Hacker News Reader

Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

Kudos to you for doing this, but just thinking about having 70 intro meetings in a single week makes me want to curl up in a ball in my closet.

View on HN

It was super painful tbh. I am so glad I had 0 meetings the following week. It took a bit to rebound.

But honestly much nicer to just get it done and move on.

Looking at your calendar, you had no time for bathroom breaks, lunch, time to reflect & recharge, etc. I would expect by the end of the day you were pretty tired. While you probably got the structure of the meeting pretty down pat by the end, don't you think your ability to evaluate may have been affected by the number of meetings you were taking?

Yes 100%. By the end of the week especially.

Probably not the perfect setup. In retrospect, I should have baked in some breaks.

I didn't expect such a response and suddenly looked at my calendar and was like....ooooo dang. :)

Why not whittle down 50% of the meetings? Sure you probably can’t guess who to cut out but you could have done 10 meetings, figure out what works for you and cut out the rest accordingly? Good idea still, I’m interested in doing something similar. Do you recommend any methods?

Yeah - I considered this. There were probably 10% of people I could tell that wouldn't lead anywhere.

Some of it was trying to not allow my own biases to cloud things. Some of it was hoping to offer a hand up to others who may not get as much attention. Some of it was wanting to just run an experiment and see what happened.

I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me.

The other thing is to pay attention to why you didn't like a given cofounder/idea. I identified a handful of industries that just were not for me (hadn't realized this consciously previously)

> I think the best method is finding a good community to start from. As I alluded to, YC matching has not done this for me.

My glean from the article was that Cambrian has a group for this, but they seem to be focused on fintech -- do you know if there's a similar high-quality community for biotech?

I wish I did, but it's not my domain of focus.

I've heard good things about OnDeck, but I'm not sure how much biotech is there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com