[HN Gopher] Was Y Combinator worth it?
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Was Y Combinator worth it?
Author : mitchpatin
Score : 70 points
Date : 2023-08-10 20:41 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tableflow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tableflow.com)
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Given the domain name, I was hoping to see some attempt to
| quantify/aggregate multiple answers.
|
| I think nearly any startup would benefit unless the founders
| entered into business with a strong perspective and network.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I think the real question is whether the benefit is worth the
| 10%. That's pretty expensive.
|
| From a macchiavellian perspective, it does appear that the
| benefits mostly attach to the founders (unless you are selling
| products to startups) and the 10% attaches to the company,
| which suggests that the optimal strategy post-YC may be to fail
| and start another company.
|
| Edit - Obviously I'm not suggesting killing a good company that
| hits it big and gets a bunch of traction, but if your post-YC
| company isn't in that position (and almost all of them aren't,
| by the way, thanks to the risky nature of startups), you have
| some very awkward math to do on whether to pivot or shut down.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That is entirely dependent on how much you're leaving on the
| table by failing. When gambling, it might make sense to quit
| while you're up but that entirely depends on the expected
| value of your next bet.
|
| From a macchiavellian perspective, you also have to consider
| how much benefit the founder would stand again from having a
| more successful startup instead of failing.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| 90% of a big number is a lot better than 100% of a small
| number. If you get benefit out of YC and your company has
| momentum, killing it and starting fresh on your own is
| absolutely not the best strategy.
| te_chris wrote:
| Given it's a corporate blog and YC will still be on the cap,
| what's the point of the leading question?
| electricduck wrote:
| You know, I've been reading Hacker News for god-knows-how-long,
| and it never occurred to me to look up what Y Combinator even
| was.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Our Eternal September has arrived.
| TheRealSteel wrote:
| Same!
| [deleted]
| joshxyz wrote:
| thats what i love about hn.
|
| i sometimes think yc is just a front to secure payment for hn
| servers for many many years.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Isn't it just like... a couple of servers? As in, entirely
| fundable by one person who could afford the time to moderate.
| tomwojcik wrote:
| 2 machines https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041
| mcpeepants wrote:
| many, many, many years
| fragmede wrote:
| It's a rounding error in some of the budgets that
| startups deal with. It becomes closer to the situation
| with the Long Now, which is a clock to last 10,000 years.
| With LLMs, even the moderation becomes an fixture in the
| project that can endure. With Solar and a GPU and some
| Internet.
| nkingsy wrote:
| llm moderation, what could go wrong
| fasterik wrote:
| You mean this isn't a website for lambda calculus enthusiasts?
| aatd86 wrote:
| Wait... This is not lambda-the-ultimate?
|
| Where am I?
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| Why combinator, Y?
| btown wrote:
| Why the lucky combinator
| agumonkey wrote:
| not so loud, you're gonna hug it to death
| [deleted]
| momothereal wrote:
| I feel like I used to see a lot more Launch HN, Y Combinator
| batches, etc. Or maybe I started tuning them out
| dalbasal wrote:
| No... I'm pretty sure he isn't near as interested in yc
| anymore.
| thallavajhula wrote:
| >So, for us YC was a no-brainer.
|
| Saved you a click.
|
| If the general consensus is that YC is worth it, then why bother
| publish something to state the obvious. I'd be more interested in
| cases or scenarios where the founders felt YC wasn't worth it,
| which I believe would be very low or non-existent.
| threeseed wrote:
| > which I believe would be very low or non-existent
|
| Only because your sample size are people who've attended YC.
|
| Ask all startups whether they think YC is worth it and the
| percentage will be significantly higher. Because if you're an
| experienced founder then the benefits versus dilution equation
| will be far different than someone who is straight out of
| college.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| the rationale is relevant. if you are interested in the inverse
| cases, you look at the reasons and assume the opposite.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Y Combinator is for established businesses, right? Not just
| business plans?
| leetrout wrote:
| They fund both but not much on these business plans unless the
| team is connected or credentialed from what I can tell
| cameroncooper wrote:
| Yes, I think YC is almost always worth it. Even as a founder who
| has raised VC and exited previously I found it to be worthwhile.
| threeseed wrote:
| This is simply not true.
|
| The optimum path for all startups is to either bootstrap
| entirely or bootstrap up until the Series A where your
| negotiation position is the strongest because you know your
| unit economics and can demonstrate clear product-market fit.
|
| Of course many startups may simply not be able to bootstrap.
| But equally there are many startups who could but choose the
| YC/VC track because of cargo culting, naivety or ignorance of
| all of the issues that it comes with e.g. dilution and the low
| percentage of startups making it to Series-A.
|
| I would argue that most founders instead of emulating Stripe,
| Airbnb etc should look to florists, bakeries, ecommerce sites
| etc and learn the fundamentals for growing a business in a
| cost-effective and sustainable way. And then decide after they
| have a successful lifestyle business whether YC/VC will take
| them to the next level.
| brianwawok wrote:
| * * *
| elaus wrote:
| What a curious product: CSV import as a service (or hosted on
| premise). Would love to know where they pivoted from (according
| to the blog post).
| mitchpatin wrote:
| We actually pivoted multiple times:
|
| 1. We applied to YC and initially started work on what we
| referred to as "data-stack-as-a-service". The premise was to
| provision, configure, and maintain the different components
| required for a data stack: Data Warehouse, Integrations,
| Transformations, Visualizations, etc. We had a working product
| and a few paying customers. Ultimately we decided to pivot as
| we felt the market for this was only small companies with small
| budgets (many of whom might not even need a mature data stack).
|
| 2. Then we released a small open-source tool for Postgres that
| could easily send webhook notifications when data was changed
| (pg triggers sent websocket messages to a Go application). Off
| of this we dove deeper into database tooling and building a
| platform that offered branching, change management, and other
| modern features for Postgres. We also had a prototype and
| slightly larger contracts with a few early customers here. We
| decided to pivot from this for a few reasons, but ultimately we
| lost conviction in the idea and were more excited about data
| import challenges that came up during user interviews.
|
| 3. As you mentioned, we're now working on CSV import as a
| service. After building and maintaining CSV import tools many
| times ourselves, we believe there's an opportunity to provide a
| robust, pre-built experience. There are actually a few other
| products in the market today. Our initial focus is to be the
| most developer-friendly choice (a big part of why we're open
| source). We want the decision to leverage an existing service
| to be a no-brainer for any engineering team tasked with
| supporting CSV import.
| benzible wrote:
| Not all that curious... https://flatfile.com
|
| If you're building a vertical SaaS and want to support import
| from a file, and don't want to spend time reinventing the
| wheel, this could be a big win. This would let new users bring
| in existing data from another SaaS (that supports CSV export)
| or where the incumbent is likely to be Excel. The development
| time it would take to make something like this solid, usable,
| and flexible enough to handle different formats would, in most
| cases, be better spent on building domain-specific
| functionality.
| reneherse wrote:
| That use case perfectly describes the needs of the SAAS
| product my team is building. We have tons of domain specific
| features we want to build, and anything that frees up dev
| time for that work gets a look.
|
| While I haven't yet seen the pricing for your link or the OP,
| this seems like a case where there aren't many negative
| tradeoffs.
| nda_dontask wrote:
| [dead]
| mks wrote:
| There's so much more to CSV file import than just uploading and
| parsing - service like this can become backbone of any
| enterprise data exchange pipeline. For real mission critical
| use cases you need features like being able to ingest multiple
| gigabyte sized files reliably, quickly revert the import or
| switch to a specific version, detecting errors and recovering
| from partially corrupted files, detecting the new version is
| available, possibly importing just changes, publishing metrics
| on imported files to observability platforms, alerting if
| anything goes wrong...
|
| If CSV import is not enough of a product (I believe it is) you
| can add exporting functionality (e.g. export this table to CSV
| and deliver to SFTP exactly once, but make sure to handle
| target downtimes) and you have an "Enterprise File Gateway"
| that could reduce development costs in many companies.
| paxys wrote:
| > We, however, were not in this position. Eric and I still had
| full-time jobs when we were accepted. While we had been meeting
| regularly for a few months to discuss different ideas, we had
| absolutely zero traction, no working product, and very little
| validation.
|
| This is the key part IMO. It's easy to give up 10% of what is
| essentially an idea in your head in exchange for $500K and some
| legitimacy from a big brand. That is exactly how an "accelerator"
| is supposed to work. If you have spent time (sometimes years of
| your life) and significant money actually building a product,
| finding a market fit and gathering customers, YC's terms will
| likely be much harder to swallow.
| waithuh wrote:
| YC did so well because they never really asked for the
| qualifications other investors did and put an end to potential
| founders deciding that its not worth it/procrastinating
| mathewpregasen wrote:
| was a great experience for me, even with the pandemic sabotaging
| our demo day last minute
| williamstein wrote:
| Answer: "So, for us YC was a no-brainer."
| lucb1e wrote:
| ...because """
|
| - we were in a bad place and, while a start-up in a good place
| could raise more than YC's $500k in exchange for 10% of the
| business, we couldn't.
|
| - we gained access to the knowledgebase that YC built of all
| the problems (incorporating, tax filing, banking, HR systems,
| etc.) and, for anything not in the KB, you can use their legal
| team.
|
| - attaching the YC brand to your name adds legitimacy
|
| - we forged strong friendships with many of our batchmates. We
| continue to meet on a regular basis to share updates, ideas,
| and provide support to each other. Having other people that can
| listen and empathize with the challenges you're experiencing
| goes a long way.
|
| """
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