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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

#41

Post by sparkzilla »

The article makes it clear that the YC interview selection process is deeply flawed. Leaving out the idea that they were selected because they told a story about the sound of biting a bottle, surely at the interview stage, if the entrepreneurs do not know what the company is making, or the business looks weak the interviewer should just say no. It's not enough to say "here are two bright people that can pivot". Bright people are everywhere, good business ideas are rare. All this does is cause the stress that the author has gone through as he and his partner have to desperately search for a business idea that may not come. This kind of stress, based on unrealistic expectations, can lead people to kill themselves, and seems to me to be borderline unethical.

Meanwhile there are literally hundreds of other companies and thousands of smart people with great ideas that would gladly take their place and succeed, including many of the readers here.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#42

Post by no_future »

wpietri wrote: post #24
edent wrote: post #12

Am I missing something here? You can get $$$ and top quality advice for an _idea_ and then just turn around and say "bored now - let's do something else"? And then, so it seems, when that idea runs out you just say "uhhh... let's do this instead!" So, what are the YC people investing in? Two guys who seem pretty smart? I appreciate that you might need to pivot from "a social network for dogs" to "a social network for…

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?…

>I know we are in another bubble.

No, we aren't. The conditions of the original tech bubble and today's conditions differed greatly, and several prominent investors have answered that it definitely isn't a bubble when questioned as such. People just use "bubble" to refer to any market that seems dubious in their likely uninformed opinion. Please stop saying this and fearmongering.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#43

Post by phkahler »

jokoon wrote: post #16

Hey, I have ideas too! http://zonas.free.fr/?p=pages&pg=ideas

Those seem like things that you'd like to make. Some might even be interesting to look at, but What problems do they solve? Why would OTHER people want them? Go to each one and write what it does for people rather than what it is.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#44

Post by Disruptive_Dave »

phkahler wrote: post #40
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 t…

I suppose teaching techies business is easier than teaching business folks tech (or maybe quicker?). Still, I continue to be perplexed at the absence of "business" in startups. I'm not convinced that injecting "business" into a startup is an option for a later date.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#45

Post by juanbyrge »

Thanks for sharing this story. I know it was a tough decision to leave the company. If you were in a situation that causes you a lot of stress and unhappiness, there's no shame in leaving.

There are a lot of people being critical here. It's easy to look at the situation from the outside and feel entitled to make comments. I bet if some of the commenters here were in you're situation they'd feel differently.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#46

Post by yesimahuman »

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…

Having been in an accelerator before, I definitely related to their sense of dread that they might mess up this opportunity and never be successful again because of it. Watching peers strike it big must have been super hard.

I quickly realized after that most "success" is exaggerated in the media, etc. and true success takes a lot longer than we expect. Raising $1M isn't success. Hell, raising $5-30M in today's climate isn't success. "Success" is such a vague concept that it's best to just focus on being happy and building cool shit and growing it year after year. It takes time.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#47

Post by cfallin »

_delirium wrote: post #35
untog wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In addition, it's not like leaving a PhD funded by an NSF GRFP leaves zero net positive impact. Funding research leads to papers (hopefully with valuable insights) and to knowledge and training passed down to other researchers. I don't think it's a very good analogy to startup funding in that sense. (Although I suppose one could make the argument that alums of failed companies have hard-earned experience so some of the value is still there, diffused out to wherever they go next.)

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#48

Post by GoLocalApps »

I think this is both an indictment of "squirrel" syndrome (the dog from Up), and YC not choosing well in the first place. maybe that's the environment there, but I would guess if you brought in a new team with an idea, gave them money for that idea and then they went and dumped the idea right off and went to something new and shinier, they shouldn't have been funded in the first place?

And with two previously abandoned businesses in his past, someone should have asked about commitment to the idea. Sure you can work on something you don't love, but then its a job not a career or a self focused business, not something worth others investing in without a really clear business plan and exit strategy.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#49

Post by charlierguo »

Hey everyone! Author here.

First off, thanks for reading! To be honest, I really didn't expect to get this much attention. This is a story that I've wanted to share with friends and family for a long time, and was thoroughly surprised when it was picked up by Backchannel (and then posted here).

Regarding some of the points made here, I (mostly) agree. Getting into YC or raising money is not success. Changing your idea completely isn't really a "pivot" (but I don't know if the industry has as concise of a term for throwing everything out and starting over). In my mind, the real failure was squandering the opportunity of YC, an opportunity I know many people would kill to have. Clearly we should have stuck it out with our idea, but we were 21 years old, stressed out, and foolish.

I also want to note (in case anyone was wondering) that my experience hasn't diminished my opinion of YC at all. PG's advice was spot on, and YC remains an amazing program for founders. We simply didn't make the best use of our time in it.

Hopefully reading about my experience is helpful in some way. If not, sorry about that. Give it a downvote and send it on its merry way.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#50

Post by 31reasons »

yesimahuman wrote: post #46
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…

Having been in an accelerator before, I definitely related to their sense of dread that they might mess up this opportunity and never be successful again because of it. Watching peers strike it big must have been super hard. I quickly realized after that most "success" is exaggerated in the media, etc. and true success takes a lot longer than we expect. Raising $1M isn't success. Hell, raising $5-30M in today's clima…

>>"Success" is such a vague concept

Actually its not in terms of business.

Success = Profit + Long term sustainability in doing so.

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