How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator • Hacker News Board

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#51

Post by cheepin » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 8:42 PM UTC

thoman23 wrote: post #10

nkangoh wrote: post #7

I find this paragraph interesting: "From the outside, it might have looked like I was crazy to feel this way. I had graduated from Stanford, I had a CS degree, and I knew how to play the startup game. In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding." Pardon my ignorance, but if a startup is a game, wouldn't knowing how to play be knowing how to win, i.e. an exit? I…

I was going to make a similar comment. There is an undercurrent of "raising money = success" in this posting. The whole concept of throwing money at 21-year olds and hoping they find an idea still seems bizarre to me, but obviously it has paid off for the YC guys.

"For the first time in my life, I had impostor syndrome: I convinced myself that I did not deserve the success I had achieved."

This particularly struck me as ironic. Maybe he felt like an imposter because the other people had an actual plan and he didn't.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#52

Post by revelation » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 8:44 PM UTC

thoman23 wrote: post #8

Please tell me that this Ryan Lawler from TechCrunch is writing in that style to insinuate his utter disdain not only for the FanHero business model, but for the whole "free money for 21-year olds with a half-baked idea" industry. He can't possibly write that way for real, could he?

Full article:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/18/y-combinator-backed-fanhero...

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#53

Post by _delirium » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 8:47 PM UTC

cfallin wrote: post #47

_delirium wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

In the best case I think that's possible, but in the usual case someone who leaves a PhD program after a year does very little research. US-style PhDs don't typically require a master's degree first, so first-year PhD students are doing mainly course work and "figure out what I want to do for my PhD" project-shopping. If you do that for a year and bail, it's pretty common that you wrote zero papers and did very little research. If you leave after two or three years, it's more likely you will leave some kind of research contribution, although it's also pretty common for people who realize they are going to leave to just "pivot" to full-time MSc coursework, so they can leave the program with a master's degree. In that case, the NSF basically funded someone to take MSc courses, which is arguably not useless, but isn't what the NSF intends to fund.

I think with this amount of money it's just a risk of funding people. Putting in strings requiring repayment if the person changes areas, when you're giving someone <$100k, is pretty heavyweight for either the NSF or Y Combinator, so they just try to pre-screen for people they think are going to use the money as intended and stick with it, and accept that some percentage of people will instead use the money to flail around for a year or two and leave. If the percentage gets too high, then I guess reconsider the screening process.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#54

Post by orasis » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 8:49 PM UTC

charlierguo wrote: post #49

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 ide…

Thanks for putting this out there. It takes guts and self awareness to write something like this.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#55

Post by untog » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 8:50 PM UTC

31reasons wrote: post #50

yesimahuman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Success can also be short term growth and being bought by a larger company, in this industry.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#56

Post by encoderer » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 8:52 PM UTC

solve wrote: post #26

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…

> So, what are the YC people investing in? Two guys who seem pretty smart? The fully loaded market rate for "two guys who seem pretty smart" in Silicon Valley is somewhere between $200,000 to $300,000 per year -- at regular day jobs. Even boring regular employers invest a ton of money in people just based on an interview. Remember this, when thinking about all of the investors who are always demanding tons of up-fron…

> The fully loaded market rate for "two guys who seem pretty smart" in Silicon Valley is somewhere between $200,000 to $300,000 per year

Each

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#57

Post by mediaright » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 8:56 PM UTC

..."professional hoop-jumper" ...He means being a kid?

There's a self-importance and arrogance to all of this that really comes through from this type of rhetor. I think the imposter syndrome might not be that much of a syndrome in the case of far too many startup teams sadly.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#58

Post by yesimahuman » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:02 PM UTC

31reasons wrote: post #50

yesimahuman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Success is the most loosely defined, illogical concept in the startup world. When your friends are raising big rounds, you think they are successful, even though most of them won't survive beyond the runway that round gives them (esp. at that stage).

Yet the media and the community celebrates founders for all sorts of things and call it "success" when it's not. So yes, it's incredibly vague, and the existence of an accounting formula means nothing in the founder psyche.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#59

Post by TheGrassyKnoll » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:08 PM UTC

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…

CS degree from Stanford == clout in the startup community

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#60

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #18

HorizonXP wrote: post #6

What a great story. Charlie is very brave for telling this, and it's something that more people need to hear. Getting into YC is not an achievement. Even if you get in, you're not special. You still have to bust your ass like everyone else trying to build a company. Not getting into YC isn't a big deal either, because you're still not special. Stories like Charlie's should help others highlight this fact. He said tha…

> Getting into YC is not an achievement. Even if you get in, you're not special. You still have to bust your ass like everyone else trying to build a company. Not getting into YC isn't a big deal either, because you're still not special. Unfortunately, the marketing of YC (and many other accelerators) disagrees with this, with emphasis that joining a startup accelerator validates you and makes you part of the elite a…

From a strict biz point of view, the flaw is in the accelerator/startup model.

If you have a viable business idea, you can make money from it almost from day one. There are plenty of people who run side businesses and do a day job too.

You only need a huge sum of investment cash if you need to pay yourself and/or a dev team a ton of money to build a massive working prototype and do some marketing.

So what is YC actually for? How much of the chumminess and support offered by getting into YC is mission critical?

If you can't answer that question, don't apply. And I'd suggest that you don't know enough to answer that question until you've built a prototype small business that runs successfully - not just a GitHub account with shiny code happening that might somehow be business related, perhaps, but a business with paying customers that makes more than it costs to run.

If you need to spend five weeks writing code, you may as well expand that to half a year of less intense and more considered part-time work, bypass the drama, and see how well your business idea does on objective terms in the real world.

You won't get feted as one of the elite entrepreneur class, but you'll learn a hell of lot more about business, customers, and yourself than you will by spending a fortune on moving to SF and hanging out with the cool kids.

Bottom line is that if you don't have the stamina to go it alone, you probably won't do so well with funding anyway.