There was a line from the rejection email:
"We realize this process is fraught with error. It's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email making fun of us; we want to learn from our mistakes."
Has anyone done that? If not, YCombinator picks the winners pretty well.
It is NOT socially acceptable to not attend college. It IS socially acceptable to not get funding for your startup. So what happens when someone wants to go to college but they don't have the money? They get loans, they work two jobs, they do what they have to do to make it happen b/c they will be socially rejected if they fail. The same is not the case for funding. If you are committed to your idea, treat funding like a college loan: Not optional. Once you get in this mindset you'll figure it out. You may not get a full ride at MIT (YC) but in state tuition + a TA job at U Mich isn't so bad either.
As of now nobody has commented on a sucessful YC reject. I think that is b/c YC applicants tend to be straight A students (blind generalization based on instinct.) Straight A students have other options that involve less social risk. I know of a number of successful entrepreneurs who were thrown out of / barely made it through college. Since they didn't have other options, they HAD to make it work. And since they had been failing their whole lives they've realized that failure is just someone else's or some organizations opionion about them. For good or for bad, they tuned those opionions out.
People need to realize that the currency of "failure" is just a bit of social rejection. Running your startup into the ground will not give you cancer. And a big fat 'F' on life's report card is just a sign that at least once, you weren't afraid to push the limits...
College is so aversive to me because all it does is prepare me to work for someone else, at a guaranteed salary of 55k per year (sixty by the time I graduate?). True failure for me will be taking a job as an Industrial Engineer. I can't think of anything I want to do less. But if I haven't become successful by the time I graduate from college and no one is funding me, I won't have much of a choice.
I'm running my current startup like a business. We're not seeking funding and we're growing very slowly. We have no costs so everything we make is profit. We haven't made any profit because we haven't actually sold anything but we'll get there eventually.
When I applied to Y Combinator, and was not accepted, I considered it an objective not met. I didn't think of it as failure, I didn't think of it as rejection. I simply made a decision about what I was going to do next.
If you think in terms of rejection and failure, it will be difficult to pick yourself up and try again, unless the semantics you attach to those words do not include notions of finality and personal worth.
Impossible to say without knowing what the selectees would've done on their own. A lot of the winners might have opted to stay in college, for example, if they hadn't been picked. Simply being selected is automatically going to influence the result -- having all that support behind you makes it more likely that you'll succeed.
There's a certain amount of being made, not born, so to speak; you might think of it as being a bit like the Spice Girls.
*Cough*
We didn't get in, everyone stayed in college, and no one devoted themselves to the project in the way that YC hackers do.
Plenty of successful technology companies have been started outside of YCombinator. In retrospect, it's kind of a funny question.
I've gained users in the past few months, but am nowhere near popularity.
Many of those rejected probably don't consider themselves startups, just working on side projects. No build-up of expectation.
I have every intention to continue if not accepted into the next YC round.
You're more likely to succeed if you openly declare your intentions to succeed.
And it's true. I'm not sure we'd be able to launch tomorrow if we hadn't posted our intention to. Now we have all your expectations to live up to, and it motivates us.
You will succeed if
1. You have a market
2. You service that market better than most or better
3. You can do what you are doing for years at a length. And then keep doing it some more without even thinking about it.
Y Combinator tends to fund companies that will be acquired, rather than become companies that displace existing huge corporations. Just a rule of thumb, of course, and there are a few that could run to IPO in three to five years if they don't get acquired (and a very few for whom that's actually the pretty firmly held goal).
Nonetheless, corporate America is a hundred+ years in the making. We're not going to take over with Web 2.0 features. You'd better start thinking bigger, much bigger, if that's your aspiration.
"Bluto's right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part."
This was a while ago and the startup still hasn't launched. I hope he succeeds at some point. The founder's idea is brilliantly disruptive and democratizes a multi-billion dollar industry we all take for granted.
It's hard to read "it's not the idea, it's the team" or "I don't invest in ideas, I invest in teams" and not want to prove someone wrong out of ego or passion/drive. It's difficult to appreciate the truth there without having realized it on your own, no matter how many times you hear that.