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Our experience moving to SF to do YC
- ultimoo 7y agoNice read! Call me jaded but _walking_ up to twin peaks in the dark? Be careful!
- james_impliu 7y agoHence this handy guide! It turns out you can get down not via the road... although it doesn't appear on Google Maps.
- chrisseaton 7y agoWhy not walking?
- refurb 7y agoLots of crime, someone was shot there not long ago.
- mandelbrotwurst 7y agoI assumed you meant because it's a strenuous walk until I saw "in the dark". Why?
- muststopmyths 7y agoit's a common spot for tourist muggings.
- mandelbrotwurst 7y agoAh, fair enough.
- gavinray 7y agoReally cool to see you guys talking about your journey, hope to see you succeed. I caught Posthog a bit early as it was trending on Git, and sent the repo link out to a few startup + dev groupchats on WhatsApp because I think it complements Metabase incredibly well. The combination of PostHog + Metabase lets you stand up a really powerful free BI and product analytics stack in a few seconds, and these are two areas I see so many early-stage startups faltering on. Not collecting product and usage/user data and using it to gain actionable insights. Excited to continue following along from the sidelines to see what the future holds for you.
- james_impliu 7y agoThanks - it's really nice to see the community sharing it! To your point on "in a few seconds"... We're currently trying to build out more libraries as fast as we can so people working on apps in lots of languages can easily integrate it - we've done Python, Ruby, NodeJS, JS, Go and PHP, and an API for the rest. Feature requests for new libraries as issues in the repo (https://github.com/posthog/posthog https://github.com/posthog/posthog) very welcome.
- gavinray 7y agoThe Docker bit (which seems an obvious choice) is what makes it cake. I just run a few bash commands and deploy PostHog + Metabase for friends on Cloud Run, since it's practically free (2,000,000 requests/mo) and has no operational burden. God bless Serverless Containers & Cloud Run. Throwing up an open source containerized BI, analytics, and observability/monitoring stack is usually the first thing I do for companies. It's super easy and delivers a ton of value. PostHog fits really well there.
- wdb 7y agoWhat would you use for "observability/monitoring stack"?
- pw 7y agoThis mentions their first group office hours. Does YC now do group office hours instead of individual? If they do, I'd hadn't heard about it, and it seems like it could be an important innovation.
- robbiet480 7y agoW18 founder checking in: we did group office hours and loved them!
- james_impliu 7y agoThere's a mix, so you can request 1:1 office hours whenever you want to speak to a particular partner. The onus is on you to drive the agenda in these. We tend to use them to talk through what we're doing next. ie after our HN launch we wanted to discuss "we have some momentum, what should we do next". Basically, whenever we've too many ideas and need help being more focussed. The group ones are a once every two weeks thing. The reason they're cool is that you hear about others raising issues you wouldn't have thought to raise yourself.
- notlukesky 7y agoDid I miss it but where did they move from? A comparison of before and after would have been great.
- fortydegrees 7y agoLondon.
- carterehsmith 7y agoLondon?
- pkrs 7y agoYes, London. You know- Fish, Chips, Cup o' tea, bad food, worse weather, Mary ing Poppins, London!
- sealjam 7y agoDoes London have a reputation for bad food?
- exclusiv 7y agoYes. It's like a dark and dreary NYC but without the good food options. You can find good stuff but you really have to search for it.
- ulfw 7y agoAnd pay for it. Never paid as much for crappy food than in London.
- chrisseaton 7y agoLondon has the fifth most Michelin stars in the world. It's only one place behind New York. It certainly has far more than San Francisco. You can get cuisine from anywhere in the world in London, including many outstanding British cuisine restaurants.
- sbilstein 7y agoomg finally a positive post on moving to San Francisco! Sure it has it's problems but the Bay Area is truly lovely in so many ways.
- tschwimmer 7y agoThis was a really refreshing take on this type of blog post. It came across as genuine and humble. I wish you folks the best of luck on PostHog!
- francescow 7y agoAmazing article! It sounds like you guys made the right choice to move to SF. Thank you so much for the super kind words about Kyte! The whole Kyte team much appreciated this and we are looking forward to delivering many more cars to your door in the future! :) The best of luck for PostHog!!!
- mav3rick 7y agoI see the pricing is per day. Have you thought of hourly pricing ?
- catchmeifyoucan 7y agoI love the logo - it adds a nice sense of playfulness.
- draw_down 7y ago> look after yourselves and work, but little else Mmm, fun life. Enjoy!
- thedance 7y agoCutting yourself off from civil society so you can totally dedicate yourself to enriching the VC class doesn't seem positive to me. In fact it seems like this is how we keep getting so much software (and hardware!) that solves no actual human need of any kind.
- est31 7y agoI wonder how you'd solve the visas in a situation like this. It seems to me the only way to found a company in the US is either via a O1 visum, a greencard, or a citizenship, all of which are rather hard to obtain, harder than the alternatives where you join an existing company. There is no big tech with on-campus immigration offices sponsoring you.
- james_impliu 7y agoIt's really tough - we had to get professional advice. YC connected us with an immigration attorney the moment we got accepted and he helped greatly to make sure we approached this in the right way. It would have been a maze to do this without him. It's still not easy and it's a lot of extra stress. Certain countries like the UK have ESTAs for up to 90 days, but the program is 3 months + then you generally will want to be here to raise afterwards, so you should get some advice on how to do this specific to your home country. Even the VISAs are painful - for example, an O1 (even if you do manage to get it) means IIRC your spouse can't work even if you can.
- est31 7y agoThanks for the answer. What did you end up doing in your specific instances?
- throw3924309 7y agoI'm interested in this as well.
- dirtydroog 7y agoWhat 'YC' is wasn't explained by the end of the first two paragraphs so I stopped reading.
- dctoedt 7y agoYes, many writing coaches counsel writers to explain terms of art that might be unfamiliar to random readers. Granting that you're new here, one assumes that someone commenting is familiar with YC, but that might be a flawed assumption.
- james_impliu 7y agoGood point! Updated it :)
- robbrown451 7y agoHint: look at the url of this page. :)
- viklove 7y agoDo you er... know where you posted this comment?
- redis_mlc 7y ago> so I stopped reading dirtydroog, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you need a lot more persistence than that. Not only is "YC" well-known, and the operator of this site, but it's the first result in google when you search for "YC" or "what is YC". Not trying to insult you, but you need to raise your game several levels. The whole "stopped reading" meme needs to die. Generally it indicates a problem with the reader, not the author.
- dirtydroog 7y agoWhy. Why should I have to google it?
- eternalny1 7y ago> I used to run sales teams, my job was to try to give a realistic figure for how much our revenue would increase. Any experienced VP Sales will play down the number – most would prefer hitting a $20M target, over missing a $22M number by $1M and ending up at a higher number. That’s how you optimize for not getting fired. 8 bosses, Bob! Good write-up.
- james_impliu 7y agoThanks :) I actually find this a really interesting topic. This approach can have some merit - ie it leads to you not overspending and running out of money if you are reliant on new business targets being hit. However, the ideal situation is that your CFO manages the spending conservatively whilst the VP Sales goes out and pushes things as far as they can. There are some morale issues too with giving very high targets when you are a managing a team who are judged against those - for fast growth, you want to give people a sense of accomplishment (so constantly undershooting huge targets is a quick way to prevent that) but also for them to push the boundary of what is possible.
- veeralpatel979 7y agoGreat post! I went ahead and read all your posts in the series: https://posthog.com/blog/before-the-yc-application/ https://posthog.com/blog/before-the-yc-application/ https://posthog.com/blog/the-yc-interview/ https://posthog.com/blog/the-yc-interview/ https://posthog.com/blog/moving-to-sf/ https://posthog.com/blog/moving-to-sf/ https://posthog.com/blog/pivot-to-posthog/ https://posthog.com/blog/pivot-to-posthog/ https://posthog.com/blog/after-the-hn-launch/ https://posthog.com/blog/after-the-hn-launch/ I'd recommend them to anyone who liked the linked post.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]