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Comment by tschesnok | Hacker News Reader

Wow. In the footnote they mention they shut down right after demo day? Perhaps I'm old school but I always had a huge feeling of indebtedness to my investors.

So here they lose all the money within 3 months and write a scathing review to boot?

Is it not a two way street?

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That's why we did it, instead of spending money dragging the decision or even taking more money and spending them while building mediocre company, we wind up operations in a shortest term, and returned everything, to minimize damage for investors. We even cancelled the checks which were about to get wired.

How to perceive it—is up to you, we sleep well because we did the best we could in that situation.

Startups are hard, and I should not have been so critical.

Everything looks bad and impossible before product market fit. How did you know you could not pivot? Did YC agree with you that this was the best decision? I'm really curious as to how that conversation went.

You sound like a very self-reflected founder to admit this!

Wish more YC founders could learn from you

Typically and hopefully they would have to return the money that they did not spend, and it's better for the investors to get that portion of their money back than to have founders run it into the ground.

I wouldn't describe the review as "scathing", although it's certainly titled as though it would be. The parts where the author offers the most critical complaints seem to be particular to their experience as a startup based in Singapore, while most of the YC companies are in SFBA or recently NYC. And in that, their feedback may be more useful for YC or others than a generic story from someone on YC's home turf.

They also seem to be thanking YC for basically inducing them to shut down before they had lost everything. Here it is more contradictory to what they wrote (3/5) about YC as a "school", because they apparently gained quite a bit from the advisement, even if it wasn't in the way they initially hoped. Though, I can certainly understand being a little unhappy with the bearer of bad news, even though we've all been taught not to be.

next post will be: how i got into YC, shut down my company, and then added x subscribers to my substack by simply trash talking YC

Positive Review: "Upstanding fellow, pillar of the community"

Negative Review: "Degenerate, bad mindset, red flags everywhere"

>> I always had a huge feeling of indebtedness to my investors

With early stage, low capital startups, relationship is more like an employer.

This is answered in the disclaimer at the top of the post:

> YC are the ones who teach how important is negative feedback for improvement.

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