301–310 of 458 posts
What do you think is the biggest blind spot or most limiting aspect of YC Group and how do you plan to fix it? Asked another way, what are YC's weaknesses, in your opinion?
Hopefully will be ready to talk about it early 2017.
Do you secretly have a Japanese nickname that goes something like Sama-sama?
Do you plan to allow future YC teams to attend the program remotely, or with a greatly reduced expectation of spending time in Mountain View? I get that SV is a great place to start a startup, all things being equal. But there are a lot of great opportunities that are 8-12 time zones away. And leaving your customers alone for 3 months -- especially if you are trying to grow rapidly during those 3 months -- sounds ver…
We have discussed trying a remote group through the YC batch. Although we're all varying degrees of skeptical, I think it's worth a try. As you point out, there are (some) good reasons that MV doesn't make sense, like your customers being very far away. That said, it's only three months.
Good on you for checking back and updating things, not doing an hour long hit and run like so many do on reddit. It reinforces that you care about keeping people informed and not just getting some visibility to your business.
Thanks!
If not, what would you need to see from an application with no product to be accepted into YC?
If so, what was about that application that made you believe in them so much?
I've been running an east-coast-but-middle-of-nowhere startup, primarily implemented by myself, and self-funded, with the occasional with help of random one-off contractors in the hospitality/IoT space for two years now. Basically during off-hours from a (pretty successful) day job in a non-tech company I started years ago. My choke point has always been finding another technical-minded parter that gets the industry.…
One of the most important life skills is to get good at taking rejection and failure and then picking yourself back up and continuing. If you are going to run a big company, far, far worse things will come your way than a YC rejection. Try again. And again. And again. Giving up too early is one of the biggest causes of failure I know. In terms of the two models--it really depends on your company and market, and what…
What's the difference between being persistent and wasting time? I'm curious as to where you draw the line.
How behind am I, assuming my primary goal is maximizing positive impact on the world?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>3) It turns out that it's harder than it sounds to capture the full value of a smaller market for a bunch of reasons, and so the failure rate is much higher than expected. What kind of reasons? Direct me to some resources if there are too many to enumerate
I'm interested in this as well. Doesn't this go against Rob Walling's advice in "Start Small Stay Small" as well as Peter Thiel's advice in "Zero to One"?
Has YC ever considered a class of only single founders and trying to solve the problems YC anticipates with single founder startups (i.e. emotional support, etc...)
It seems to me that the demand is there, and the potential for single founders to succeed is certainly possible... why not experiment putting together a track that "fills in the blanks" for singe founders much the way YC does with legal and accounting for startups to get started.
Edit: I recognize the signaling issue of not being able to convince a cofounder to join, etc... but sometimes signals are just noise.