How Y Combinator Started (2012) | Hacker News Reader

How Y Combinator Started (2012)

paulgraham.com

222 pointsyarapavan33 comments

Always makes me tingle to think back about this. A friend and I had submitted for the very first batch — we had a working prototype built using Mozilla XUL of a “FileMaker for the web” (YC later funded something similar-ish — today, the closest would be AirTable..?). We had even wired the server to send us an SMS whenever someone opened the page (it probably emailed <phonenumber>@<carrier>, there was no Twilio back then).

The first YC form had a question about “do you have a working demo (bonus points if you do)”. We were confident the demo would be at least checked out.

You know where this is going. We didn’t get in, and never received any SMS. Years later, I saw PG at an event and asked him about it — he said that somebody other than him might have reviewed our application and regretted that this happened. That may have been a polite way of saying that we weren’t ready or the idea wasn’t good enough — who knows.

All good in the end, but definitely a “what if” moment that I’ve kept from back then...! :)

Did you end up doing something with your prototype?

No. We started doing more general web “consulting” (i.e. work for hire) which then morphed into doing web mapping sites/applications (“mashups”!) which became a startup specialized in this field.

Having worked a bit with AirTable, I do find that it fills this really great and interesting niche of diy table/database systems.

I was writing code at ESPN two hours down the road from Cambridge when the summer founders program launched. I had been following pg and his essays for a while and thought he was the real deal. So I tried to convince a co-worker to apply with me as we were batting around business ideas. He wasn’t up for it and I didn’t end up applying.

I don’t have many professional regrets, but not applying is one of them!

FWIW, I don't know how likely it is that any team that applied would've been selected, anyway.

I think it was that first summer founders event, when a team of four of us Lisp-ish hackers in Cambridge/Boston applied. We were mostly young (mostly early-mid 20s, though I think one guy was 30+), but already had a little experience, and university affiliations like PG might value, had done some early Web stuff already, and PG had talked about Lisp and hackers and such, and at least I was ready to go all-in on a startup with subsistence funding... so I thought we had a good chance, but I don't recall we even heard back.

PG might've already been looking for only college kids. Although we were young, some of us started working/school unusually young, and might've looked older on paper than we were. Or maybe it looked like we already had career starts we might not want to risk. And/or probably our proposal sucked badly, because I don't remember a single thing about what it was, and there weren't so many VC courtship conventions to tell us what to do then.

(Incidentally, the young thing was something PG was pushing around that time (e.g., encouraging people to interrupt college to do a startup, when they supposedly have few obligations, and perhaps are very malleable). But I don't recall ever hearing of favoring hiring 20yos in software or Internet industry before. What I'd seen in industry was both skill and experience being valued, and a good amount of meritocracy that didn't care about things like university degrees if you could do good work. It was only later that I'd start to hear things like a certain dotcom CEO saying publicly that they only wanted 20yos, and the industry-wide institutionalization of hiring processes that appeared designed to select for currently or fresh out of undergrad, preferably from Stanford. PG seemed immensely influential on startups, perhaps even moreso then than in new ideas now, and I wonder how much the current recent-grad emphasis is because of ideas he first planted.)

I wish that early startup team had gotten funding. With that initial disappointment, we each ended up doing other things. I was totally ready to rapidly build out innovative and working dotcom tech, like not many startups then could; just didn't know how to get funding for living expenses and servers&pipes. Thankfully, many years later, I'm working in a fresh startup team, of very skilled and nice people, all working on something constructive.

I love the photos from the early days, especially of the first batch. Humble beginnings, great future ahead!

https://web.archive.org/web/20170609041739/http://old.ycombi...

I think it's nearly impossible for many of us to read that essay and not think back to "what was I doing in March 2005 and what would have been different if I'd heard about and pulled the trigger to join that first batch?"

That's right along the line of what if I had entered the right lottery numbers or bought Apple when it was low. You can regret any decision you make in life with hindsight.

True. Doesn’t stop humans from acting human though.

It might stop them though. Can't say categorically that it doesn't.

If I am feeling down about not joining YC 15 years back, and someone says 'why don't you feel bad about not buying bitcoin 5 years back, or GOOG 20 years back, or AAPL 40 years back, or X Y years back', I'll soon realize a pattern that I can feel sad about ANYTHING if I put my mind to it

And since it's our natural state to feel happy, and not feel sad, above knowledge might stop me from acting 'human' (depressed) over inevitable/infinite things.

Many people ask me how I knew about YC back in early 2007. It was Founders at Work for me. It took me a few years to get my hands on a copy of the book (Amazon didn't deliver in Romania back then), but the content was incredibly useful and completely original.

Reddit also had a play in it. At the time it was the competing Digg Upstart, or that's how everyone saw it. I distinctly remember a blog post after Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast, where the founders said they went out for ramen and for the first time ever it didn't matter who picked up the check at the end of the meal. That pushed me to apply to the program.

It might have been the early days looking back -- but YC seemed like a big thing even back then if you were into the startup scene. Between Reddit, Stripe and Auctomatic (Founded by Harj Taggar and Patrick Collison, which to me meant european founders are welcome in the program) you could sense that everyone involved with the group was continuing the stories I read about in Founders at Work.

> If we'd had enough time to do what we wanted, Y Combinator would have been in Berkeley. That was our favorite part of the Bay Area. But we didn't have time to get a building in Berkeley.

Huh, I didn't know Berkeley was the place they originally wanted to headquarter YC at. That definitely would have been very interesting had it happened, especially given the proximity to such a strong research university.

Looking back, it really stands out that YC did all that it did with starting with only $200K.. and it was more about how execution happened.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3711008

We were in that first California batch for our old company Inkling Markets. I remember going through our interview and being asked very few questions about our actual idea, and instead Paul asking a bunch of questions about a political blog I was writing at the time. Being consultants at the time working for big companies we walked out thinking what the hell was that and questioning if we even wanted to make this leap if we were offered. But that night at 9pm as we were aimlessly wandering around Cambridge waiting for a call back (or not) we decided we'd do it if they called. "We want to invest in you. You have 5 minutes to decide if you want to come. If we don't hear back from you by then, we'll assume you're not interested." We called back, flew home, quit our consulting jobs and two months later drove out from Chicago to live in a rented house in Cupertino.

We did YC again in 2011 and it was kind of a shit show, but I'll never forget my time out there Jan - Apr in 2006. Probably still one of the most productive, eye opening experiences I've ever had in my entire life.

I actually remember when pg made the announcement for YC. I'd been following his essays and was quite impressed with him as I tried to figure out what I'd been doing wrong with my previous startups. I thought then it was a clever idea but never imagined it would blow up like it did.

Do you have link to original announcement?

Unrelated: should a site like this be running ssl/https? What’s the case for not? It’s certainly not for a lack of skills and this is not meant to be a dig, just thought maybe I’m missing something and safari made sure to tell me that it was “not secure”.

Mine is running HTTPS. Even when I try to force it to use HTTP, it redirects me to HTTPS. I am on Chrome.

Chrome on Android says: "This site can’t provide a secure connection paulgraham.com uses an unsupported protocol. ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH"

Edit: This is when I try to load https://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html

Sorry. I thought you were talking about Hacker News. Maybe it doesn't require HTTPS because there is no transmission of any sensitive data.

It's not just about sensitive data, your ISP can easily inject some crap into the website if it's not on HTTPS for example.

(it happened in the past many times)

Here's an example; https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/157828/my-isp-b...

If possible change isp to another provider. If they are doing this I can imagine what else they are doing in private with your traffic.

Not my ISP. I’m mostly on VPN anyway :)

Now that's bad. I never thought of that possibility.

There's really no reason to secure a site if it's just informational or someone's blog. The worst that's going to happen in this case is someone might be able to see the blog sent to you in plain text, which is no big deal, because it's public anyway. Now if it has a form asking you to enter personal information or credit card numbers, you would definitely want SSL.

That's not entirely true though: plaintext doesn't only allow snooping but also man-in-the-middle attacks such as injecting malicious code or ads.

*How Y combinator started according to pg at that time thinking about writing a blog post to people that will be read even in a few years.

meaning:

This is not really the truth, about how y combinator started in case you want to clone "their secret formula" based upon this blog post.

There rarely is a secret formula. It's some combination of seeing something others aren't at the time, having access to resources and a good enough execution.

Having access to KFC's secret recipe isn't enough to build KFC. Similarly, Paul Graham doesn't have some big secret to safeguard.

The "secret formula" probably looks something like this:

Be rich. Be well connected. Invest wisely. Be lucky.

Know someone with a huge location in mountainview that you can use as a backup to a sf location.

You can't really recreate this kind of company anyway. What started as a unique idea has become a viable business by creating a unique set of networks and cultures. It's not really about the idea anymore, they've got capital and inertia.

Good luck copying that.

Maybe not Y Combinator as it is now. But you sure can copy the way they invested in the beginning. Not every idea YC is funding is a huge success I assume. and not every team they don't invest in will fail. So there should be a lot of opportunities there. That is where all the other accelerators step in. Given how hard it is to get seed funding in Germany the space is not yet fully occupied it seems.

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