How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator • Hacker News Board

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#61

Post by cfallin » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:13 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #53

cfallin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition, it's not like leaving a PhD funded by an NSF GRFP leaves zero net positive impact. Funding research leads to papers (hopefully with valuable insights) and to knowledge and training passed down to other researchers. I don't think it's a very good analogy to startup funding in that sense. (Although I suppose one could make the argument that alums of failed companies have hard-earned experience so some of t…

In the best case I think that's possible, but in the usual case someone who leaves a PhD program after a year does very little research. US-style PhDs don't typically require a master's degree first, so first-year PhD students are doing mainly course work and "figure out what I want to do for my PhD" project-shopping. If you do that for a year and bail, it's pretty common that you wrote zero papers and did very littl…

Yes, that's true. For full disclosure, I left a PhD after 4 years to work in industry (I was frustrated by some aspects of academia), having spent three years on an NSF fellowship, so I may be biased here :-) I absolutely didn't go into it thinking I would do that, and I try to bring a researchy perspective everywhere I go now. I also think it depends on the school and the field. Where I was, it was common for first-years to get on a project right away and help churn out results. Probably guided closely by older students or advisors, but still doing productive work.

I think you're right re: clawbacks, though. I can't imagine the mental pressure were the scenario to be "you MUST stay in academia or you owe the government $XXXk". I actually know a PhD student on a (non-US) government scholarship who has a clause like that. He calls it his "slave contract".

Getting back to the original topic, I think that for any venture with a high rate of failure (startups or grad school or...), there has to be some room to allow the funded person/people to say "this isn't working" in good faith and pivot or leave. That's totally different from someone taking funding without the intention to use it properly, or just deciding they're bored or whatnot.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#62

Post by ferrari8608 » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:14 PM UTC

bkeroack wrote: post #5

This is what happens when people want to "do a startup" more than they want to build a business doing X. The passion for the idea/product should come first, with incubators (if deemed necessary) being used as a tool towards achieving that goal.

This is something I've been struggling to understand with some of the startups I read about on here. My lack of understanding is probably to do with the fact that I'm not an entrepreneur, nor do I desire to be. What I'm missing, though, is why these people want to simply start a company.

I get wanting to start a company around your idea. In that case, the company isn't the goal but rather the medium for pursuing the goal, which is to push your idea/product. I don't understand wanting to start a company for the sake of having a company.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#63

Post by jokoon » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:15 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #43

jokoon wrote: post #16

Hey, I have ideas too! http://zonas.free.fr/?p=pages&pg=ideas

Those seem like things that you'd like to make. Some might even be interesting to look at, but What problems do they solve? Why would OTHER people want them? Go to each one and write what it does for people rather than what it is.

thanks for the suggestion :)

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#64

Post by jlukanta » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

charlierguo wrote: post #49

Hey everyone! Author here. First off, thanks for reading! To be honest, I really didn't expect to get this much attention. This is a story that I've wanted to share with friends and family for a long time, and was thoroughly surprised when it was picked up by Backchannel (and then posted here). Regarding some of the points made here, I (mostly) agree. Getting into YC or raising money is not success. Changing your ide…

Thanks for posting this. As others said, it takes guts to do it. I don't think you necessarily need to stick with your idea, especially if you aren't passionate about it. Quitting early is better than spending a couple of years being miserable because you don't think your work amounts to much.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#65

Post by ridruejo » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:22 PM UTC

charlierguo wrote: post #49

Hey everyone! Author here. First off, thanks for reading! To be honest, I really didn't expect to get this much attention. This is a story that I've wanted to share with friends and family for a long time, and was thoroughly surprised when it was picked up by Backchannel (and then posted here). Regarding some of the points made here, I (mostly) agree. Getting into YC or raising money is not success. Changing your ide…

Thanks for writing about your experience, it must be difficult to do so. When we were looking at joining YC, one of the things that made us pull the trigger was the fact that we could not find anyone that had gone through the program that did not say that was worth it. No one, neither publicly nor privately and regardless of whether their startup had succeeded of failed.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#66

Post by drawkbox » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:23 PM UTC

edent wrote: post #12

Am I missing something here? You can get $$$ and top quality advice for an _idea_ and then just turn around and say "bored now - let's do something else"? And then, so it seems, when that idea runs out you just say "uhhh... let's do this instead!" So, what are the YC people investing in? Two guys who seem pretty smart? I appreciate that you might need to pivot from "a social network for dogs" to "a social network for…

It is a calculated risk, some end up like this and others make Reddit (who also pivoted), Dropbox or Twitch. Since you only need a few really big winners the net can only catch but a few and it can still be a successful process.

It is really timing as well, even if you have the right people at the time it might not work out. Personally it seems you would want more of a track record for investment, but it is a risk YC is willing to take for the big fish as they have a much bigger net + filter with smaller investments.

YC essentially pans for gold way upstream right in the blue stream before the blue ocean way before the red ocean.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#67

Post by gravedave » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

guynamedloren wrote: post #34

Not sure why the author didn't consider a fourth option when graduating from college: 4) Join the ground floor of a startup *as an early employee* It would've yielded invaluable experience and a whole lot of personal growth, leaving him in a much better place to run a company years down the road. At this point, I don't really think he's learned anything at all, and he won't learn much about running a company while he…

I agree with this, but I don't think it even has to be a startup. Big enterprises may also provide good learning environments, possibly even with experienced developers/marketers/whatevers as mentors, as opposed to a startup's possibly few young, inexperienced recent grads, hellbent on revolutionizing The Way You Think About Shoe Storage with their product called Shoely™ or whatever. Big companies also pay consistently.

I don't know though, the guy seems quite dishonest to me, more interested in means rather than ends, yet still claiming that he "never wanted to start a company simply for the sake of starting a company". To me, he never seemed to question whether he even had anything to give in the first place and address this issue first, if needed, but simply expected to run a successful startup fresh out of college.

Not sure I'd call his closing statements to be humblebragging though, it seems to be just a passing thing for him.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#68

Post by trwhite » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:40 PM UTC

yesimahuman wrote: post #46

birken wrote: post #22

This post really misunderstands what both success and failure are. Getting into YC or raising money isn't success. And trying an idea out for a few months before giving up on it isn't failure. Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots of years. Maybe the idea is bad, but giving up on it after a couple of months really proves nothing. All it has proven is that the founders are the type of people t…

Having been in an accelerator before, I definitely related to their sense of dread that they might mess up this opportunity and never be successful again because of it. Watching peers strike it big must have been super hard. I quickly realized after that most "success" is exaggerated in the media, etc. and true success takes a lot longer than we expect. Raising $1M isn't success. Hell, raising $5-30M in today's clima…

I think it was Patrick Collison who also spoke about 'impostor syndrome' when joining YC. I imagine this is probably quite common. The whole question of what it means to succeed or fail is interesting; OP's perception of failure contradicts what I thought was the common view in SV - that to 'fail' (i.e. not get funding) is part of a greater process of learning and enhancement. I also can't understand how a 21-year-old Stanford graduate who already has experience in the market he's about to launch in could ever feel he "must have just been lucky".

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#69

Post by pjlegato » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:41 PM UTC

sparkzilla wrote: post #41

The article makes it clear that the YC interview selection process is deeply flawed. Leaving out the idea that they were selected because they told a story about the sound of biting a bottle, surely at the interview stage, if the entrepreneurs do not know what the company is making, or the business looks weak the interviewer should just say no. It's not enough to say "here are two bright people that can pivot". Brigh…

It's probably true that the YC interview process is deeply flawed, but OTOH there is no known better way to select worthy investments yet. Good startup business ideas are not only rare but also impossible to identify a priori. The only way to tell whether a business idea is good or not is to actually try it out in the market and see what happens. (This doesn't mean that any crazy idea is good, but it does mean that some good ideas seem crazy before they are tried.)

If there were any methodology that could identify worthy investments with anything close to high accuracy, there would not be stock markets and there certainly wouldn't be a VC industry.

VC investment works differently from other forms of investment due to the outsize gains on the rare successes. This market requires many comparatively small bets with limited losses and a few low-probability but huge payoffs. Compare this to a Warren Buffet style investment methodology of a few large bets in well-established companies and industries with high probability of moderate payoff. Neither is "right" in an absolute sense; it depends on the investor's risk tolerance and the nature of the opportunities.

The VC business model is to apply some coarse-grained filters to screen out obvious scammers and gross incompetents, then give the remainder of the cohort some money, knowing in advance that 99% will fail completely. The remaining 1% will pay for the losses on the 99% many times over.

Moreover, in YC's case, the amount of money they invest is so small compared to the massive returns on their few successes that they can now afford to take many of these small risks on "two guys who seem smart." Most of them will fail, and they know that going in. It doesn't matter. They're betting that sooner or later, they'll wind up with another AirBnB or Reddit that will pay for many thousands of these small bets.

Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

#70

Post by Meekro » Sat, Jan 10, 2015, 9:42 PM UTC

charlierguo wrote: post #49

Hey everyone! Author here. First off, thanks for reading! To be honest, I really didn't expect to get this much attention. This is a story that I've wanted to share with friends and family for a long time, and was thoroughly surprised when it was picked up by Backchannel (and then posted here). Regarding some of the points made here, I (mostly) agree. Getting into YC or raising money is not success. Changing your ide…

Cool story, great read! I'm surprised how negative some of the comments here on HN were. They're probably just envious about how they're not getting that sweet, sweet investor money!