Why I'm frustrated that I wasn't accepted into Y Combinator.
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12. There are 2 kinds of judgments: Admissions and Grades If you get a bad grade in a class, but think you did a great job, then you feel entitled to go and talk to the teacher and challenge the decision. On the other hand, that entitlement feeling isn't present if you apply to a college and get denied. This is because in admissions there are a limited number of seats available and a cutoff point at which no more people can be accepted. Like in the olympic tryouts - the top X% of swimmers for a country may get to go to the games, but those below that threshold don't get to go. It's not much different in getting funding - you can just slide off the edge and just not make the 'admission'. When I was rejected by Harvard I thought I sucked. Now I see it as laughable. Have you ever been to the admissions office? A rejection in an admissions scenario is not necessarily a reflection on you. At YCombinator we go through and rank all of the applications, then we take the top 30 for interviews. Recently we looked at some of our early teams and compared how they are doing now with how we rated them in the application process. It was scary! One of our most successful teams was at number 30! Just one more down and they would have missed the cutoff.
That would mean, incidentally, that anyone who was rejected this round might have been accepted in the last, or might be accepted in the next one.
You said: "That would mean, incidentally, that anyone who was rejected this round might have been accepted in the last, or might be accepted in the next one."
Yes, that is exactly right according to what Paul said.
On Monday, pick yourself up and work with what you've got. You've got lots of opportunities. Find out what they are and use them to their fullest. Don't let being "rejected" beat you. Give yourself time to grieve then move one.
It's what you're going to do anyway. Just shorten the cycle.
I bet that more startups are started because of groups applying to YC. It's a good thing you applied, but move on already. My partner and I don't need the money. We applied more for the mentoring and camaraderie one gets spending time in a group setting. Instead of YC we're tapping the locals here in NYC, online and anyone else we can think of to bounce ideas off of, test our application and help get the word out once we've launched.
Go, work, launch. Let me know when you do.
And one of their best-performing picks currently was their thirtieth and last pick of the 30 "most promising" they invited for interviews that round -- if they had assigned it #31, it would have gotten axed. One can infer from this that some who missed the cut would likely do better than some who made it.
The low-hanging web 2.0 fruit may be harvested soon, in which case they would have to expand into other types of ventures.
Also, there are some technologies that are vital but don't make good start-ups. Work done on the Linux kernel (including virtualization); Compiz/Beryl; PostGreSQL; and so forth. The complexity may be an order of magnitude greater than doing a website, but you can't sell ads in Xen source code.
YC's modus operandi also rules out start-ups that need more time and/or capital. In short, they are pursuing a specific niche.
Don't be discouraged -- their validation is orthogonal to whether your work is technically novel or highly profitable.
One lesson I have learned over the years from disappointments is never to get too attached or confident when applying for something. I felt we had a very strong application but I always know there is decent chance we won't get accepted and it would have little to do with the quality of our idea or product--communication and bad luck, may be.
That's all well and good, but where's your cocaine habit? How are you blowing all your money if you're spending all your time at work or on the startup?
IF you're not blowing all your moeny, and you've spent a year looking for funding (like it sounds like) then why dont' you have a year's worth of living expenses saved up?
The problem here is hte pervasive idea that the first step to starting a company is getting someone else to fund it. Screw that-- nobody can ever know your business as well as you can. You can use advice, sure, but wasting months working on proposals-- getting seeking emotional validation from investment, this is all the wrong way to go about it.
Build your product, save your cash. When you have enough money saved up, and if you really believe in your predictions (That you'll be cash flow positive in 6 months) then you quit your jobs when you have $12,000 saved up, or less.
If you can't save $12,000 between now and the next YC funding round, and you're working full time, then you are spending your money on something-- cocaine, maybe?
IF your idea and team really are good, you shouldn't be desperate for money... and hinging your emotional well being, or self confidence, on validation from investors is a recipe for failure (and unhappiness.)
If you think you have a great idea that users will actually want, get up on your feed and go run with it.
Not getting YC funding is definitely not the end of the world. There are a ton of reasons why you might not have gotten funding, and many of them aren't really related to how great a hacker/startupper you might be.
There are plenty of folks around here who are going to press on despite the setback [2]. No matter what you do, you're going to run into roadblocks, and part of being successful is getting past them without losing heart. Don't give up now, and good luck in the future.
If you are so creative, why can't you find other ways to raise money? Besides, I think if you apply for YC you don't really need money (because surely you could get 15000$ somehow), it is all about the experience, right? If you build your startup anyway, it will be exciting and interesting, too. Who knows, next year YC might invite you as a speaker.
I think you live in a different world than some of the rest of us. Not only is 15K a lot of money (more than half of what my wife and I made last year, and we're not doing badly here in east Alabama), but it's often the case that the only people who could possibly get that kind of money are friends and family who've already paid for most or all of a house. So, the question becomes, would you rather work on this part time, or try to convince your parents or friends to bet their home on your startup?
In my graduating class, about 1/3 took jobs in engineering, consulting, or finance that pay $60-$80k (more in finance). The remaining 2/3 became graduate students, temp workers, secretaries and teachers making $20-30k/year. The ones making $60-80k don't live significantly more extravagant lifestyles (actually, I see far more engineers and consultants living with their parents than secretaries and teachers), so they pocket the $40K/year difference.
What's a typical salary for a talented computer programmer in Alabama? Are there particular barriers to relocating to Boston or SF or Redmond or Austin and getting a decent salary?
There are a coupla barriers to moving; we have a house to pay for, hardly know anyone (personally) who doesn't live around here, and have issues "getting a decent salary" due to history. I've been freelancing for seven years, with no degree, and it turns out that people aren't interested in hiring someone like that remotely.
In 2003, we gave moving to the Boston area a shot (Nashua), but the only position I managed to get was Comcast tech support (and all our clients were down here, of course), which didn't pay enough to save up enough money for a deposit. It was a totally different world up there. Here, if you have a thousand dollars, you can pay a deposit and the first two months rent, and have plenty left over to look for a job for a month. Your first full paycheck at even a convenience store would pay the rent. In Nashua, I was making (for the 6 months we were there) about the same amount I would here for the same job, except that landlords wanted outrageous sums for housing that even slumlords would be ashamed of in the South. "Let me get this straight: you want nearly a thousand a month for a room that doesn't even have a private bath?! Did you accidentally include an extra zero?"
Anyway, enough ranting. :) If you've lived in such a place long enough to think it's normal to pay thousands a month, rather than hundreds, just to have food, gas, and a small house, I imagine it's hard to understand the shock. Six months into that attempted move, after being too exhausted from dealing with people all day (I'm not a people person) to do anything but collapse into bed, it finally became clear that there was essentially no way we would ever be able to save up enough money (we had to stay in weekly places, due to never having the 2K or so it would have required to get a crappy apartment). We'd been spoiled by doing exactly this same thing in 1998 moving to Florida, and having that turn out well.
So, basically, the biggest barrier is that it would take years of saving, here, to come up with enough money to not instantly be homeless in the Boston area or SV. Alternatively, we can just continue with doing startups in extremelycheapland, while living a middle class lifestyle on 15 hours of freelancing a week.
If you want a startup, it sounds like you have 25 hours a week to invest in it. It doesn't sound like you need to save up a lot of money.
How much do houses cost where you live, btw? I don't think people would be "gambling away their houses" by giving you 15K - wouldn't that just be two or three years more of paying off the mortgage?
Yes, I admit I was being a bit melodramatic. :)
Houses around here cost anywhere from 30K (manufactured home and a building lot) up; site-built homes start in the 60s for a small two bedroom place. I don't personally know anyone who spent more than 150K for a house within 40 miles of here, but there are a lot of ads for subdivisions "starting in the 190s" and such, now. Property values have gone way up for newly built homes, but older homes haven't appreciated proportionately. As I mentioned above, we're paying a little over 50K for ours, but we had the land given to us by relatives.
This is all totally off-topic, I suppose. Perhaps I'll point at this thread when I start hiring to explain why I'm only offering 35K salary. ;)
Zero reason to move to the bay area if you're in seattle... and a lot of reasons not to.
Is this the best place to start a startup? No. However, having attempted to pull up and move to an expensive place where we knew no one (NH, in 2003), I'm not eager to go through that experience again just now, so we'll just keep plugging away until we succeed.
If you're a software engineer, even in alabama, you can easily make $60k a year.
And anyway, it doesn't matter-- if your income is that low, cost of living should be low as well.
Alabama is probably a great place to start a startup-- just you should start living on half your income.
Do that for a year and save the balance and you have a years living expenses to live off while you try and get your business going.
At any rate, failure is a part of business. Think of a store owner: He sits and watches people enter and exit all day long without buying anything. Failure, failure, failure. If you can't stomach it, then _that_ is your real problem, not what PG thinks--remember that PG has his prejudices when it comes to technology, and I don't think he likes games very much.
Tease investors suck the life out of startups.
"Tease investors (cough, in this definition all investors) suck the life out of WEAK startups."
Startups that really have any potential will not be phased by a trivial 'setback' like this.
From my notes on pg's talk the other day:
Some founders approach investors as if they are asking for permission to start a company. That is very much the wrong approach. You need to make it clear that the train is leaving and if they want to be on it, they better get on. That being said, you have to mean it 100%, because if you don't, they'll be able to tell. A good way to mean it 100% is to have a solid backup plan. What also helps is to start cheap and avoid doing the expensive things till later so you don't need the investment, but can get real momentum going for your company.
You're startup needs to be like a cockroach - hard to kill, even after a nuclear war. Don't be a delicate beautiful flower, be a cockroach.
The word on the street is that adventure games are the next big thing in casual games. Not sudoku, or bejeweled. Casual gamers expect more these days. Adventure games are also much harder and take much more time to clone. Finally, you could sell level packs to your customers once your actual product is done, something that you can't do for games with random levels. I think between your web site and the main portals (RealArcade, BigFishGames, Oberon) and your own web site you can start your own niche. Just make sure you can partner with somebody who can create great art, quickly. However, the kind of companies PG wants for YC are ones that can have a reasonable demo after just three months of work, and also those that he knows enough about that he can actually contribute to. In other words, there are millions of things in the digital world one could make money off, but PG (like everybody else) is interested in a subset of them, and no investor who wants to be involved with a project will choose one where you'll be in the corner working on your own thing and he will only play a small role in the fun. (I wouldn't be surprised if helping startups from scratch IS like an adventure game to PG.)
And, actually, Yahoo! could actually buy you considering they are one of the top places for selling casual games. BigFishGames bought a developer in Europe after he came out with 2 or 3 hit games within 1 year, and called it BigFishGames Europe. In other words, the portals are buying developers who can actually create a quality game on a low budget, quickly and repeatedly. When they own the developer, they can put it on the front page and make a lot more profit, such as BigFishGames is doing with their Mystery series of games. But, some people have made a decent living (not millionaires, but livable).
If you want to create adventure games that use the mouse that are easy to get into and want to make about $8-$10 per sale on the portals and about $18 on your web site, go for it. Those are the kinds of games that people want which are also hard to clone, and hard to find a free flash game online to replace. You also have the advantage of creating some IP (character, names, trademarks) to use later, which is hard to do if you're just creating Bejeweled (and for which games will easily find flash games if they don't want to pay for the real versions.)
So, go for it, as long as you are focusing on creating an actual game as soon as possible, and not spending the next 10 months developing a framework for your future game, because that is pointless. Aveyond is not an adventure game but more like an RPG, but it was a good seller (supposedly) and made in Game Maker (which also supports old-school one-screen-at-a-time adventure games.) Just create some kind of an adventure game where you own the IP using Game Maker, then after you are a big success you can port it to XBOX 360 or the Mac. The key is to create a game, not a game framework.