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There's a difference between monetary runway and time runway. YC solved the money problem but didn't solve the time problem with throwing more money. To put i
by niggler 14y ago
There's a difference between monetary runway and time runway. YC solved the money problem but didn't solve the time problem with throwing more money.
To put it different, you can throw billions of dollars at a company, but they'll still operate in stress mode if you tell them a demo is due in a few months.
What they should have done is extended the program length while giving more money.
- rdl 14y agoI think there are probably two distinct types of company. One where you do a 1 month dev, 1 month launch, and can have traction; another where having a year helps (hardware, or some enterprisey stuff, or some platforms). There is a strong bias toward "having launched at Demo Day". If I had two things to work on, and got into YC, I'd absolutely pick the one I could get launched before Demo Day. There are some companies which think they're type 2 but really have elements of type 1, and should do those elements first. (which is kind of what my company did; we wanted to do generalized secure/trustworthy cloud computing, and should have focused on specific applications of that technology, which is what we're doing now) It's probably a net win for society and for an accelerator if they push some of the "fake type 2" into type 1 even at the cost of excluding some genuine type 2. An easy hack for YC would be to have companies accepted into YC but let them choose to defer until the following Demo Day. You do need the initial 20-50k ASAP to get corp formation and other things done on a good foundation, but most of the "genuine type 2" companies are founded by people who can float their own living expenses for a year or two (or do very low time commitment consulting to do so), so it doesn't need to be more money.