Open-Sourcing My YC Application (Athens Research, W21)
hardpivot.substack.com
hardpivot.substack.com
A mention for those who helped a bit on the application as a token of appreciation would had been nice...
1. We had revenue, meaning we weren't afraid to charge. Many first founders are afraid of charging, and there is step-wise more validation having $100/month than $0.
2. We had a product that my partners could actually download and use.
3. "You seemed young and hungry. And I like young and hungry." - Michael Seibel
Unfortunately, I don't have the video of how our actual interview went. I think that would've been very informative too.
Following on, how did your interview go and what do you think made you stand out there? (or if you write a blog post on that separately I’d be very interested)
1) He asked something about if I was going to find a co-founder or not. I think I said that we started getting traction pretty fast without one and I wasn't going to wait for a co-founder to appear -- cofounders are not something to force. I think this is how he observed that I was "young and hungry." 2) He asked about why I thought open-source was a key differentiator. I said it wasn't, it was just good marketing, and thought you can build the best product without being open-source. I think this turned out to be true. Some arguments for open-source are that it is better for extensibility, privacy, and community. Obsidian does a great job of these 3 things, arguably the best in the networked note-taking app category, despite being closed-source.
I remember both of these questions actually causing Michael and the other partners on the call to pause and think about what I said, because it wasn't necessarily what they expected. Expected answers to these questions might be: "I'm looking for a co-founder" and "Open-source is better because X/Y/Z" given that I had marketed Athens as "open-source Roam" for the first 1 year and throughout YC.
I thought I bombed the interview because I remember being pretty shocked and speechless when they gave me a call saying I got in.
> Shout out to Syrus Akbury (W19), Ian Tien (S12), and Taariq Lewis (S15) for encouraging me to apply and helping me with my application way back when :)
But seriously, thank you so much Syrus! I was thinking about you 3 the whole time while I wrote the post, hoping it would help someone else like how you helped me!
Let’s keep the chain going!
https://twitter.com/AthensResearch/status/159113849137912217...
Basically, looks like they wasted a lot of time building collaborative knowledge graph features, and then realized no one really wanted them. By that point there were mature single-user alternatives and they were no longer competitive.
Now there are even more single-player tools, they are all still competing with each other, and implementing the same features, i.e. wrappers around GPT-3. Super happy with the bet we made :)