22 ms·

The YC Founder Directory

248 points by sandslash 4y ago

aliqot 4y ago
That's a little scary. Any way to opt out of being included in that? I'm probably not the target market for YC, but if I were, this would run me off. I don't want to be known, I just want people to enjoy the stuff I make and for that enjoyment to be quantified in USD.
- benatkin 4y ago
  > That's a little scary. It's an awful lot like AngelList. > Any way to opt out of being included in that? I think there probably is. It might even be opt-in. How do you get people to opt in? Have them check their information is correct and remind them to until it's launched.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    It is opt-in: > We’re also enabling any YC company to opt into having their YC application video, written application answers, and Demo Day video public on the YC Startup Directory
    - aliqot 4y ago
      I'm mainly concerned about the listing of me as a person at all, not the materials.
      - capableweb 4y ago
        But if you chose to incorporate and run a company in the US as YC requires, and participate in their program, you'd be "public" regardless, in various forms.
        ignoramous 4y ago
        There's being in public, and there's being put on a pedestal (:
        quartesixte 4y ago
        As far as I can see, choosing to become a founder in YC and succeeding at it requires a bit of desire for the limelight.
        benatkin 4y ago
        Not necessarily. With young startups, the only available position for a role is often "Founder". A developer could simply want to work on a project and see where it goes, and the only way would be to become a founder.
        quartesixte 4y ago
        In general yes. But with YC, I get the feeling that there is a push for founders who at the very least won’t actively shun the limelight if required.
        ignoramous 4y ago
        Yep: There's a reason a bunch of YC founders appear every year like clockwork on popularity lists like Forbes 30u30 ...
    - SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
      It's almost certainly opt-out for founders, I would be very surprised if they individually went back and got permission from every founder for the past decade before creating this. I see someone I know would have said no if asked, for example, as their time at YC was pretty awful and resulted in what they consider to be shameful failure.
      - benatkin 4y ago
        Yeah, that sounds right, and I don't agree with making it opt-out. I think it should be opt-in and like you am now almost completely certain that it isn't.
      - antipotoad 4y ago
        Maybe it’s a lack of imagination, but I can’t think of why any kind of YC experience should be shameful, provided lessons were learned and no one ended up in jail. That said, I still agree it should be opt-in.
        SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
        He had to drop out due to still-unresolved mental health issues, and the source of his shame is mostly that he didn't deal with those issues earlier, and still isn't dealing with them now.
        antipotoad 4y ago
        Hmm, I see. Can relate too. I still see that as no reason for shame, even though from within that situation it can feel shameful. The journey to getting better can be a long and challenging one that’s hard to make sense of from the outside.
        SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
        I would like to give you some feedback; nobody cares if you see something as shameful or not, least of all the person feeling the shame.
    - santa_boy 4y ago
      Looking for any YC application video, written application answers made public so far. Any links?
- nkotov 4y ago
  There is an option for YC founders to not be publicly listed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- alexgrover 4y ago
  If you’re not the target market, why do you care?
  - maest 4y ago
    First they came for the YC founders, and I did not speak out...
- cameroncooper 4y ago
  Founders can opt-out, though it looks like there's little control on what information is shared publicly.
- paxys 4y ago
  Why is it scary? There is an option to opt out, but marketing and networking are two of the main reasons people join YC in the first place. No founder is saying no to this.
  - greggarious 4y ago
    >Why is it scary? There is an option to opt out, but marketing and networking are two of the main reasons people join YC in the first place. No founder is saying no to this. Probably because in an age of targeting phish paired with browsers that strain to run whatever JavaScript or whatever you hurl at them, the founders are rightfully concerned someone who’d be stopped by the secretary can slam their inbox because they misticked some box. (But what do I know? I’m a venture socialist slamming lattès in the museum when everyone else is at work.)
    - radlad 4y ago
      I think there might be a disconnect here. The Founder Directory doesn't appear to offer a way to contact founders (besides social media links.)
      - greggarious 4y ago
        Sorry for misspeaking then, I need to think more before I post. (The only thing I’ve ever founded is a lemonade stand)
- rdl 4y ago
  They emailed months ago asking if people wanted to opt out; it was a concern but I suspect the vast majority of people both want to be in it AND are already trivially googleable as being in YC.
jasfi 4y ago
The Startup Directory points to the Founder Directory as well.
- gist 4y ago
  Yes that is actually https://www.ycombinator.com/companies https://www.ycombinator.com/companies
breck 4y ago
I am not in there, even though I did YC twice. My 2 classes are the 2 most valuable classes of all time. Coincidence? But they banned me. "Make something people want...that the censors approve of."
- tr33house 4y ago
  could you share a bit more? Why were you banned? What did they not approve of. As someone who's considered YC, it would be great to know some of this
  - breck 4y ago
    > Why were you banned? I don't know. > could you share a bit more? I still have not been able to get to the bottom of it. My ex stole a bunch of money from me, lied like crazy and ran off with our two daughters (this part is heart breaking and kills me every day). We are in a bitter legal battle (an ironic thing is I am ordered to pay her legal bills), and she has sadly perjured herself multiple times. She somehow got YC involved, and was able to steal $50,000 from my business Mercury account. I couldn't believe it, and still haven't gotten an explanation or apology from Mercury. I raised bloody hell on the forums when that happened, and so I'm guessing the ban was related to that. I think it might be a cover your ass thing, as they really fucked up that one and are probably worried I'll sue (which I may, as I have great cause and people have been encouraging me to, but I'd rather focus on more positive things in life). They've done their best to censor me, but luckily there are mostly honest people there and many stick up for me. I'll keep fighting for the truth.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - OnlineGladiator 4y ago
      Can you please send me a link to your story? I started looking through your comment history and the first thing I noticed was this comment doesn't show up (probably because it's a descendant of a flagged comment), and rather than go looking for something that may have already been hidden on HN I figured I'd just ask.
emptysea 4y ago
Search is really quick and a look under the covers shows it’s using algolia + s3 for images
- Alex3917 4y ago
  It is quick, but it also looks faster than it is because of the way they're animating the rows as you type. At the end of the day it's still taking the full 300ms or whatever to load the images from S3, and without all the extra jitter it would look kind of janky.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  To be fair, if you manage to make search slow for a database with ~10,000 entries, you're doing something very strange. Even allowing for egregious post-sizes of 100Kb/entry, that's less than 1 Gb. A raspberry pi could keep the database in RAM with room to spare.
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    Full text search is tricky no matter how small the dataset is. But yes the speed should be instantaneous as long as you use standard FTS solutions.
    - paxys 4y ago
      It really isn't. You could have implemented this site using a single MySQL LIKE query and it would have been equally performant. Or even download the full dataset to the client on page load and do the search locally in JavaScript. The problems all arise when you need to scale.
      - maxwelldone 4y ago
        > Or even download the full dataset to the client on page load and do the search locally in JavaScript. That's exactly what I did for a recent hobby project of mine[0]. In my case, I've a db of 30K entries with gzipped size of ~600kb. This serves well for the few hundred visitors I get every day. [0] https://theshowgrid.com/ https://theshowgrid.com/
pigtailgirl 4y ago
-- best pre-seed you can do is Stanford? --
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tcgv 4y ago
Nice tool. I searched entries for my University and the data needs some cleansing: - Universidade de São Paulo [11] - Universidade de São Paulo (USP) [8] - University of Sao Paulo [4] - Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo [3] All of these refer to the same University. The last one is one of the University's engineering schools.
- newuser94303 4y ago
  Lots like this University of Calgary 9 The University of Calgary 4
  - greggarious 4y ago
    Sounds like the kind of thing someone at Waterloo could stretch out for a summer coop ;-) (Imagine the end of term meeting. “What did you do at ycombinator? Regex? Tell me about that.”)
- benatkin 4y ago
  I think it's better how it is because it's up to the founders to say it how they want. Certainly Sao Paolo without the tilde is not something to impose on people.
BillSaysThis 4y ago
UX is strange. I searched for a founder friend and he has multiple companies listed but clicking on his image or anywhere in the result row just opens the page for an old company.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ElijahLynn 4y ago
[flagged]
- grepLeigh 4y ago
  I've always been super curious about the YC application vs. accepted demographics. ESPECIALLY who gets told to come back with a co-founder. I applied as a solo woman technical founder with a product that is already close to ramen profitability. Going in, I thought this already made me an outlier - especially because I'll be able to tap my network and hire a founding team with some cash in the bank. The tepid response during YC interviews was jarring. I know the panels are an exhausting marathon, but my group partners acted like they'd rather be anywhere else than talking to me. I got the impression that maybe I'd been invited to fill a quota, and the Zoom interview was just going through the motions. The whole experience made me sit down and reverse-engineer the actions needed to hit 10-15k MRR by Q2 2023. With that amount of cash flow, I can reach out to angels directly. Just 6 angels in for 30k/1% party round is 180k @ 3M post. If you're a woman with a similar story, I'm an angel investor (B2B, Saas, manufacturing). Reach out (email in profile).
  - ShivShankaran 4y ago
    [dead]
  - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
    On th face of it, it doesn't sound like you need venture capital. Angel investor is usually defined as a high-net-worth individual who provides financial backing for small startups or entrepreneurs. With that in mind, if your product is at or near profitability, I'd have imagined that wouldn't been a good fit for YC?
    - grepLeigh 4y ago
      I'm going to bounce this back and ask what you'd do in my shoes. Your net worth is around 2M, you burn around 50k/year to eat, sleep, and be merry. You could retire tomorrow, but you weren't put on this Earth to just be idle. Let's say (hypothetically) you worked somewhere that just announced they're laying off 10% of their workforce. You want to make an offer to 2-3 product + infra engineers who were laid off. You know they do excellent work, and they're a god damn joy to be around. However, you need at least 6 months of payroll, health insurance premiums, and incidentals fully liquid to extend those offers. Ideally you'd have 8-12 months banked - because you care. Your startup is "Ramen profitable" - that means you're making around 7k/month revenue to cover 2-5k expenses. If you start saving 100% of profits NOW you can afford 1 of those engineers in (checks notes) just under 8 years! What's your next move?
majani 4y ago
Interesting trends that pop out at first glance: 1. Seems like YC is all aboard the B2B SaaS train. This is funny because early last decade B2B SaaS was known as mostly a lifestyle business category, while investors focused on consumer facing tech and big ticket enterprise products 2. It appears that the big tech employee track and the startup track are one and the same now. This flies in the face of the common wisdom that entrepreneurs and employees are very different from one another.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Recurring revenues and hockey stick growth. AKA VC crack.
- tptacek 4y ago
  It's a funding process that appears to somewhat deliberately mimic the process for applying to postsecondary school, so the frequent school connections are unsurprising. (I didn't meaningfully attend college at all and am in this directory.)
- tomhoward 4y ago
  In a recent video chat, YC partners explained how consumer startups are often a "tarpit" (seem attractive - "all my friends think it's a great idea", but super-hard to get uptake, scale and revenue). Whereas there's an endless pool of opportunities to solve business problems that many small-med companies would happily pay (a little bit) for, and it's much quicker to validate (see if other startups will use it) and monetise early (vs both consumer and enterprise). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMIawSAygO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMIawSAygO4
  - majani 4y ago
    I remember the Basecamp guys shouting themselves hoarse about these very same values back when "Social, Local & Mobile" were the new hotness. Seems like they were prophets now
neilv 4y ago
> For prospective founders who are looking for inspiring leaders, here is a way to discover founders who have had experiences that reflect your own and learn more about their founder journey. I'd guess a directory of 10,000 YC alumni could be awesome, if you're a new YC founder doing B2B sales cold calls. (YC might connect their current/recent startups to each other. But this could help you put shoe to the pavement, and knock on many more YC alumni doors, where you have the name of a likely well-placed person, and a small "in" with them. Unless that's frowned-upon.)
andrewstuart 4y ago
Universities and former employers really pop out as something important, in a way I'd never fully grasped before.
welder 4y ago
Cool, it's a round-about way to search YC companies based on HQ location: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/founders?yc_locations=Berlin%2C%20Berlin%2C%20Germany https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/founders?yc_locations=...
aryamaan 4y ago
Working in startups as an employee is a lottery ticket. Is there any heuristics/tips which could help winning this lottery ticket? Like joining previously successful exit cofounder's company? Joining series B ones which are likey to get series C
- paxys 4y ago
  If you really had the answer to that you'd be the most successful VC in history
- nugget 4y ago
  The best advice I heard for non zero-to-one folks was to watch for Series B rounds where multiple top tier venture firms participated, for example Sequoia + Lightspeed or Benchmark + Accel. This was back around 2012 so the economics could have shifted, less so the firms although there's been some movement. Series B @ $150-$250m valuation seems to be the place where PMF is (usually, not always) de-risked but the company still has room to grow 10-20x (in a good tech market).
- ipaddr 4y ago
  From my experience look for a strong sales team over anything else aside from funding being very low.
bradgessler 4y ago
When do we get a YC OAuth provider?
grepLeigh 4y ago
There was a top comment about the demographics of this directory. Roughly paraphrasing, the comment was something like "male, male, male, male, male, male, male, male, female, male, male." I think this comment was flagged and hidden. Please be kind + compassionate in your replies, but I'm curious why the original comment was suppressed. What happened?
- manholio 4y ago
  Probably flagged by readers who are tired of this drama (not one of the flaggers, btw). In the thread you were saying something like 'you can't find any reason why your ramen profitable start-up received such a tepid response from YC and you got the advice to come back with a co-founder' [other than the implied systemic misogyny]. Sorry, but that just not an acceptable response to a rejection. Startup accelerators do not exist to empower women founders, make the world a better place or other such grand idea, they exists to make money and you failed to convince one such accelerator that you can make money for them. It's as simple as that. Biases might affect their decision process, but that's a problem for their business, not yours. Edit: here's the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267515
  - grepLeigh 4y ago
    Here's my original post, which doesn't mention anything about "empowerment" or "making the world a better place" or "implied systemic misogyny." >> I've always been super curious about the YC application vs. accepted demographics. ESPECIALLY who gets told to come back with a co-founder. I applied as a solo woman technical founder with a product that is already close to ramen profitability. Going in, I thought this already made me an outlier - especially because I'll be able to tap my network and hire a founding team with some cash in the bank. The tepid response during YC interviews was jarring. I know the panels are an exhausting marathon, but my group partners acted like they'd rather be anywhere else than talking to me. I got the impression that maybe I'd been invited to fill a quota, and the Zoom interview was just going through the motions. The whole experience made me sit down and reverse-engineer the actions needed to hit 10-15k MRR by Q2 2023. With that amount of cash flow, I can reach out to angels directly. Just 6 angels in for 30k/1% party round is 180k @ 3M post. If you're a woman with a similar story, I'm an angel investor (B2B, Saas, manufacturing). Reach out (email in profile.

248 points by sandslash 4y ago

That's a little scary. Any way to opt out of being included in that? I'm probably not the target market for YC, but if I were, this would run me off. I don't want to be known, I just want people to enjoy the stuff I make and for that enjoyment to be quantified in USD.

benatkin 4y ago
> That's a little scary. It's an awful lot like AngelList. > Any way to opt out of being included in that? I think there probably is. It might even be opt-in. How do you get people to opt in? Have them check their information is correct and remind them to until it's launched.
- capableweb 4y ago
  It is opt-in: > We’re also enabling any YC company to opt into having their YC application video, written application answers, and Demo Day video public on the YC Startup Directory
  - aliqot 4y ago
    I'm mainly concerned about the listing of me as a person at all, not the materials.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      But if you chose to incorporate and run a company in the US as YC requires, and participate in their program, you'd be "public" regardless, in various forms.
      - ignoramous 4y ago
        There's being in public, and there's being put on a pedestal (:
        quartesixte 4y ago
        As far as I can see, choosing to become a founder in YC and succeeding at it requires a bit of desire for the limelight.
        benatkin 4y ago
        Not necessarily. With young startups, the only available position for a role is often "Founder". A developer could simply want to work on a project and see where it goes, and the only way would be to become a founder.
        quartesixte 4y ago
        In general yes. But with YC, I get the feeling that there is a push for founders who at the very least won’t actively shun the limelight if required.
        ignoramous 4y ago
        Yep: There's a reason a bunch of YC founders appear every year like clockwork on popularity lists like Forbes 30u30 ...
  - SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
    It's almost certainly opt-out for founders, I would be very surprised if they individually went back and got permission from every founder for the past decade before creating this. I see someone I know would have said no if asked, for example, as their time at YC was pretty awful and resulted in what they consider to be shameful failure.
    - benatkin 4y ago
      Yeah, that sounds right, and I don't agree with making it opt-out. I think it should be opt-in and like you am now almost completely certain that it isn't.
    - antipotoad 4y ago
      Maybe it’s a lack of imagination, but I can’t think of why any kind of YC experience should be shameful, provided lessons were learned and no one ended up in jail. That said, I still agree it should be opt-in.
      - SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
        He had to drop out due to still-unresolved mental health issues, and the source of his shame is mostly that he didn't deal with those issues earlier, and still isn't dealing with them now.
        antipotoad 4y ago
        Hmm, I see. Can relate too. I still see that as no reason for shame, even though from within that situation it can feel shameful. The journey to getting better can be a long and challenging one that’s hard to make sense of from the outside.
        SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
        I would like to give you some feedback; nobody cares if you see something as shameful or not, least of all the person feeling the shame.
  - santa_boy 4y ago
    Looking for any YC application video, written application answers made public so far. Any links?
nkotov 4y ago
There is an option for YC founders to not be publicly listed.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alexgrover 4y ago
If you’re not the target market, why do you care?
- maest 4y ago
  First they came for the YC founders, and I did not speak out...
cameroncooper 4y ago
Founders can opt-out, though it looks like there's little control on what information is shared publicly.
paxys 4y ago
Why is it scary? There is an option to opt out, but marketing and networking are two of the main reasons people join YC in the first place. No founder is saying no to this.
- greggarious 4y ago
  >Why is it scary? There is an option to opt out, but marketing and networking are two of the main reasons people join YC in the first place. No founder is saying no to this. Probably because in an age of targeting phish paired with browsers that strain to run whatever JavaScript or whatever you hurl at them, the founders are rightfully concerned someone who’d be stopped by the secretary can slam their inbox because they misticked some box. (But what do I know? I’m a venture socialist slamming lattès in the museum when everyone else is at work.)
  - radlad 4y ago
    I think there might be a disconnect here. The Founder Directory doesn't appear to offer a way to contact founders (besides social media links.)
    - greggarious 4y ago
      Sorry for misspeaking then, I need to think more before I post. (The only thing I’ve ever founded is a lemonade stand)
rdl 4y ago
They emailed months ago asking if people wanted to opt out; it was a concern but I suspect the vast majority of people both want to be in it AND are already trivially googleable as being in YC.

jasfi 4y ago

The Startup Directory points to the Founder Directory as well.

gist 4y ago
Yes that is actually https://www.ycombinator.com/companies https://www.ycombinator.com/companies

breck 4y ago

I am not in there, even though I did YC twice. My 2 classes are the 2 most valuable classes of all time. Coincidence? But they banned me. "Make something people want...that the censors approve of."

tr33house 4y ago
could you share a bit more? Why were you banned? What did they not approve of. As someone who's considered YC, it would be great to know some of this
- breck 4y ago
  > Why were you banned? I don't know. > could you share a bit more? I still have not been able to get to the bottom of it. My ex stole a bunch of money from me, lied like crazy and ran off with our two daughters (this part is heart breaking and kills me every day). We are in a bitter legal battle (an ironic thing is I am ordered to pay her legal bills), and she has sadly perjured herself multiple times. She somehow got YC involved, and was able to steal $50,000 from my business Mercury account. I couldn't believe it, and still haven't gotten an explanation or apology from Mercury. I raised bloody hell on the forums when that happened, and so I'm guessing the ban was related to that. I think it might be a cover your ass thing, as they really fucked up that one and are probably worried I'll sue (which I may, as I have great cause and people have been encouraging me to, but I'd rather focus on more positive things in life). They've done their best to censor me, but luckily there are mostly honest people there and many stick up for me. I'll keep fighting for the truth.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - OnlineGladiator 4y ago
    Can you please send me a link to your story? I started looking through your comment history and the first thing I noticed was this comment doesn't show up (probably because it's a descendant of a flagged comment), and rather than go looking for something that may have already been hidden on HN I figured I'd just ask.

emptysea 4y ago

Search is really quick and a look under the covers shows it’s using algolia + s3 for images

Alex3917 4y ago
It is quick, but it also looks faster than it is because of the way they're animating the rows as you type. At the end of the day it's still taking the full 300ms or whatever to load the images from S3, and without all the extra jitter it would look kind of janky.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
To be fair, if you manage to make search slow for a database with ~10,000 entries, you're doing something very strange. Even allowing for egregious post-sizes of 100Kb/entry, that's less than 1 Gb. A raspberry pi could keep the database in RAM with room to spare.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  Full text search is tricky no matter how small the dataset is. But yes the speed should be instantaneous as long as you use standard FTS solutions.
  - paxys 4y ago
    It really isn't. You could have implemented this site using a single MySQL LIKE query and it would have been equally performant. Or even download the full dataset to the client on page load and do the search locally in JavaScript. The problems all arise when you need to scale.
    - maxwelldone 4y ago
      > Or even download the full dataset to the client on page load and do the search locally in JavaScript. That's exactly what I did for a recent hobby project of mine[0]. In my case, I've a db of 30K entries with gzipped size of ~600kb. This serves well for the few hundred visitors I get every day. [0] https://theshowgrid.com/ https://theshowgrid.com/

pigtailgirl 4y ago

-- best pre-seed you can do is Stanford? --

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tcgv 4y ago

Nice tool. I searched entries for my University and the data needs some cleansing: - Universidade de São Paulo [11] - Universidade de São Paulo (USP) [8] - University of Sao Paulo [4] - Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo [3] All of these refer to the same University. The last one is one of the University's engineering schools.

newuser94303 4y ago
Lots like this University of Calgary 9 The University of Calgary 4
- greggarious 4y ago
  Sounds like the kind of thing someone at Waterloo could stretch out for a summer coop ;-) (Imagine the end of term meeting. “What did you do at ycombinator? Regex? Tell me about that.”)
benatkin 4y ago
I think it's better how it is because it's up to the founders to say it how they want. Certainly Sao Paolo without the tilde is not something to impose on people.

BillSaysThis 4y ago

UX is strange. I searched for a founder friend and he has multiple companies listed but clicking on his image or anywhere in the result row just opens the page for an old company.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ElijahLynn 4y ago

[flagged]

grepLeigh 4y ago
I've always been super curious about the YC application vs. accepted demographics. ESPECIALLY who gets told to come back with a co-founder. I applied as a solo woman technical founder with a product that is already close to ramen profitability. Going in, I thought this already made me an outlier - especially because I'll be able to tap my network and hire a founding team with some cash in the bank. The tepid response during YC interviews was jarring. I know the panels are an exhausting marathon, but my group partners acted like they'd rather be anywhere else than talking to me. I got the impression that maybe I'd been invited to fill a quota, and the Zoom interview was just going through the motions. The whole experience made me sit down and reverse-engineer the actions needed to hit 10-15k MRR by Q2 2023. With that amount of cash flow, I can reach out to angels directly. Just 6 angels in for 30k/1% party round is 180k @ 3M post. If you're a woman with a similar story, I'm an angel investor (B2B, Saas, manufacturing). Reach out (email in profile).
- ShivShankaran 4y ago
  [dead]
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  On th face of it, it doesn't sound like you need venture capital. Angel investor is usually defined as a high-net-worth individual who provides financial backing for small startups or entrepreneurs. With that in mind, if your product is at or near profitability, I'd have imagined that wouldn't been a good fit for YC?
  - grepLeigh 4y ago
    I'm going to bounce this back and ask what you'd do in my shoes. Your net worth is around 2M, you burn around 50k/year to eat, sleep, and be merry. You could retire tomorrow, but you weren't put on this Earth to just be idle. Let's say (hypothetically) you worked somewhere that just announced they're laying off 10% of their workforce. You want to make an offer to 2-3 product + infra engineers who were laid off. You know they do excellent work, and they're a god damn joy to be around. However, you need at least 6 months of payroll, health insurance premiums, and incidentals fully liquid to extend those offers. Ideally you'd have 8-12 months banked - because you care. Your startup is "Ramen profitable" - that means you're making around 7k/month revenue to cover 2-5k expenses. If you start saving 100% of profits NOW you can afford 1 of those engineers in (checks notes) just under 8 years! What's your next move?

majani 4y ago

Interesting trends that pop out at first glance: 1. Seems like YC is all aboard the B2B SaaS train. This is funny because early last decade B2B SaaS was known as mostly a lifestyle business category, while investors focused on consumer facing tech and big ticket enterprise products 2. It appears that the big tech employee track and the startup track are one and the same now. This flies in the face of the common wisdom that entrepreneurs and employees are very different from one another.

EGreg 4y ago
Recurring revenues and hockey stick growth. AKA VC crack.
tptacek 4y ago
It's a funding process that appears to somewhat deliberately mimic the process for applying to postsecondary school, so the frequent school connections are unsurprising. (I didn't meaningfully attend college at all and am in this directory.)
tomhoward 4y ago
In a recent video chat, YC partners explained how consumer startups are often a "tarpit" (seem attractive - "all my friends think it's a great idea", but super-hard to get uptake, scale and revenue). Whereas there's an endless pool of opportunities to solve business problems that many small-med companies would happily pay (a little bit) for, and it's much quicker to validate (see if other startups will use it) and monetise early (vs both consumer and enterprise). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMIawSAygO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMIawSAygO4
- majani 4y ago
  I remember the Basecamp guys shouting themselves hoarse about these very same values back when "Social, Local & Mobile" were the new hotness. Seems like they were prophets now

neilv 4y ago

> For prospective founders who are looking for inspiring leaders, here is a way to discover founders who have had experiences that reflect your own and learn more about their founder journey. I'd guess a directory of 10,000 YC alumni could be awesome, if you're a new YC founder doing B2B sales cold calls. (YC might connect their current/recent startups to each other. But this could help you put shoe to the pavement, and knock on many more YC alumni doors, where you have the name of a likely well-placed person, and a small "in" with them. Unless that's frowned-upon.)

andrewstuart 4y ago

Universities and former employers really pop out as something important, in a way I'd never fully grasped before.

welder 4y ago

Cool, it's a round-about way to search YC companies based on HQ location: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/founders?yc_locations=Berlin%2C%20Berlin%2C%20Germany https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/founders?yc_locations=...

aryamaan 4y ago

Working in startups as an employee is a lottery ticket. Is there any heuristics/tips which could help winning this lottery ticket? Like joining previously successful exit cofounder's company? Joining series B ones which are likey to get series C

paxys 4y ago
If you really had the answer to that you'd be the most successful VC in history
nugget 4y ago
The best advice I heard for non zero-to-one folks was to watch for Series B rounds where multiple top tier venture firms participated, for example Sequoia + Lightspeed or Benchmark + Accel. This was back around 2012 so the economics could have shifted, less so the firms although there's been some movement. Series B @ $150-$250m valuation seems to be the place where PMF is (usually, not always) de-risked but the company still has room to grow 10-20x (in a good tech market).
ipaddr 4y ago
From my experience look for a strong sales team over anything else aside from funding being very low.

bradgessler 4y ago

When do we get a YC OAuth provider?

grepLeigh 4y ago

There was a top comment about the demographics of this directory. Roughly paraphrasing, the comment was something like "male, male, male, male, male, male, male, male, female, male, male." I think this comment was flagged and hidden. Please be kind + compassionate in your replies, but I'm curious why the original comment was suppressed. What happened?

manholio 4y ago
Probably flagged by readers who are tired of this drama (not one of the flaggers, btw). In the thread you were saying something like 'you can't find any reason why your ramen profitable start-up received such a tepid response from YC and you got the advice to come back with a co-founder' [other than the implied systemic misogyny]. Sorry, but that just not an acceptable response to a rejection. Startup accelerators do not exist to empower women founders, make the world a better place or other such grand idea, they exists to make money and you failed to convince one such accelerator that you can make money for them. It's as simple as that. Biases might affect their decision process, but that's a problem for their business, not yours. Edit: here's the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267515
- grepLeigh 4y ago
  Here's my original post, which doesn't mention anything about "empowerment" or "making the world a better place" or "implied systemic misogyny." >> I've always been super curious about the YC application vs. accepted demographics. ESPECIALLY who gets told to come back with a co-founder. I applied as a solo woman technical founder with a product that is already close to ramen profitability. Going in, I thought this already made me an outlier - especially because I'll be able to tap my network and hire a founding team with some cash in the bank. The tepid response during YC interviews was jarring. I know the panels are an exhausting marathon, but my group partners acted like they'd rather be anywhere else than talking to me. I got the impression that maybe I'd been invited to fill a quota, and the Zoom interview was just going through the motions. The whole experience made me sit down and reverse-engineer the actions needed to hit 10-15k MRR by Q2 2023. With that amount of cash flow, I can reach out to angels directly. Just 6 angels in for 30k/1% party round is 180k @ 3M post. If you're a woman with a similar story, I'm an angel investor (B2B, Saas, manufacturing). Reach out (email in profile.