeah in person definitely makes it way better. I've no regrets, would do YC again every time.

I've also heard similar sentiment from investors! "7% it too much for $125k", etc. But it's the prestige of the brand, and the super powerful network. I'm not part of any other pre-defined networks so I don't really know how to compare, but YC is POWERFUL. Nobody I've talked with that had those opinions had alternatives to getting that network or valuation that quickly, unless your already a startup star.

The big caveat is that my timezone lined up and I had many in person options, I also did not shut down immediately after demo day. I'm sure that made our experiences dramatically different. Being in a group of founders with similar experiences and comfortable being vulnerable with each other is the greatest therapy any founder could ask for.

I would warn non-YC founders reading this that this founders experience is highly abnormal for YC, and to talk to many more YC founders before drawing your own conclusions.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#259

Post by mrobins »

itsoktocry wrote: post #36
hassy wrote: post #25

Did YC S21 which was an all remote batch. my 2c. YC is 100% what you make of it. It's not a lean back experience. I did not meet most of the companies in my batch but I've gotten to know many founders through YC that I would not have otherwise. Founders that have been source of advice and support. Network of clients - yep don't go into YC expecting to sell to other YC cos. It is easier to get warm intros through the…

> Some of the advice I did not take and did the opposite and it was the right decision. And some advice that I did not take was exactly right, but I only saw it in retrospect months later. Sometimes their advice is right, and sometimes it's wrong? That doesn't sound particularly valuable. > Fundraising - being a YC company definitely opens doors, and also helps protects you from bad actors who have to think twice bef…

Hearing both good and bad advice and making smart decisions is what a CEO’s job is. Get as much advice as possible but understand no one knows your business like you do. Being able to hit go hard on the right advice and go slow/ignore the bad is what makes a good leader.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#260

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

rubenfiszel wrote: post #75

S22, solo founder, open-source infra + internal tools (windmill.dev). As the other ones in this thread have mentionned, YC is what you make out of it. For the fundraising alone, it allowed me to raise - a non US solo founder - at very comfortable terms and on the financial aspect alone it would have been worth it. But most importantly, the hardest part to start a company in my opinion is to keep being motivated. I wa…

Thanks so much for posting this, I really appreciated it. I can't say enough how much this point aligns with my experience:

- the great people of this world are smart, but not crazy smart. They are crazy pragmatic, and crazy motivated, which you can be TOO

One of the things I've seen about successful entrepreneurs is that they have the ability to just push, push, push, even when everything is hitting the fan. I've realized about myself that that's just not the way I work - in super stressful/chaotic situations, some people have the ability to just cut out the noise and focus. I'm not like that, my nervous system just gets too hyped up.

So, over time, while I've been disappointed that I don't have some of these skills I wish I had, I've found that I can be very valuable in other roles, and those can be lucrative or at least "lucrative enough" for me.

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