But how did they have the money to even invest in startups?
Jessica Livingston: How to Build the Future
51–60 of 87 posts
Re: Jessica Livingston: How to Build the Future
#52Great interview, I think Jessica was the secret sauce that made YC so good.
Absolutely.
Re: Jessica Livingston: How to Build the Future
#53I think there needs to be a moratorium on that AirBnB political cereal box story. "The most important thing to do is to focus on your business, but also it's cool if you spend time on a random side business," is a big mixed message.
I hope people remember that AirBnB spammed Craigslist to grow their user base. Not a great example of ethical behavior, IMHO.
Re: Jessica Livingston: How to Build the Future
#54I believe http://qz.com/696377/y-combinator-is-running-a-basic-income-... is the future;
Re: Jessica Livingston: How to Build the Future
#55Jessica is awesome. That said, this part near the beginning, where Sam says... >>Sometimes they create a small success, and sometimes they create these companies that really transform the world, and YC has been very fortunate to be involved in a lot of these, Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, the list goes on. I mean... really? OK, I'll grant you Airbnb, but Dropbox "transformed" the world?
Stripe has transformed the world. In 1999, I was asked to look into how to setup credit card processing for our company. I contacted Authorize.net for technical help. They just asked me to fax some information to them. Two months later my boss receives a bill for $3,000 claiming we had signed a contract agreeing to that fee. I think Stripe has made CC processing a lot easier for everyone.
lot of time passed between 199 and stripe. a little thing called paypal had a pretty huge impact on opening up credit card payments for folks too.
Re: Jessica Livingston: How to Build the Future
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you have ever advocated that move to a portfolio company? I can't imagine any of the partners advocating that tactic during an office hours conversation... It only seems awesome after the fact.
To answer your question: no, nope, no. Absolutely agree with you there. This anecdote is definitely the most extreme and not-advised route of keeping your company alive. They were extremely lucky this worked at all in their favor. Please don't try this at home :) There are way more reproducible methods of keeping your company above water, such as reducing burn or spending your time wisely and focusing on your core pr…
So if I'm reading you right, the tldr: that was a crazy-foolish, low probability move by the airbnb founders rather than a sound "stay alive" strategy. In which case, it should not be fetishized as a "be like them" move (at least in some respects)?
Though it does make for an awesome 'hustle' story (on that, I agree; same with startups being hard). It sounds like they were just having fun, and happened to earn some scratch along the way.
Re: Jessica Livingston: How to Build the Future
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you have ever advocated that move to a portfolio company? I can't imagine any of the partners advocating that tactic during an office hours conversation... It only seems awesome after the fact.
To answer your question: no, nope, no. Absolutely agree with you there. This anecdote is definitely the most extreme and not-advised route of keeping your company alive. They were extremely lucky this worked at all in their favor. Please don't try this at home :) There are way more reproducible methods of keeping your company above water, such as reducing burn or spending your time wisely and focusing on your core pr…
You didn't need to backtrack. Your original comment summed it up nicely: be determined, creative, and willing to do anything necessary for your business to succeed. They did so and cleverly. beambot asking if you'd recommend that specific move any other time is a red herring in the big picture where that move is specific to a moment in time and probably only works once. Point is to make the move that keeps you successful, whatever it may be.
It was a good move, probably only works once, and anyone running a startup about to die should think up something as effective. Lesson learned.
EDIT: Interesting our replies came at almost exactly the same time.
Re: Jessica Livingston: How to Build the Future
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the message that I've gotten from that story is that you need to do whatever you can to afford you the means to focus on your business, no matter how un-scaleable it may seem. And that's the attitude we love here at YC. It's definitely one of my favorite stories, and really serves as a great testament to the idea that staying alive so you can keep working on your product is easily one of the most important th…
Would you have ever advocated that move to a portfolio company? I can't imagine any of the partners advocating that tactic during an office hours conversation... It only seems awesome after the fact.
My co-founder and I were most certainly advised by YC partners when we were close to hitting the wall: "just do whatever you have to do to keep your company alive – and do it fast!".
The cereal box story serves as a reminder that sometimes it takes the most unlikely, left-field, crazy-seeming idea to get yourself out of the hole.
The one my company pulled was very different to this, but it worked, and the company is now thriving, albeit on a much smaller scale to Airbnb.
Had we not been in the same YC batch as Airbnb and seen up close just what it takes to survive hardship and get to sustainability, it's unlikely we'd have made it.
Re: Jessica Livingston: How to Build the Future
#59scribd is such a piece of shit