From what I hear the biggest value is the network, both from a customer and investor perspective. Especially if you are selling to startups there are huge benefits in applying.
Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
71–80 of 85 posts
Re: Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
#72The bit that stood out to me was "a Figma file so big it sometimes crashed". I don't know YC but it sounds like this is the kind of thing one of their Mentors would tell them to throw in the bin and take out a paper notebook instead.
In larger companies, it is just accepted to invest the enormous amount of design time into these things but in a startup, anything that hogs your time over selling should be an alarm bell.
It would be different if you were producing a massive UI-dependent product but this sounds like fairly basic sass that doesn't need a Figma design, certainly not initially.
Re: Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm willing to bet race has some underlying influence whether they like to admit it or not.
Probably not skin color, but maybe founder was born in an authoritarian place (like Russia)? Far more likely that he used Windows, Word, or preferred Java, though.
the founder is from San Francisco, our codebase was in Ruby / React
Re: Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
#74Very strange hearing such stories. I remember a company I worked for went through a YC interview. We were rejected with "we are not sure you can deliver". At that point, we had built 2 mobile apps, a big customer wesbite, rich portals for partners, contractors and admins, had thousands of customers, were almost profitable. Our CEO had a history of delivering in that he sold his previous startup. I must sound bitter,…
Why feel bad? Watch other growing companies pitch and crash. I suspect it is harder to sell when you have a little traction. . . Easier to sell vapour than solids ;)
Re: Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
#75Did you have any initial investment before YC? or what was the value? I don't get it.
You started to make the service and pivoted multiple times... how big was your team of programmers/designers once you were accepted ?
Did you get money instantly ?
ps. I'm looking for a one angel investor about 70k for my next app and don't know where to start looking. Already have few national apps making revenue and multiple made for customers, but nothing like this international one..
Re: Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
to swyx: wow, i like the way you approach problems--and how you see things. Do you recommend any good books on critical thinking?
very kind. the silicon valleyite answer is annie duke's thinking in bets. get the book or crank up any of the 3000 podcast interviews she's done. the realer answer is have about ~16 years of being in love with/thinking about microeconomics. maybe do some math/linear algebra (where you get very used to projecting spaces onto different dimensions), and then make a few high stakes decisions with regards to job negotiati…
thank you--i love a good thinking process--i have heard of duke's book and i will definitely read it.
i always suspicious linear algebra was very useful in representing probabilistic outcomes and your answer confirms my hunch. ;)
good day
Re: Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
#77The bit that stood out to me was "a Figma file so big it sometimes crashed". I don't know YC but it sounds like this is the kind of thing one of their Mentors would tell them to throw in the bin and take out a paper notebook instead. In larger companies, it is just accepted to invest the enormous amount of design time into these things but in a startup, anything that hogs your time over selling should be an alarm bel…
I was thinking the same. Hundreds of hours saved if only used bootstrapbuilder or similiar tool which has almost all the components ready
Re: Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
#78Thanks for sharing. It seems like everyone was mostly focused on sales and some were doing quite well. Were there any strategies that stood out to you that were working? Was there some leg up provided to companies in their sales efforts who were in YC?
Everyone in YC sells to each other. It's quite encouraged to buy from other YC startups and test out their tech as alpha customers because it increases the valuation of the YC network (including your own company). It's a very interesting model because as a SaaS getting the first enterprises to sign up is extremely hard, yet those add enormous equity value and provide the proof and case studies for growth at scale. YC…
That's an interesting way to think about it. In some respects it could be viewed as a way to funnel to total YC investment into the "more-functional" startups in the network. Companies that provide more value (to other startups in the affinity network) end up with more of the net investment.
Re: Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
#79> Heck, you can even choose to skip Demo Day entirely and take that initial $500K (yes, it’s $500,000 now), and just bootstrap it from there. I wouldn’t recommend it, but hey, it’s not against the rules.
Interesting, I didn't know YC allows this. Are there any well-known (atleast within technical circles) YC companies that have done this?
Re: Reflections on my time in Y Combinator
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think one downside is that because you are optimizing for sales in the short-term, it can lead to product design/architecture decisions which unknowingly constrain the direction or limits of future development/innovation (or at least make it very expensive to retrofit). I think Notion is potentially suffering from this now as users try to push its limits into more complex applications.
> it can lead to product design/architecture decisions which unknowingly constrain the direction or limits of future development/innovation (or at least make it very expensive to retrofit) As my beard starts to grey, I've come to the conclusion that needing to drop a lot of money to retrofit is an infinitely better problem than not having captured a large segment of the market. As someone who did Perl commercially fr…
> Much better to be in that position than a company with a beautiful codebase who didn't capture the market
For sure. But I wonder how many are prevented from capturing a larger segment of the market because of poor design decisions re more fundamental primitives of the product. I suppose the worst case scenario here is a complete rebuild and migration.