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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.
  • 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.
  • Better fundraising: greater ease of attracting offers / higher valuations / better deal terms / better post-investment behavior
    • I have noticed that when investors get a whiff of "YC" they start to beat down your door... (Source)
    • Notice to investors who think they can be evil to small startups: YC remembers. - Aaron Harris, YC Partner, founder of Tutorspree (Source)
  • 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)
  • The initial seed money
    • Positive references:
    • Neutral references:
      • YC gives you $120k, so you generally live on that [while going through YC]. (Source)
    • Negative references:
      • We haven't touched the money, so probably not that. (Source)
  • 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)

Is YC worth it?


Criticisms of YC

  • 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.


 

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







 

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


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