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We Make Mistakes

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: We Make Mistakes

#101

Post by AustinPythonFTW »

birken wrote: post #85
AustinPythonFTW wrote: post #77

I'm definitely speaking at least a little bit out of bitterness (our team just got rejected), so with that caveat it feels like YC is becoming more like traditional VC (venture capital): - extremely low probability of success just due to volume of applications - no feedback (again, due to volume of applications, and they posted a nice blog post about this, but just stating a fact) - it seems (I don't have any factual…

Lots of people will give you money if they think you will turn it into more money. VCs, YC, techstars, rich people, angel investors, your parents, your dentist, etc. Having dealt with many varieties of these before, they all generally share those principles: - You get a lot more 'no's than 'yes'es - They don't give you a lot of feedback when they pass - Having a previous relationship with them is helpful - The more s…

I think we're making the same point here, but with a nuance.

I think we both agree that: YC is becoming more like everyone else in the investing game. they want to make a lot of money.

Just to clarify, it felt like YC used to be more different from others in the investing game, like they cared more, or they were willing to invest in earlier-stage startups, or they had a higher purpose, or followed the hacker ethos. but now it just feels like they're more like every other investor out there -- please note the use of the word "more". they still do great things (watsi case in point), and all of their blog posts are very respectful towards applicants. to reiterate, it just feels like they're becoming "more" like traditional VC and less like what I thought YC was or used to stand for.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#102

Post by panther2k »

clairity wrote: post #41
panther2k wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s8udpwEe7TPz1xJLA3E1N9qb... We are building a decentralized bank/crowdlending network on the blockchain.

neat idea. did you consider applying to PnP bitcoin accelerator? http://plugandplayaccelerator.com/programs/Bitcoin

We were accepted but decided it wasn't the best fit for us. I know most of the companies in their current batch and they're doing some cool stuff. It's great to see accelerators with a cryptocurrency/blockchain focus like PnP and boost.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#103

Post by rdlecler1 »

paul9290 wrote: post #81
rdlecler1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were accepted for an interview (Not accepted to the class yet). I'm 41 and my co-founder (who doesn't looks quite as young as I am) is 47. To be honest, I fully expected a rejection for this very reason so I'm pleasantly surprised which is actually pretty consistent with the YC brand. To make a fair assessment you also need to look at the distribution of applicants. If 15% of applicants are female, then your null…

Congratulations! I do wonder if you... - Are already generating revenue - Have lots of traction/traffic - Sold previous start-ups and or companies before - Worked at and or working at Apple, Facebook, Google or similar companies - Ran a successful KickStarter - Went to an ivy league school As for us.. I am 39 and this is my second start-up. My co-founder is 21. Our first start-up idea (was a novel idea at the time) h…

Revenue: I wish. We're in a highly regulated environment and we didn't raise enough money to get a broker dealer license so we had to defer revenue because we couldn't afford it as well as the legal and compliance costs.

Traffic/Traction. Wow, Two different things. We're an investment marketplace for agriculture and agtech (http://agfunder.com). Listed companies have raised $10.5M since Feb2014, we have another $2M in live deals, and about $12M in deal flow coming on in the next 4 weeks. So in that respect traction is huge, this is not being funded by thousands of investors but by VCs in Silicon Valley family or in Russia, offices, strategics. In our case the LTV of a customer is in the hundreds of thousands so we don't need traffic in the millions. We average about 5,000 uniques per month, and we have about a 1% conversion rate, of which 0.25% are investors.

Sold previous startups: No. I wish. I wouldn't be living off my credit card right now.

Apple/Facebook/Google: No.

KickStarter: No, family then advisories, and then friends of friends got us this far but it has been very very painful and it seemed like just when we were on deaths door (Maxed credit cards, zero sleep for 2 weeks) that we had a stay of execution.

Ivy: Yes. I have a PhD from Yale and have published in Nature, Harvard Business Review, and most recently TechCrunch so I had a lot of social proof to work with (That said I have ADD and dyslexia and I didn't graduate from high school so don't let a poor start hold you back). I'm sure this played in, but it is possible to build up your CV. I think YC (and frankly everyone else) wants to know that you are someone who is capable of doing something extraordinary. You need to give them data points. Start with some baby steps and leverage your way into something bigger. I submitted several articles to TC before one was accepted.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#104

Post by jl »

AustinPythonFTW wrote: post #77

I'm definitely speaking at least a little bit out of bitterness (our team just got rejected), so with that caveat it feels like YC is becoming more like traditional VC (venture capital): - extremely low probability of success just due to volume of applications - no feedback (again, due to volume of applications, and they posted a nice blog post about this, but just stating a fact) - it seems (I don't have any factual…

We've been doing pretty much the same things since we started in 2005: we've never given specific feedback about rejections at the application stage (it wasn't going to scale even when we only got a few hundred applications). We funded 8 startups in our first batch, which was roughly 2-3% of the total applications.

We definitely fund people who have no connection to folks we already know, or Silicon Valley for that matter. And we also fund startups who are at the idea stage and have no traction (though traction does help).

I'm very sorry we rejected you, but we are honestly often wrong.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#105

Post by rdlecler1 »

aliakhtar wrote: post #70
rdlecler1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were accepted for an interview (Not accepted to the class yet). I'm 41 and my co-founder (who doesn't looks quite as young as I am) is 47. To be honest, I fully expected a rejection for this very reason so I'm pleasantly surprised which is actually pretty consistent with the YC brand. To make a fair assessment you also need to look at the distribution of applicants. If 15% of applicants are female, then your null…

Congrats. What's your start up about?

We're an investment marketplace for agriculture and agtech. On the face of it, this sounds totally dull in the world of SnapChat and Secret. Our job is to make sure that your grandchildren have food to eat by 2050 when we we need to feed 10 billion people. I started the company because I was working for a company in west africa before this. We failed to marshal enough capital to grow our business beyond the pilot stage and because of that 1,500 subsistence level farmers lost their only source of income.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#106

Post by AustinPythonFTW »

jl wrote: post #104
AustinPythonFTW wrote: post #77

I'm definitely speaking at least a little bit out of bitterness (our team just got rejected), so with that caveat it feels like YC is becoming more like traditional VC (venture capital): - extremely low probability of success just due to volume of applications - no feedback (again, due to volume of applications, and they posted a nice blog post about this, but just stating a fact) - it seems (I don't have any factual…

We've been doing pretty much the same things since we started in 2005: we've never given specific feedback about rejections at the application stage (it wasn't going to scale even when we only got a few hundred applications). We funded 8 startups in our first batch, which was roughly 2-3% of the total applications. We definitely fund people who have no connection to folks we already know, or Silicon Valley for that m…

thanks for the comment. YC is definitely great about being very respectful to applicants in its process and blog posts, so don't get me wrong.

I'm just wondering if there's a way for people to understand what their chances are. For example, if 0.01% of people that have lower than a 650 GMAT get into Stanford, then that would be useful information to know (for hopeful applicants).

Similarly, if the "has revenue" cohort has a 15% interview rate, and the "pre-revenue" cohort has a 0.5% interview rate, that would also be really great to know. (same thing for solo vs. multiple founders, recommended vs. non-recommended, etc).

I understand that YC has no obligation to provide this information, and perhaps there are very good reasons why it wouldn't provide it even if it was available. It would just be useful to know if possible.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#107

Post by Fando »

AustinPythonFTW wrote: post #77

I'm definitely speaking at least a little bit out of bitterness (our team just got rejected), so with that caveat it feels like YC is becoming more like traditional VC (venture capital): - extremely low probability of success just due to volume of applications - no feedback (again, due to volume of applications, and they posted a nice blog post about this, but just stating a fact) - it seems (I don't have any factual…

I agree, I think YCombinator is great and they need to find a way to "foster" the growing community of mini start-ups who are perhaps, not yet ready for incubation, or don't need it, but are still capable of realizing their potential. This community should be free for all, in order to meet, network, collaborate, learn and keep passions burning. Focus on investment potential could be secondary to focus on start-up community growth, involvement, and learning.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#108

Post by birken »

AustinPythonFTW wrote: post #101
birken wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people will give you money if they think you will turn it into more money. VCs, YC, techstars, rich people, angel investors, your parents, your dentist, etc. Having dealt with many varieties of these before, they all generally share those principles: - You get a lot more 'no's than 'yes'es - They don't give you a lot of feedback when they pass - Having a previous relationship with them is helpful - The more s…

I think we're making the same point here, but with a nuance. I think we both agree that: YC is becoming more like everyone else in the investing game. they want to make a lot of money. Just to clarify, it felt like YC used to be more different from others in the investing game, like they cared more, or they were willing to invest in earlier-stage startups, or they had a higher purpose, or followed the hacker ethos. b…

I'll preface this by saying I'm not a big YC apologist. I've never been through it, I've never applied, I've directly competed against lots of YC companies, yada yada. But I disagree. I've dealt with VCs before and I've read enough to understand what dealing with YC is like, and they are much more different from a traditional VC than they are alike.

1. Anybody can apply, from anywhere, and you apply online. Good luck finding an online application for a normal VC, and cold-emailing partners isn't going to get you anywhere. Oh, and if you don't live in the bay area your chances just went way down of getting a meeting or investment.

2. They give you a nice chunk of money in exchange for a really tiny amount of common stock (I think it's common stock), have really nice terms, and don't take a board seat. I'm sure for many of the companies that apply, YC could take much more equity but they don't (and it would still be worth it for the companies anyway). They are paranoid about and lose a ton of money by restricting partners investing or taking their pro-rata rights to protect the companies they don't follow on with (this is my understanding of their policies).

3. They keep increasing their class sizes in attempts to get more people going through it. They created an online class that they offered for free to everybody to encourage more people to do startups and spread the knowledge.

4. They have a means of preventing and responding to investor misbehavior by threatening to blacklist them from YC companies. This is hugely valuable for your average entrepreneur as its helps to shift the culture in a way that is better for entrepreneurs (which has happened a lot in the past few years).

They aren't perfect. They don't claim to be perfect (case in point: the title of this blog post). But believe me, they are miles away from a traditional VC.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#109

Post by AustinPythonFTW »

Fando wrote: post #107
AustinPythonFTW wrote: post #77

I'm definitely speaking at least a little bit out of bitterness (our team just got rejected), so with that caveat it feels like YC is becoming more like traditional VC (venture capital): - extremely low probability of success just due to volume of applications - no feedback (again, due to volume of applications, and they posted a nice blog post about this, but just stating a fact) - it seems (I don't have any factual…

I agree, I think YCombinator is great and they need to find a way to "foster" the growing community of mini start-ups who are perhaps, not yet ready for incubation, or don't need it, but are still capable of realizing their potential. This community should be free for all, in order to meet, network, collaborate, learn and keep passions burning. Focus on investment potential could be secondary to focus on start-up com…

Absolutely agree with your thoughts here.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#110

Post by AustinPythonFTW »

birken wrote: post #108
AustinPythonFTW wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're making the same point here, but with a nuance. I think we both agree that: YC is becoming more like everyone else in the investing game. they want to make a lot of money. Just to clarify, it felt like YC used to be more different from others in the investing game, like they cared more, or they were willing to invest in earlier-stage startups, or they had a higher purpose, or followed the hacker ethos. b…

I'll preface this by saying I'm not a big YC apologist. I've never been through it, I've never applied, I've directly competed against lots of YC companies, yada yada. But I disagree. I've dealt with VCs before and I've read enough to understand what dealing with YC is like, and they are much more different from a traditional VC than they are alike. 1. Anybody can apply, from anywhere, and you apply online. Good luck…

birken: good point. I think the wording i used was too strong (again, disclaimer that I'm still a little bitter from our team being rejected). i think they're becoming more like a traditional vc, but still miles away. in other words: i agree with your points above
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