10 ms·

Reflections on my time in Y Combinator

151 points by chrisfrantz 4y ago

CoffeePython 4y ago
Great read Chris! I was in the S21 batch and definitely relate to a lot of the things you posted. Especially re: batchmate quality. One big thing that YC did for me is it was an ambition multiplier. Pre-YC I thought it'd be cool to make software that could just pay my bills. A year post-batch and I find my default state is much more ambitious than before. It's a crazy feeling seeing so many people start from 0 and the progress they can make in just 3 months. YC helped me and my company tremendously.
- personjerry 4y ago
  > A year post-batch and I find my default state is much more ambitious than before. But you no longer have a choice right? Now that you're VC funded you're expected to hit that 1000x valuation?
- chrisfrantz 4y ago
  Thanks! Yeah, sounds like we shared a similar experience. YC definitely starts to make anything feel possible. They give you the tools, it’s up to you to take it from there.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  I’m at my third YC company and it seems like each time what I thought my career was completely changed. I’m leading a whole company engineering team where at my last job I was a principal engineer who spent Covid working (sadly) alone. My first I thought I’d be lucky to land a entry level gig and did so well I become the lead engineer over a couple of guys within a month (as soon as we found them.) I would never have gotten that experience that fast. Sure looking bad I was a senior at entry level because I had practiced so much: but at a traditional corp I would have had to wait years to get to that level of experience where YC basically throws you at it and hopes you don’t fail
- bko 4y ago
  >One big thing that YC did for me is it was an ambition multiplier. Pre-YC I thought it'd be cool to make software that could just pay my bills. A year post-batch and I find my default state is much more ambitious than before. When you talk about an "ambition multiplier", do you mean personal wealth? YC is great for receiving favorable terms in the future. But you can't really take that money out of the firm, or pay yourself some stupid salary. It's just paper wealth. And a bigger valuation and more ambitious growth usually means scaling up a lot faster (fail fast), rely more on future rounds and maximize your valuation. For a fund they'd prefer a 10% chance for $100 million valuation to 90% chance for an $11 million valuation, but personally I would prefer a 90% change for a million opposed to 10% chance of 10 million, because I can't diversify and run 10 startups simultaneously like a VC can. So I guess that's the downside of the "ambition multiplier"
talhof8 4y ago
Great read! Applied for W23, so it was super relevant and interesting for me to read. :)
- chrisfrantz 4y ago
  Good luck!
  - talhof8 4y ago
    Thanks!
henning 4y ago
> But, we got to the 2 week mark with 0 revenue and we still didn’t have a completed product. That’s not really an excuse that flies in YC What are they going to do, take their money back because you didn't meet their ludicrous immediate-term expectations?
- chrisfrantz 4y ago
  Hah, well they didn’t! But the high expectations definitely encouraged us to perform at a higher level, even if we didn’t hit the initial goals.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Nothing would have happened at all.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bko 4y ago
This was a great read, but after reading it and how the group got funded with just an idea and a mock-up that took 15 minutes to make would make me less likely to apply for YC in the future. Imagine you're building a business and put a lot of thought into the the product and start building it out. And you're basically getting the same deal as someone who just came up with an idea and wung the whole process? Sure, you're investing in the person, but you either have the right experience or not. If you had the right experience and a product, you should probably look to bootstrap or other funding options. A stat I read before is that 29% of the batch has just an idea while 10% had more than $50k of monthly revenue when accepted. Imagine being that guy that grinded to create a business that's generating a million a year and getting the same terms as some dude with just an idea and "the right experience"? https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-winter-2022-batch/ https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-winter-2022-bat...
- chrisfrantz 4y ago
  I understand the sentiment. The reason the mock-up was quick to create was because the entire thing was already done in my head. There were plenty of folks with very little experience and some with quite a bit of experience. I can’t say that I have any real idea what goes on in the minds of the folks making the decisions, but they do seem to pick an outsized number of winners. Whether we’re in that bucket or not remains to be seen.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    Selection bias is a tricky question when evaluating "they do seem to pick an outsized number of winners." Does that mean that the people they pick off personal traits and a 15 minute demo are intrinsically winners, or is it just possible for YC to turn almost anyone with the right skills into a winner?
    - chrisfrantz 4y ago
      Great question, I imagine there is some truth in both statements. The failure rate in the startup world, especially when success means a billion dollar exit or IPO, is incredibly high though.
swyx 4y ago
this was a great ad for YC :) i think where people are more borderline is if they can raise at a decent seed valuation elsewhere already (eg based on existing revenue or prior reputation/technology being far more established). It's well understood that YC has some value add. So the fun question is - what is the valuation you can raise at which it does NOT make sense to enter YC? YC values you at ~2m when they invest (120k divided by 7%, 380k MFN SAFE aside). Lets say you come out of it worth $10-20m on average. Maybe the connections and other stuff gives you value worth $5-10m. so if your business is valued above 15-30m you should consider NOT going into YC. Is that a good way to think about it? any of these numbers you would change?
- dheera 4y ago
  S16 here. I think the greatest value add was actually being able to work heads-down for 3 months knowing that you would almost certainly get investment on Demo Day. Almost all companies got investment, since YC was extremely selective back then (batch sizes were much smaller) and investors generally trusted YC's judgement. Prior to S16, this was probably even more true. If it weren't for YC one would have to spend 50% of their working hours having coffee chats and preparing demos, since investors generally had their own contorted idea of what a good demo is before they would invest, and it was usually not what the customer wanted. Being able to get twice as much work done in return for 7% was a good deal. I don't think that applies anymore, sadly, with the large batch sizes they accept now. Nowadays you'll have to waste half your summer having coffee, not have guaranteed investment, and still give away 7%. Not a good deal. Also, if you live in the bay area, it's fairly easy to come across most YC advice and get investor intros just by going to enough house parties with seasoned founder attendees.
  - chrisfrantz 4y ago
    Nowadays you start with $500K though, which puts you in a much better position when speaking with investors as your initial runway isn’t as close to nil.
    - dheera 4y ago
therusskiy 4y ago
Very strange hearing such stories. I remember a company I worked for went through a YC interview. We were rejected with "we are not sure you can deliver". At that point, we had built 2 mobile apps, a big customer wesbite, rich portals for partners, contractors and admins, had thousands of customers, were almost profitable. Our CEO had a history of delivering in that he sold his previous startup. I must sound bitter, but it's pretty gut-wrenching when someone gets throgh by making UI mockups during a zoom call.
- chrisfrantz 4y ago
  I could be wrong here, but it sounds like you would have been further along than anyone I met in the batch. The majority of folks I spent time with were starting from scratch.
  - therusskiy 4y ago
    The founder never told it in great detail, but he did say he thought "they started on the wrong foot" with the interviewers. Now that I think about it, you mentioned you had a laugh together. Like with everything in life, there's probably a big subconcious bias towards people you like that extends to products they build.
- upupandup 4y ago
  I'm willing to bet race has some underlying influence whether they like to admit it or not.
  - therusskiy 4y ago
    The founder was jewish in his late 30s :-)
    - upupandup 4y ago
      I mean just the fact that there is overwhelming presentation from one group not speaking to your founder here. Sounds like if he's that far in the game, they won't be able to steer him
alixanderwang 4y ago
We could easily have slammed together off the shelf components and potentially grown at a similar rate. Also potentially not, sales is hard! Seeing founders with less care for detail and more for the sheer growth of their user base was impressive and deflating. It felt like everyone I compared myself to, they were devoting 90% of their time to selling and 10% to building. I share the feeling. There's success stories of companies doing the same (e.g. Notion, Replit), so I know it's not completely off-book, but I constantly wonder whether there is downside to that approach of focusing on sales in the beginning. I can guess things like less likely to be innovative, but is that true? Maybe since they average being alive longer than the ones that focused on product in the beginning, any potential downsides are negated in the long term (e.g. just innovate later with the infinite runway they now have). Would love to see some study/survey on this.
- taaron 4y ago
  I think one downside is that because you are optimizing for sales in the short-term, it can lead to product design/architecture decisions which unknowingly constrain the direction or limits of future development/innovation (or at least make it very expensive to retrofit). I think Notion is potentially suffering from this now as users try to push its limits into more complex applications.
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    > it can lead to product design/architecture decisions which unknowingly constrain the direction or limits of future development/innovation (or at least make it very expensive to retrofit) As my beard starts to grey, I've come to the conclusion that needing to drop a lot of money to retrofit is an infinitely better problem than not having captured a large segment of the market. As someone who did Perl commercially from 2001-2019, most of my career was spent working at companies who'd done a large Perl build-out some time between 1995 and 2005, made a lot of money and captured a large amount of market share, and were now expensively retrofitting a lot of very, very nasty code that inexperienced programmers had smashed together in a rush. Much better to be in that position than a company with a beautiful codebase who didn't capture the market
nkotov 4y ago
I had a similar experience (S20) and one of things I wished I did more of during the batch was to connect with more people, not for the sake of selling something but to just meet people from all over the globe. I'm working on a new idea now and most likely will apply for YC again as well.
- chrisfrantz 4y ago
  Good luck!
falsemove 4y ago
Thanks for sharing. It seems like everyone was mostly focused on sales and some were doing quite well. Were there any strategies that stood out to you that were working? Was there some leg up provided to companies in their sales efforts who were in YC?
- seibelj 4y ago
  Everyone in YC sells to each other. It's quite encouraged to buy from other YC startups and test out their tech as alpha customers because it increases the valuation of the YC network (including your own company). It's a very interesting model because as a SaaS getting the first enterprises to sign up is extremely hard, yet those add enormous equity value and provide the proof and case studies for growth at scale. YC can be thought of as a tech startup affinity network. The"shocked-pikachu face" attitude of the author, from being surprised a napkin worked for funding to being amazed that YC-affiliated startups gave him revenue before a product is live, is a testament to the YC model. Either the author is unaware of this obvious inside-network effect or they are pretending it doesn't exist. In the real world no random enterprise cuts you a check for untested, pre-live, alpha software. It is the SaaS cross-selling YC scheme that enables this. I'm not even saying this is necessarily a bad thing. It's just a very unique model that is a warped inversion of real-world economics, and it decreases the risk for investors provided the whole network can continue selling into each other.
  - bcbrown 4y ago
    That's an interesting way to think about it. In some respects it could be viewed as a way to funnel to total YC investment into the "more-functional" startups in the network. Companies that provide more value (to other startups in the affinity network) end up with more of the net investment.
  - alexcnwy 4y ago
    We did YC W22 and did not sell to any YC companies but YC did really help with sales. You’re overestimating the magnitude and importance of selling inside the YC network.
charxyz 4y ago
Genuine question — what is work-life balance like in YC? Is it possible to maintain a decent work schedule or are you essentially sacrificing that to be in YC (or start the company in general)?
- vecter 4y ago
  That's entirely up to you. It's your company. Startup life in general is probably going to be busier than working a corporate job, but the answer is: whatever the company needs. Sometimes that will be 80 hour weeks, and sometimes you can do 40 or take a vacation (which you should do from time-to-time anyways). In my opinion, you should do everything you can to maximize your valuable time during the YC batch, so it'd make sense to work harder then. But even a startup is not everything in your life. If you have a family and kids, those need time also.
cupachabra 4y ago
From what I hear the biggest value is the network, both from a customer and investor perspective. Especially if you are selling to startups there are huge benefits in applying.
lbriner 4y ago
The bit that stood out to me was "a Figma file so big it sometimes crashed". I don't know YC but it sounds like this is the kind of thing one of their Mentors would tell them to throw in the bin and take out a paper notebook instead. In larger companies, it is just accepted to invest the enormous amount of design time into these things but in a startup, anything that hogs your time over selling should be an alarm bell. It would be different if you were producing a massive UI-dependent product but this sounds like fairly basic sass that doesn't need a Figma design, certainly not initially.
- anonymous344 4y ago
  I was thinking the same. Hundreds of hours saved if only used bootstrapbuilder or similiar tool which has almost all the components ready
anonymous344 4y ago
Did you have any initial investment before YC? or what was the value? I don't get it. You started to make the service and pivoted multiple times... how big was your team of programmers/designers once you were accepted ? Did you get money instantly ? ps. I'm looking for a one angel investor about 70k for my next app and don't know where to start looking. Already have few national apps making revenue and multiple made for customers, but nothing like this international one..
madmax108 4y ago
> Heck, you can even choose to skip Demo Day entirely and take that initial $500K (yes, it’s $500,000 now), and just bootstrap it from there. I wouldn’t recommend it, but hey, it’s not against the rules. Interesting, I didn't know YC allows this. Are there any well-known (atleast within technical circles) YC companies that have done this?

151 points by chrisfrantz 4y ago

Great read Chris! I was in the S21 batch and definitely relate to a lot of the things you posted. Especially re: batchmate quality. One big thing that YC did for me is it was an ambition multiplier. Pre-YC I thought it'd be cool to make software that could just pay my bills. A year post-batch and I find my default state is much more ambitious than before. It's a crazy feeling seeing so many people start from 0 and the progress they can make in just 3 months. YC helped me and my company tremendously.

personjerry 4y ago
> A year post-batch and I find my default state is much more ambitious than before. But you no longer have a choice right? Now that you're VC funded you're expected to hit that 1000x valuation?
chrisfrantz 4y ago
Thanks! Yeah, sounds like we shared a similar experience. YC definitely starts to make anything feel possible. They give you the tools, it’s up to you to take it from there.
edgyquant 4y ago
I’m at my third YC company and it seems like each time what I thought my career was completely changed. I’m leading a whole company engineering team where at my last job I was a principal engineer who spent Covid working (sadly) alone. My first I thought I’d be lucky to land a entry level gig and did so well I become the lead engineer over a couple of guys within a month (as soon as we found them.) I would never have gotten that experience that fast. Sure looking bad I was a senior at entry level because I had practiced so much: but at a traditional corp I would have had to wait years to get to that level of experience where YC basically throws you at it and hopes you don’t fail
bko 4y ago
>One big thing that YC did for me is it was an ambition multiplier. Pre-YC I thought it'd be cool to make software that could just pay my bills. A year post-batch and I find my default state is much more ambitious than before. When you talk about an "ambition multiplier", do you mean personal wealth? YC is great for receiving favorable terms in the future. But you can't really take that money out of the firm, or pay yourself some stupid salary. It's just paper wealth. And a bigger valuation and more ambitious growth usually means scaling up a lot faster (fail fast), rely more on future rounds and maximize your valuation. For a fund they'd prefer a 10% chance for $100 million valuation to 90% chance for an $11 million valuation, but personally I would prefer a 90% change for a million opposed to 10% chance of 10 million, because I can't diversify and run 10 startups simultaneously like a VC can. So I guess that's the downside of the "ambition multiplier"

talhof8 4y ago

Great read! Applied for W23, so it was super relevant and interesting for me to read. :)

chrisfrantz 4y ago
Good luck!
- talhof8 4y ago
  Thanks!

henning 4y ago

> But, we got to the 2 week mark with 0 revenue and we still didn’t have a completed product. That’s not really an excuse that flies in YC What are they going to do, take their money back because you didn't meet their ludicrous immediate-term expectations?

chrisfrantz 4y ago
Hah, well they didn’t! But the high expectations definitely encouraged us to perform at a higher level, even if we didn’t hit the initial goals.
tptacek 4y ago
Nothing would have happened at all.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bko 4y ago

This was a great read, but after reading it and how the group got funded with just an idea and a mock-up that took 15 minutes to make would make me less likely to apply for YC in the future. Imagine you're building a business and put a lot of thought into the the product and start building it out. And you're basically getting the same deal as someone who just came up with an idea and wung the whole process? Sure, you're investing in the person, but you either have the right experience or not. If you had the right experience and a product, you should probably look to bootstrap or other funding options. A stat I read before is that 29% of the batch has just an idea while 10% had more than $50k of monthly revenue when accepted. Imagine being that guy that grinded to create a business that's generating a million a year and getting the same terms as some dude with just an idea and "the right experience"? https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-winter-2022-batch/ https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-winter-2022-bat...

chrisfrantz 4y ago
I understand the sentiment. The reason the mock-up was quick to create was because the entire thing was already done in my head. There were plenty of folks with very little experience and some with quite a bit of experience. I can’t say that I have any real idea what goes on in the minds of the folks making the decisions, but they do seem to pick an outsized number of winners. Whether we’re in that bucket or not remains to be seen.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  Selection bias is a tricky question when evaluating "they do seem to pick an outsized number of winners." Does that mean that the people they pick off personal traits and a 15 minute demo are intrinsically winners, or is it just possible for YC to turn almost anyone with the right skills into a winner?
  - chrisfrantz 4y ago
    Great question, I imagine there is some truth in both statements. The failure rate in the startup world, especially when success means a billion dollar exit or IPO, is incredibly high though.

swyx 4y ago

this was a great ad for YC :) i think where people are more borderline is if they can raise at a decent seed valuation elsewhere already (eg based on existing revenue or prior reputation/technology being far more established). It's well understood that YC has some value add. So the fun question is - what is the valuation you can raise at which it does NOT make sense to enter YC? YC values you at ~2m when they invest (120k divided by 7%, 380k MFN SAFE aside). Lets say you come out of it worth $10-20m on average. Maybe the connections and other stuff gives you value worth $5-10m. so if your business is valued above 15-30m you should consider NOT going into YC. Is that a good way to think about it? any of these numbers you would change?

dheera 4y ago
S16 here. I think the greatest value add was actually being able to work heads-down for 3 months knowing that you would almost certainly get investment on Demo Day. Almost all companies got investment, since YC was extremely selective back then (batch sizes were much smaller) and investors generally trusted YC's judgement. Prior to S16, this was probably even more true. If it weren't for YC one would have to spend 50% of their working hours having coffee chats and preparing demos, since investors generally had their own contorted idea of what a good demo is before they would invest, and it was usually not what the customer wanted. Being able to get twice as much work done in return for 7% was a good deal. I don't think that applies anymore, sadly, with the large batch sizes they accept now. Nowadays you'll have to waste half your summer having coffee, not have guaranteed investment, and still give away 7%. Not a good deal. Also, if you live in the bay area, it's fairly easy to come across most YC advice and get investor intros just by going to enough house parties with seasoned founder attendees.
- chrisfrantz 4y ago
  Nowadays you start with $500K though, which puts you in a much better position when speaking with investors as your initial runway isn’t as close to nil.
  - dheera 4y ago

therusskiy 4y ago

Very strange hearing such stories. I remember a company I worked for went through a YC interview. We were rejected with "we are not sure you can deliver". At that point, we had built 2 mobile apps, a big customer wesbite, rich portals for partners, contractors and admins, had thousands of customers, were almost profitable. Our CEO had a history of delivering in that he sold his previous startup. I must sound bitter, but it's pretty gut-wrenching when someone gets throgh by making UI mockups during a zoom call.

chrisfrantz 4y ago
I could be wrong here, but it sounds like you would have been further along than anyone I met in the batch. The majority of folks I spent time with were starting from scratch.
- therusskiy 4y ago
  The founder never told it in great detail, but he did say he thought "they started on the wrong foot" with the interviewers. Now that I think about it, you mentioned you had a laugh together. Like with everything in life, there's probably a big subconcious bias towards people you like that extends to products they build.
upupandup 4y ago
I'm willing to bet race has some underlying influence whether they like to admit it or not.
- therusskiy 4y ago
  The founder was jewish in his late 30s :-)
  - upupandup 4y ago
    I mean just the fact that there is overwhelming presentation from one group not speaking to your founder here. Sounds like if he's that far in the game, they won't be able to steer him

alixanderwang 4y ago

We could easily have slammed together off the shelf components and potentially grown at a similar rate. Also potentially not, sales is hard! Seeing founders with less care for detail and more for the sheer growth of their user base was impressive and deflating. It felt like everyone I compared myself to, they were devoting 90% of their time to selling and 10% to building. I share the feeling. There's success stories of companies doing the same (e.g. Notion, Replit), so I know it's not completely off-book, but I constantly wonder whether there is downside to that approach of focusing on sales in the beginning. I can guess things like less likely to be innovative, but is that true? Maybe since they average being alive longer than the ones that focused on product in the beginning, any potential downsides are negated in the long term (e.g. just innovate later with the infinite runway they now have). Would love to see some study/survey on this.

taaron 4y ago
I think one downside is that because you are optimizing for sales in the short-term, it can lead to product design/architecture decisions which unknowingly constrain the direction or limits of future development/innovation (or at least make it very expensive to retrofit). I think Notion is potentially suffering from this now as users try to push its limits into more complex applications.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  > it can lead to product design/architecture decisions which unknowingly constrain the direction or limits of future development/innovation (or at least make it very expensive to retrofit) As my beard starts to grey, I've come to the conclusion that needing to drop a lot of money to retrofit is an infinitely better problem than not having captured a large segment of the market. As someone who did Perl commercially from 2001-2019, most of my career was spent working at companies who'd done a large Perl build-out some time between 1995 and 2005, made a lot of money and captured a large amount of market share, and were now expensively retrofitting a lot of very, very nasty code that inexperienced programmers had smashed together in a rush. Much better to be in that position than a company with a beautiful codebase who didn't capture the market

nkotov 4y ago

I had a similar experience (S20) and one of things I wished I did more of during the batch was to connect with more people, not for the sake of selling something but to just meet people from all over the globe. I'm working on a new idea now and most likely will apply for YC again as well.

chrisfrantz 4y ago
Good luck!

falsemove 4y ago

Thanks for sharing. It seems like everyone was mostly focused on sales and some were doing quite well. Were there any strategies that stood out to you that were working? Was there some leg up provided to companies in their sales efforts who were in YC?

seibelj 4y ago
Everyone in YC sells to each other. It's quite encouraged to buy from other YC startups and test out their tech as alpha customers because it increases the valuation of the YC network (including your own company). It's a very interesting model because as a SaaS getting the first enterprises to sign up is extremely hard, yet those add enormous equity value and provide the proof and case studies for growth at scale. YC can be thought of as a tech startup affinity network. The"shocked-pikachu face" attitude of the author, from being surprised a napkin worked for funding to being amazed that YC-affiliated startups gave him revenue before a product is live, is a testament to the YC model. Either the author is unaware of this obvious inside-network effect or they are pretending it doesn't exist. In the real world no random enterprise cuts you a check for untested, pre-live, alpha software. It is the SaaS cross-selling YC scheme that enables this. I'm not even saying this is necessarily a bad thing. It's just a very unique model that is a warped inversion of real-world economics, and it decreases the risk for investors provided the whole network can continue selling into each other.
- bcbrown 4y ago
  That's an interesting way to think about it. In some respects it could be viewed as a way to funnel to total YC investment into the "more-functional" startups in the network. Companies that provide more value (to other startups in the affinity network) end up with more of the net investment.
- alexcnwy 4y ago
  We did YC W22 and did not sell to any YC companies but YC did really help with sales. You’re overestimating the magnitude and importance of selling inside the YC network.

charxyz 4y ago

Genuine question — what is work-life balance like in YC? Is it possible to maintain a decent work schedule or are you essentially sacrificing that to be in YC (or start the company in general)?

vecter 4y ago
That's entirely up to you. It's your company. Startup life in general is probably going to be busier than working a corporate job, but the answer is: whatever the company needs. Sometimes that will be 80 hour weeks, and sometimes you can do 40 or take a vacation (which you should do from time-to-time anyways). In my opinion, you should do everything you can to maximize your valuable time during the YC batch, so it'd make sense to work harder then. But even a startup is not everything in your life. If you have a family and kids, those need time also.

cupachabra 4y ago

From what I hear the biggest value is the network, both from a customer and investor perspective. Especially if you are selling to startups there are huge benefits in applying.

lbriner 4y ago

The bit that stood out to me was "a Figma file so big it sometimes crashed". I don't know YC but it sounds like this is the kind of thing one of their Mentors would tell them to throw in the bin and take out a paper notebook instead. In larger companies, it is just accepted to invest the enormous amount of design time into these things but in a startup, anything that hogs your time over selling should be an alarm bell. It would be different if you were producing a massive UI-dependent product but this sounds like fairly basic sass that doesn't need a Figma design, certainly not initially.

anonymous344 4y ago
I was thinking the same. Hundreds of hours saved if only used bootstrapbuilder or similiar tool which has almost all the components ready

anonymous344 4y ago

Did you have any initial investment before YC? or what was the value? I don't get it. You started to make the service and pivoted multiple times... how big was your team of programmers/designers once you were accepted ? Did you get money instantly ? ps. I'm looking for a one angel investor about 70k for my next app and don't know where to start looking. Already have few national apps making revenue and multiple made for customers, but nothing like this international one..

madmax108 4y ago

> Heck, you can even choose to skip Demo Day entirely and take that initial $500K (yes, it’s $500,000 now), and just bootstrap it from there. I wouldn’t recommend it, but hey, it’s not against the rules. Interesting, I didn't know YC allows this. Are there any well-known (atleast within technical circles) YC companies that have done this?