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What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator

about.gitlab.com

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Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator

#14

Post by sytse »

annerajb wrote: post #7

What did you learn at YC that you feel you would have not learned elsewhere or that it would have taken you longer?

We learned many things. The two most important ones:

1. You can do more than you think. We came in wanting to grow into a 30 person company in 2020. Now we're 100+ people and plan to IPO in 2020. You realize that you have only so many years left and you want to make them count. And that with some help you can aim higher. Not every company should take VC and I love companies like Basecamp. But YC helped these two EU founders be more ambitious.

2. You can ship faster than you think. Seeing what is now https://www.wayup.com/ and other people in our group achieve much more than us every two weeks made us question how we worked. We learned to iterate and launch the minimal iteration as soon as possible. It was a counter-intuitive lesson that greatly increased how effective we are.

Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator

#16

Post by work4beer »

boxcardavin wrote: post #13

What did getting into YC 'liberate' you to do that you later found out was just a mental block?

Honestly you can just watch the CS183 video's, the same speakers on there, its their shtick it ain't going to change,

What I find troubling is getting young people to come and live in the valley for 3 months.

Why on earth with so many good places do these old fart's continue to suck young blood to Bohemia-Grove? For what?

The action is now Asia, that is where the customers and many are, I think people should be doing this in HK,Singapore, and BKK.

SV is a sewer.

Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator

#18

Post by jnpatel »

sytse wrote: post #4
jontonsoup wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will you read over my application? Would love feedback!

Yes, please coordinate with kirsten@gitlab.com for a 25 minute Google Hangout with me, please link to this comment in your email to her. If the advice is generic enough we might work with you to publish it https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/ceo-pref... (you have a final say in what gets published). This process was also used to produce the OP.

Sid, willing to meet with us too? It'd be very appreciated!

(I totally understand you can't do this for everyone who'll ask.)

P.S. I'm also open to a peer feedback session for anyone else applying!

Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator

#19

Post by jkarneges »

Most people I know that are interested in starting a company need help near the beginning, within 6-12 months of setting out on their own. Almost always pre-revenue, and very early traction (if b2b, maybe just a few users evaluating).

Where are these kinds of entrepreneurs supposed to go? Is it still YC, when they have to compete with already-successful applicants?

Kudos to GitLab bootstrapping to $1M ARR though. That's truly incredible. They should write a story about that part. :)

Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator

#20

Post by sytse »

vbhartia wrote: post #17

Reading through your YC application, you were already so successful ($1M in rev, 60% growth rate, 1M users), did you ever have second thoughts about going through YC? If you had not gotten in, what would you have done otherwise? Congrats on your success!

Thanks! We never had second thoughts about YC. We did talk a lot during YC if we wanted to take outside investment. If you take investment you need to work to a liquidity event (acquisition or IPO). Since we would like to stay independent the only option is an IPO. Not many companies make make that.

But we also wanted to make GitLab a great and popular solution. For this we need the best marketing and sales people. When we tried to hire those they wanted options in the company. It is not fair to give options if it will take very long to cash them. So we needed a liquidity event in any case. In that case it was better to take outside investment so the chance of getting to IPO was higher than without it.

If we would have not gotten in we would have continued GitLab and probably applied again for the next batch.

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