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How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

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Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#31

Post by untog »

_delirium wrote: post #27
wpietri wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had similar questions based on this: "In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding. My two cofounders and I attended StartX, an incubator affiliated with Stanford, but ultimately decided to finish our degrees instead of pursuing the startup dream." Am I understanding that right? Twice in two years this guy took other people's money for something and then quit?…

Unless there's some kind of actual contract (leave before X years and you have to return Y% of the funding), I don't think that should be very surprising. People start on something (even a funded something) and then change to other things all the time, if their interests change or another opportunity arises. For example, a portion of the people who win $30k/year National Science Foundation graduate research fellowshi…

A research fellowship is not seed funding, though. YC doesn't "give" people $30k, it invests $30k in their business.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#32

Post by minimaxir »

birken wrote: post #22

This post really misunderstands what both success and failure are. Getting into YC or raising money isn't success. And trying an idea out for a few months before giving up on it isn't failure. Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots of years. Maybe the idea is bad, but giving up on it after a couple of months really proves nothing. All it has proven is that the founders are the type of people t…

> The "nightmare" described in this post is a joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through. Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me? Really?

From the narrative, it sounds like there's a causal link between the TechCrunch article and the startup forcibly being summoned to office hours to ask what the hell is going on. Which says more about YC/PG's policies than it does about the startup founders.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#33

Post by Disruptive_Dave »

Does YC ever accept business / growth people or just "tech"? I ask that in seriousness, as my take - in my very limited time as a startup founder & employee - has consistently been that many startups fail due in part to an obvious lack of business sense and skills. I'm regularly surprised by the sheer amount of startups out there, many of which are funded, with coders and designers who have no damn clue how to sell.

"We were a solid team, a designer/developer combo." Is that a solid "build a business" team or just a solid "engineer the product" team?

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#34

Post by guynamedloren »

Not sure why the author didn't consider a fourth option when graduating from college:

    4) Join the ground floor of a startup *as an early employee*
It would've yielded invaluable experience and a whole lot of personal growth, leaving him in a much better place to run a company years down the road.

At this point, I don't really think he's learned anything at all, and he won't learn much about running a company while he's galavanting around southeast asia humblebragging.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#35

Post by _delirium »

untog wrote: post #31
_delirium wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless there's some kind of actual contract (leave before X years and you have to return Y% of the funding), I don't think that should be very surprising. People start on something (even a funded something) and then change to other things all the time, if their interests change or another opportunity arises. For example, a portion of the people who win $30k/year National Science Foundation graduate research fellowshi…

A research fellowship is not seed funding, though. YC doesn't "give" people $30k, it invests $30k in their business.

It's not identical, but it's not like the NSF "gives" people $30k of the taxpayer's money just as a gift ether. The goal is to invest public money in future researchers. In both cases there's a clear intent that you will use this as seed money to jump-start a project that will achieve the funder's goals (monetary return and positive PR for Y Combinator, production of research & PhDs for the NSF GFRP). But there's no requirement that you continue to do it indefinitely, and no ban on bailing out if you decide it's not for you after spending $30k of the funder's money. I don't see this as any more morally binding in the Y Combinator case than the NSF case.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#36

Post by EvaK_de »

nakovet wrote: post #20

I don't get it, I have been working with web development for the past 10 years, I never had problems finding a job but I wouldn't know how to do remote consulting while I travel around the work to "take a break", nevertheless the tone set from OP is confusing you don't know if he is humble, spoiled or bragging. It's all mixed up, and like other people noted pivoting is not changing your idea completely, this is start…

I share your impression of the tone. It's probably due to the text being written by a 21-year old. At that age hardly anyone has a fixed personality, but displays kind of fluctuating character traits. At least I think that's what leads to the impression you so accurately described.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#38

Post by lesingerouge »

Through some very strange twists of fate it seems to me that bot programming and starting a business ended up being "fashionable" things to do. And obviously as all fashionable things there's quite a lot of people that want to ride the hype train.

Statistics tell us that there will always be a certain percentage that are on the train just for the hype.

My 2 cents: getting on the train just for the hype is a clear indicator that you do not have a very good knowledge of yourself. Internal, time-tested, hard-earned kind of knowledge.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#39

Post by birken »

minimaxir wrote: post #32
birken wrote: post #22

This post really misunderstands what both success and failure are. Getting into YC or raising money isn't success. And trying an idea out for a few months before giving up on it isn't failure. Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots of years. Maybe the idea is bad, but giving up on it after a couple of months really proves nothing. All it has proven is that the founders are the type of people t…

> The "nightmare" described in this post is a joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through. Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me? Really? From the narrative, it sounds like there's a causal link between the TechCrunch article and the startup forcibly being summoned to office hours to ask what the hell is going on. Which says more about YC/PG's policies than it does about the startup…

I realize the actual nightmare is that after a few months of all-night coding the founders didn't launch the next facebook, but still:

> We had much bigger problems than the piece, to be sure, but launching with an article that roundly mocked us was one of the final nails in the coffin.

Hint to startup founders: It doesn't matter if Techcrunch writes about you or what they write about you. If you are letting that affect your perception of your company in a large way, you are doing it wrong. Though to Techcrunch's credit, in this case they really did a good job of reporting.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#40

Post by phkahler »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #33

Does YC ever accept business / growth people or just "tech"? I ask that in seriousness, as my take - in my very limited time as a startup founder & employee - has consistently been that many startups fail due in part to an obvious lack of business sense and skills. I'm regularly surprised by the sheer amount of startups out there, many of which are funded, with coders and designers who have no damn clue how to sell.…

YC is supposed to help with things like that. They teach techies the business side of things and I would imagine they'd say "you need to hire someone to do sales" if that's what they needed. In this case they said from the start something like "we're concerned about your product idea" which was their primary problem. I suppose having someone with sales smarts may have helped them figure it out, since their idea was to help you-tubers sell stuff apparently.
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