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But you did decide to fund "less" startups when you had some scaling issues. Does this mean you said "no" to startups that you would've said "yes" to if you ha
by PabloOsinaga 13y ago
But you did decide to fund "less" startups when you had some scaling issues. Does this mean you said "no" to startups that you would've said "yes" to if you had scaled well?
It looks like the increase in quality of startups is an independent factor to your ability to accept all of the really good ones.
Does this mean that you will need to figure out how to scale more aggressively or start rejecting more and more good startups?
- pg 13y agoThe way we managed to fund fewer startups was to train ourselves to pick better. So essentially we said no to startups we would have mistakenly said yes to before. Unless we can improve our ability to pick winners at the same rate the number of startups increases, which is unlikely, we'll have to grow. Fortunately we can now. The reason we tightened up our filters in w2013 was to buy ourselves time to figure out how to shard YC. We've now done that, and we can probably grow another 2 or 3x before hitting the next bottleneck-- which will probably be the format of Demo Day.
- PabloOsinaga 13y agoInteresting. So hitting a bottleneck was an external constrain which forced you to be better at picking startups (your core thing). Is this another example of arbitrary constrains as a forcing factor for effectiveness? (as in don't raise too much money).
- socksy 13y agoWhat kind of traits now make you say no that would have previously made you said yes?
- petervandijck 13y agoSo you 1. optimized the algorithm and 2. sharded the backend. Next: buy more hardware and scale horizontally? (aka partners)
- kennethtilton 13y ago"we said no to startups we would have mistakenly said yes to before" Reminds me of dating.
- X4 13y agoself-organization @work