A Successful YC S13 Application

Agreed. The confidence and maturity it takes to make this kind of statement is a positive sign, and I'd bet the YC partners interpreted it as such.

I was working for the city but didn't have a computer or email. Brought my laptop to work but couldn't do all that much without Internet--couldn't access the network and no public wifi. Point was I got that through chatting with a bail bondsman. It's not the greatest hack in the world.

It's a subset of what we're doing, yes. We've focused on taking internal bank systems -- information, payments such as ACH, wires, bill pay, other products most people aren't aware of like virtual card numbers -- and presenting them as clean, RESTful APIs.

Also see https://plaid.io/ which is more directly going after Yodlee.

That's not a reason not to apply / work on it though. It's an ecosystem with a lot of space for innovation. Or you could come work with us!

And can everyone stop using '''triple single quotes''' to mark quotations. English isn't Python; they have different syntaxes.

Indeed. Sorry for the error. My point was merely to indicate orders of magnitude and I was using is as short-hand for the word "order", as you might use that term in a Fermi problem.

I agree. O(100s of billions) = O(1).

The common perception is that YC is very big on pedigree (top schools, serial founders, worked at top companies). They are known for having a prototype (they liked to call it patterns) of what is the ideal founding team.

500startups for example are willing to take more risks on people and look more deeply at the product if it has traction and a business model, even the founding team is unknown / international.

There's a lot of different investment thesis, which all make sense for different reasons.

It interesting because Dan and I are partially heavily motivated by the chip on our shoulder. My father was a mailman and my mother a waitress, etc. Its hard for us to imagine ourselves as "the man" although we pretty clearly are in a prima facie reading of our resumes.

Having said that, I do think their seems to be a much wider variance in the ages and experiences of YC founders than most people think. If I had to guess, the median age for our batch was likely 25/26 with a standard deviation of 3 years. Not 19/20 and I think that's been true for a long time.

There are also a ton of different education backgrounds. I'm not going to lie and say that there aren't a lot of people who went to Harvard and MIT, but there are also people who went to state schools or no college at all.

The short answer is that we basically know a ton of people both in financial technology and in the valley. If people know you, know you're a good person, and know you're looking for something specific they'll often help you.

Tons of people have been surprised by our success to be honest. We had a talk with a potential investor recently and we told him who we were working with at [big bank]. The potential investor was shocked - the gentlemen leading our project at [big bank] is in charge of a 10-digit-a-year business and is a hard man to find time with. But one of our lawyers, who is also an investor, introduced us. They are old friends. Banking innovation / payments / technology, etc, is a small world.

I would like to think that its overwhelmingly due to #2. It's a really articulate, I-know-what-the-fuck-I'm-talking-about explanation of a huge problem and market. Rest is icing IMO

    YC is slowly drifting away from its original mission.

I think that they tend to fund people who they think will have the highest chance of success. You end up with priorities like:

1. Previous successes

2. Company with traction

3. Employee at Stripe/Google/Apple/etc

4. Smart MIT/Harvard/Stanford student

5. Misc. high magnitude achievements

I think what you're seeing might be a higher number of 1-3 applying to YC, not leaving much room for 4 and 5. The four and fives who do get accepted are extraordinarily impressive.

Quoting http://blog.zencoder.com/2010/09/21/doing-y-combinator-in-yo...

Does YC accept founders older than 30?

Yes. And according to PG, age is neither a penalty nor a bonus. He writes: “I don’t actually know the numbers. We don’t keep track. But I know there haven’t been any with founders in their 50s, and only 2 or 3 with founders in their 40s or their teens. Most founders are in their 20s or 30s. Completely guessing, I’d say 15-20% have founders in their 30s.” (That was a year ago, so the numbers may have changed.)

Basically, the age distribution of YC companies is pretty close to the age distribution of applicants. More YC founders are 25 than 35, but more 25-year-olds apply than 35-year-olds.

(Paul has an essay[3] where he says the ideal range to start a startup is 22-38. As far as I know, that isn’t a rule, just a suggestion. YC has accepted plenty of people younger than 22, and at least a few over 38.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=809885 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1642525 [3] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

Which is to say, there were a bunch of people in our batch that were over 25. 25 might have been the median age of founders in the batch.

Definitely cracked a smile when I got to the "who do you fear" answer --

I used to work for one of the large banks on a commercial operations team. It was one of the most bogged down, regulated things I have ever witnessed in my life.

This product will end up doing extremely well; then I see the regulators and major financial institutions going "hey wait a minute, these guys are making too much money, let's fix that"

Best of luck to the team -- I think you're onto something huge, should make the speed bumps worth it.

We certainly were not as far along on demo day as we (or the YC partners!) would have liked. That's the reality of big enterprise sales. Our customers have incredibly long procurement and sales cycles. We aimed to get signed LOIs by demo day and instead we got very serious negotiations.[1]

We spent the summer building the product to support a heavy amount of sales and business development work. We put together a prototype (we essential built the platform against something we call "fake financial") where we can use the terminal and some simple application to show banks and bank customers how easy it would be with our platform-as-a-service.

[1] Whats important here is that you can't bullshit investors. The proof is in the pudding. We had to account for where we were with every potential customer, who we were speaking to at the companies (investors might end up knowing them!), what terms were discussed, etc.

Ultimately they're very different businesses. Card payments and banking are related but not directly. The truth is that all I know from Stripe about the card networks, card risk, etc, has proven not useful in commercial banking. I couldn't even use their IP if I wanted to (!) and they know that as well as I do. If I started a payments processor I'd be in deep trouble. But a different part of finance, with a different business model...no one seems that worried.

We were the only two people in the same two classes.

The real answer about staying in touch is the internet -- yay AIM, the best communication tool of 2003. In reality though we didn't live that far apart in New Jersey so we could hang out from time-to-time.

I can't quite tell if you're calling me a phony or yourself one. If you're call me phony then I'm sorry I come off that way. I have a lot of personal and professional flaws (far too long to enumerate here) but I don't think a lack of genuineness is one of them.

If, on the other hand, you're saying you don't want to apply because you feel phony, well, then, that's hogwash. Impostor syndrome is deep in most YC founders, in most ambitious people, and in Silicon Valley more generally. If you have an idea that you're passionate about then you should apply.