The YC Experience (So Far)
YC is such an exclusive program and group that it draws a lot of attention from pretty much every founder. I know this because every time I post about anything YC on twitter, it always produces one of my most liked tweets. People are just naturally curious about what it’s like to be a YC founder so I thought I’d write about what the first few months pre program and the first few weeks of the program have been like so far.
We were skeptical going into YC weighing the equity cost / benefit. My honest review though is that I think this experience will likely be a “make or break“ moment for our company, and help push us over the edge to being successful.
First, in my time working on companies, I’ve pitched probably on the order of 100s of investors, and worked with 50+ investors directly. YC is tied for what I consider to be the best investors I’ve worked with (the other in the tie is Steve Jang from Kindred Ventures for very different reasons - for founders looking for seed investors).
What Makes YC Different
In my mind it really comes down to three things:
The community
The fact that I consider all of the partners “founders“ instead of “investors“
Off the record knowledge that’s exclusive to this group of founders
The Community
The most powerful part of YC is the community that it brings together. It’s like if you took the most exclusive colleges in the US (Harvard, Stanford), and then hand-picked the most driven, ambitious people some of which have already had impressive and prestigious careers, put them in a situation where they’re all facing similar problems, colocated them in the same city for a summer, and watched them work. This is really the secret to YC. Yes, it’s nice to have access to the YC partners (even getting to meet with PG etc), but nothing compares to the people you get to be around all of the time.
I think a huge amount of the value I’ve gotten has been things like the Saturday grind sesh that the Ledger Up team hosts. Just a bunch of YC founders grinding on Saturday, sharing knowledge and having fun. It’s things like the community growth call where founders are learning from other founders on how to sell. It’s going to the founder dinners on Fridays, and going out to drinks after talking with other founders about how to structure and grow their tech teams. The way the community is structured is that you actually learn the most from your peers, and it’s this supportive group where everyone is trying to solve similarish problems from eachother and you can kind of figure it out together.
I feel that being part of this condensed community just makes you move faster, face hard decisions more quickly, and ultimately have more fun. The energy at the YC office is unparalleled, like an adult college dorm with some of the most qualified people in the world.
Founders *not* Investors
This is just more a blanket rule for investors, but I’ve found the best investors are former founders. YC is no exception. I’m pretty sure it’s a hard requirment to be a partner, you must have previously started a YC company. This is what makes the group partners so good, because they “just get it“. At the pre seed and seed stage especially, you aren’t qualified to advise these companies if you haven’t done it before yourself.
In our group alone, of the three partners, one went from zero to an exit with Niantic, another started whatsapp before whatsapp existed, exited, and built the growth team at Airbnb from scratch, and the third started a 200m ARR business from his college dorm room. These are people who can advise any stage business, but especially the earliest stages because they’ve been there and done it.
Off-the-Record Knowledge
After listening to a lot of startup advice, I think there’s something special about the advice YC provides. One piece of good news is the open source a lot of it. Big fan of their youtube channel. That said, it’s hard to beat an off the record conversation with Brian Chesky of airbnb giving you the real shit of what it was like to scale the company through covid. That you can’t get anywhere else
Conclusion
I think going in my cofounder were doing this internal tradeoff trying to decide whether the 7% equity is worth it for what we would be getting. 7% for 125k is a pretty bad deal after all, and you can get much cheaper money elsewhere. I think a lot of founders face this question. After being in it through it though, I think there’s something special here that can’t really be replaced. There are *many* 2nd time YC founders in the batch who could definitely raise at better terms elsewhere. The way that YC sets you up to win for the rest of your company kind of can’t be replaced, and I’m happier than ever that we did it.