gatsby

Really great idea - excited to try this out!

Author here, our company also went through YC in 2015.

Email me with any questions: chris at laskie.co

I just did a short thread on how we went from $0 -> $2m ARR with founder-led B2B sales.

https://twitter.com/ChrisJBakke/status/1309197276061945857

There was a lot of interest, so I wrote a longer-form version that I'm sending out next week, and I'm happy to send to you if you email me.

The biggest things are: learn by doing + learn via mentorship.

Feel free to email any specific questions and I'll do my best to help answer.

Thanks for the context.

"Management was basically incredibly incompetent, for a long time, and were so unfair to employees at the company that they felt this was the only option"

Why not just quit and get a new role? I don't really understand how being unionized under terrible management is desirable.

Gmail is 15 years old.

Maps is ~15 years old (and was the combination of several acquisitions in the maps space: Keyhole, Where2, Zipdash, etc.)

Chrome is 11 years old + extremely successful, but my point still stands.

Almost every successful Google product over the last 15 years has been the result of acquiring an already-built product and marketing + distributing it well: Youtube, Nest, Waze, Doubleclick, Android.

Products that are organically created within Google (even Google Hire, created via acquihire) have a pretty awful track record.

We were fortunate to have Geoff as one of our YC group partners in S2015 and he asked tough questions and kept us focused more so than almost any other early investor we had. Looking back, Geoff really helped us maximize our full potential - all the way from day 1 through selling our company.

Congrats, Geoff!

The SAC vest story is fascinating. Have a source on that?

No, they have a massive sales team, they just call them "customer advocates" or "Ecosystem Account Manager" or "Product Advocate"

https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/all-jobs?team=Mark...

Must be, right? Typically long-term single family PM fees are 8-12% and multifamily is 6-9%.

Fair point - updated my original comment to remove the expansion of the "bay area."

Perfectly said.

In the 80s and 90s, the "center" of SV was Mountain View and surrounding cities, with the VCs mostly in Menlo/Palo Also.

In the last 10 years, as companies have decided to increasingly be based out of SF, the radius of SV is expanding, and a lot of that expansion is to the north + east: Richmond, Concord, Walnut Creek, San Rafael, Mill Valley - making SF the center of the action.

What's your point? People are moving to Oakland, and it's a lot easier to commute from Oakland to SF than from Oakland to Palo Alto or Menlo.

I signed up for HN eight years ago yesterday.

Back then, I was working at a mind-numbing job in private equity and hating every minute of it.

HN encouraged me to move to SF, learn new skills, join a startup (where I met my wife), which led to an acquisition, which led to joining a YC company as an employee, and eventually starting my own company.

For a bunch of strangers, this community was, and still is life-changing.

This seems bitter and certainly exaggerated. For one, the three companies that you listed have almost 1m employees and clearly not all of them are naive or scumbags.

Serious question: what did you decide to do instead of working at a startup or a big tech co, and why do you feel that your life now is better than it would have been otherwise?

I know that comes across a bit rude, but I'm genuinely curious.

Huh?

Investors frequently say things like this:

“Am I at, or can I get to, profitability on the money I have?...(If so) Go raise “opportunistic money” from your existing investors at a good or great price.”

If you’re profitable and believe that your customers will continue investing in you, you should think long and hard about raising more capital as “the answer.”

Raising more capital is sometimes the answer, and it’s an investor’s job to convince you that raising capital is always the answer.

What has he done wrong in your opinion?

I think my point is that if lots of money is being made, someone is going to have to spend it. You may disagree with how it is spent by Bezos, etc. but I can’t imagine capping net worth so that governments can spend more is the right solution.

Why? You sincerely think the world would be any better off if governments managed hundreds of billions more?

I’m a YC founder from the S15 batch and worked as an early employee at another company from W12.

Happy to review your application or answer any questions from a founder perspective.

Email is in profile.

These companies are massive and meaningful because they've had time on their side...who's to say that Frey isn't the next Tide? Is that a small market? Not a user of Frey, but your examples are really poor:

--Twitch started with Justin Kan strapping a video camera onto his head and live streaming it. He did this for over a year iirc. They've spent the last 11 years going from that livestream to what Twitch is today.

--Reddit was such an early flop it was comical. Alexis and Steve talk about sitting around and making fake comments for the first year of the site because no one was using it.

--Um...do you remember Dropbox's launch on HN? Not so great.

--Airbnb had to re-launch something like five times because literally no one gave a shit about "another couchsurfing.com"

I'm a YC founder from S15 and was working at another YC company as an employee when we got the idea to apply to YC. Not exactly the same situation, but I've been here, and several founders in our batch went through similar situations. Feel free to email me if you want to discuss specifics - it will remain 100% confidential.

1.) This is really tricky from your brief description. Hire a lawyer asap if you're even remotely serious about leaving and doing your side hustle full time. Not trying to discourage you, but there are going to be some IP issues to sort through that shouldn't be ignored.

2.) Ideally if you leave and apply to YC, you want to have your boss say positive things about you. It's not just for YC: every single investor will ask you about the jobs you've had before you started your company. If there are any red flags that you or your company are going to get sued, they won't invest. The best way to handle this is by ending on good terms (and ideally getting some sort of IP release agreement with the help of a lawyer [but that may not be feasible, given the new direction your current employer]).

Reading this on mobile I got really confused: this was published in 1995.

Can't answer the age factor into YC's acceptance decision, but as a YC founder, I have met many founders in their 50s and 60s in the last few batches.

You should definitely apply to YC regardless of your age, circumstances, etc.

This will not end well: “He believes there’s an energy behind the brand, and he’s gotten people to invest at that valuation. He has not tried to explain it in traditional financial terms.”

“Social media: not that bad!” -Facebook

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Formal business plans (at least for internet or saas companies) are wildly over-rated and increasingly unnecessary.

They may provide more value in other industries (I have no/limited experience outside of internet/software).

Prototyping is so easy, quick, and inexpensive.

Why spend a week or two on a business plan when you can spend a week putting up a landing page, driving some ads at it, and then definitively get some data points on, "do people want what I'm about to do?"

If you have a term sheet from a great/good investor, you don't say who it is because all good investors talk and the investor you're trying to get a term sheet from will just call the investor who gave you a term sheet. Worse case, they talk each other out of the deal. Best case, investor B comes in ever-so-slightly above investor A's offer (vs. potentially coming in way above, in absence of knowing the price).

If you have a term sheet from a bad or unknown investor, you don't say who it is because all investors (great, good, bad, or ugly) will discount their offer significantly. There is a huge difference (even if it's bullshit) in getting a $10m A from Sequoia vs. a $10m A from a Dutch strategic investor who's making their second investment in three years.

This is a great point. There are absolutely candidates who are "good interviewers."

I think one of the most helpful methods of determining a good interviewer vs. a good future employee is taking a structured, situational interview question, i.e. "How would you go about selling a new product to a customer?" and turning it into an actionable work sample that is tailored to your company. "We make this piece of software that does this. Spend the next 10 minutes writing a cold email to a prospect that outlines our offering." As the interviewer, grade the work sample on structured criteria that is important.