Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Y Combinator worth the money?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 349 posts

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#311

Post by rhtgrg »

opportune wrote: post #188
rhtgrg wrote: post #46

YC used to be for people who investors wouldn’t normally take a chance on…and imo, it still is. If you have a FAANG attached to your name with multiple years of experience, you can probably find better deals elsewhere. YC has done a relatively good job of scaling themselves, but it has never been a “one size fits all” funding solution, and if you are a founder you’d be wise to consider your options carefully. That be…

I have FAANG attached to my name with multiple years of experience, where else would you recommend as a replacement or competitor to YC? I am aware of angel investors’ existence but looking for anything besides that

It depends on what your goals are and what your business needs. I would recommend reaching out to your local angel investors —- even if you don’t plan to fundraise with them, they usually have an avenue for you to get in touch directly with investors —- and they can interview you about your startup and dispense free advice that is much more informed than what I can give you here.

Assuming you are at a very nascent stage with your startup, there are still all sorts of options out there, including but not limited to —- Kickstarter, loans, raising from friends and family, running on a shoestring budget offshore, raising convertible notes from local investors (you probably have some of these people in your extended network already), selling preorders, self-funding (e.g. via collateral loans), grants, incubators (other than YC), etc.

There are a lot of variables, and several options to choose from depending on your particulars.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#312

Post by opportune »

rhtgrg wrote: post #311
opportune wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have FAANG attached to my name with multiple years of experience, where else would you recommend as a replacement or competitor to YC? I am aware of angel investors’ existence but looking for anything besides that

It depends on what your goals are and what your business needs. I would recommend reaching out to your local angel investors —- even if you don’t plan to fundraise with them, they usually have an avenue for you to get in touch directly with investors —- and they can interview you about your startup and dispense free advice that is much more informed than what I can give you here. Assuming you are at a very nascent st…

Thanks! Yeah I guess to be more specific, what meant to ask is: besides YC and angel investors, what will help me as much or better than YC? Particularly in the context of the person I was replying to saying that people with my background can potentially find better deals than with YC (which I guess I assumed meant in terms of VC - you’re right that it probably helps with alternative funding routes too).

Like, what better incubators or accelerators will be looking at 5+ years at FAANG as a shoe-in (honestly, I’m a bit skeptical that’s even a shoe in at at YC, but what do I know) and give me better terms and/or more support? I know Sequioa has a small incubator now and I’ve actually talked to them, but I assume there are some good ones out there that would be hard to learn about except through word of mouth.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#313

Post by lobocinza »

JohnFen wrote: post #64
itsoktocry wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Sometimes their advice is right, and sometimes it's wrong? That doesn't sound particularly valuable. This is true of literally every source of advice you'll ever encounter. It's not that the advice is right or wrong in an absolute sense, it's that how good the advice is depends on the context of it. So you always have to evaluate the advice according to your own circumstances. Some of it will be appropriate to you…

Was it 50/50?

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#314

Post by rsp1984 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #288
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…

Maybe that’s your clue that your idea is bad then? YC likely has decided it’s not in their interest to badmouth your idea, but if you are making the 20th data pipeline company in the same batch, maybe the smart thing to do is take a step back and ask yourself “is this really what I want to spend 5 years in?” From what I hear in the YC YouTube videos, it’s clear that the partners quickly form an image of how much brut…

W.r.t bad ideas, I'll just leave you with this PG quote [1]

Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. So better a good idea with competitors than a bad one without.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#315

Post by _sentient »

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?

Definitely not trying to imply that these people don’t exist elsewhere, but rather than YC does a great job getting a bunch of them in one place.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#316

Post by indymike »

mahmoudimus wrote: post #309
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is usually more like being told to do X, me saying X probably isn’t worth the time and energy, doing X anyway at their prompting assuming they’ll take some accountability for it going sideways, it ultimately going sideways because it was a bad idea, and then them taking zero accountability for their bad idea and not helping with the fact we’ve now been materially set back by the attempt. I’ve since lear…

As someone who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for venture capital backed companies, I can tell you that this absolutely does not change even at the highest level of the company. My advice from experience - if the advice you're receiving is wrong and you know it's wrong, explain why it's wrong and if you're pressured to go against your advice, then that person is not a fit for you and you should part ways.

> My advice from experience - if the advice you're receiving is wrong and you know it's wrong, explain why it's wrong and if you're pressured to go against your advice, then that person is not a fit for you and you should part ways.

I've raised about 5 million from VC... and agree at least 100% with this advice.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#317

Post by toomim »

lossolo wrote: post #229
baxtr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super interesting. Do you have an example in mind where a startup excels through marketing in a crowded niche with the mentioned 10-15 startups?

In the crypto space currently, there are projects that excel in terms of technological merits, making them far superior to their competition. However, the competition often has better marketing and generates more hype and win the market.

I don't think that's true for crypto companies with actual customers (like coinbase) but rather the ones that are surviving on hype/investment alone, which all crash sooner or later, and aren't really companies. Just fluff.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#318

Post by JohnFen »

lmm wrote: post #294
jschveibinz wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are describing a moat, and it is indeed important. I’ll step up on the soapbox for a moment… A moat can be unique technology, an exclusive licensing agreement, an exclusive IP (patent or otherwise), very unique experience or insight, an exclusive geographic location, a very unique business model, a very unique skill and/or reputation, etc. Follow the leader seems like a plan, but it’s probably not a good plan unl…

> Writing software is not a differentiator. It’s not a shortcut to big bucks. It’s not a solution in itself. It’s just a tool. Anything you can write in a week (or 3 months) can be done by 100,000 other people—-in a week (or 3 months). > You have to start with a problem, defined by a large group of people, that you have the experience and expertise to solve in a unique and valuable way. That precise argument is why I…

> As I get older I'm more and more convinced that actually doing anything at all can be a differentiator.

Indeed. This has always been true, and will always be true. Thus the old saw about how "80% of success is just showing up."

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#319

Post by _sentient »

Eiriksmal wrote: post #55
_sentient wrote: post #34

I wonder how much of this is a function of the W22 batch being remote. We all know the benefits: The fundraising pop is great, the brand patina helps you hire better talent than you would otherwise, the advice can be useful, especially for first-time founders, you can sell into the YC network, etc. All of this pales, IMO, to the value of the personal connections you make in the program. It sounds like OP, by virtue o…

Even if you can't have personal connections with the founders of 80 companies in a batch, having hundreds of companies in each batch--twice a year!--is seriously diluting my own worked-for-a-YC-startup brand equity. "Oh, yeah, I met Jeremy at $EVENT" becomes a thing of the past when there are thousands of founders with tens of thousands of early-stage employees.

I could see it going both ways. You're not going to know all YC founders by default, but you will know more founders than if the batches were small.

The individual network is larger, but comprises a smaller % of the total network as the program scales.

Re: Is Y Combinator worth the money?

#320

Post by MichaelZuo »

dustingetz wrote: post #241
mritchie712 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

building a valuable product doesn't make you successful in 2023? Please, elaborate.

* markets measure sentiment * capital flows through trust networks * the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws ) * Curse of Development: the depth of any transaction is limited by the depth of the shallower party ( https://www.dustingetz.com/#/page/the%20curse%20of%20develop... ) * You Can't Tell People Anything ( https://www.dustingetz.com/#/page/…

How does this invalidate the possibility of a valuable product leading to success?
Post reply on HN