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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

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
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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?
  - ves 4y ago
    > You could retire tomorrow, but you weren't put on this Earth to just be idle. nice > 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? Offer the engineers meaningful equity rather than the one or two points they might ordinarily expect.
    - grepLeigh 4y ago
      Just curious, would you accept $1k/month salary + 4% with a 1 year cliff to hack on PrintNanny.ai? The app stack is a mix of Python, Rust, Typescript deployed to a single-board computer like Raspberry Pi or Rock Pi. New features are released monthly, via a rolling release embedded Linux distro based on Yocto/Poky (PrintNanny OS).
      - janalsncm 4y ago
        I know this is your baby and building it all out on a raspberry pi is pretty cool, but I feel like that could be a bottleneck long-term. First of all customers will need a physical device so you have to figure out shipping. Second, the RPi puts a limit on your computation. If you ever want a bigger and better model, you’re out of luck. Why not just make it into an iPhone/Android app? Either do the processing locally or use the app as a thin client for a SaaS ($$$). Hell, people are running stable diffusion on an iPhone these days. If it’s an app, people can easily try it out, and if it works for them you have a new customer overnight. Plus you don’t have to deal with pain in the ass RPi supply chain issues. Maybe it already exists as an app in which case ignore everything I said. So personally what I would do is spend $10k porting to a mobile ecosystem and go back to YC saying you need cash for a couple mobile devs and maybe a temporary designer. If you’re comfortable doing the ML yourself you can save on that too.
      - ves 4y ago
        I would not, but I know some people who would consider a deal like that. At $12k/yr and your stage you’re basically hiring a cofounder, so four points is… not a lot. You sound like you probably still have most of the equity left, so I’d expect more. And a cliff? Nobody does cliffs these days after big tech axed them.

ShivShankaran 4y ago

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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?
- ves 4y ago
  > You could retire tomorrow, but you weren't put on this Earth to just be idle. nice > 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? Offer the engineers meaningful equity rather than the one or two points they might ordinarily expect.
  - grepLeigh 4y ago
    Just curious, would you accept $1k/month salary + 4% with a 1 year cliff to hack on PrintNanny.ai? The app stack is a mix of Python, Rust, Typescript deployed to a single-board computer like Raspberry Pi or Rock Pi. New features are released monthly, via a rolling release embedded Linux distro based on Yocto/Poky (PrintNanny OS).
    - janalsncm 4y ago
      I know this is your baby and building it all out on a raspberry pi is pretty cool, but I feel like that could be a bottleneck long-term. First of all customers will need a physical device so you have to figure out shipping. Second, the RPi puts a limit on your computation. If you ever want a bigger and better model, you’re out of luck. Why not just make it into an iPhone/Android app? Either do the processing locally or use the app as a thin client for a SaaS ($$$). Hell, people are running stable diffusion on an iPhone these days. If it’s an app, people can easily try it out, and if it works for them you have a new customer overnight. Plus you don’t have to deal with pain in the ass RPi supply chain issues. Maybe it already exists as an app in which case ignore everything I said. So personally what I would do is spend $10k porting to a mobile ecosystem and go back to YC saying you need cash for a couple mobile devs and maybe a temporary designer. If you’re comfortable doing the ML yourself you can save on that too.
    - ves 4y ago
      I would not, but I know some people who would consider a deal like that. At $12k/yr and your stage you’re basically hiring a cofounder, so four points is… not a lot. You sound like you probably still have most of the equity left, so I’d expect more. And a cliff? Nobody does cliffs these days after big tech axed them.