10 ms·

How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator

379 points by mparramon 12y ago

dasil003 12y ago
I don't think you should call it a pivot when you are effectively starting over. Pivot literally means one foot planted and moving the other to a new spot.
- replicatorblog 12y ago
  Totally agree, see also: http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/07/before-you-make-that-pivot/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/07/before-you-make-that-pivot/
rubiquity 12y ago
The author sounds spoiled and entitled to everything in their life up until YC.
bkeroack 12y ago
This is what happens when people want to "do a startup" more than they want to build a business doing X. The passion for the idea/product should come first, with incubators (if deemed necessary) being used as a tool towards achieving that goal.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ferrari8608 12y ago
  This is something I've been struggling to understand with some of the startups I read about on here. My lack of understanding is probably to do with the fact that I'm not an entrepreneur, nor do I desire to be. What I'm missing, though, is why these people want to simply start a company. I get wanting to start a company around your idea. In that case, the company isn't the goal but rather the medium for pursuing the goal, which is to push your idea/product. I don't understand wanting to start a company for the sake of having a company.
  - hodgesmr 12y ago
    HBO's "Silicon Valley", Arron Sorkin's "Social Network", TechCrunch, The Verge, Hacker News and tweetstorms brought to you by Marc Andreessen glorify the tech-startup entrepreneur. People within our industry have been taught that the best of the best start tech companies. And the best of the best are 20-somethings! It seems so reachable. So everyone thinks this is what they're supposed to do. Anybody who's anybody has launched a startup in San Francisco, right?
- porter 12y ago
  People want to do a startup to get rich. Solving interesting problems keeps you motivated, but it's the profit motive that pushes people to actually do a startup. It's the profit motive that drives capitalism, not the "solve interesting problems" motive.
HorizonXP 12y ago
What a great story. Charlie is very brave for telling this, and it's something that more people need to hear. Getting into YC is not an achievement. Even if you get in, you're not special. You still have to bust your ass like everyone else trying to build a company. Not getting into YC isn't a big deal either, because you're still not special. Stories like Charlie's should help others highlight this fact. He said that he felt impostor syndrome. I've felt that too. I don't have a great solution for that, but what it should tell you is that even people who you feel are smarter/better than you really are not. We are all the same, and we all face the same struggles, albeit in different circumstances. PG's advice to Charlie about focusing on an idea they're passionate about, and an idea that they could see themselves working on for the next 5 years is sound. Don't chase trends. Don't chase money. Chase your passion. When you're really passionate about something, it's infectious to others around you. They want to help you. The success and money will usually follow. I'm glad that people like Charlie tell these stories, since we seem to focus on the success stories. Those are few and far between. Charlie's story is likely more prevalent than we perceive.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  > Getting into YC is not an achievement. Even if you get in, you're not special. You still have to bust your ass like everyone else trying to build a company. Not getting into YC isn't a big deal either, because you're still not special. Unfortunately, the marketing of YC (and many other accelerators) disagrees with this, with emphasis that joining a startup accelerator validates you and makes you part of the elite and gives you the authority to make a I'm-a-thought-leader Medium blog post. (Case in point, the "A YC alumni’s tactic to hack some early investors interest through a prolific Angel" incident: https://www.dropbox.com/s/go9lfnxwt9fnax2/My%20Investment%20hack_%20Jason%20Calacanis%E2%80%99%20voicemail%20%E2%80%94%20Medium.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/go9lfnxwt9fnax2/My%20Investment%20...) The disconnect between <X>-group-likes-my-startup and the reality of operating the startup is one of the reasons why there is a rise in stupid startups which eventually crash and burn. (This is also one of the reasons I hate sites like Product Hunt)
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
nkangoh 12y ago
I find this paragraph interesting: "From the outside, it might have looked like I was crazy to feel this way. I had graduated from Stanford, I had a CS degree, and I knew how to play the startup game. In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding." Pardon my ignorance, but if a startup is a game, wouldn't knowing how to play be knowing how to win, i.e. an exit? I feel like getting venture capital would be the equivalent of prolonging the game, which is a +0 type of action. Is raising money really "playing?" From what I've read raising money just results in needing to raise more money.
- thoman23 12y ago
  I was going to make a similar comment. There is an undercurrent of "raising money = success" in this posting. The whole concept of throwing money at 21-year olds and hoping they find an idea still seems bizarre to me, but obviously it has paid off for the YC guys.
  - cheepin 12y ago
    "For the first time in my life, I had impostor syndrome: I convinced myself that I did not deserve the success I had achieved." This particularly struck me as ironic. Maybe he felt like an imposter because the other people had an actual plan and he didn't.
thoman23 12y ago
Please tell me that this Ryan Lawler from TechCrunch is writing in that style to insinuate his utter disdain not only for the FanHero business model, but for the whole "free money for 21-year olds with a half-baked idea" industry. He can't possibly write that way for real, could he?
- nhjk 12y ago
  I think he's writing that way on purpose and I share his disdain for "free money for 21-year olds with a half-baked idea"...
- revelation 12y ago
  Full article: http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/18/y-combinator-backed-fanhero-helps-youtubers-sell-branded-merch-to-their-fans/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/18/y-combinator-backed-fanhero...
- jvrossb 12y ago
  He may be writing in the style of the YouTube celebrities the product targeted.
- sago 12y ago
  You cannot satirise illiteracy or ignorance online without people assuming you are actually illiterate or ignorant.
Noelkd 12y ago
> I would have to talk to my cohort and confirm that no, we hadn’t found an idea yet and yes, we were still super excited about our “company.” I did little else but eat, code and sleep. If you don't have an idea what you're doing what are you doing coding?
- DenisM 12y ago
  a prototype is a conversation with yourself [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html
edent 12y ago
Am I missing something here? You can get $$$ and top quality advice for an _idea_ and then just turn around and say "bored now - let's do something else"? And then, so it seems, when that idea runs out you just say "uhhh... let's do this instead!" So, what are the YC people investing in? Two guys who seem pretty smart? I appreciate that you might need to pivot from "a social network for dogs" to "a social network for pets" or even "a dog training forum" - but this just seems like they were given investment for one idea, then immediately dropped it to do something else. Or, like I say, have I missed something vital?
- andrelayer 12y ago
  The only part you're missing is that PG has said many times in the past that they invest mostly in the team and that many teams that go through YC end up changing their idea slightly or completely. So the beginning of this situation doesn't seem very unusual, just that they never actually figured it out.
  - femto113 12y ago
    I can accept this rationale for investing in teams over ideas, but when did "pivoting" go from meaning "a modest change in direction" (e.g. switching the target market for your SASS product from consumers to enterprise, or making what was initially a secondary feature a primary one) to "start over from scratch with an entirely unrelated idea"? Seems like another term is needed--"flailing" perhaps?
    - _delirium 12y ago
      A least in the YC model, that seems to be a common definition of "pivoting". A bunch of their companies end up pursuing products bearing very little resemblance to the idea they were accepted on. If anything they seem to view being too attached to your idea as the bigger negative.
    - wpietri 12y ago
      Normally I use the term "leap" for the latter. You're completely correct that the original meaning of the term was specific. Eric Ries originally wrote, "I want to introduce the concept of the pivot, the idea that successful startups change directions but stay grounded in what they've learned. They keep one foot in the past and place one foot in a new possible future. Over time, this pivoting may lead them far afield from their original vision, but if you look carefully, you'll be able to detect common threads that link each iteration. By contrast, many unsuccessful startups simply jump outright from one vision to something completely different. These jumps are extremely risky, because they don't leverage the validated learning about customers that came before." [1] Sadly, the term is getting killed by Semantic Diffusion [2]. Precisely because people want to dignify their flailing with a fancy-sounding word. [1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jump-to-new-vision.html http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jump... [2] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html
jokoon 12y ago
Hey, I have ideas too! http://zonas.free.fr/?p=pages&pg=ideas http://zonas.free.fr/?p=pages&pg=ideas
- phkahler 12y ago
  Those seem like things that you'd like to make. Some might even be interesting to look at, but What problems do they solve? Why would OTHER people want them? Go to each one and write what it does for people rather than what it is.
  - jokoon 12y ago
    thanks for the suggestion :)
nakovet 12y ago
I don't get it, I have been working with web development for the past 10 years, I never had problems finding a job but I wouldn't know how to do remote consulting while I travel around the work to "take a break", nevertheless the tone set from OP is confusing you don't know if he is humble, spoiled or bragging. It's all mixed up, and like other people noted pivoting is not changing your idea completely, this is starting over.
- EvaK_de 12y ago
  I share your impression of the tone. It's probably due to the text being written by a 21-year old. At that age hardly anyone has a fixed personality, but displays kind of fluctuating character traits. At least I think that's what leads to the impression you so accurately described.
- reledi 12y ago
  I'm also interested in how he's travelling the world while doing consulting work. Travelling (for leisure) and working don't go well together in my experience, curious how he's pulling it off (so I can try too).
  - jerguismi 12y ago
    I have seen pretty many doing that. However, don't except a work like in a stable, salary-based job, with a little risk. More like shorter freelancer gigs, maybe some small software products/apps/websites which generate some passive income along the side, etc. Also I wouldn't say that you can travel just to have fun, you also have to get the work done. That means settling for some place longer than you would recreationally. I have met these guys in coworking places, for example.
- no_wave 12y ago
  It's a euphemism for not working at all, though likely with one or two experiences that keep it from being a total lie (the majority of the money lived off of being either already saved or coming from family). The guy just failed hard in a pretty limp way. The options are either to try to "grow personally" and then to try something similar again, or to buckle down with a normal job and develop your skills and knowledge into something that really has value. When you've been drinking the start-up kool-aid the second is a hard pill to swallow - having to actually compete with everyone else - but I think it's worth it.
researcher88 12y ago
When I read about FanHero on techcrunch, I thought it was a good idea despite the article's tone. Mainly because I watch a lot of alternative content and listen to podcasts, and I want a way to support what I like. It wasn't an original idea but with awesome execution I think it could had worked.
- Meekro 12y ago
  I agree! And if you read the comments on the TechCrunch article, many of them agree about the article being badly written. I get that it's sarcasm, but what was the TechCrunch writer's message supposed to be? That nobody needed this product? That it was badly built? That the author just doesn't like YC kids? Whatever the author was trying to say, there was probably a better way to say it.
birken 12y ago
This post really misunderstands what both success and failure are. Getting into YC or raising money isn't success. And trying an idea out for a few months before giving up on it isn't failure. Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots of years. Maybe the idea is bad, but giving up on it after a couple of months really proves nothing. All it has proven is that the founders are the type of people that are readily willing to bail out at any moment, and that is a quality that doesn't lead to startup success. The "nightmare" described in this post is a joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through. Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me? Really? Try having to decide whether to lay off people to make payroll or having spent years on an idea only to still be not sure if it is working on not.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  > The "nightmare" described in this post is a joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through. Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me? Really? From the narrative, it sounds like there's a causal link between the TechCrunch article and the startup forcibly being summoned to office hours to ask what the hell is going on. Which says more about YC/PG's policies than it does about the startup founders.
  - birken 12y ago
    I realize the actual nightmare is that after a few months of all-night coding the founders didn't launch the next facebook, but still: > We had much bigger problems than the piece, to be sure, but launching with an article that roundly mocked us was one of the final nails in the coffin. Hint to startup founders: It doesn't matter if Techcrunch writes about you or what they write about you. If you are letting that affect your perception of your company in a large way, you are doing it wrong. Though to Techcrunch's credit, in this case they really did a good job of reporting.
- yesimahuman 12y ago
  Having been in an accelerator before, I definitely related to their sense of dread that they might mess up this opportunity and never be successful again because of it. Watching peers strike it big must have been super hard. I quickly realized after that most "success" is exaggerated in the media, etc. and true success takes a lot longer than we expect. Raising $1M isn't success. Hell, raising $5-30M in today's climate isn't success. "Success" is such a vague concept that it's best to just focus on being happy and building cool shit and growing it year after year. It takes time.
rl3 12y ago
Developing an idea that you feel comfortable genuinely committing yourself to is hard. Usually it takes six months from coming up with an idea to researching it and getting to the point where I believe in it. Most of the time, you start with only a vague notion and have to further develop that into something concrete. No wonder that it didn't turn out well for them doing it under pressure in just a few days time.
Disruptive_Dave 12y ago
Does YC ever accept business / growth people or just "tech"? I ask that in seriousness, as my take - in my very limited time as a startup founder & employee - has consistently been that many startups fail due in part to an obvious lack of business sense and skills. I'm regularly surprised by the sheer amount of startups out there, many of which are funded, with coders and designers who have no damn clue how to sell. "We were a solid team, a designer/developer combo." Is that a solid "build a business" team or just a solid "engineer the product" team?
- phkahler 12y ago
  YC is supposed to help with things like that. They teach techies the business side of things and I would imagine they'd say "you need to hire someone to do sales" if that's what they needed. In this case they said from the start something like "we're concerned about your product idea" which was their primary problem. I suppose having someone with sales smarts may have helped them figure it out, since their idea was to help you-tubers sell stuff apparently.
  - Disruptive_Dave 12y ago
    I suppose teaching techies business is easier than teaching business folks tech (or maybe quicker?). Still, I continue to be perplexed at the absence of "business" in startups. I'm not convinced that injecting "business" into a startup is an option for a later date.
  - bsdpython 12y ago
    If you have to hire someone to sell to your first customers then you might have a problem
guynamedloren 12y ago
Not sure why the author didn't consider a fourth option when graduating from college: 4) Join the ground floor of a startup *as an early employee* It would've yielded invaluable experience and a whole lot of personal growth, leaving him in a much better place to run a company years down the road. At this point, I don't really think he's learned anything at all, and he won't learn much about running a company while he's galavanting around southeast asia humblebragging.
- gravedave 12y ago
  I agree with this, but I don't think it even has to be a startup. Big enterprises may also provide good learning environments, possibly even with experienced developers/marketers/whatevers as mentors, as opposed to a startup's possibly few young, inexperienced recent grads, hellbent on revolutionizing The Way You Think About Shoe Storage with their product called Shoely™ or whatever. Big companies also pay consistently. I don't know though, the guy seems quite dishonest to me, more interested in means rather than ends, yet still claiming that he "never wanted to start a company simply for the sake of starting a company". To me, he never seemed to question whether he even had anything to give in the first place and address this issue first, if needed, but simply expected to run a successful startup fresh out of college. Not sure I'd call his closing statements to be humblebragging though, it seems to be just a passing thing for him.
blazespin 12y ago
They seemed like good guys who had no sense of wherewithal. I liked the FanHero idea, it seemed pretty good.
- dougabug 12y ago
  Having youtubers hawk goods seems not so different from advertising/endorsements/affiliate links. I think something that might be more useful for people would be low friction engagement of consultation/services/speaking/musical performances etc.
lesingerouge 12y ago
Through some very strange twists of fate it seems to me that bot programming and starting a business ended up being "fashionable" things to do. And obviously as all fashionable things there's quite a lot of people that want to ride the hype train. Statistics tell us that there will always be a certain percentage that are on the train just for the hype. My 2 cents: getting on the train just for the hype is a clear indicator that you do not have a very good knowledge of yourself. Internal, time-tested, hard-earned kind of knowledge.
sparkzilla 12y ago
The article makes it clear that the YC interview selection process is deeply flawed. Leaving out the idea that they were selected because they told a story about the sound of biting a bottle, surely at the interview stage, if the entrepreneurs do not know what the company is making, or the business looks weak the interviewer should just say no. It's not enough to say "here are two bright people that can pivot". Bright people are everywhere, good business ideas are rare. All this does is cause the stress that the author has gone through as he and his partner have to desperately search for a business idea that may not come. This kind of stress, based on unrealistic expectations, can lead people to kill themselves, and seems to me to be borderline unethical. Meanwhile there are literally hundreds of other companies and thousands of smart people with great ideas that would gladly take their place and succeed, including many of the readers here.
- pjlegato 12y ago
  It's probably true that the YC interview process is deeply flawed, but OTOH there is no known better way to select worthy investments yet. Good startup business ideas are not only rare but also impossible to identify a priori. The only way to tell whether a business idea is good or not is to actually try it out in the market and see what happens. (This doesn't mean that any crazy idea is good, but it does mean that some good ideas seem crazy before they are tried.) If there were any methodology that could identify worthy investments with anything close to high accuracy, there would not be stock markets and there certainly wouldn't be a VC industry. VC investment works differently from other forms of investment due to the outsize gains on the rare successes. This market requires many comparatively small bets with limited losses and a few low-probability but huge payoffs. Compare this to a Warren Buffet style investment methodology of a few large bets in well-established companies and industries with high probability of moderate payoff. Neither is "right" in an absolute sense; it depends on the investor's risk tolerance and the nature of the opportunities. The VC business model is to apply some coarse-grained filters to screen out obvious scammers and gross incompetents, then give the remainder of the cohort some money, knowing in advance that 99% will fail completely. The remaining 1% will pay for the losses on the 99% many times over. Moreover, in YC's case, the amount of money they invest is so small compared to the massive returns on their few successes that they can now afford to take many of these small risks on "two guys who seem smart." Most of them will fail, and they know that going in. It doesn't matter. They're betting that sooner or later, they'll wind up with another AirBnB or Reddit that will pay for many thousands of these small bets.
juanbyrge 12y ago
Thanks for sharing this story. I know it was a tough decision to leave the company. If you were in a situation that causes you a lot of stress and unhappiness, there's no shame in leaving. There are a lot of people being critical here. It's easy to look at the situation from the outside and feel entitled to make comments. I bet if some of the commenters here were in you're situation they'd feel differently.
GoLocalApps 12y ago
I think this is both an indictment of "squirrel" syndrome (the dog from Up), and YC not choosing well in the first place. maybe that's the environment there, but I would guess if you brought in a new team with an idea, gave them money for that idea and then they went and dumped the idea right off and went to something new and shinier, they shouldn't have been funded in the first place? And with two previously abandoned businesses in his past, someone should have asked about commitment to the idea. Sure you can work on something you don't love, but then its a job not a career or a self focused business, not something worth others investing in without a really clear business plan and exit strategy.
charlierguo 12y ago
Hey everyone! Author here. First off, thanks for reading! To be honest, I really didn't expect to get this much attention. This is a story that I've wanted to share with friends and family for a long time, and was thoroughly surprised when it was picked up by Backchannel (and then posted here). Regarding some of the points made here, I (mostly) agree. Getting into YC or raising money is not success. Changing your idea completely isn't really a "pivot" (but I don't know if the industry has as concise of a term for throwing everything out and starting over). In my mind, the real failure was squandering the opportunity of YC, an opportunity I know many people would kill to have. Clearly we should have stuck it out with our idea, but we were 21 years old, stressed out, and foolish. I also want to note (in case anyone was wondering) that my experience hasn't diminished my opinion of YC at all. PG's advice was spot on, and YC remains an amazing program for founders. We simply didn't make the best use of our time in it. Hopefully reading about my experience is helpful in some way. If not, sorry about that. Give it a downvote and send it on its merry way.
- orasis 12y ago
  Thanks for putting this out there. It takes guts and self awareness to write something like this.
- jlukanta 12y ago
  Thanks for posting this. As others said, it takes guts to do it. I don't think you necessarily need to stick with your idea, especially if you aren't passionate about it. Quitting early is better than spending a couple of years being miserable because you don't think your work amounts to much.
- ridruejo 12y ago
  Thanks for writing about your experience, it must be difficult to do so. When we were looking at joining YC, one of the things that made us pull the trigger was the fact that we could not find anyone that had gone through the program that did not say that was worth it. No one, neither publicly nor privately and regardless of whether their startup had succeeded of failed.
- Meekro 12y ago
mediaright 12y ago
..."professional hoop-jumper" ...He means being a kid? There's a self-importance and arrogance to all of this that really comes through from this type of rhetor. I think the imposter syndrome might not be that much of a syndrome in the case of far too many startup teams sadly.
- bsdpython 12y ago
  When I read that line - "nearly two decades as a professional hoop-jumper" - I pictured in my head a guy in his early 40s. Professional means you get paid for your work. Hoop-jumper is a strange way to describe your education.
georgeecollins 12y ago
This seems like a parody of entrepeneurship. Like instead of defying the odds to be an entrepeneur he's defying the odds to avoid getting startup funding as a recent CS grad from Stanford. The world it full of things that sound appealing. But you may find when you get a chance to do them it isn't your thing. You may enjoy art, admire artists, but not really enjoy or be suited to the work of an artist.
myohan 12y ago
"I don’t want to start another company until I find a problem that I care about. A problem that I eat, sleep and breathe. A problem worth solving." i agree with you but you shouldn't wait for these ideas to come by out the blue moon, you should be constantly searching, trying/testing, and keep living/experiencing a lot of different things...because there are a lot of problems out there that you DO NOT know they exist, and how would you know you care about these problems if you don't know they exist. good luck.
zeeshanm 12y ago
Thanks for writing the article. One thing have bothered me for a long time is why tech startups think TechCrunch or any other high-speed news website writing about them is an indication of early success. It may help you get early customers via the write up if your customers are actually those clicking through these clickbaity links. But this probably doesn't apply in all cases. A lot of the times those reading such viral stories more often than not are on the lookout for the next big big idea to copy. So why bother? May be I don't get as it is some sort of a Valley thing.
rsp1984 12y ago
Aside from some other great comments here (some of it which really nail it) I'd like to point out that the greatest difficulty of the author seems to be being in charge of things. Throughout the entire story he is denying control. Being accepted into Y Combinator? Pure luck. Most critical interview factor? Sound of biting a plastic bottle. It doesn't surprise me a tiny bit that he thought he had impostor syndrome since he probably felt he is getting rewarded for something that is seemingly totally out of his control. Then all the "pivots". Again feeling that startup success is something that will magically come just by "waiting a bit longer" or "having a slightly better idea" (i.e. being largely out of one's control), of course you re-set the course right away if the odds seem against you. Even if it's just some objections by interviewers who know you for about 10 minutes. Because they surely know better, right? No way to to prove these guys wrong, right? Probably much better to try something different... The author ends by saying he wants to get back into startups once he's found a suitable problem to work on. That's cool. Even better would be to find a problem he knows he can solve, by being in charge.
pavlov 12y ago
The "impostor syndrome" meme would have us believe that if you feel like an impostor, don't worry -- it's a positive sign that you're actually a modest, shy kind of genius. But sometimes it just means that you really are out of your depth.
- kethinov 12y ago
  Impostor syndrome is also frequently abused by successful people who want a socially acceptable way of denying that much of their success actually was due to luck and timing.
mb_72 12y ago
This post seems to neatly encapsulate a lot of what I feel is wrong with the entire start-up / accelerator scene. I've always felt that capable people with a good idea will succeed 99% of the time anyway - and if that team in particular doesn't succeed, then another group will, and hence no net loss to humanity of the 'idea'. OTOH, this kind of process seems to rescue half-baked ideas, or throw money at people that can perhaps program but can't actually run a business, or glorifies killing yourself working for hope of a huge payday. Perhaps I'm in the minority, and perhaps it's because I'm old (44) and 'get-off-my-lawny' ... but I am so not down with this kind of approach to making money.
paulvs 12y ago
An idea may be worth less than the potential of the founders, but a well thought-out idea reveals a lot about the founders themselves, in my opinion.
smurph 12y ago
Am I the only one who thinks it's insane that someone can go from an undergrad CS degree to a failed startup and then directly into (presumably well paid) consulting gigs? I'd be pretty wary of a consultant who's only work experience was starting their own company and failing.
rdtsc 12y ago
> We researched Bitcoins, smart devices, 3D printing, biometrics, and a host of other industries. Is this common? As in people first decide they want to do a "startup thing". Then they fish for idea. Just curious, is this how most startup idea begin? I kind of thought it was always someone first having a burning and interesting idea that eventually they want to develop and it gets developed as a startup or patent or something like that.
- GoLocalApps 12y ago
  Probably more common than you'd think. Brainstorming for new ideas or looking for something that doesn't work as well as you think it should or seems to be "missing" is a valid way of trying to start a business. You may not be passionate about it, but if it can make money, you can be passionate about that.
Animats 12y ago
Now YC gives startups less money, so they can't try to "pivot" after the first failure. Win big or die fast. Comment below: "Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots of years." Not in the YC world. That's not the model.
onewaystreet 12y ago
Did anyone at YC talk with these founders after investing in them? It sounds like they never understood why they were accepted. Getting accepted into YC should be a confirmation signal, not a signal that you should pivot (yes, YC invests in people, but if that was the case in this case then I would've expected a partner to have helped them find a new idea).
haky_nash 12y ago
Wow. Aspiring Founder here. What a read. Loved this: "I don’t want to start another company until I find a problem that I care about. A problem that I eat, sleep and breathe. A problem worth solving."
ricardobeat 12y ago
So what was FanHero? The website is now redirecting to imhomeapp.com (their latest pivot, I suppose), and the article doesn't explain at all.
mortdeus 12y ago
I wrote a lengthy blog post in response to this post in hopes that it will help aspiring founders avoid a similar fate if their startup gets accepted into Y Combinator. http://mortdeus.blogspot.com/2015/01/y-combinator.html http://mortdeus.blogspot.com/2015/01/y-combinator.html

379 points by mparramon 12y ago

I don't think you should call it a pivot when you are effectively starting over. Pivot literally means one foot planted and moving the other to a new spot.

replicatorblog 12y ago
Totally agree, see also: http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/07/before-you-make-that-pivot/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/07/before-you-make-that-pivot/

rubiquity 12y ago

The author sounds spoiled and entitled to everything in their life up until YC.

bkeroack 12y ago

This is what happens when people want to "do a startup" more than they want to build a business doing X. The passion for the idea/product should come first, with incubators (if deemed necessary) being used as a tool towards achieving that goal.

deleted 12y ago
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ferrari8608 12y ago
This is something I've been struggling to understand with some of the startups I read about on here. My lack of understanding is probably to do with the fact that I'm not an entrepreneur, nor do I desire to be. What I'm missing, though, is why these people want to simply start a company. I get wanting to start a company around your idea. In that case, the company isn't the goal but rather the medium for pursuing the goal, which is to push your idea/product. I don't understand wanting to start a company for the sake of having a company.
- hodgesmr 12y ago
  HBO's "Silicon Valley", Arron Sorkin's "Social Network", TechCrunch, The Verge, Hacker News and tweetstorms brought to you by Marc Andreessen glorify the tech-startup entrepreneur. People within our industry have been taught that the best of the best start tech companies. And the best of the best are 20-somethings! It seems so reachable. So everyone thinks this is what they're supposed to do. Anybody who's anybody has launched a startup in San Francisco, right?
porter 12y ago
People want to do a startup to get rich. Solving interesting problems keeps you motivated, but it's the profit motive that pushes people to actually do a startup. It's the profit motive that drives capitalism, not the "solve interesting problems" motive.

HorizonXP 12y ago

What a great story. Charlie is very brave for telling this, and it's something that more people need to hear. Getting into YC is not an achievement. Even if you get in, you're not special. You still have to bust your ass like everyone else trying to build a company. Not getting into YC isn't a big deal either, because you're still not special. Stories like Charlie's should help others highlight this fact. He said that he felt impostor syndrome. I've felt that too. I don't have a great solution for that, but what it should tell you is that even people who you feel are smarter/better than you really are not. We are all the same, and we all face the same struggles, albeit in different circumstances. PG's advice to Charlie about focusing on an idea they're passionate about, and an idea that they could see themselves working on for the next 5 years is sound. Don't chase trends. Don't chase money. Chase your passion. When you're really passionate about something, it's infectious to others around you. They want to help you. The success and money will usually follow. I'm glad that people like Charlie tell these stories, since we seem to focus on the success stories. Those are few and far between. Charlie's story is likely more prevalent than we perceive.

minimaxir 12y ago
> Getting into YC is not an achievement. Even if you get in, you're not special. You still have to bust your ass like everyone else trying to build a company. Not getting into YC isn't a big deal either, because you're still not special. Unfortunately, the marketing of YC (and many other accelerators) disagrees with this, with emphasis that joining a startup accelerator validates you and makes you part of the elite and gives you the authority to make a I'm-a-thought-leader Medium blog post. (Case in point, the "A YC alumni’s tactic to hack some early investors interest through a prolific Angel" incident: https://www.dropbox.com/s/go9lfnxwt9fnax2/My%20Investment%20hack_%20Jason%20Calacanis%E2%80%99%20voicemail%20%E2%80%94%20Medium.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/go9lfnxwt9fnax2/My%20Investment%20...) The disconnect between <X>-group-likes-my-startup and the reality of operating the startup is one of the reasons why there is a rise in stupid startups which eventually crash and burn. (This is also one of the reasons I hate sites like Product Hunt)
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

nkangoh 12y ago

I find this paragraph interesting: "From the outside, it might have looked like I was crazy to feel this way. I had graduated from Stanford, I had a CS degree, and I knew how to play the startup game. In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding." Pardon my ignorance, but if a startup is a game, wouldn't knowing how to play be knowing how to win, i.e. an exit? I feel like getting venture capital would be the equivalent of prolonging the game, which is a +0 type of action. Is raising money really "playing?" From what I've read raising money just results in needing to raise more money.

thoman23 12y ago
I was going to make a similar comment. There is an undercurrent of "raising money = success" in this posting. The whole concept of throwing money at 21-year olds and hoping they find an idea still seems bizarre to me, but obviously it has paid off for the YC guys.
- cheepin 12y ago
  "For the first time in my life, I had impostor syndrome: I convinced myself that I did not deserve the success I had achieved." This particularly struck me as ironic. Maybe he felt like an imposter because the other people had an actual plan and he didn't.

thoman23 12y ago

Please tell me that this Ryan Lawler from TechCrunch is writing in that style to insinuate his utter disdain not only for the FanHero business model, but for the whole "free money for 21-year olds with a half-baked idea" industry. He can't possibly write that way for real, could he?

nhjk 12y ago
I think he's writing that way on purpose and I share his disdain for "free money for 21-year olds with a half-baked idea"...
revelation 12y ago
Full article: http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/18/y-combinator-backed-fanhero-helps-youtubers-sell-branded-merch-to-their-fans/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/18/y-combinator-backed-fanhero...
jvrossb 12y ago
He may be writing in the style of the YouTube celebrities the product targeted.
sago 12y ago
You cannot satirise illiteracy or ignorance online without people assuming you are actually illiterate or ignorant.

Noelkd 12y ago

> I would have to talk to my cohort and confirm that no, we hadn’t found an idea yet and yes, we were still super excited about our “company.” I did little else but eat, code and sleep. If you don't have an idea what you're doing what are you doing coding?

DenisM 12y ago
a prototype is a conversation with yourself [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html

edent 12y ago

Am I missing something here? You can get $$$ and top quality advice for an _idea_ and then just turn around and say "bored now - let's do something else"? And then, so it seems, when that idea runs out you just say "uhhh... let's do this instead!" So, what are the YC people investing in? Two guys who seem pretty smart? I appreciate that you might need to pivot from "a social network for dogs" to "a social network for pets" or even "a dog training forum" - but this just seems like they were given investment for one idea, then immediately dropped it to do something else. Or, like I say, have I missed something vital?

andrelayer 12y ago
The only part you're missing is that PG has said many times in the past that they invest mostly in the team and that many teams that go through YC end up changing their idea slightly or completely. So the beginning of this situation doesn't seem very unusual, just that they never actually figured it out.
- femto113 12y ago
  I can accept this rationale for investing in teams over ideas, but when did "pivoting" go from meaning "a modest change in direction" (e.g. switching the target market for your SASS product from consumers to enterprise, or making what was initially a secondary feature a primary one) to "start over from scratch with an entirely unrelated idea"? Seems like another term is needed--"flailing" perhaps?
  - _delirium 12y ago
    A least in the YC model, that seems to be a common definition of "pivoting". A bunch of their companies end up pursuing products bearing very little resemblance to the idea they were accepted on. If anything they seem to view being too attached to your idea as the bigger negative.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    Normally I use the term "leap" for the latter. You're completely correct that the original meaning of the term was specific. Eric Ries originally wrote, "I want to introduce the concept of the pivot, the idea that successful startups change directions but stay grounded in what they've learned. They keep one foot in the past and place one foot in a new possible future. Over time, this pivoting may lead them far afield from their original vision, but if you look carefully, you'll be able to detect common threads that link each iteration. By contrast, many unsuccessful startups simply jump outright from one vision to something completely different. These jumps are extremely risky, because they don't leverage the validated learning about customers that came before." [1] Sadly, the term is getting killed by Semantic Diffusion [2]. Precisely because people want to dignify their flailing with a fancy-sounding word. [1] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jump-to-new-vision.html http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jump... [2] http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html

jokoon 12y ago

Hey, I have ideas too! http://zonas.free.fr/?p=pages&pg=ideas http://zonas.free.fr/?p=pages&pg=ideas

phkahler 12y ago
Those seem like things that you'd like to make. Some might even be interesting to look at, but What problems do they solve? Why would OTHER people want them? Go to each one and write what it does for people rather than what it is.
- jokoon 12y ago
  thanks for the suggestion :)

nakovet 12y ago

I don't get it, I have been working with web development for the past 10 years, I never had problems finding a job but I wouldn't know how to do remote consulting while I travel around the work to "take a break", nevertheless the tone set from OP is confusing you don't know if he is humble, spoiled or bragging. It's all mixed up, and like other people noted pivoting is not changing your idea completely, this is starting over.

EvaK_de 12y ago
I share your impression of the tone. It's probably due to the text being written by a 21-year old. At that age hardly anyone has a fixed personality, but displays kind of fluctuating character traits. At least I think that's what leads to the impression you so accurately described.
reledi 12y ago
I'm also interested in how he's travelling the world while doing consulting work. Travelling (for leisure) and working don't go well together in my experience, curious how he's pulling it off (so I can try too).
- jerguismi 12y ago
  I have seen pretty many doing that. However, don't except a work like in a stable, salary-based job, with a little risk. More like shorter freelancer gigs, maybe some small software products/apps/websites which generate some passive income along the side, etc. Also I wouldn't say that you can travel just to have fun, you also have to get the work done. That means settling for some place longer than you would recreationally. I have met these guys in coworking places, for example.
no_wave 12y ago
It's a euphemism for not working at all, though likely with one or two experiences that keep it from being a total lie (the majority of the money lived off of being either already saved or coming from family). The guy just failed hard in a pretty limp way. The options are either to try to "grow personally" and then to try something similar again, or to buckle down with a normal job and develop your skills and knowledge into something that really has value. When you've been drinking the start-up kool-aid the second is a hard pill to swallow - having to actually compete with everyone else - but I think it's worth it.

researcher88 12y ago

When I read about FanHero on techcrunch, I thought it was a good idea despite the article's tone. Mainly because I watch a lot of alternative content and listen to podcasts, and I want a way to support what I like. It wasn't an original idea but with awesome execution I think it could had worked.

Meekro 12y ago
I agree! And if you read the comments on the TechCrunch article, many of them agree about the article being badly written. I get that it's sarcasm, but what was the TechCrunch writer's message supposed to be? That nobody needed this product? That it was badly built? That the author just doesn't like YC kids? Whatever the author was trying to say, there was probably a better way to say it.

birken 12y ago

This post really misunderstands what both success and failure are. Getting into YC or raising money isn't success. And trying an idea out for a few months before giving up on it isn't failure. Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots of years. Maybe the idea is bad, but giving up on it after a couple of months really proves nothing. All it has proven is that the founders are the type of people that are readily willing to bail out at any moment, and that is a quality that doesn't lead to startup success. The "nightmare" described in this post is a joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through. Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me? Really? Try having to decide whether to lay off people to make payroll or having spent years on an idea only to still be not sure if it is working on not.

minimaxir 12y ago
> The "nightmare" described in this post is a joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through. Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me? Really? From the narrative, it sounds like there's a causal link between the TechCrunch article and the startup forcibly being summoned to office hours to ask what the hell is going on. Which says more about YC/PG's policies than it does about the startup founders.
- birken 12y ago
  I realize the actual nightmare is that after a few months of all-night coding the founders didn't launch the next facebook, but still: > We had much bigger problems than the piece, to be sure, but launching with an article that roundly mocked us was one of the final nails in the coffin. Hint to startup founders: It doesn't matter if Techcrunch writes about you or what they write about you. If you are letting that affect your perception of your company in a large way, you are doing it wrong. Though to Techcrunch's credit, in this case they really did a good job of reporting.
yesimahuman 12y ago
Having been in an accelerator before, I definitely related to their sense of dread that they might mess up this opportunity and never be successful again because of it. Watching peers strike it big must have been super hard. I quickly realized after that most "success" is exaggerated in the media, etc. and true success takes a lot longer than we expect. Raising $1M isn't success. Hell, raising $5-30M in today's climate isn't success. "Success" is such a vague concept that it's best to just focus on being happy and building cool shit and growing it year after year. It takes time.

rl3 12y ago

Developing an idea that you feel comfortable genuinely committing yourself to is hard. Usually it takes six months from coming up with an idea to researching it and getting to the point where I believe in it. Most of the time, you start with only a vague notion and have to further develop that into something concrete. No wonder that it didn't turn out well for them doing it under pressure in just a few days time.

Disruptive_Dave 12y ago

Does YC ever accept business / growth people or just "tech"? I ask that in seriousness, as my take - in my very limited time as a startup founder & employee - has consistently been that many startups fail due in part to an obvious lack of business sense and skills. I'm regularly surprised by the sheer amount of startups out there, many of which are funded, with coders and designers who have no damn clue how to sell. "We were a solid team, a designer/developer combo." Is that a solid "build a business" team or just a solid "engineer the product" team?

phkahler 12y ago
YC is supposed to help with things like that. They teach techies the business side of things and I would imagine they'd say "you need to hire someone to do sales" if that's what they needed. In this case they said from the start something like "we're concerned about your product idea" which was their primary problem. I suppose having someone with sales smarts may have helped them figure it out, since their idea was to help you-tubers sell stuff apparently.
- Disruptive_Dave 12y ago
  I suppose teaching techies business is easier than teaching business folks tech (or maybe quicker?). Still, I continue to be perplexed at the absence of "business" in startups. I'm not convinced that injecting "business" into a startup is an option for a later date.
- bsdpython 12y ago
  If you have to hire someone to sell to your first customers then you might have a problem

guynamedloren 12y ago

Not sure why the author didn't consider a fourth option when graduating from college: 4) Join the ground floor of a startup *as an early employee* It would've yielded invaluable experience and a whole lot of personal growth, leaving him in a much better place to run a company years down the road. At this point, I don't really think he's learned anything at all, and he won't learn much about running a company while he's galavanting around southeast asia humblebragging.

gravedave 12y ago
I agree with this, but I don't think it even has to be a startup. Big enterprises may also provide good learning environments, possibly even with experienced developers/marketers/whatevers as mentors, as opposed to a startup's possibly few young, inexperienced recent grads, hellbent on revolutionizing The Way You Think About Shoe Storage with their product called Shoely™ or whatever. Big companies also pay consistently. I don't know though, the guy seems quite dishonest to me, more interested in means rather than ends, yet still claiming that he "never wanted to start a company simply for the sake of starting a company". To me, he never seemed to question whether he even had anything to give in the first place and address this issue first, if needed, but simply expected to run a successful startup fresh out of college. Not sure I'd call his closing statements to be humblebragging though, it seems to be just a passing thing for him.

blazespin 12y ago

They seemed like good guys who had no sense of wherewithal. I liked the FanHero idea, it seemed pretty good.

dougabug 12y ago
Having youtubers hawk goods seems not so different from advertising/endorsements/affiliate links. I think something that might be more useful for people would be low friction engagement of consultation/services/speaking/musical performances etc.

lesingerouge 12y ago

Through some very strange twists of fate it seems to me that bot programming and starting a business ended up being "fashionable" things to do. And obviously as all fashionable things there's quite a lot of people that want to ride the hype train. Statistics tell us that there will always be a certain percentage that are on the train just for the hype. My 2 cents: getting on the train just for the hype is a clear indicator that you do not have a very good knowledge of yourself. Internal, time-tested, hard-earned kind of knowledge.

sparkzilla 12y ago

The article makes it clear that the YC interview selection process is deeply flawed. Leaving out the idea that they were selected because they told a story about the sound of biting a bottle, surely at the interview stage, if the entrepreneurs do not know what the company is making, or the business looks weak the interviewer should just say no. It's not enough to say "here are two bright people that can pivot". Bright people are everywhere, good business ideas are rare. All this does is cause the stress that the author has gone through as he and his partner have to desperately search for a business idea that may not come. This kind of stress, based on unrealistic expectations, can lead people to kill themselves, and seems to me to be borderline unethical. Meanwhile there are literally hundreds of other companies and thousands of smart people with great ideas that would gladly take their place and succeed, including many of the readers here.

pjlegato 12y ago
It's probably true that the YC interview process is deeply flawed, but OTOH there is no known better way to select worthy investments yet. Good startup business ideas are not only rare but also impossible to identify a priori. The only way to tell whether a business idea is good or not is to actually try it out in the market and see what happens. (This doesn't mean that any crazy idea is good, but it does mean that some good ideas seem crazy before they are tried.) If there were any methodology that could identify worthy investments with anything close to high accuracy, there would not be stock markets and there certainly wouldn't be a VC industry. VC investment works differently from other forms of investment due to the outsize gains on the rare successes. This market requires many comparatively small bets with limited losses and a few low-probability but huge payoffs. Compare this to a Warren Buffet style investment methodology of a few large bets in well-established companies and industries with high probability of moderate payoff. Neither is "right" in an absolute sense; it depends on the investor's risk tolerance and the nature of the opportunities. The VC business model is to apply some coarse-grained filters to screen out obvious scammers and gross incompetents, then give the remainder of the cohort some money, knowing in advance that 99% will fail completely. The remaining 1% will pay for the losses on the 99% many times over. Moreover, in YC's case, the amount of money they invest is so small compared to the massive returns on their few successes that they can now afford to take many of these small risks on "two guys who seem smart." Most of them will fail, and they know that going in. It doesn't matter. They're betting that sooner or later, they'll wind up with another AirBnB or Reddit that will pay for many thousands of these small bets.

juanbyrge 12y ago

Thanks for sharing this story. I know it was a tough decision to leave the company. If you were in a situation that causes you a lot of stress and unhappiness, there's no shame in leaving. There are a lot of people being critical here. It's easy to look at the situation from the outside and feel entitled to make comments. I bet if some of the commenters here were in you're situation they'd feel differently.

GoLocalApps 12y ago

I think this is both an indictment of "squirrel" syndrome (the dog from Up), and YC not choosing well in the first place. maybe that's the environment there, but I would guess if you brought in a new team with an idea, gave them money for that idea and then they went and dumped the idea right off and went to something new and shinier, they shouldn't have been funded in the first place? And with two previously abandoned businesses in his past, someone should have asked about commitment to the idea. Sure you can work on something you don't love, but then its a job not a career or a self focused business, not something worth others investing in without a really clear business plan and exit strategy.

charlierguo 12y ago

Hey everyone! Author here. First off, thanks for reading! To be honest, I really didn't expect to get this much attention. This is a story that I've wanted to share with friends and family for a long time, and was thoroughly surprised when it was picked up by Backchannel (and then posted here). Regarding some of the points made here, I (mostly) agree. Getting into YC or raising money is not success. Changing your idea completely isn't really a "pivot" (but I don't know if the industry has as concise of a term for throwing everything out and starting over). In my mind, the real failure was squandering the opportunity of YC, an opportunity I know many people would kill to have. Clearly we should have stuck it out with our idea, but we were 21 years old, stressed out, and foolish. I also want to note (in case anyone was wondering) that my experience hasn't diminished my opinion of YC at all. PG's advice was spot on, and YC remains an amazing program for founders. We simply didn't make the best use of our time in it. Hopefully reading about my experience is helpful in some way. If not, sorry about that. Give it a downvote and send it on its merry way.

orasis 12y ago
Thanks for putting this out there. It takes guts and self awareness to write something like this.
jlukanta 12y ago
Thanks for posting this. As others said, it takes guts to do it. I don't think you necessarily need to stick with your idea, especially if you aren't passionate about it. Quitting early is better than spending a couple of years being miserable because you don't think your work amounts to much.
ridruejo 12y ago
Thanks for writing about your experience, it must be difficult to do so. When we were looking at joining YC, one of the things that made us pull the trigger was the fact that we could not find anyone that had gone through the program that did not say that was worth it. No one, neither publicly nor privately and regardless of whether their startup had succeeded of failed.
Meekro 12y ago

mediaright 12y ago

..."professional hoop-jumper" ...He means being a kid? There's a self-importance and arrogance to all of this that really comes through from this type of rhetor. I think the imposter syndrome might not be that much of a syndrome in the case of far too many startup teams sadly.

bsdpython 12y ago
When I read that line - "nearly two decades as a professional hoop-jumper" - I pictured in my head a guy in his early 40s. Professional means you get paid for your work. Hoop-jumper is a strange way to describe your education.

georgeecollins 12y ago

This seems like a parody of entrepeneurship. Like instead of defying the odds to be an entrepeneur he's defying the odds to avoid getting startup funding as a recent CS grad from Stanford. The world it full of things that sound appealing. But you may find when you get a chance to do them it isn't your thing. You may enjoy art, admire artists, but not really enjoy or be suited to the work of an artist.

myohan 12y ago

"I don’t want to start another company until I find a problem that I care about. A problem that I eat, sleep and breathe. A problem worth solving." i agree with you but you shouldn't wait for these ideas to come by out the blue moon, you should be constantly searching, trying/testing, and keep living/experiencing a lot of different things...because there are a lot of problems out there that you DO NOT know they exist, and how would you know you care about these problems if you don't know they exist. good luck.

zeeshanm 12y ago

Thanks for writing the article. One thing have bothered me for a long time is why tech startups think TechCrunch or any other high-speed news website writing about them is an indication of early success. It may help you get early customers via the write up if your customers are actually those clicking through these clickbaity links. But this probably doesn't apply in all cases. A lot of the times those reading such viral stories more often than not are on the lookout for the next big big idea to copy. So why bother? May be I don't get as it is some sort of a Valley thing.

rsp1984 12y ago

Aside from some other great comments here (some of it which really nail it) I'd like to point out that the greatest difficulty of the author seems to be being in charge of things. Throughout the entire story he is denying control. Being accepted into Y Combinator? Pure luck. Most critical interview factor? Sound of biting a plastic bottle. It doesn't surprise me a tiny bit that he thought he had impostor syndrome since he probably felt he is getting rewarded for something that is seemingly totally out of his control. Then all the "pivots". Again feeling that startup success is something that will magically come just by "waiting a bit longer" or "having a slightly better idea" (i.e. being largely out of one's control), of course you re-set the course right away if the odds seem against you. Even if it's just some objections by interviewers who know you for about 10 minutes. Because they surely know better, right? No way to to prove these guys wrong, right? Probably much better to try something different... The author ends by saying he wants to get back into startups once he's found a suitable problem to work on. That's cool. Even better would be to find a problem he knows he can solve, by being in charge.

pavlov 12y ago

The "impostor syndrome" meme would have us believe that if you feel like an impostor, don't worry -- it's a positive sign that you're actually a modest, shy kind of genius. But sometimes it just means that you really are out of your depth.

kethinov 12y ago
Impostor syndrome is also frequently abused by successful people who want a socially acceptable way of denying that much of their success actually was due to luck and timing.

mb_72 12y ago

This post seems to neatly encapsulate a lot of what I feel is wrong with the entire start-up / accelerator scene. I've always felt that capable people with a good idea will succeed 99% of the time anyway - and if that team in particular doesn't succeed, then another group will, and hence no net loss to humanity of the 'idea'. OTOH, this kind of process seems to rescue half-baked ideas, or throw money at people that can perhaps program but can't actually run a business, or glorifies killing yourself working for hope of a huge payday. Perhaps I'm in the minority, and perhaps it's because I'm old (44) and 'get-off-my-lawny' ... but I am so not down with this kind of approach to making money.

paulvs 12y ago

An idea may be worth less than the potential of the founders, but a well thought-out idea reveals a lot about the founders themselves, in my opinion.

smurph 12y ago

Am I the only one who thinks it's insane that someone can go from an undergrad CS degree to a failed startup and then directly into (presumably well paid) consulting gigs? I'd be pretty wary of a consultant who's only work experience was starting their own company and failing.

rdtsc 12y ago

> We researched Bitcoins, smart devices, 3D printing, biometrics, and a host of other industries. Is this common? As in people first decide they want to do a "startup thing". Then they fish for idea. Just curious, is this how most startup idea begin? I kind of thought it was always someone first having a burning and interesting idea that eventually they want to develop and it gets developed as a startup or patent or something like that.

GoLocalApps 12y ago
Probably more common than you'd think. Brainstorming for new ideas or looking for something that doesn't work as well as you think it should or seems to be "missing" is a valid way of trying to start a business. You may not be passionate about it, but if it can make money, you can be passionate about that.

Animats 12y ago

Now YC gives startups less money, so they can't try to "pivot" after the first failure. Win big or die fast. Comment below: "Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots of years." Not in the YC world. That's not the model.

onewaystreet 12y ago

Did anyone at YC talk with these founders after investing in them? It sounds like they never understood why they were accepted. Getting accepted into YC should be a confirmation signal, not a signal that you should pivot (yes, YC invests in people, but if that was the case in this case then I would've expected a partner to have helped them find a new idea).

haky_nash 12y ago

Wow. Aspiring Founder here. What a read. Loved this: "I don’t want to start another company until I find a problem that I care about. A problem that I eat, sleep and breathe. A problem worth solving."

ricardobeat 12y ago

So what was FanHero? The website is now redirecting to imhomeapp.com (their latest pivot, I suppose), and the article doesn't explain at all.

mortdeus 12y ago

I wrote a lengthy blog post in response to this post in hopes that it will help aspiring founders avoid a similar fate if their startup gets accepted into Y Combinator. http://mortdeus.blogspot.com/2015/01/y-combinator.html http://mortdeus.blogspot.com/2015/01/y-combinator.html