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Table of contents
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- Sam Altman on how to get funded by Y Combinator
- there's some really good advice here, I should transcribe it.
Summary of the reported benefits of YC
- Excellent advice
- The mentor advice is amazing. Just one little piece of advice will completely alter the trajectory of your company. That's happened to us three times. (Source)
- The biggest help of YC is ... knowing what is and isn't important, IMO. (...) Especially with such a small time window, you have to do the single most important thing. (Source)
- One surprising thing about Y Combinator is that it often helps startups most not during the 3 months, but in some crisis a year later. - Paul Graham (Source)
- One thing I remember hearing/reading, but don't have a quote on-hand for, is that during the unrecorded private YC dinners with successful YC founders you can get "uncensored" advice, which I assume includes discussions of the "naughty" (to use PG's term) things they did to succeed. So, for example, the founders of Airbnb publicly credit their success early-on with PG's advice to "do things that don't scale" and getting extremely hands-on with the first few people to list their apartments. But the founders of Airbnb and Paul Graham never publicly mention the bot that would automatically email people who listed their apartments / homes on Craigslist. I imagine that during those private YC dinners they may be willing to talk about such tactics.
- The mentor advice is amazing. Just one little piece of advice will completely alter the trajectory of your company. That's happened to us three times. (Source)
- Focus during the program / an acceleration of the founders' seed-stage rate-of-product-development
- The biggest help of YC is the focus and knowing what is and isn't important, IMO. (...) Especially with such a small time window, you have to do the single most important thing. (Source)
- IIRC Parker Conrad mentioned in an interview that he and his cofounder really benefited from the "build the product" focus that the YC experience provided.
- The biggest help of YC is the focus and knowing what is and isn't important, IMO. (...) Especially with such a small time window, you have to do the single most important thing. (Source)
- Better fundraising: greater ease of attracting offers / higher valuations / better deal terms / better post-investment behavior
- The network
- One surprising thing about Y Combinator is that it often helps startups most not during the 3 months, but in some crisis a year later. - Paul Graham (Source)
- One surprising thing about Y Combinator is that it often helps startups most not during the 3 months, but in some crisis a year later. - Paul Graham (Source)
- The initial seed money
- The confidence-boost / status ("status" may be very-closely-tied or even the same thing as the fundraising/network benefits)
- Benefits? (...) the stamp of approval of being a YC founder (Source)
- Benefits? (...) the stamp of approval of being a YC founder (Source)
Is YC worth it?
- Undated
- Close.io - Y Combinator is a waste of time—unless you do THIS
- Paul Graham - The Equity Equation
- Quora - Is Y Combinator worth it?
- Quora - If you did Y Combinator and regretted it, what were your reasons?
- Quora - Does anyone regret going through TechStars, Y Combinator or other top accelerators (or incubators)?
- Quora - Who has regretted participating in Y Combinator and why?
- Quora - Is Y Combinator asking too much equity for 120k worth of funding?
- SaaStr - Jason Lemkin - What are the benefits of YC, is it worth it if you don’t plan to raise money right away?
- Dated
- 2011.03.15 - Martin Kleppmann - What's so special about Y Combinator? ← cofounder of Rapportive
- 2012 - StartupGrind - The Happiest Words a Founder Can Say: "I Got Into YCombinator"
- 2013.08.27 - Techendo - Rejected from YC? Here is what you're missing out on.
- HN discussion
- There are comments by YC founders in which they talk about whether YC is worth it.
- HN discussion
- 2014.02.15 - TechCrunch - Was YC Worth It?
- 2015.04.22 - YesGraph / Ivan Kirigin - Is YC Worth It / The Valuation Boost Needed to Justify YC Will Surprise You
- 2015.05.20 - Reddit - Is YC overrated?
- 2017.07.14 - Reddit - AMA: I'm a founder in the current Y Combinator batch
Criticisms of YC
- Demo day
- 2012.08.22 - no upside - On YC Demo Day, and those graphs.
- Summary: the problem with a “demo day” that presents not demos but graphs, is that the product gets lost. Teams that are building quality products are forced to pick some metric, any metric, and spin it into something extraordinary.(...) it really seems like a better format for this would have been to have people demo-ing in booths, keeping the focus on what they’ve been working so hard on: the product.
- 2012.08.23 - Robert Scoble - I prefer Techcrunch Disrupt's model of demos, here's why
- Summary: It's boring without demos.
- My guess at how YC might respond to these criticisms: "The goal of demo day is to get investors as eager as possible to give money to one or more YC companies. Thus, Demo day is optimized to present information that will get those potential investors interested / excited, and not what will get a general audience interested / excited."
- 2012.08.22 - no upside - On YC Demo Day, and those graphs.
What chance does a 52-year-old non-coding technical single founder with ideas for global unemployment solutions have of participating in YC W15?
Tyler Menezes, YC alum (Framebase, S12)
667 Views • Upvoted by Parker Conrad, Co-founder, Zenefits (YC W13)
Essentially zero, but it has nothing to do with your age. Ideas are essentially worthless without execution, and you haven't brought up any actual skills you have other than "ideas" and "resourceful". (Being resourceful is definitely a plus, but you need the skills to bring the product to market.)
Written 28 Sep, 2014 • View Upvotes
Misc links
- 2005 - YC - Summer Founders Program (The original explanation for the original YC program/batch)
- 2005 - YC - The original pitch email to reporters for the first YC program / batch
Should I tell my employer I am applying to YC?
Parker Conrad, Co-founder, Zenefits (YC W13)
21k Views • Upvoted by Kah Seng Tay, Worked at Etacts (W10), and now at Quora (S14)
If they are YC alums you should definitely tell them. I think pretty much any YC alum will respect and be supportive of something like this, so the risk is low.But, more importantly, the founders of your company can recommend you to YC, which is meaningful in the application process (depending on the strength of the recommendation) and can improve your chances of getting in.
Written 21 Sep, 2014 • View Upvotes
Their equity take
Does Y Combinator take pro-rata rights?
Parker Conrad, Co-founder, Zenefits (YC W13)
No. YC takes common stock (same as founders and employees) which does not have prorata rights.
Written 26 Apr, 2014 • View Upvotes
Source: https://www.quora.com/Does-Y-Combinator-take-pro-rata-rights
What's the story behind Initialized Capital and what effect will it have on the Y Combinator partnership?
Parker Conrad, Co-founder, Zenefits (YC W13)
It's pretty common for the YC partners to invest on their own, independent of YC itself, and has been for some time. So common that I have to imagine this is encouraged & expected -- so the answer here is almost certainly that the impact is small.Garry, Harj and Alexis invested in Zenefits' round -- but so did Paul Buchheit, Sam Altman, and Justin Kan -- some personally and others through their own funds.
There are some neat advantages to this system. For founders who may be intimidated by the fundraising process, the YC partners themselves can be a sympathetic / low-risk first crack at the process. Because the YC partners will almost by definition be true-believers in the (pretty founder-friendly) YC ideals, you can trust them implicitly as investors.
Written 7 Aug, 2013 • View Upvotes