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I'm also with you! Just wanted to share my experience in case it helps as a data point. Gates, Jobs, and Zuck all famously dropped out of college of course. It's an interesting and tricky social dynamic matching within and between these somewhat distinct groups.
So did Elizabeth Holmes.
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Video is fine(it's just a minute), but why LinkedIn URL is required(not optional)? LinkedIn is about education, career, and networking. I am under average in all of them, so I'm not registered. This is the only thing which holding me back from applying. Otherwise, I work full-time on kick-ass product for months with 1000+ commits.
Sorry about that! Based on this thread, we removed the requirement for a LinkedIn profile.
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That's not so. At the last YC talk I attended, founders of $100M startups were cited as successes (anything else would be pretty weird, no?) That's incredibly successful, even though startup investing is a power-law game.
That’s totally true, though there’s a difference between “founders of $100M startups” that already have that valuation, and working on a company in a market where $100M is the max you could expect. If you aim for $10B and hit $100M that’s great, you aimed for the Sun and landed on the Moon! But if the max you can hit is $100M, then everything needs to go right to reach the Moon, and the Sun is fully out of reach — an…
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>> ideas are supposedly not worth anything If ideas are worth nothing then a great team executing well should be able to create a billion dollar company selling dog droppings. Anyone who says ideas are worth nothing is flat out wrong.
I think the claim is rather that idea is not the high-order bit in an early-stage startup funding decision; founders are. There's no success without eventually finding a good idea, especially since 'successful in the end' is practically the definition of 'good idea', or close enough to be inseparable. So it's not so much "ideas don't matter" as " starting ideas don't matter", as long as you're the type of founder who…
If people do want to play the VC industrial complex game - then at least understand the pros and cons of it; otherwise it's good to understand it so you know how to better position yourself.
Re: "won't get in" How do I balance this encouraging advice with everything I've heard online about YC basically being a post-Ivy League thing? Seems like there's basically a 0% chance a random person would get into YC. And often those who did get in went to Stanford, Harvard, etc. and don't even have a product - sometimes they don't even know what they're going to build yet. I wrote the idea of VC stuff off long ago…
As you say, a lot of YC founders don't have a real business yet, but they're not there because they're well connected. They're there because YC thinks they fit the profile of someone who really wants to build a big business and might pull it off. They're wrong most of the time but it's a numbers game.
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Not that I'm aware of, no, just the local state school. My impression of the YC application process was that it was way more holistic than just educational background.
YC approval process is pretty much this: - Do I even understand your idea. - Have you talked to customers. - Am I impressed in your use of time. - Do I believe that your team is capable of delivering. - Is it a good idea. Most people can't get past the first two but obsess over the last two.
What happened? Not enough people applied? Here's the last batch.[1] Gives a sense of what's being funded. Ideas: - MoneyNow - leverages the new FedNow instant payment system. FedNow is run by the Fed and transfers money in seconds with a charge of just US$0.045 per transaction. And they mean seconds . If the money isn't there in 10 seconds, the transaction times out. Few banks support it yet, but some do. It needs co…
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-winter-2024-bat...
Re: "won't get in" How do I balance this encouraging advice with everything I've heard online about YC basically being a post-Ivy League thing? Seems like there's basically a 0% chance a random person would get into YC. And often those who did get in went to Stanford, Harvard, etc. and don't even have a product - sometimes they don't even know what they're going to build yet. I wrote the idea of VC stuff off long ago…
You are running a profitable business, why play that game?
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Most (all?) countries do this. Consumer banking services will offer free transfers as a loss leader.
I think SEPA Instant in the EU is probably free, seeing as EU will require banks to provide SEPA Instant for free to their users (or at the same cost as normal transfers)