YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

YC Lessons From Two Latin Americans Who Walked Into Silicon Valley

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152 pointskatm37 comments

Great post.

Could you explain a little about the visa situation being an international founder. There is not much information about the issues faced by international founders and most advice comes down to "Contact a lawyer". It would be nice if you can share your experience.

One relatively straightforward path is to apply for an E-2 visa.

I believe you need to make an investment out of your own pocket to apply for that visa. An immigration lawyer told me $200k, do you know if you can go lower than that?

The requirement is that a majority share of the company be foreign owned (I think it may have to be the founder's country but I don't recall the exact details), and that "substantial operational investment has been made in the United States". The latter represents having a office lease, having purchased equipment and furniture, etc.

The latter also will cause you to hear sums like $200k be quoted. Our number was higher than this when we applied (we raised our first round outside of the States), so I do not know if there is a lower bound. This whole process is not well defined and is very much an exercise in compelling storytelling to convince the Visa officer that you're not committing fraud.

My cofounder went for the O1, I'm in the process of getting an L1.

A tourist visa is a good start as long as you know the rules and limitations. It's 100% legal to start and own a company in the US with a tourist visa.

Every case is different. Contacting a lawyer is the best advice to avoid getting distracted. You will anyway, but try to delegate as much as possible. Some countries have special quotas in the H1B, others have the NAFTA, some founders might do E2, others L1s, etc. And all the knowledge from achieving this is a good line to start a conversation with other international founders.

I'm the author of the article. After being part of YC, I had a lot of things I wish I knew before doing it, from common mistakes to humble reminders. Specially being an "international founder".

Happy to answer any questions.

I just wanted to say that I enjoyed reading your article. I wish you the best and keep up the good work. I especially appreciated the viewpoint of a non-american (as a non-silicon valleyian, which arguably has similar learning curves).

Oh god it's so cool to see Platzi in HN! (I learned a lot from you guys when it was mejorando.la).

Thanks for the post. Just wanted to say thanks for your work and how happy made me read about you guys.

Thank you so much for that, Ramiuz. I hope you still learn from us now that we're Platzi.

That's really good advice. There is a few people I'll forward this too(it doesn't directly apply to me being in Japan but the advice in general does!).

Good luck with your project!

Thank you. Japan is amazing.

Do you think you could've done the YC program remotely via the Fellowship?

I've thought on applying but sometimes circumstances make it hard to been able to move there.

If you had joined the YC Fellowship instead, what do you think could've been different?

Also, kudos! and thanks for the advice.

I know some YCF companies. They loved it. I wanted to move to Mountain View and do the full three month program. But if I couldn't, YCF is a great deal.

Fantastic, a whole post with useful advice from minority founders and no mention of their (supposedly) disadvantage status. We need more of this and less of the bullshit about how badly minorities have it in SV.

To be fair, discrimination exists and it happened to me occasionally while raising post Demo Day. In subtle ways.

But there's people like that everywhere so I used it as a filter for good people.

Can someone summarize the content, and specifically point out the lessons? The only thing I'm getting from reading it is "we come from far away, that's why it was harder" (true story but doesn't really help others in this situation) and "YC is so great" (which may or may not be true, but also doesn't teach us anything). I don't find any lessons.

* If English is your second language, don't worry

* Be truthful and give the whole story

* You win with growth, good metrics (acceleration > size) and good execution.

* live close to YC

* talk to your batch mates

* listen to YC partners' advice

* learn to talk slowly

* fundraising is not a right

* be humble

* YC will continue to help after your batch is over

* pay it forward

Thanks for the GitLab mention, so much good advice in this, I agree with all of it.

Of course! We did our first technical live class in English thanks to you guys <3

How do you know they are lie detectors unless you tried lying to them?

Indirect experiences and anecdotes. Also, it's inevitable sometimes to feel ashamed of certain things in your startup, so you actively avoid talking about it.

But they know. And you end up talking about it, which is a good thing.

So... yeah, I tried lying and failed?

> so you actively avoid talking about it.

Yes, lying is more commonly - the act of omission rather than telling.

Be interesting if they went into detail about what prompted this paragraph. Anyone can state generalities.

>Lying to YC partners is a waste of time. They won't ask for the money back, so tell them everything. All startups are chaotic shitshows. They know. They invented the phrase.

OK,

Most (all?) startups have broken things. Mine did and I tried to hide them at first. But I guess YC is at a point that, after thousands of startups, they've seen most of the patterns and just want to help you fix them. They'll help you no matter in what shape your company is.

Also, some startups plainly lie about their metrics, but those rarely get accepted to YC, from my limited experience.

Why would you lie about metrics?

That seems highly verifiable. You should only lie about things that will be hard to find out like how many women you ever slept with.

I never lied about metrics but I've seen startups that do outside YC. Most of them don't do it out of malice but due to bad math. It's easy, for example, to miscalculate CAC in the early days of your company.

A more interesting question: What do you think the investors lied to you about? What do you think they kept to themselves?

At YC? Nothing. They have no reason to do that. It'd defeat the purpose of YC.

Other ways, besides lying yourself, that you could know a person was a good lie detector:

* You've seen them catch others in a lie

* You've heard stories about the ability 2nd hand, either from people who have been caught themselves or from people who have seen others get caught.

In addition, there are many fuzzier, less reliable types of evidence:

* Somebody has so much knowledge and experience about something that you can safely assume irregularities would stand out to them.

* They just give off that vibe: soul-piercing gaze, etc.

* They tell you.

So logically, the question makes about as much sense as asking how you could know someone was a good cook if you've never tasted their food. And not only that, getting caught in a lie by someone isn't even necessarily good evidence of their lie detection abilities. Maybe you are just a terrible liar. Maybe they got lucky one time.

"How our courses work" jump link doesn't work.

s/Colaborate/Collaborate/g

Are you going to make all the courses yourself or are you considering paying third parties to make courses?

We're considering opening it up to certain third parties. If you're interested, f at platzi.com

I guess I missed the 'Fundraising' portion while being Latin American in the 'lessons' - must be because its so easy, right?

I didn't find any particular strong bias against me due to my race/ethnicity compared to my batchmates. There were ocasional subtle moments of doubt from certain people at first, nothing too obvious.

But I think fundraising was as hard for me as it is for most founders at similar stages. The fact that our company was profitable at Demo Day helped, I guess.

Great post!

Great post, good advices.

Good article and I think it will be helpful for me personally as well.

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