For some reason I'm inspired to take this opportunity to say, to anyone who has any reservations about applying to YC: do it. Right now. Then do your best to nail the interview and get picked. This has been (already!) one of the best experiences of my life. The people that you get to meet and learn from - not just the amazing speakers they bring in, but the rest of the group you're in and the network of founders are the best part. It's all about being exposed to success and constantly hearing about and seeing the factors of success and being inspired to keep working, persist, iterate, make what people want. One of the best realizations for me has been that the people who succeed aren't that different from any of us. If they can do it, so can we. If we can do it, so can you.
I'm intrigued that you, as a veteran, would phrase it this way. If you got to call yourself 10 years ago, what would you say?
I would tell myself to apply earlier! Although I've learned a crazy amount about a lot of things in the last 10 years, I've just relearned a lot of them (better this time) in the past 2 months. The thing about it is, there's this perception that the people who do these things are so much smarter, more experienced, more something than you, but that's not necessarily true, so what's stopping you? Just yourself.
I can't believe you wouldn't give yourself stock tips if you could call yourself from 10 years ago.
I wouldn't. That would be wrong. (j/k, good idea)
What are the key things you've learned, if you don't mind me asking?
1. Make something people want. 2. Don't die until you do #1. 3. There's nothing stopping you except yourself - the people who read this site are already further ahead than they might think. 4. Distribution is key, and is easier to get if you're doing #1. 5. Talking to important people (selling yourself!) is easy and fun if you're doing #1. 6. Don't think - do. Perfection is the enemy of good enough, and good enough is the enemy of at all. (That came from Paul Buchheit). 7. Launch fast, launch often. There's more, I should probably write a blog post about it but I'm wasting time when I should be doing #1. :)
Excellent bulletin board material! Thank you.
How old are you? (If you don't mind)
(I was somehow under the impression that most of the people were very young so your "10 years" remark stuck out for me.)
I turned 30 last year, and I'm the youngest of our 3 founders, so I'm feeling my age a bit. The RescueTimers skew the average age higher a bit, but not by that much, There are people ten years older than me here, too, for sure.
Nice to hear it, thank you. Keep up the good work!
It's a shame no-ones blogged it this time like auctomatic crew, draftmix did
We're doing some emergency maintenance on the sites, and things should already have been fixed a long time ago. Scaling issues are rough. The good news is that even though our shared-storage system was quite scaling as we'd hoped, we've got a new one in place, so things should be better going forward.