Why Y Combinator is a waste of time

Microsoft took funding before their IPO. I've never understood why; it has the smell of a bribe; but they did. Apple took a lot of funding.

Yes, but I meant to imply that they never raised money at the startup stage (and up until IPO...). Microsoft was almost entirely self-funding before going public, except for the money they received that PG mentions, which I never knew about.

I think I understand from personal experience what he might be trying to describe in terms of not letting YC be your alpha / omega.

We applied to the Fall 06 YC round. I was in school and my co-founder had a job at a small software company. Really we just had a cool idea and wanted to do it. When we found out about YC we thought it was "perfect for us". We spent a week or two struggling over answering question just right. We had no product, and had not yet considered some of the questions the application was asking. As you may guess we got an email from YC in late October saying:

--- " We're sorry to say that we can't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally, because most of the proposals we rejected, we rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the applicants. For example, we were very reluctant to accept proposals with only one founder, because we think starting a startup is too much work for one person. We also rejected a lot of proposals simply because we couldn't understand them, or didn't understand the problem domain well enough to judge them, or because the project seemed too big to start on only three months of funding.

We realize this process is fraught with error. It's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email making fun of us; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Thanks Y Combinator Staff" ---

We told ourselves that wasn't going to stop us.... but it sorta did for a while. I wasn't done with school, but was getting dream job offers, and my co-founder was enjoying his software development job. So we didn't do much for a few months. We just kept talking about our idea for Revvu.

In doing some soul searching though, I decided I had to turn down these job offers and stop wasting time in school. This is not the life I wanted. After talking to my co-founder we came to grips with the fact that... working regular jobs was the default. That was the easy way to go about life, but we wanted more than that. We are too creative and determined to be held back or stifled by the nuances of a "job".

In January I moved across the country to live with my co-founder and work full time on our project. Shortly after that we had a full business plan, and were testing our site in closed beta. As of this week we've launched publicly and are getting encouraging user feedback.

We are beginning to tap our network to find potential investors, so that we can grow the business significantly in the next 12 moths.

About a week ago my co-founder brought up YCombinator for the first time in months, and we decided to apply at the last minute. Not because we NEED the living expenses, we both have savings. Also, not because we need it to feel like we're doing something. We're already confident that we're doing something, and we'll peruse other sourced of funding if we don't get YC. We applied because we know we could benefit from the mentoring, the guidance, the connections, and i guess partially because not draining our bank accounts just to eat would be kinda nice.

If the author had good intentions, IMHO, we might be a model for what he was trying to communicate. We weren't ready before. We were sitting around waiting to hear back from YC in October, and nearly let our passion fade after not being accepted.

This time filling out the application didn't take long at all, because we actually knew our answers. This time we have a real plan for our business and legitimately strive towards success.

If we get YC... awesome, if not... thats fine too.

I hope many of you are in the same boat. I hope you're building something you believe is great, and nothing will stop you. Don't get discouraged. Don't let anything slow you down. The world is big enough for all of us to succeed.

-if you build it, they will come

As usual, people see only the money. Y Combinator is also about the networking, and based on some things I've heard, that's the more important part. "Never Eat Alone."

This is exactly what I got from the article, and I totally agree with you that the headline is malformed. What it boils down to is that you should not be waiting for YC funding in order to begin work on your startup. Just work on it when you can, put something interesting together, grow it slowly (i.e. over a period of months instead of some huge launch), and go full-time when the opportunity presents itself.

I also have to agree with the others that the writer of the article kind of missed the point of the environment and guidance that YC provides. But then again, perhaps some of the applicants are only applying because they think they need the money.