I'd be willing to bet the most important metric is the startup's response to yc rejection. Is it, "Oh well, back to the drawing board." or "They're wrong and we'll show them."?
Ask HN: What is Y Combinator's 'anti-portfolio' like
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Re: Ask HN: What is Y Combinator's 'anti-portfolio' like
#12My business became profitable this month, but it's not the same as the idea I applied to YC with. Not sure whether that counts or not, since apparently half of YC folks change their idea anyway. To be fair though I don't think I could have done it without going through Seth's MBA program, which was a lot more hands on than YC. (In terms of more contact hours, more formal instruction, more varied curriculum, more opportunity to find a diverse set of mentors, etc.) Also not the same co-founder, but the co-founder I applied with wasn't the problem.
Re: Ask HN: What is Y Combinator's 'anti-portfolio' like
#13I'd be willing to bet the most important metric is the startup's response to yc rejection. Is it, "Oh well, back to the drawing board." or "They're wrong and we'll show them."?
I don't know. If I had the money to invest, either response would be good although I would prefer the last one (you know in your gut that you are right and they are wrong, and you know you don't get anything from going back to the drawing board).
Re: Ask HN: What is Y Combinator's 'anti-portfolio' like
#14DriverMax from http://www.drivermax.com is in the Compete top 100,000. We are not looking for VC investment. We are profitable.
Microsoft from http://www.microsoft.com is in the Compete top 100,000. We are not looking for VC investment. We are profitable.
Re: Ask HN: What is Y Combinator's 'anti-portfolio' like
#15I would say that the operative questions is more about founders who become successful after they were not accepted into a YC "class." YC themselves are good at pointing out that most start-ups have to change direction/pivot multiple times before being successful. That's why it's about the people/founders imho.
I also suspect that there is little correlation in terms of success or not for companies accepted/not accepted into YC. The one exception worth exploring is that moving to SV for 90 days for non SV companies and working in one living room might increase focus and hence chances of success. That would be interesting to know.
Re: Ask HN: What is Y Combinator's 'anti-portfolio' like
#16My business became profitable this month, but it's not the same as the idea I applied to YC with. Not sure whether that counts or not, since apparently half of YC folks change their idea anyway. To be fair though I don't think I could have done it without going through Seth's MBA program, which was a lot more hands on than YC. (In terms of more contact hours, more formal instruction, more varied curriculum, more oppo…
Alex3917 is there a link to your company I could check out. Congratulations on a huge milestone. I hope you take time to celebrate.
Re: Ask HN: What is Y Combinator's 'anti-portfolio' like
#17Being accepted or not by YC has very little bearing on whether a startup can be successful or not, I do not expect there to be any significant correlation between YC rejected companies and accepted ones (in terms of success). They simply have a limited amount of time. What I do think you will find is that those that are bitter about a rejection tend to cluster around the failure point, mostly because they will be loo…
I do not expect there to be any significant correlation between YC rejected companies and accepted ones (in terms of success)
Did you mean variation rather than correlation?
Re: Ask HN: What is Y Combinator's 'anti-portfolio' like
#18My business became profitable this month, but it's not the same as the idea I applied to YC with. Not sure whether that counts or not, since apparently half of YC folks change their idea anyway. To be fair though I don't think I could have done it without going through Seth's MBA program, which was a lot more hands on than YC. (In terms of more contact hours, more formal instruction, more varied curriculum, more oppo…
Alex3917 is there a link to your company I could check out. Congratulations on a huge milestone. I hope you take time to celebrate.
Thanks bill, the link is swagapalooza.com. Basically it's a conference that I'm leveraging to do other things. Hopefully I'll be able to post more about this over the next 6 months.
Re: Ask HN: What is Y Combinator's 'anti-portfolio' like
#19Being accepted or not by YC has very little bearing on whether a startup can be successful or not, I do not expect there to be any significant correlation between YC rejected companies and accepted ones (in terms of success). They simply have a limited amount of time. What I do think you will find is that those that are bitter about a rejection tend to cluster around the failure point, mostly because they will be loo…
> I do not expect there to be any significant correlation between YC rejected companies and accepted ones
That's a pretty bizarre statement. You mean to imply that the YC folks have exactly zero predictive power in the success of a startup? That seems pretty crazy.
I agree that being rejected by YC doesn't by any means block one from future success, but the selection process is better than, say, random sampling. If nothing else, there have to be a fair percentage of just plain dumb ideas that get filtered out or patterns that emerge for people who aren't likely to pull something off that they can predict with some degree of accuracy (no matter how small).
Re: Ask HN: What is Y Combinator's 'anti-portfolio' like
#20I won't list names, but there's one team that was rejected from this batch that had raised a series A (from a good VC) before any of the teams from the batch did.
The fundamental thing is that you've got to want to start a startup, rather than to be in YC -- if you want to start a startup YC can be something along that path, but far and away most of the startups that have succeeded have done so without YC, so that's obviously a well-worn path to success.