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I applied as a solo woman technical founder with a product that is already close to ramen profitability. Going in, I thought this already made me an outlier - especially because I'll be able to tap my network and hire a founding team with some cash in the bank.
The tepid response during YC interviews was jarring. I know the panels are an exhausting marathon, but my group partners acted like they'd rather be anywhere else than talking to me. I got the impression that maybe I'd been invited to fill a quota, and the Zoom interview was just going through the motions.
The whole experience made me sit down and reverse-engineer the actions needed to hit 10-15k MRR by Q2 2023. With that amount of cash flow, I can reach out to angels directly. Just 6 angels in for 30k/1% party round is 180k @ 3M post.
If you're a woman with a similar story, I'm an angel investor (B2B, Saas, manufacturing). Reach out (email in profile).
Angel investor is usually defined as a high-net-worth individual who provides financial backing for small startups or entrepreneurs.
With that in mind, if your product is at or near profitability, I'd have imagined that wouldn't been a good fit for YC?
Your net worth is around 2M, you burn around 50k/year to eat, sleep, and be merry. You could retire tomorrow, but you weren't put on this Earth to just be idle.
Let's say (hypothetically) you worked somewhere that just announced they're laying off 10% of their workforce.
You want to make an offer to 2-3 product + infra engineers who were laid off. You know they do excellent work, and they're a god damn joy to be around.
However, you need at least 6 months of payroll, health insurance premiums, and incidentals fully liquid to extend those offers. Ideally you'd have 8-12 months banked - because you care.
Your startup is "Ramen profitable" - that means you're making around 7k/month revenue to cover 2-5k expenses. If you start saving 100% of profits NOW you can afford 1 of those engineers in (checks notes) just under 8 years!
What's your next move?
nice
> Your startup is "Ramen profitable" - that means you're making around 7k/month revenue to cover 2-5k expenses. If you start saving 100% of profits NOW you can afford 1 of those engineers in (checks notes) just under 8 years! What's your next move?
Offer the engineers meaningful equity rather than the one or two points they might ordinarily expect.
The app stack is a mix of Python, Rust, Typescript deployed to a single-board computer like Raspberry Pi or Rock Pi.
New features are released monthly, via a rolling release embedded Linux distro based on Yocto/Poky (PrintNanny OS).
First of all customers will need a physical device so you have to figure out shipping. Second, the RPi puts a limit on your computation. If you ever want a bigger and better model, you’re out of luck.
Why not just make it into an iPhone/Android app? Either do the processing locally or use the app as a thin client for a SaaS ($$$). Hell, people are running stable diffusion on an iPhone these days.
If it’s an app, people can easily try it out, and if it works for them you have a new customer overnight. Plus you don’t have to deal with pain in the ass RPi supply chain issues. Maybe it already exists as an app in which case ignore everything I said.
So personally what I would do is spend $10k porting to a mobile ecosystem and go back to YC saying you need cash for a couple mobile devs and maybe a temporary designer. If you’re comfortable doing the ML yourself you can save on that too.
And a cliff? Nobody does cliffs these days after big tech axed them.
I wouldn't bother with an accelerator largely because I know I wouldn't find a social fit, and the informal connections are so much of the value prop. If YC had 25% women, they'd get to 40% pretty quickly. But so long as they're <5%, it's going to asymptotically approach 0%.
Also I'm confident that biases would factor into not only YC selection, but also (and more importantly) the investors who traditionally work with YC companies, since they just don't see women outside of "fem-tech" and fashion, in part because that's how YC selects.
My perspective may be as much a product of my pattern recognition of consistently having to deal with sexism as it is the valley being sexist, but either way I'm just done with it.
It seems quite reductive to make some polarising statements based on seeing male faces in a founders directory.
I just happen to be one of them, and I worked my way into the top 1% of software engineers (by salary) in Silicon Valley. I've spent a lot of time wondering: how did this happen? How many more people out there just like me, and how do I invest in them NOW?
Here's a podcast that does a great job of explaining how PC advertising in the 80s/90s and onwards resulted in the current abysmal number of women CS graduates (in the US / English-speaking countries especially).
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/07/1141358586/women-coders-progr...
Yes?
"I just happen to be one of them, and I worked my way into the top 1% of software engineers (by salary) in Silicon Valley. I've spent a lot of time wondering: how did this happen? How many more people out there just like me, and how do I invest in them NOW?"
My wife is an IT consultant (frontend), the most recent customer actively asked for women developers so both of the women in the company got the job directly without any interviews (they had other gigs at the time). The IT consultant company is making bank, she is not (happened to me too so I switched industry). So maybe start an IT consultant company? Seems to be quite the market for it.
I used to run a WordPress services business before SquareSpace/Wix commoditized the space.
If your wife decides to start an IT consulting company, tell her to shoot me an email.
As much as we glorify technical founders, a CTO is still an employee.
YC has an investment thesis that fixates on early technical talent, but I think software production is basically a commodity in 2023 (and onwards).
Here's an example of me generating an AsyncApi schema with ChatGPT (similar to OpenAPI / Swagger, but for systems built around distributed events/msgs). https://twitter.com/grepLeigh/status/1604935357832654848?t=X...
In a year or two, I'll probably be able to build a production micro-service by dictating to an LLM. That'll be the execution tool of choice for a Founder doesn't have much coding exp, but has 10-15+ years of line of business experience.
I say all this as someone who thought they'd be a CTO and has depended on software to put food on the table for 15 years.
Do males take more chances?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267515
I wouldn't call it rolling the dice though. Starting a business is a calculated way to continue compounding my wealth all while doing something that I love and that I believe will be important in my lifetime.
I'm curious though about the business plan going forward though (after the beta). My assumption would be that PrintNanny is currently targeting hobbyists and smaller 3d printing services.
I say smaller, because I assume that companies like Shapeways either already have something similar or would build their own if you tried to charge enough. (E.g., for $XM/yr they could hire multiple engineers to work on it full time).
Is the angle to expand laterally into more manual monitoring opportunities? (ShopNanny?) Go deeper? Is this market bigger than people think?
My target market is SMB manufacturers in the US and Germany. My ideal SaaS customer has 10-15 employees and 5M in annual revenue, around 50% coming from a mix of services and government contracts.
The United States is ramping up domestic manufacturing, since the pandemic revealed weakness in "just in time" supply chains.
Automation/AI-assisted production is the only way to make the unit economics work though. Picture Zapier, but laser-focused on automating service/production tasks.
Here's a rundown of the public-private programs committing resources to replacing imported parts with domestic 3D printed parts. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
The second line of business I want to add in 2023 is a white-labeled PrintNanny appliance, with a SaaS sub. A few 3D printer manufacturers have reached out to me and are interested in white-labeling PrintNanny for their large format printers, which retail for 5-10k/unit. This will give me access to trusted/mature distribution networks while I'm building the business's credibility.
I've talked to 3D printer manufacturers who've tried to build their own stuff in house, since the margins of software (90%+) are VERY attractive to a hardware biz with margins around 30%. The tl;dr is:
1) 3D printer manufacturers are only willing to invest in in-house software for their hardware, but most manufacturing shops use like 10-20 different pieces of hardware from 5+ vendors. No one wants to spend money supporting their competitor's hardware.
2) Shapeways (consumer and pro-sumer on-demand printing) is not where the money is.
Compare to 2D printing: the overhead of print-on-demand t-shirts is not an attractive investment. Shapeways is the Rush Order Tees Dot Com of 3D printing.
The REAL money in 3D printing comes from companies who are manufacturing drone parts for the US gov, misc plastics for OEM and after-market automotive industry, satellites, commercial plumbing, Ag Tech. Ask someone who works at John Deere their ballpark budget for domestic manufactured parts.
The next 10 years of plastics and metal additive manufacturing on US soil are going to be important, and the stuff sci fi nerds like me used to dream electric dreams about
I'm curious if you perceive white-labeling as a stepping stone or a reasonable destination. That is, it seems like you'd prefer for customers to buy directly from you, once you're ready for it. Precisely because of the diversity of vendors problem: you don't want them to think of the PrintNanny appliance/service as being from FormLabs or Inkbit or anybody else, you want them to know "We have our printers and then we have our PrintNanny". Right?
Out of extremely high stakes games, my understanding is this has always been male dominated. So you’d have to first take the prerequisite ratio (for instance if CS degree, it’d be ~19% women, in the US) and then multiply by some risk taking factor, perhaps by comparing to other ventures in domains with 50-50 to get some form of baseline.
I mean hell, we don’t even know the ratio of applicants.
We'd have to see applications by male / female to distill any type of bias. Even then it would be shaky, albeit often-parroted, logic.