I’ve applied not less than 7 times to YC. Rejected every time.
Some of our customers are multi billion dollar companies.
We are profitable, growing and got accepted by their direct competitor.
I still believe YC influence is amazing and I have nothing but respect for all the people involved in the program but I like to remind fellows entrepreneurs that any accelerator is just a tool.
If you want to build something, no amount of rejection will stop you.
Getting backing can be hard, even if your idea is amazing. Often amazing ideas just seem to slip through the cracks. There are plenty of stories of startups that felt like giving up after 99 VC meetings, only to get funding at the 100th one and go on to success.
It's a tough slog, and it takes the founders away from doing the actual work they love, but don't give up. If your idea is good, keep ploughing onwards. I've given up way too easily in the past. It was only once I saw other companies recreate the same idea many years later and then be valued at billions of dollars that I really realized the value of the original idea and the opportunities I'd missed by not dragging myself out of bed to another fundraising meeting.
Also potentially interesting is how YC changed the VC market. [0] is an essay from PG that talks about how VC funding used to work. [1] is a short essay that starts to get at why YC is different. (These should be read with a grain of salt, since PG is the founder of YC)
TLDR is that YC was the first firm to fund a lot of small companies, as opposed to a medium amount of medium sized companies. Similar to what Square did for payments by offering credit card readers to individuals, YC offered funding to super small companies where previously it was not available.
The impact of this on the world is up for interpretation, but at least one positive result is a lower barrier of entry for entrepreneurship.
I am far from an expert so if this is inaccurate feel free to correct me.
I was under the impression that the small amount offered was the realization that it didn't take a lot of money to get a startup off the ground. So I thought Paul was one of the first to capitalize on it. This would seem to let him go for both quality and volume.
I was fortunate enough to be a fly on the wall the first couple of years of YC. A handful of incredible people, but honestly JL seemed to me to be the glue that held it all together.
This thread is somewhat depressing. Depressing because the very nature of YC and HN at its best is optimism. A belief in the ability to build and not just a respect for those who do but a genuine desire to support those trying. Maybe not succeeding, but trying to create something in a world so set on making that difficult. It that always morally perfect: no. Does that always work: no. But, at its best, YC operates more like a university than a venture fund.
Jessica, PG, Geoff, PB, Michael, Jared, Sama and all the other partners have all done very very well by creating/working on YC, but there is a particular underlying ethos of support. Of just a human connection with founders who build. HN in its earliest days had that too, but I don't see any of that on this thread.
The article has a certain ambivalence about the nature of startups themselves (and perhaps, under that, capitalism itself), but Y Combinator has had a profoundly positive effect on my life personally, the lives of hundreds of people I know, the startup and venture ecosystem, and -- whether or not this is "changing the world" -- the economy more broadly.
There are people here who are shitting on the companies YC has helped, in their earliest stages, push forward. Would some of them have succeeded without YC, absolutely. But that doesn't change the fundamental fact that no other small collection of people in history has been instrumental to creating so much enterprise value from scratch -- and thus economic wellbeing more broadly (with, maybe, the exception of Sequoia) other than a few founders of the very biggest tech companies (which YC companies will eventually join the ranks of).
Maybe, you say, that's all just signaling or selection effects. Perhaps you don't learn anything at Harvard or YC; it's just about getting in. Maybe. But when that list includes Airbnb, Doordash, Coinbase, Gitlab, Dropbox, PagerDuty, Stripe, Instacart, Brex, Cruise, Faire, Reddit, Zapier, Gusto, Rippling, Flexport, Segment, Checkr, Webflow, Lob, Opeansea, Sift, Astranis, Twitch, Ironclad, just to mention the ones I can pull off the top of my head, I think it says something about the method, the process, and the support mattering.
And look I'm a founder who didn't succeed with the company I built during YC but that has more to do with my NOT listening to and focusing on the lessons that the partners were trying to impart than any failure on their part.
Now, I'm not without criticisms and suggestions but damn if I'm not rooting for YC and every company in every batch at Alumni Demo Day.
The thing is that people didn't lose interest in startups. Startups lost interest in people. I am still interested startups that do things differently, accelerators that enables startup that otherwise wouldn't happen or other things that are, well, interesting. But those are few and far between these days.
I also fundamentally disagree with the idea that you have to like something because of its process even if you dislike the outcome. Ironically I think that was what put YC apart in the first place. Every other incubator would talk about their fancy offices, lawyers and contacts but then wouldn't produce many notable startups. And by that measure YC probably never would have happened, or at least didn't deserve support.
It's something I think about whenever there is a development with some really popular company. That if the company had adopted the mindset of those rooting for it it probably wouldn't have been successful in the first place.
On the first line what do you mean by "The thing is that people didn't lose interest in startups. Startups lost interest in people." Or what, differently, do you want startups to do? (I"m genuinely asking, I'm curious!). I'm all for things like longer exercise windows, insourcing, etc, but I also think that startups, generally, have a much more inclusive brand of capitalism than most normal companies.
As for the rest, I'm not sure I follow the argument. I do not agree with the notion that every company that succeeds but has gone through YC would have succeeded without YC. I also don't agree with the notion that only companies that are going to succeed either way go through YC either. Empirically the latter is more easily falsifiable but I think both are false.
We don’t live in a world where success is measured by money. No decent people think that way, and even most Silicon Valley people you’d consider “indecent” don’t think that way. Most people look at money-obsession and conspicuous displays of wealth as crass and lame, which is entirely appropriate.
That said, money is a focus for companies as it is a measure of resources and scale. Without money, a company can’t survive or grow, and with it, it can do more of its “solving problems” work for more people.
I really don’t see any truly successful people or companies focusing on money beyond that.
I mean I would also like to live in a world where everyone gave it their 100% for the betterment of all humanity. The reality though is that if we set those incentives naively, nearly all past examples have led to way less output then using monetary (capitalistic) incentives.
what's the best way for the world to be more selfless and productive without that being a pipe dream?
The cynicism in this thread is simply astounding. The people of HN has had a negative impact on my view of the world and my own internal optimism. It’s hard to find even the smallest light of hope here. “Can do” attitude is outdated and is replaced by “Pull everyone else down”.
You're as much HN as anyone else here. Don't fall prey to the notice-dislike bias! It leads to an exceedingly negative false feeling of generality, in which the world seems dominated by whatever counts as the worst to you. In reality, it's a statistical distribution and you choose what to focus on.
I once tried to argue that most YC founders don't spend their time on HN. It got a surprising amount of blowback. With people like this here, it seemed entirely obvious that no founder would want to.
But now I think founders just roll their eyes and move on.
Many YC founders I know read HN, but far fewer comment. On this article, for example, two other founders have commented. YC founders on any given thread are (generally) few.
> But now I think founders just roll their eyes and move on.
yes.
My personal attitude is that unless it’s grossly unfair _and_ largely upvoted, there’s not much need to jump to YC’s defense. Those two conditions are rarely met in one comment.
The site actually serves myriad business purposes and plenty of good comments/discussion happens here, though you do need to try harder to ignore the noise than was once true.
I mean just because you don't see it as having changed the world doesn't mean it hasn't. I've worked at companies that couldn't use stripe / existed before it was a thing and accepting payments was/is a difficult problem subject to all the regulation from multiple countries and building and maintaining it yourself is a total crapshoot.
Starting a business and accepting money with stripe is super simple comparatively.
A lot of world changing happens behind the scenes and isn't necessarily super flashy. They lowered the barrier to entry making it much easier for anyone building new things to get their customers paying which is world changing for people involved in doing business and business has always been a huge part of humanity whether you like it or not.
I wonder how many things exist because one person somewhere was able to integrate stripe over a few hours and start making money versus needing a team to maintain a payments system.
If those founders hadn't changed the world, they wouldn't be rich.
Sure, Dropbox and Stripe aren't dismantling apartheid or eradicating polio, but these products do solve real problems and make life a little bit more bearable for millions of people.
We should give credit where credit's due and acknowledge this impact.
Y Combinator managed to convince startups that would have been founded anyway to give up expensive equity to them. I'm not sure they would have failed without YC.
Put another way, if you take a piece of every startup on the planet, can you claim influence if some of those startups eventually succeed?
Airbnb was basically dead before they got into YC. They very likely would have quit, as they were heavily in personal debt and couldn’t find anyone to invest in them.
Reddit was pretty much PG’s idea, or at least an idea he helped Steve and Alexis come up with.
Stripe is hard to imagine getting started if PC hadn’t already had an exit with an earlier YC-funded startup.
I could go on and on, but the point is clearly false.
This is similar to the idea that it doesn't matter where you go to college - because the things that get you into top X schools are the same traits that correlate with success afterward. This paper is a study that makes that argument: https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322 (disclaimer - I only read the abstract)
Also - in fairness to YC - there are a staggering number of companies that are started every year. I don't have the stats but I would guess that YC outperforms the totality of the startup market.
Readit News
Some of our customers are multi billion dollar companies.
We are profitable, growing and got accepted by their direct competitor.
I still believe YC influence is amazing and I have nothing but respect for all the people involved in the program but I like to remind fellows entrepreneurs that any accelerator is just a tool.
If you want to build something, no amount of rejection will stop you.
Happy 2022!!
It's a tough slog, and it takes the founders away from doing the actual work they love, but don't give up. If your idea is good, keep ploughing onwards. I've given up way too easily in the past. It was only once I saw other companies recreate the same idea many years later and then be valued at billions of dollars that I really realized the value of the original idea and the opportunities I'd missed by not dragging myself out of bed to another fundraising meeting.
And if it does, you wouldn’t have built it anyway
For those of us unfamiliar with the startup world, could you share the name of their direct competitor?
TLDR is that YC was the first firm to fund a lot of small companies, as opposed to a medium amount of medium sized companies. Similar to what Square did for payments by offering credit card readers to individuals, YC offered funding to super small companies where previously it was not available.
The impact of this on the world is up for interpretation, but at least one positive result is a lower barrier of entry for entrepreneurship.
I am far from an expert so if this is inaccurate feel free to correct me.
[0]http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html [1]http://www.paulgraham.com/whyyc.html
I no longer try to follow what she's up to but I used to be intensely curious about her career.
The psychological aspects of young YC are the parts I want to hear more about.
IIRC, I read that Jessica is an excellent judge of character, and Paul has some kind of spidey sense about technical founders.
In addition to everything else, of course.
He retired some years before her, which suggests to me this business is probably more "her baby" than his in some sense.
Jessica, PG, Geoff, PB, Michael, Jared, Sama and all the other partners have all done very very well by creating/working on YC, but there is a particular underlying ethos of support. Of just a human connection with founders who build. HN in its earliest days had that too, but I don't see any of that on this thread.
The article has a certain ambivalence about the nature of startups themselves (and perhaps, under that, capitalism itself), but Y Combinator has had a profoundly positive effect on my life personally, the lives of hundreds of people I know, the startup and venture ecosystem, and -- whether or not this is "changing the world" -- the economy more broadly.
There are people here who are shitting on the companies YC has helped, in their earliest stages, push forward. Would some of them have succeeded without YC, absolutely. But that doesn't change the fundamental fact that no other small collection of people in history has been instrumental to creating so much enterprise value from scratch -- and thus economic wellbeing more broadly (with, maybe, the exception of Sequoia) other than a few founders of the very biggest tech companies (which YC companies will eventually join the ranks of).
Maybe, you say, that's all just signaling or selection effects. Perhaps you don't learn anything at Harvard or YC; it's just about getting in. Maybe. But when that list includes Airbnb, Doordash, Coinbase, Gitlab, Dropbox, PagerDuty, Stripe, Instacart, Brex, Cruise, Faire, Reddit, Zapier, Gusto, Rippling, Flexport, Segment, Checkr, Webflow, Lob, Opeansea, Sift, Astranis, Twitch, Ironclad, just to mention the ones I can pull off the top of my head, I think it says something about the method, the process, and the support mattering.
And look I'm a founder who didn't succeed with the company I built during YC but that has more to do with my NOT listening to and focusing on the lessons that the partners were trying to impart than any failure on their part.
Now, I'm not without criticisms and suggestions but damn if I'm not rooting for YC and every company in every batch at Alumni Demo Day.
I also fundamentally disagree with the idea that you have to like something because of its process even if you dislike the outcome. Ironically I think that was what put YC apart in the first place. Every other incubator would talk about their fancy offices, lawyers and contacts but then wouldn't produce many notable startups. And by that measure YC probably never would have happened, or at least didn't deserve support.
It's something I think about whenever there is a development with some really popular company. That if the company had adopted the mindset of those rooting for it it probably wouldn't have been successful in the first place.
As for the rest, I'm not sure I follow the argument. I do not agree with the notion that every company that succeeds but has gone through YC would have succeeded without YC. I also don't agree with the notion that only companies that are going to succeed either way go through YC either. Empirically the latter is more easily falsifiable but I think both are false.
Dead Comment
I dream of a world where we try to solve problems first and monetize them second, and I don't mean growth hacking.
> It’s Y Combinator’s world, and we’re all invested in it.
There are many people who resent this world. I'd like to live in a world where success isn't measured by money.
That said, money is a focus for companies as it is a measure of resources and scale. Without money, a company can’t survive or grow, and with it, it can do more of its “solving problems” work for more people.
I really don’t see any truly successful people or companies focusing on money beyond that.
Dead Comment
I dream of a world where we don’t create solutions, such as blockchain, and then try to find the problem.
I certainly do use other metrics, though dollar value of some things remains a handy means to nutshell quantify some things.
Note: I don’t particularly agree with GP.
Maybe a multi-goal optimization, and using more concrete goals is better?
And goals should be directly related to fullfilment of human needs over both the short and long terms.
So let's say measure something like home ownership rate, good jobs, good healthcare accessibility, etc.
what's the best way for the world to be more selfless and productive without that being a pipe dream?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I once tried to argue that most YC founders don't spend their time on HN. It got a surprising amount of blowback. With people like this here, it seemed entirely obvious that no founder would want to.
But now I think founders just roll their eyes and move on.
> But now I think founders just roll their eyes and move on.
yes.
My personal attitude is that unless it’s grossly unfair _and_ largely upvoted, there’s not much need to jump to YC’s defense. Those two conditions are rarely met in one comment.
Dead Comment
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Starting a business and accepting money with stripe is super simple comparatively.
A lot of world changing happens behind the scenes and isn't necessarily super flashy. They lowered the barrier to entry making it much easier for anyone building new things to get their customers paying which is world changing for people involved in doing business and business has always been a huge part of humanity whether you like it or not.
I wonder how many things exist because one person somewhere was able to integrate stripe over a few hours and start making money versus needing a team to maintain a payments system.
I remember paper filing cabinets, PCI compliance, jump drives, etc.
Sure, Dropbox and Stripe aren't dismantling apartheid or eradicating polio, but these products do solve real problems and make life a little bit more bearable for millions of people.
We should give credit where credit's due and acknowledge this impact.
Good to know I'm changing the world with my CRUD apps - more than all the volunteers in the world since I'm (slowly) getting rich, and they aren't.
Dead Comment
Put another way, if you take a piece of every startup on the planet, can you claim influence if some of those startups eventually succeed?
Reddit was pretty much PG’s idea, or at least an idea he helped Steve and Alexis come up with.
Stripe is hard to imagine getting started if PC hadn’t already had an exit with an earlier YC-funded startup.
I could go on and on, but the point is clearly false.
Also - in fairness to YC - there are a staggering number of companies that are started every year. I don't have the stats but I would guess that YC outperforms the totality of the startup market.