YC Fellowship

Post by speeder » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

mattkrisiloff wrote: post #92

speeder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can my company join, aiming to finish our flagship product? My company released lots of products, all of them had critical acclaim and high user reviews, but we ran out of money before releasing our main product, and we never had marketing money, so our sales are nowhere interesting. I am wondering if you consider this early enough or not. (we had no investment beside from extra money from the original founders).

It sounds like you might be doing a company re-launch from the ground up? If that's the case, definitely apply for YCF. If you still have successful ancillary products and just want to develop your flagship product with YC's help, consider applying to YC W16. Applications for that will open up in August.

Post by SeoxyS » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 8:05 PM UTC

zkhalique wrote: post #155

mattkrisiloff wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No bias, but it generally is harder to build a successful company as a solo founder (though totally possible! Dropbox, Zenefits, Instacart all started with solo founders). If you're applying alone, tell us how you plan to overcome the solo hurdles of being alone / managing everything to do, and if you plan to bring someone in soon, let us know.

Also if you look at the TOP tech companies of the last 20 years, they were all started with a dominant founder: Apple - Steve Jobs Amazon - Jeff Bezos Microsoft - Bill Gates (Google - Larry Page) So if you're looking for a runaway unicorn hit like that, perhaps having a very dominant founder and a founder with like 20% ain't half bad.

    Apple:     Steve Jobs      | + Steve Wozniak + Ronald Wayne
    Microsoft: Bill Gates      | + Paul Allen
    Google:    Larry Page      | + Sergey Brin
    Facebook:  Mark Zuckerberg | + Dustin Moskovitz + Chris Hughes + Andrew McCollum + Eduardo Saverin
    Uber[1]:   Travis Kalanick | + Garrett Camp + Ryan Graves
    Tesla[1]:  Elon Musk       | + JB Straubel + Martin Eberhard + Marc Tarpenning + Ian Wright

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 8:06 PM UTC

logn wrote: post #118

s73v3r wrote: post #23

Any mention of health insurance, or other things like that? One of the biggest reasons people do go to work for large companies instead of starting their own business is things like that. Without them, you're really only targeting the young kids right out of school, most of whom (but not all) don't really need that much in healthcare.

Older people are more likely to have a spouse with insurance or to already be freelancing/contracting and used to providing their own insurance. Even in the days before Obamacare, I think there was a short time you were allowed to be uninsured without being excluded by insurance companies. COBRA also helps fill the gaps (in addition to Obamacare itself).

Post by arihant » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 8:07 PM UTC

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Jul 20, 2015, 8:08 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #112

s73v3r wrote: post #23

Any mention of health insurance, or other things like that? One of the biggest reasons people do go to work for large companies instead of starting their own business is things like that. Without them, you're really only targeting the young kids right out of school, most of whom (but not all) don't really need that much in healthcare.

If you're a U.S. resident, PPACA has made this a lot easier. I recently bought an individual health plan on healthcare.gov for $250/mo (not including subsidies). If you make less than $50k/yr the amount is further subsidized. It can be more if you have a family, but in any case, with a fellowship income of $6k/mo you should be able to buy a health plan, at least for those two months.