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On Shutting Down
21–30 of 88 posts
Re: On Shutting Down
#22To be clear, since now ycombinator is in the business of clickbaiting titles, this is a blog about shutting down a company, not a blog about ycombinator or HN shutting down. Edit: the original title was 'Shutting Down'
“On Shutting Down” isn’t a whole lot better!
Re: On Shutting Down
#23I don't know Aaron at all, but I'm curious about what kind of bonafides you must have to be a Partner at YC. Do they mean partner in the financial sense (ie: he bought into it) or in an operational sense? If it's the latter, at first glance there's a bit of strange optics to have someone in that role whose only notable experience to my knowledge in the startup world ended in failure.
Re: On Shutting Down
#24I don't know Aaron at all, but I'm curious about what kind of bonafides you must have to be a Partner at YC. Do they mean partner in the financial sense (ie: he bought into it) or in an operational sense? If it's the latter, at first glance there's a bit of strange optics to have someone in that role whose only notable experience to my knowledge in the startup world ended in failure.
When your job is to help startups, your experience of failure is much more valuable than your experience of success, because it’s much easier to learn from your mistakes.
In any case, YC partners quickly accumulate enormous experience from the failures of all the startups they’re helping. I bet Aaron has personally seen hundreds of startups fail, and has learned from every single failure in order to better help his next batch of startups. That experience probably eclipses whatever else he did before YC.
To me that’s YC’s biggest competitive advantage: they aggregate the learning experience of thousands of startup failures, and use it to keep their success rate above market.
Re: On Shutting Down
#25To be clear, since now ycombinator is in the business of clickbaiting titles, this is a blog about shutting down a company, not a blog about ycombinator or HN shutting down. Edit: the original title was 'Shutting Down'
Most real shutting down announcements are titled with some spin that makes it sound like the opposite though like: "The next chapter of advancing Y-Combinator"
Re: On Shutting Down
#26I don't know Aaron at all, but I'm curious about what kind of bonafides you must have to be a Partner at YC. Do they mean partner in the financial sense (ie: he bought into it) or in an operational sense? If it's the latter, at first glance there's a bit of strange optics to have someone in that role whose only notable experience to my knowledge in the startup world ended in failure.
Partner at a VC fund generally means you have a proven track record picking winning deals or bringing on investors and have been given a seat at the adult table by the other existing partners. Usually it involves putting up some of your own money so you have skin in the game. Doesn't necessarily require startup success of your own.
Re: On Shutting Down
#27YC has talked about how startups die of suicide, not homicide. Shutting down is a hard decision, and there always seems to be pressure to do it. Raising money looks like success to others - so it's tough to declare later that you have made nothing of value and will close shop. Here were my shutdown articles after I closed Staffjoy: https://blog.staffjoy.com/staffjoy-is-shutting-down-39f7b5d6... https://blog.staffjoy.…
Thanks for open sourcing staffjoy by the way. That was awesome.
Re: On Shutting Down
#28YC has talked about how startups die of suicide, not homicide. Shutting down is a hard decision, and there always seems to be pressure to do it. Raising money looks like success to others - so it's tough to declare later that you have made nothing of value and will close shop. Here were my shutdown articles after I closed Staffjoy: https://blog.staffjoy.com/staffjoy-is-shutting-down-39f7b5d6... https://blog.staffjoy.…
it's tough to declare later that you have made nothing of value and will close shop.
It's not that you've made nothing of value or that there was no need, it's simply that you weren't able to build a viable business from what you were doing. It doesn't even mean that nobody could build a viable business, it may be that your definition of viable is different from someone else's (e.g. minimum required growth numbers, desire for an acquisition, etc.).
Re: On Shutting Down
#29YC provides a toolkit for starting up and incorporation. Do they also provide a toolkit for shutting down and wrapping up legal / tax obligations?
Re: On Shutting Down
#30To avoid further cardiac anomalies maybe change the title a bit?
I thought the same thing