Valley of Broken Dreams: A YC Postmortem

http://warren.igsig.org/?p=19

by revolvingcur • 18 years ago

59 60 18 years ago

warren.igsig.org

jgrahamc2• 18 years ago

I'd be happy to hear about the online dating ideas. I think that is an are that's ripe for new thinking.

utx002• 18 years ago

why do you think the time is ripe?

jgrahamc2• 18 years ago

I think the time is ripe whenever there's a good idea.

rantfoil• 18 years ago

Yeah dating is interesting -- if you can solve two problems and get people to know you've solved it (or at least made the situation better) -- you probably have something viable.

First is supply -- just having lots of available people on there. It's a classic network that derives its value from the connections. So you could break down barriers like cost (plenty of fish) or complexity in getting a profile up.

Second is quality. This is where barriers are important -- Christian dating becomes a prefilter that reduces the population but increases quality. eharmony.com actually actively tries to increase quality by returning NO matches for people who 'fail' their personality tests. As controversial as that is (e.g. if a user is a depressed Atheist, then they probably will get 0 matches) -- it serves the community by making the dating pool better for their targeted audience.

The two existing ways in which sites attack these problems is that they specialize for a specific niche and make it awesome for a particular type of person, or just go for pure quantity (which makes sense for an adwords play).

Are there others?

iloveyouocean2• 18 years ago

I have been following Paul Graham for some time and attended Startup School a couple years ago. At that time pg was somewhat adamant that they were not be interested in funding companies innovating in the 'online dating' space. Of course they ended up funding iminlikewithyou. But the initial negativity led me to decide against applying to YC. But it hasnt stopped our team from following our dream. We have been working very hard on modernizing (in fact revolutionizing) 'online dating'. When I tell people this they are generally unbelieving and point out all the terrible shortcomings of current sites. To me, that signals opportunity. We are really going to change things for the better. Although our site is still under wraps, if you are interested in finding out more then visit http://www.jumbledate.com and put your name on the list.

pg4• 18 years ago

At that time pg was somewhat adamant that they were not be interested in funding companies innovating in the 'online dating' space.

I doubt I said that. In fact I used the wretchedness of existing dating sites as an example of an opportunity for startups in a couple early essays on startups.

rms2• 18 years ago

I should have reposted my old YC interview advice comment... I'll write a new set for the next round.

One of the main tips and a reason we didn't get in is that if PG and co suggest some kind of change to you, you should agree with whatever they say. One thing they're testing for is flexibility. Don't waste time defending yourself against them because you can't win.

Whatever they told you, think about it, run with it, and reapply in 5 months. If you can actually make progress towards solving online dating they'll accept you in a heartbeat. If YC was a VC that had a model for the types of companies they were going to invest in, online dating would be at the very top of the list.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

That's not just YC interview advice, that's advice for life. The ability to recognize good ideas in others is a far rarer skill than being able to come up with good ideas yourself. And, since there are far more others than selfs in the world, it tends to be a more useful skill as well. Even if you disagree with advice being offered, showing respect for the ideas of the person offering the advice by at least pondering it will make the advice-giver feel good about themselves and therefore like you.

pg4• 18 years ago

if PG and co suggest some kind of change to you, you should agree with whatever they say

A lot of people disagree with things we suggest and we fund them anyway. What we care about in this situation is how they respond. Plain yes is as bad a sign as plain no.

rms2• 18 years ago

OK, I phrased to the extreme, I will try and leave it at "be flexible."

jsjenkins1682• 18 years ago

As someone who was also turned down, my advice is actually the opposite: Do not reapply in 5 months.

It's a mental thing. If you always keep the dream of YC on a golden pedestal in your mind (one that must be reached in order to be successful), you could be setting yourself up for further disappointment and wasting valuable time. I'm not saying that YC is not worth aspiring for (I still think its a tremendous opportunity), just that dwelling on it rather than your product will kill you.

5 months is a long time in startup world. You need to put your defeat behind you as quickly as possible and focus on building your product. Remember, that is what is really the most important.

Hopefully you learned some useful things about your idea and team from your interview. We certainly did, and for that I'm thankful. Its a little disappointing to hear that they no longer talk things over with you on the phone, but at least you got to meet some smart people and got some critical advice during the interview.

nostrademons2• 18 years ago

As someone who's been turned down 4 times from YC without getting to the interview stage, I'd say do reapply in 5 months. Don't fixate on it, definitely do stuff in the meantime, but I think you should treat it as just one more thing you can do to maximize the chance of success for your startup.

The big advantage of applying isn't so much that you'll get in (I've kinda given up hope of that happening unless a buyout is imminent, a la Fleaflicker, and at that point we wouldn't need them). It's that it gives you a regular point to check your progress and see how what you've done stacks up against what you said you'd do. My experience - with 3 consecutive application cycles - is that we're basically doing exactly what we said we'd do in the first application, just 60-80% slower than we anticipated. That's very useful data when we're planning future milestones.

It also gives you a chance to revisit your assumptions and make any necessary course corrections. For example, we had a founding-team issue that PG brought to our attention with the first application that we corrected between app 1 and app 2. Several of the competitors we were initially afraid of have not materialized. The market as a whole does not seem to be developing as quickly as we thought it would, though it does seem to be developing. That's very useful data when we're trying to budget finances and decide whether it's time to go for outside funding. We have the excuse to take another close look at our competitors and see what they're doing wrong and what they're doing right.

It's easy to go full steam ahead on coding and then miss fundamental changes in the environment that render all your coding useless. 6 months is just about the right period of time to revisit your assumptions and see if it's still worth doing. You should be doing this anyway as a business, but YC gives you an excuse and a deadline.

gscott• 18 years ago

I saved myself the trouble this time around of applying and I found it to be a liberating experience.

Filling out the YC form, eding it over and over again, getting excited, waiting for decisions on who they are going to interview, then the let down of not getting to the interview stage is too much for me, a nearly paralyzing distraction to serious endeavors.

jonathan• 18 years ago

@jsjenkins168: best advice ever

signa11• 18 years ago

“What has greater social impact than online dating?!”

getting laid with online dating ?

mrtron3• 18 years ago

If you are downmodding this, quickly read some craigslist person seeking person posts.

I would guess the majority are just looking for random sexual hookups. Some sort of eHarmony matching for sexual partners would probably be an overwhelming success.

schtog• 18 years ago

id make a wild guess and say those already exist in community form on the internets.

for sex the problem is the same as in "real" life, women can choose so i doubt its just hooking up over the internets to get laid...

if guess its 10 to 1 or worse men to women wanting to get laid...

and that 1/10 is not jessica alba.

falsestprophet• 18 years ago

AdultFriendFinder.com sold to Penthouse for a half billion dollars.

Harj• 18 years ago

just going through the process of failing already puts you ahead. after school, most people don't put themselves in positions where they can fail at something. it's not human nature. so congrats.

utx002• 18 years ago

you're putting waaaay too much weight on this silly idea of startup success. seriously man, put things in perspective. what exactly were you expecting to get? life comes with its own sets of problems regardless of where you are.

if you have any savings go and travel the world. if you don't, work for a year, and then do it. my guess would be that 3 months from now you'll be laughing at yourself.

good luck.

suboptimal• 18 years ago

Secret to life: it's about the stories.

Fifty years from now will you remember that day spent coding, or will you remember your adventure in California?

andr• 18 years ago

Just like OP, one thing I didn't like about the interviews was the instant and final yes-or-no answer. In our case, YC said they were worried about a problem we did not think would be a serious issue. We did come up with a solution, but only a few hours later, which, apparently, was too late.

pg4• 18 years ago

one thing I didn't like about the interviews was the instant and final yes-or-no answer

Yes, that is a problem for us too. We'd like to be able to spend longer with each group. But we want to give the maximum number of groups a chance to interview. If we spent more time on each interview, we'd have to interview fewer groups.

brlewis• 18 years ago

YC has a problem. YC has money. Sounds like a business opportunity.

Somebody needs to implement a Questions Requiring Thought (QRT) system. There should be a way to note questions during the interview that would require a lot of thought before a smart answer could be given concisely. Interviewees would leave the interview, put their thoughts together, and make a concise video of their answer. YC could review these answers anytime. I bet for 1.2x the time they're spending now, YC could get 2x the information.

cperciva• 18 years ago

Have you considered drafting some YC alumni into helping you do interviews? I'm imagining a system where applicants would have several interviews with YC alumni and then you'd interview the groups which get the most "yes" votes from your alumni screeners -- I'm guessing that after going through the YC program people get reasonably good at identifying what it takes to be a successful YC participant.

Of course, this would depend on the availability of YC alumni. I know I'd sign up to do it -- if I were a YC alumnus, that is -- but the fact that I spend several hours per week acting as an alumni representative on my alma mater's university senate (and committees thereof) marks me as being unusually prone to volunteer for such things.

dhimes3• 18 years ago

Sounds like you have some good takeaways from the experience. Next time, it won't be pg making comments but customers. You'll have to work harder to read between the lines, but you'll do fine if you give their suggestions, hints, and concerns the same weight you should have given pg's.

martythemaniak2• 18 years ago

Sadly, we did not make it either. Since I don't have a blog, I'll just say a few things here...

Basically, we did everything we could on our end:

-Had a pretty good demo. We spent a few months working on it part-time and we had the entire thing up and running with enough features for it to be roughly usable and we had some nice mock-ups of the future stuff we wanted to put in. I even showed them that TechCrunch featured one of the UI components (that was released as a standalone widget) done by our UI guy.

-we prepared very well. We met with a few people from the local startup community (organizers of DemoCamp, a CEO and CTO of a local startup, etc) and had them pick apart our pitch. They did a very good job and brought up a lot of concerns which we worked out. People I emailed beforehand said to expect a lot of questions at the interview and to think on your feet, but because we had already gone through this 3 times with the local people, none of the questions during the interview were new to us and we had decent answers.

So why didn't we get accepted? Well, there were simply better teams around that day. The email from pg did give two reasons, but to be honest, they were pretty flaky. The first was the community aspect (ie, it depended on user generated content) and the second our planned revenue stream. We had good answers to these ready since we expected they'd be raised during the interview and plenty of previous YC startups had overcome the same problems. The way I see it, if pg's philosophy is "build something nice people want to use, then worry about the money" and he rejects you because of revenue concerns, then it's basically a nice way of saying "Sorry, I just liked the other teams better"

Of course this illustrates a one of the downsides of the whole startup thing. A lot of the things you do in life are pretty deterministic: if you spend 1hr/day learning Spanish, you'll know it well sooner or later, if you spend 1hr/day working out, you'll increase your stamina or muscles or whatever you're working on. If you work 1hr/day on a startup up.. well, its probabilistic, so all you're doing is tilting the odds in your favour, but you're never guaranteed anything - be it progress or success or whatever. So all the work on the app and all of the preparation for the demo/interview was for naught.

Anyway... it'd be a shame to throw so much work away, so we'll probably work on it a bit more, then release it as a side project or something. At least have a decent project to put on future resumes or whatever.

fallentimes• 18 years ago

Marty, hopefully you guys are doing the startup regardless.

dhimes3• 18 years ago

Thanks for posting. But on your probabilistic/deterministic thought, you did get something out of the startup experience. After all, working out one hour per day can make you more fit, but doesn't guarantee you'll make the team on the first tryout.

davidw2• 18 years ago

Working out is a bell curve thing, whereas startups and wealth and some other things like that are exponential. The fastest sprinter in the world can probably run...what...2, 3, 4 times as fast as I can? But the wealthiest guy in the world is worth many orders of magnitude more than I am, which is exponential, not a bell curve distribution.

Working at a normal company, doing a more or less normal job is more along the bell curve - you can make pretty good money as a top software guy somewhere, but (options aside), you're never going to get that lucky break and make zillions. On the other hand, you might well make more than the startup guy, if he spends a year working on his own thing, 'for free', and then fails.

(See: The Black Swan)

kashif• 18 years ago

We got rejected last year too. It would be nice to be with YC but, over the last year, we found ways of funding ourselves and changed our business plan. We continue to look for great advice - which is often forth coming in videos, forums etc and networking opportunities.

YC gives -

1. Advice/guidance

2. A little money

3. Networking Opportunities

4. A high pressure environment to get the best out - quick.

Except for #3, we have substitutes for all others. And #3 is picking up too.

So I say, "Go be your on YC!"

dennykmiu• 18 years ago

Thanks for the great comment. The following is my very similar observation. YC or not YC is just the means, not the end. Good luck.

http://gigaom.com/2008/04/11/to-yc-or-to-vc-that-is-my-quest...

mynameishere2• 18 years ago

Your last paragraph strongly suggests to me that you were rightly rejected.

Here's the last paragraph:

Translation: "Because one VC firm rejected us, I...suppose...I can still use the incipient startup as resume filler. Or whatever""

That's a loser attitude if there ever was one, and I'm going to guess that VCs look for it.

ericb2• 18 years ago

You make a good point, but maybe the name calling was a little over-much?

nostrademons2• 18 years ago

"That's a loser attitude if there ever was one, and I'm going to guess that VCs look for it."

I'd imagine VCs look for it too, but it's important to remember that what people say and what they do often have no correlation, and it works both ways. There're some folks that are all "rah, rah, we're going to take over the world" and then they crumble at the first difficulty. Then there are others that are "well, maybe it'll work and maybe it won't, but if it doesn't it'll look great on a resume, so I think I might give it a try, at least for now", then they keep at it for 8 years and exit for millions of dollars.

I'm reminded of James Hong's "Happiness = Reality - Expectations, so I do my best to keep expectations low" post. Everybody chided him for being so blase and said that if he expected to fail, of course he would. But if you look at what James has actually done, it's clear that he hasn't failed, he just keeps his expectations low as a trick to stay motivated.

webwright• 18 years ago

I'd also guess that VCs look for leaders who can give constructive feedback without pissing on (or pissing off) the recipient.

martythemaniak2• 18 years ago

What you call a "loser attitude" is what I'd call being realistic. A lot of people get a little too caught up in the hype and hubris associated with startups, but its important to look at issues from both the positive and negative sides.

For example, you can take a rejection from YC and say "Gee, we got this far, there's something to this idea, we should definitely keep working on it" and you'd be right. But you can also say "Gee, we couldn't get into with YC their (relatively) lower standards, how are we ever gonna impress an Angel/VC?" and you'll also be correct.

So I'm just trying to be honest here. YC would have provided a great vote of confidence needed to put in a monumental effort into this (ie, quit jobs, take huge financial risk etc). Now we'll keep working on it and put it out, and maybe that vote of confidence will come in the form of enough users and growth to convince us to really get into this. Or maybe we've been wrong all along, all the criticisms correct and the thing will fizzle out.

But mindless hyperbole of the "we'll keep going no matter what and change the world" does little but stroke your ego, which I personally hate.

wheels2• 18 years ago

What were you planning on doing when the first VC you pitched to rejected you? Seriously, take the rejection, and channel that into drive. Prove them wrong. Drop them a politely smug mail when you do your IPO. :-)

As YC grows it's invevitable that they, like every investment group, are going to pass on something big, and I think the good folks running YC would be the first to admit that.

cowmoo• 18 years ago

We were also among the group that were invited for a interview - but received at the end a rejection e-mail. As graduating college seniors, we had banked a lot on pursuing our startup idea. I spurned a offer to work at a blue chip company that would offer full-rides and time off for grad school in CS; my partner for the YCombinator application decided to skip his final presentation in a major class taught by his thesis advisor (effectively garnering an incomplete mark on his transcript and less-than-favorable reception for his future grad school recommendations) for our presentation.

We certainly do not blame Paul Graham for our setbacks. Our motto had always been, "you win some, and you lose some." We won some when we received an invitation to Mountain View. We lost some when we received a rejection e-mail from PG afterwards. But then, we won some more, when we decided to take the free advice offered by PG (think bona fide corporate consulting) and go ahead with our startup idea anyways. Thanks to YCombinator, we have learned a lot from our trip to Cali and our first presentation to VC's, that we are going to take away and put to use,

- The Silicon Valley is just a place. Coming from a sleepy college town on the East Coast, we relished the idea of coming to the tech mecca where everything came together. But driving down San Jose/Pal Alto on $4/gallon reminded me of the suburban sprawl/commercial park/new development of Washington D.C/Boston/Philly; riding the $12/one way VTA light rail and BART and witnessing scores of IT workers getting off at Cisco Way reminded me of the scenes of my arriving for work at BigCo, back in Connecticut. But I was reminded that unlike those around me, I didn't have a ID badge, all I had was my idea and the thrill of following through or failing with my idea. Being Silicon Valley did not dazzle me with its "glitz," but my idea was still exciting to me.

- Doing startup's sucks, in the "conventional sense". As a college student, you can't help but compare yourself with your peers; I secretly maintained a secretive competitive streak with my friends, who will be going to med school/law school/wall street firms. While I have been outwardly conceding that they will be obscenely rich soon in comparison to my "poor" startup-wanabe self, I was hoping that getting accepted into YCombinator would put me ahead of my lame corporate-sellout friends. As an result, I poured a lot of time in writing the application and preparing our presentation. Now that we have been rejected, I relish of having the opportunity to once again, sit in my school's computer lab - late at night, coding away.

- How little rejections matter. We were heartbroken when we initially read the e-mail from PG on Saturday evening. But the next day when we woke up, I and my partner went our respective way's for more startup job interview's we had lined up for our trip to California. On our flight back home, we discussed how we could address on our own, the valid concerns that PG had brought up regarding our startup. When we got back to Connecticut, I fired off a e-mail to my mentor for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) that my plans for VC funding fell through, and that I will be able to work on my GSoC project full time during the summer (Any GSoC people here?). During the course of my writing this, my partner in crime caught up with me in the computer lab and showed me some of his plans for the back-end of next iteration for our startup website.

I've just realized how lucky I am, and how much the trip to Mountain View was worth all the time and troubles I went through.

fleaflicker2• 18 years ago

It sounds like the founder didn't really believe in the idea.

I would not invest in founders that aren't passionate about what they are doing.

Find something that makes you excited.

JayNeely• 18 years ago

Speaking of investing, now that your startup's been acquired have you thought about becoming an angel investor?

Everyone's always saying there's a need for more startup investors who were formerly startup founders themselves. Checking your profile on Fleaflicker, I see you're in NYC; there are bound to be angel investor groups that you could join if you didn't want to do it alone.

fleaflicker2• 18 years ago

I'm not done with Fleaflicker yet. It's still my top priority. But yes, the thought has crossed my mind. Nothing more than that though.

LostInTheWoods• 18 years ago

Bah. Getting rejected by YC is not the end of the world; and getting accepted by YC is no guarantee of success. At the end of the day, if you don't truly believe in your startup, then why are you doing it?

alex_c• 18 years ago

Congrats! Hopefully the first of many rejections.

(and eventual success)

wumi• 18 years ago

go out and build your product and let the users prove whether or not your startup is valuable.

chrysb• 18 years ago

If you have an idea you really believe in and you quit because YC didn't buy into it then you're fooling yourself.

You really need to follow through with your ideas whether or not other people believe after they heard your pitch for 10 minutes.

YC is indeed a great opportunity, but it's definitely not the only one. Keep working at your idea, go out to conferences and meet-ups -- you can network on your own. Be yourself and be your product.

I believe something that is important to YC is that you are not banking on their funding to fulfill your idea. You need to have the mentality that you are going to finish your product with or without them. You need to make them want to get on your boat rather than you praying to be on theirs.

We came across the application and decided to fill out as an exercise for solidifying our idea. Whether or not YC was going to fund us, we still had a plan of action, which is essentially still the same. I feel that our mentality is what gave us the confidence to interview the way we did.

Try again next time, don't be so bitter. Give value before you get value. If you make your product and it is good, word will spread, and you will succeed, just keep at it. Please.

babul• 18 years ago

YC is not the be all and end all. We all have rough rides at time and fall down. Pick yourself up, learn from the experience and keep moving forward, don't stop.

Valley of Broken Dreams: A YC Postmortem

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