Ask News.YC: What are the most useful things Y Combinator provides its startups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask News.YC: What are the most useful things Y Combinator provides its startups?

36 pointspchristensen19 comments

Here's my list (in descending order):

1) exposure to investors at Demo Day (EDIT: exposure to the right people throughout the process)

2) guidance and mentoring (both from principals and alums)

3) forcing you into an intense, focused schedule

4) validation of your abilities and ideas

5) contacts and streamlining the legal/financial issues

6) free publicity

7) a few thousand dollars

Did I miss any? Anyone disagree with the order?

View on HN

Here's our list: http://ycombinator.com/about.html

I don't think Demo Day is the most important. Demo Day was a joke the first time (we just looked at the guest list, and there were 12 people), but Reddit and Loopt both came out of that batch. As well as Kiko, the predecessor of Justin.TV. So it doesn't seem that Demo Day is the active ingredient.

I think the most valuable things the average startup gets from YC are product advice, help in dealing with later stage investors, and the atmosphere/network created by all the other YC funded startups, which now comprises about 200 people.

I suppose by now the YC brand also confers some baseline legitimacy. Pretty much every VC firm will at least give you a meeting, every online pub write about you if you ask them, every startup law firm give you a deferred fee deal, etc.

Can someone elaborate more on product advice from YC (an example would be sweet)?

We heard some advice from the Digg/flickr guys and they said that it doesn't really matter what you write it in (just as long as code is manageable and your interface usable), just get it out there, and then iterate and optimize (because you'll have to change things later anyway).

#1 for me is on your list in indirect form:

The dinners with a bunch of equally intensely focused people.

Every single dinner we were exposed to something new that caused us to look at our product differently. I can point at about a dozen features in our product and tell you what interaction they sprung from. Google Analytics support was written while AT a dinner in response to something someone said earlier in the evening. Everything mobile in our product (quite a lot, at this point--alerts, mobile access, etc.) came from discussions with the guys from Tsumobi and Heysan. And the UI is still undergoing a massive transformation that started last year during those dinners.

So, for me, the other founders were the most valuable part of the experience.

SwellJoe, I checked your website and I like your web server administration tool. I think you need to partner with web hosting companies. I like to see http://slicehost.com offering this tool for their cutomers.

We are. Joyent is currently our largest provider. RimuHosting has just agreed to offer it (it'll show up in their shopping pages in the next couple of weeks). GridZones offers Virtualmin. There are quite a few others.

We'd love to have SliceHost on board. Next time you're talking to them, mention our name. It eases the conversation when we approach new hosts if they've been hearing about us from their customers (most know us from Webmin, but often don't grok what the difference between the two products).

This is what I think matters (in this order)

1) exposure to the right people (not just investors, and not just at demo day)

2) great product advice

3) a fast schedule and competitive environment that will make you work harder than you've ever worked before

That being said, YC mostly provides greater opportunities (and more of them), its still up to you to make the most of that.

The belief to take on a huge market and think you can win

You missed one of the biggest: the YC alumni network.

What's the deal with the schedule? I'm not understanding. I thought YC kind of let you do whatever you want during the week (with goals and progress checks, etc) and the biggest demands they placed on you were the weekly dinners and demo day.

There's no schedule in the sense of having to do specific things at specific times. The only scheduled thing is Demo Day, and even that's optional.

I think what he meant is that everyone tends to buckle down and work really hard. But it's the situation that makes them do that. You have a demo to around 130 (= practically all) top startup investors coming up in 10 weeks; you're surrounded by other people working hard; so you end up working hard yourself.

My order:

8, 3, 4, 2, 5, 1, 6, 7

where 8 is

8) Peer network. It makes you feel pressured to work, launch, and get investment. It also makes it seem almost normal. Like you're not crazy for doing this.

While I agree with your list, I would like to add that working side by side with professionals in the industry for which you are trying to get funding for could be the most valuable resource available. This allows you to gain an insight as to how a particular industry works as well as being able to network with the right people to help move you forward. Having the right team and the right people working along side you, can be a greater asset to any company wanting to achieve success. Without great people, there's no great success.

I think the biggest useful thing Y Combinator provides is the marketing/publicity at the start. As someone else mentioned, many online blogs will write about you, as you are a y combinator startup. Also I see a tendency of other yc startups promoting other startups (like justin.tv clickpass, disqus clickpass, etc...)

Moral support

pg's homecooking

I would guess that #3 is most important. Amazing what you can do when the pressure is on and the obstacles removed. I also like the "binaryness" of it. Perform and leverage the other 6. Don't perform and nothing else matters.

(The irony is that you don't need YC to do #3. You can do it yourself. So if you don't get into YC, do #3 anyway. It may not be as good as being part of YC, but I bet it would still be a great start.)

8) free tshirt :)

The first t-shirt is free, but the second will cost you your soul. :-)

The best chili I've ever had.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com