I wish people wouldn't treat us like an oracle that can predict startups' success. If only. The fact is we read applications fast and make plenty of mistakes.
One thing YC has taught me is that this must be true of practically every application process. For some reason, both the people who are accepted and rejected in any application process tend to read too much into it. (Is there a name for this phenomenon?)
We humans tend to assume that everyone sees something about us, when a much smaller amount actually notice (and an even smaller amount actually care). This has rejected startups thinking "What did I do" when it really has nothing to do with them at all (just that someone else was better).
Not even necessarily that someone was better - people who read applications are human too, they have things that resonate with them, they have opinions, fallible memories, biases and gut feelings. At the end of the day, this comes in to play too, as well it should. Getting rejected doesn't mean you were empirically worse than any given candidate, it may just mean the two parties involved in the possible relationship don't have the chemistry that would make the endeavor the best it could be. At the end of the day, there's a limit to what you can infer about the relative merits of your idea from a rejection letter.
Perhaps you are to 'blame' for the reading too much into decisions.
When we read your essays, you kind of open up a window to your mind and thought process. Process being the key word. It would seem that there is a methodology to what you do and do not necessarily 'wing it'. So therefore, people would certainly think that process applies to them when you decide their 'fate'.
As for YC being an oracle, it is a great brand that will almost certainly do more good than harm for startups to be associated with it.
It sounds a little like in this case (young?) people look at YC as a critical external validation around their professional worth. What I thought most interesting was that YC is now the customer for this individual. Typically a startup finds the most important validation around that first or 10 paying customers. That's because you feel fantastic realizing you were right - that your idea does matter enough to others to write a check for it. Secondly, that validation is the most important part for the other pieces coming together; attracting other bright minds to your startup, raising an angel round, getting into YC, getting more customers. As I read this I couldn't help but feel as though YC was the intended customer for said startups. So rejection was devastating because they'd built a product with just one customer in mind and they passed.
Well, I think it's very hard to accept the fact that human decisions can be arbitrary, especially when it comes to the judgement of something that you worked very hard to create. It's along the same lines as calling someone's child ugly. Even if it's a random person, that remark will still sting, you will wonder if everyone else feels the same way.
If you really wanted to avoid the emotional consequences of this decision, you could make it completely random. It would be not only stress-relieving but an act of humility given the truth: that you will never be able to predict the success of these companies.
You have a peice of information they do not: you know that it's nothing personal. But if you tell a reject that it isn't personal there are two scenarios that are most prominent in their minds: that you tell the truth, or you're trying to make them feel better while there is something subtle wrong about themselves that they can't find. The latter option has much more weight put on it because the consequences are more dire. If they have two options with equal probabilities, as far as they know, but with one result being far more devastating than the other, it would be stupid to neglect this possibility, because what if it's true? If this was tribal warfare this could mean life or death, people aren't just going to believe your words.
For better or worse, it's often likely the only metric people have to go on. You command a lot of respect and admiration from people who follow YC and read your essays. It's easy to dismiss criticism from peers and institutions who "don't get it", but to hear it from somebody you respect deeply can give a disproportional weight to your feedback, even if it's ridiculous to expect your feedback to be the final word on an idea's success or failure.
One of the strengths of the YC process is that being rejected one time isn't prejudicial against future applications. So, even if the process is somewhat imprecise in any given year, applying again is possible (unlike, say, college admissions), and those who apply multiple times and show improvement are more likely to get in.
Colleges will most certainly welcome re-applications (transfers or post-gap-years), but the window is generally small, as elite colleges are a young-person's institution.
We're all on a journey and there are phases where some of us loose the way.. and end up thinking others can predict our fate.
" Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings. " - Said by Cassius in `Julius Caesar' Act I, Scene 2
Understandable... but perhaps you need to accept that you have put yourself in a position that has a serious effect on not only people's success but also their perception of you and their own efforts.
This highlights part of the HN/YC culture that just doesn't resonate with me at all. I like coming up with creative ideas and working on fun stuff, but it seems totally backwards to me to repeatedly try to conjure a startup out of thin air in the hopes of getting funded. One of the parts that gave me pause was the idea of somebody furiously learning programming to facilitate building an app to teach others to program.
I guess it's a different mentality, and some people get the same thrill out of the entrepreneurial game that I do from writing code. Anyway, looks like some interesting conclusions came from the story, thanks for sharing.
I have always been a bit confused by this also. I think I am most likely missing something here, but I've thought about this a lot and can't figure it out. Overall, I think YC and friends provide a net gain to society, encouraging entrepreneurial ideals and bringing a few really great ideas to fruition. But for the rest... I don't know.
This is certainly not universal, but it seems like a bunch of YC funded startups exist solely to attempt being acquired. I understand that 'exiting' is a marker of some form of success, but doesn't this notion sort of contradict some of the hacker mentality and startup culture that created it in the first place? I mean, you just poured your heart and soul into a company for the past several months, if not years, and you're just going to let some mega corporation purchase it and grow even larger? And yet the vast majority of these companies just sit there and eat through their funding... what's the point?
It really feels like the web bubble all over again, but like I said, maybe I'm just missing something.
We seem to have this discussion too much. Startup culture is business culture. Hacker culture (making and breaking) to me almost seems diametrically opposed to startup culture (making and selling). Startups don't want to reinvent the wheel so much that they rely on the big guns (Apple, Google) to do the foundation work (e.g., making an OS). Twenty to thirty years from now, who will know how to make an operating system. College students online lament that there are no challenging programming jobs anymore so they can't use the deep knowledge from their CS degree. It seems to me that the most challenging stuff that you can make a lot of money from today is a Mac application. My dream is to see a resurgence of MIT and Unix hacker culture.
I know my writing style is disjointed and awkward, so sorry about that :P
My impression of the focus on exiting is that it represents the highest profile "winning" that a startup can achieve - it gets media time, [edit: possibly] large amounts of cash and validation from others that the idea and business is "good". Growth is unique while an exit is even more unique.
How in any way does this represent part of the HN/YC culture? He got rejected the first time, didn't he?
As a coder, I always encourage non-technical people I meet to learn how to code, so I don't find the idea of a non-technical person trying to learn to code at all a negative aspect of the tech scene.
A story about being rejected 3 times by YC up voted to the front page of HN. You don't see that as a large indicator as to the culture here?
And I have no problem with non-technical people, or anyone learning to code, I just thought it odd that the startup idea was for a non-coder to learn programming in order to 1) teach it to others, 2) ?, 3) profit.
In case it saves anyone some headaches, I was rejected from YC 3 times (though with useful feedback and connections arise from the experience each time).
Our startup (LightSail Energy) is currently among the best poised to change how the world gets its energy. Investors agree; our startup is currently valued above $100MM, with Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Khosla Ventures among those who have invested. So things are going well.
Paul's essays, advice, and YC really did help me get started. But people should remember that the road doesn't stop there. Success is self-determined.
Wow, it sucks that LightSail isn't in YC. Is that what you applied with? There's probably a bias toward "team" vs. "idea" in evaluating apps, but idea is still important, and it's one of the best ways to understand a team, I think.
We were in a related field but not there yet. We were still honing in.
Also, we were pre-prototype, and I'm not even sure if we had revealed our secret sauce yet (important, because we had to patent it).
At the time, it was a compressed air powered scooter that was to be the product.
Note: I applied three times. I think YC was right to reject the first two, as suboptimal ideas, further sub-optimally suited to still further sub-optimally configured teams (Paul rightly surmised that I was grabbing whatever resources at hand to complete some kind of made dash across the Antarctic).
The last application was for a proto-LightSail Energy. We didn't have much and it was an even bigger project than the first two, which, it should be said, never went anywhere notable. If I were YC judging DaniFong circa 2008 applying with LightSail, I'd wonder if she'd ever make it happen, and gently encourage narrowing the scope of the problem. Which they did.
PG and Trevor Blackwell wisely suggested that we consider industrial applications, which turned out to be half right -- nobody really needed to replace industrial air compressor, but many places needed energy storage (e.g. islands reliant on expensive liquid fuels for power, renewable energy developers held up by transmission infrastructure or volatility saturation).
The size of this market -- literally in the billions, somehow eluded us in the early phase because it just wasn't visible -- we seldom think of how we get electricity, it seems like a practically natural resource for us hackers.
Vinod Khosla and his partner Ford Tamer finally got through to us. Ford dutifully sat through the first presentation, but kept coming back to (at every slide!) how this might be useful for the grid. Steve says he made the most important decision in his career, said "we'll get back to you," and we made the decision to rewrite the whole business plan on the drive back. Two weeks later, we engaged with Vinod and Ford together, and after a lengthy period of due diligence we raised capital.
The basic reasoning -- that it was unnecessarily difficult to try to make a compelling mass produced vehicle and invent a new power train technology, took time to dawn on us. We were somewhat blinded by the sexiness of many of the electric car startups of the time, and had the impression that, with the money for YC to hack together a slick and basically functional scooter prototype, that money would flow.
The advice -- and acting on it -- spared us. The disasters that were at that very time befalling Tesla Motors and its now clearly less fortunate ilk were evidently well known on Sand Hill Road, but not to us. Focusing on stationary applications was incredibly important for us at that time, and I'm glad we had a chance to switch.
Still, the dream of an air powered vehicle floats above us.
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I should also say, over and over again YC supported me (and thus us as a team.) They connected me with a cadre of super fantastic entrepreneurs (one of which I consulted for, providing the necessary funds to keep going), hosted the amazing and free startup school, hosted this amazing community, and provided the essay example I needed to start my own site, which really launched my professional identity. I posted my essays on HN, where, read by a few fellow entrepreneurs, I both found housing (provided in exchange for my cooking dumplings!) and through a couple more links, my cofounders Steve and Ed.
I have zero sour grapes; YC has been awesome to me.
My only interest is in mollifying the sting of rejection. The YC process is by nature and necessity fallible.
Of course PG himself mentions this in his own writings, describing AirBnB as a strange kind of bad seeming idea, Dropbox as another one of those iDrives that never took off, and describes how people shouldn't read too much into things:
However! I still felt rejection strongly and painfully, at least the first two times. So if folks were reading this, have heart.
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I dearly hope that this won't be taken the wrong way. The YC application process launched me, and countless others. Nothing's perfect. But for every one person they dissuade or distract, 99 must have been launched, just like me.
Heh, the first time I saw LightSail, my immediate thought was "replace the crappy battery powered UPSes and diesel generators at datacenters", and then "add redundancy to industrial facilities which could benefit from it (mills, processing plants, etc.) which don't have UPSes because they're too inefficient/expensive in the multi-megawatt industrial scale, and then grid-leveling. I never would have thought of vehicles.
The closest I'd get to vehicles would be something like a supercharger station -- absorb power from the grid at night (or from solar panels), lightsail it, and then dump 480v into a Li-Ion Tesla in an hour.
YC companies have raised $6-15mm within a few months of Demo Day, I believe. I don't think the limiting factor is "how much money is available", but how much can be reasonably used.
Most of the comments have (thus far) had quite a snotty attitude regarding the OP's very directed attempt to try and get into YC. I have a different opinion.
I don't buy the "do whatever your passion is" bullshit. I just don't. I think that people that win are people that WANT to win. Of course, some times you see some guy who's passion was building boats all his life (or something) and he happens to get on CNN and get some major coverage and his business booms (when he's like 60); my argument is that those are largely exceptions.
If you want to win, you need to focus on winning (like the OP is/was doing). Winning in the start-up world is largely contingent on two things: VC and media coverage. YC can bring both home. I see absolutely nothing wrong with OP's attempt to enhance his application (heck even "leveraging" a woman co-founder is fair game).
Here's a (somewhat poor) analogy: I have a large number of friends that go to law schools (or have already graduated). In many cases, the most ambitious ones will not even consider a sub-T14 school. If they don't get into a top law school, what's the point of paying for a degree and practicing law at some sub-par firm?
Of course, the romantics in us don't really appreciate this cold-hearted realism (if you really really like law, you can succeed! see Erin Brokovich!) But real life doesn't work like that. YC is, in many ways, prime real-estate for new start-ups. I see no reason why you WOULDN'T cater your application and idea to trying to get in. Heck, that's exactly what people to do when trying to get Fullbright scholarships, Ivy league acceptances, etc.
Yes it can, but being funded by YC isn't the only way to accomplish these goals, yet the author makes it seem like that is the only validation of success they will accept.
I completely agree with you that the people that win are the ones that want to win, but winning isn't getting into an incubator, it is shipping a successful, profitable product. The author needs to re-frame their metric of success because they don't seem to have a goal of making the product they are working on successful, or rather, they seem to think their product's success is dependent on them getting into YC.
The difference between your law school analogy and YC is that people actually care about what law school you attended. When it comes down to it, your customers are unlikely to care that you are a YC funded company, they end up caring about your product's value proposition.
The question I have is "Win what?" There's no doubt getting into YC is a feather in one's cap. But for what purpose? What's the plan here? That's what struck me as surprising in this story. "I want to be a YC startup to say I was a YC startup and I'll do anything to get it" doesn't make a lot of sense. If you aren't, to use your terminology, leveraging that for something bigger that you already had your heart set on, why go through all the effort?
I was fairly explicit: VC and media coverage. YC is much (much) more than a feather in one's cap. Most astute start-uppers understand that exceedingly well. That's why YC is so competitive.
There's something to be said for having a clear goal, but there's also something to be said for establishing the conditions such that when you do identify your goal, you're in a better position to be able to meet it. Years ago, people weren't doing MBAs at Harvard because they already had a business plan. It was because it made it more likely they'd succeed later one when they had their plan.
I think you've clarified it better, thanks for that. But take the MBA: the narrative typically goes something like, "I want power/money, being a corporate executive is one of the best means of achieving that, getting an MBA at Harvard makes that much easier, therefore I'll do whatever it takes to get into Harvard."
The narrative here is "I want to succeed/win, getting into YC is going to help me, therefore I must get into YC and I'll do whatever it takes even though every time I've tried so far I've failed." The seemingly obvious question here is: what are you trying to succeed/win at? It obviously wasn't a product you're passionate about (although going into the fourth try, it sounds like the latest pivot is growing on you). Fame, power, money, personal validation? 2.3 kids and a white picket fence? YC isn't the only way to get it, and it's probably one of the harder ways to do it.
If it's common to treat YC as a Harvard MBA—something like "if I have it, everything in life will almost magically work out for me"—that's pretty interesting and surprising to me. I always thought it was more about speeding up getting a specific vision or idea to market, or at the very least iterating on an idea until it grows into something huge.
> If you want to win, you need to focus on winning (like the OP is/was doing).
I don't really see what would be "winning" here and I think the whole concept is weird, so your Glengarry Glen Ross angle just seems satirical. But I think you're being serious.
The first five paragraphs—particularly the multiple pivots, bringing on a woman co-founder in hopes that it might look good, and spending an inordinate amount of time researching everything about getting into YC—really surprised me. I would think you'd want to get into YC because you have a (hopefully) marketable vision and YC is simply a means to an end in getting that vision shipped.
It looks like the OP finally realized that towards the end, but is the first part a common way to approach YC, where it's an end in and of itself? If so, is the central idea that "well, now that I've been a part of YC, everything will just fall into place"?
Just to clarify, we initially decided to work together because she's an excellent designer and I can't design for shit. I just thought it might help our case.
"I thought having a female co-founder might help, but alas, YC isn’t like college admissions, and demographics don’t help your application" <-- that doesn't came out very good actually. I don't see any explanation about the skills of your co-founder.
Seems like an strategic addition, which doesn't look good either.
1) The "threaten to show up on YC's porch until you get an answer" thing is seriously a bad idea. I probably wouldn't have let alone know about that even jokingly. I mean, "football player waiting outside your door until you give him an answer" is inherently threatening. You probably didn't mean it this way, but I can see people being concerned.
2) Why do you want to try to sell to schools? From what I see of the product, it looks like something a programmer-parent would be more likely to buy for his kids, which is a quick $20 sale with no hassle, vs. the long and drawn out sales process to a school district. I hate kids, but if I had them, I'd definitely be looking for applications like this to get them thinking logically and like a programmer from as early an age as possible. Yes, a school would be a lot of units at once, but much more hassle.
The good thing about selling to parents is that once you sell one product, the kid will continue to grow, and the parents are likely to buy additional products from the same company (if you keep moving up in age along with the kids). Sell things to 3-5y to start, then move to 5-7, then 7-11. This is largely what made J.K. Rowling rich -- her first books were perfect for one cohort, and kept moving up with them in sequels. Kids can start at the appropriate stage later on.
The YC company "tutorspree" has some interesting stories about parents who really care about their kids, and spend substantial money on their education -- as do any tutoring programs. (I know people who spend $120k/yr for a Mandarin-speaking nanny for their kids in California.)
3) From the public info here and your iPad app, it's not bad. I don't know about 70th percentile. If you figure YC gets 3k apps/yr, and interviews 150 (5%), and accepts 50 (1.5%), then 70th percentile is not ideal. But there's probably both a huge amount of variance how things are evaluated by different people, and maybe some variance year to year (like, if there's a super-successful Bitcoin company, a lot of investors will go for a Bitcoin company again which they might not have before; not sure how YC is about that.)
Also on a serious note: I'm not sure this post is going to help you get in. You might be thinking so but I might say that it could set you back a bit. PG can't deposit your passion in the bank. He's out to find great scalable ideas that can be turned into profitable businesses being run by efficient and smart people.
YC is not some kind of beauty pageant and it's not a make or break situation for your business. Posting up the rejection letter in your office? Don't be obsessed with Ycom. If you make it, that's great, you can get a lot of good resources and you've essentially got the seal of approval from angel investors. If Not? No big deal! Build the product, bring it to market, get active users and make sure that it's a profitable business that can stay profitable even at a scaling point. If you do this much, you'll get good attention and will find yourself raising seed money.
Getting into Y Combinator for the sake of getting into Y Combinator seems to be quite common; I wasn't too surprised at that. Could there be scope in the application for a question along the lines of "What do you want to achieve by being a part of Y Combinator?"?
No doubt that YC has a fast growing fan club, I know IDEO have to differenciate between the suitable employee vs. the fan club of which YC is likely to be the same. I have applied to YC this round, but I am confident we can build a business and take on the world with or without YC. The tone of your blogpost suggests success is dependent upon getting in to YC which isn't overly attractive.
I really like this post. It had a ring of truth, admission of failure and its associated feelings, with a positive narrative arc.
It doesn't seem surprising that someone with an entrepreneurial drive but only an embrionic vision would want to join the cool kids club. I mean, you gotta do something with your life even if you don't have a grand vision.
I'm surprised nobody in the comments or even in the OP has mentioned the prevalence of "How to get into YC", "How to hack your way into YC", etc. submissions that pop up on HN every cycle. There really have been a lot of those and they usually try to spell out a concise set of rules or patterns for each question/step. Even when PG gets interviewed and asked the question "What kind of companies do you accept?" I wonder if he realizes that this is bait for prospective applicants and blog post fodder instead of a genuine opportunity to endorse the quality of startups accepted into YC (to make these companies look good).
Has there ever been a write-up on "how to get into YC" by someone who followed such a guide and got in?
- Someone who was rejected 4+ times, and doesn't believe in that kind of stuff anymore
A fair number of YC founders/alums have written about the application process and how to optimize for it.
I'm thinking about doing something like that, but it would be about helping people avoid false negatives (which make YC's decision-making harder, by obscuring/defacing otherwise great applications), rather than helping bad people or even marginal people get into YC when they otherwise wouldn't.
There are a lot of things you can do to make it less likely you'll get into YC. Not doing those things is the first step. It's the "do this and you'll get into YC" is much more concerning, because if there were exploits to the process, they would harm the set of YC companies, and if they were widely used, they'd rapidly be "patched".
This all seems so misguided. "I'm going to come up with something so I can get into this club and I'm going to sit in protest until they let me in! And if that doesn't work, I'll just keep trying." Reminds me of Rudy... Instead of working on an idea in hopes of getting into YC, focus on an idea/market you care about and don't give a shit whether you get into a special "cool kids" club. That will get you a hell of a lot further.
> I think that this in and of itself was the reason we were rejected. We hadn’t done a whole lot of customer discovery, didn’t have a fleshed out business model, and were banking on the idea that once we got into YC we would take care of all that. We were counting on YC to create our business, not just accelerate it. I believe this showed in our application, and is ultimately what hurt us the most.
I'm learning this now. We've been working this idea over for months so we think we know it. And sure we've talked to customers, but we have not focused on rigorous customer development.
All I can say know is if you are getting started on an idea start with customer development, do it early, do a lot of it and actually learn to get good at it. It's everything when you're talking to investors or customers. It helps define all the fuzzy details of your product and business model. It helps determine distribution, positioning, marketing and yes features.
Customer development is really good. You gain a deep understanding of the problem you're trying to solve. You know what's even better though? Convincing those customers to pay you immediately. Now your bar is set high. You need to deliver a quality product or service. I find that when doing customer development for customers who aren't paying they tend to care less about what you're doing.
I read your post and it reminds me of how I was at the age of 18 when I started my first business. At 18 I had grossed over $100k on eBay within a single year but at the time they were hypersensitive to any wrong doings and I ended up getting kicked off the site for a few months. I wanted to handcuff myself to their front entrance door until they reinstated my account. hahaha! Ahhh wreckless passion...the good ol days! :)
One way to look at getting into YC is like a marketing channel. They help you shape your startup into something that looks fundable. The press will get you eyeballs. But it's still up to you to successfully convert those eyeballs into paying customers. Your startup won't just magically become successful.
“At the end of the day YOU have to be the one to make your own destiny. If we want Kodable to be used in every elementary school in the country, YC isn’t going to do that. We are.”
...so get to it. The past 3 seasons you spent trying to get into Y Combinator you could have spent building a base of customers.
I wouldn't take it so seriously. In the grand scheme of things it's a minor detail unless you let it be a major one. (I've been rejected several times but my company is profitable and growing at a nice rate and I'm having the time of my life).
Do I love the guy, no. But, he is doing something. I've "completed" quite a few side projects (video game, chat server, etc) but I've never got anyone to actually use them. To do all three sides of the coin, technical product development, artistic design, and marketing, earns you respect in my book.
You know, the one thing that I think even PG would agree with is that the best way to figure out some of this stuff is to ship product, talk to customers, fix stuff, and repeat the cycle of shipping, talking, and fixing.
The OP is lucky they finally figured this out and shipped regardless of YC.
Getting VC or getting in YC can be great, but plenty of great businesses are built by people just putting their head down and building stuff.
This is an interesting essay on the politics of education. Wherein the filtering mechanism drives, in a somewhat murky way, "real-world" behaviour. That being said, the quote you can never step in the same river twice comes to mind, and its interesting to see the experience from another perspective.
One thing YC has taught me is that this must be true of practically every application process. For some reason, both the people who are accepted and rejected in any application process tend to read too much into it. (Is there a name for this phenomenon?)