How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
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How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
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Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
#2I don't think you should call it a pivot when you are effectively starting over. Pivot literally means one foot planted and moving the other to a new spot.
Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
#3The author sounds spoiled and entitled to everything in their life up until YC.
Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
#4I don't think you should call it a pivot when you are effectively starting over. Pivot literally means one foot planted and moving the other to a new spot.
Totally agree, see also: http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/07/before-you-make-that-pivot/
Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
#5This 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.
Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
#6What a great story. Charlie is very brave for telling this, and it's something that more people need to hear.
Getting into YC is not an achievement. Even if you get in, you're not special. You still have to bust your ass like everyone else trying to build a company. Not getting into YC isn't a big deal either, because you're still not special.
Stories like Charlie's should help others highlight this fact. He said that he felt impostor syndrome. I've felt that too. I don't have a great solution for that, but what it should tell you is that even people who you feel are smarter/better than you really are not. We are all the same, and we all face the same struggles, albeit in different circumstances.
PG's advice to Charlie about focusing on an idea they're passionate about, and an idea that they could see themselves working on for the next 5 years is sound. Don't chase trends. Don't chase money. Chase your passion. When you're really passionate about something, it's infectious to others around you. They want to help you. The success and money will usually follow.
I'm glad that people like Charlie tell these stories, since we seem to focus on the success stories. Those are few and far between. Charlie's story is likely more prevalent than we perceive.
Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
#7I find this paragraph interesting:
"From the outside, it might have looked like I was crazy to feel this way. I had graduated from Stanford, I had a CS degree, and I knew how to play the startup game. In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding."
Pardon my ignorance, but if a startup is a game, wouldn't knowing how to play be knowing how to win, i.e. an exit? I feel like getting venture capital would be the equivalent of prolonging the game, which is a +0 type of action. Is raising money really "playing?" From what I've read raising money just results in needing to raise more money.
Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
#8Please tell me that this Ryan Lawler from TechCrunch is writing in that style to insinuate his utter disdain not only for the FanHero business model, but for the whole "free money for 21-year olds with a half-baked idea" industry. He can't possibly write that way for real, could he?
Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
#9> I would have to talk to my cohort and confirm that no, we hadn’t found an idea yet and yes, we were still super excited about our “company.” I did little else but eat, code and sleep.
If you don't have an idea what you're doing what are you doing coding?
Re: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator
#10I find this paragraph interesting: "From the outside, it might have looked like I was crazy to feel this way. I had graduated from Stanford, I had a CS degree, and I knew how to play the startup game. In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding." Pardon my ignorance, but if a startup is a game, wouldn't knowing how to play be knowing how to win, i.e. an exit? I…
I was going to make a similar comment. There is an undercurrent of "raising money = success" in this posting. The whole concept of throwing money at 21-year olds and hoping they find an idea still seems bizarre to me, but obviously it has paid off for the YC guys.