Sadly, we did not make it either. Since I don't have a blog, I'll just say a few things here...
Basically, we did everything we could on our end:
-Had a pretty good demo. We spent a few months working on it part-time and we had the entire thing up and running with enough features for it to be roughly usable and we had some nice mock-ups of the future stuff we wanted to put in. I even showed them that TechCrunch featured one of the UI components (that was released as a standalone widget) done by our UI guy.
-we prepared very well. We met with a few people from the local startup community (organizers of DemoCamp, a CEO and CTO of a local startup, etc) and had them pick apart our pitch. They did a very good job and brought up a lot of concerns which we worked out. People I emailed beforehand said to expect a lot of questions at the interview and to think on your feet, but because we had already gone through this 3 times with the local people, none of the questions during the interview were new to us and we had decent answers.
So why didn't we get accepted? Well, there were simply better teams around that day. The email from pg did give two reasons, but to be honest, they were pretty flaky. The first was the community aspect (ie, it depended on user generated content) and the second our planned revenue stream. We had good answers to these ready since we expected they'd be raised during the interview and plenty of previous YC startups had overcome the same problems. The way I see it, if pg's philosophy is "build something nice people want to use, then worry about the money" and he rejects you because of revenue concerns, then it's basically a nice way of saying "Sorry, I just liked the other teams better"
Of course this illustrates a one of the downsides of the whole startup thing. A lot of the things you do in life are pretty deterministic: if you spend 1hr/day learning Spanish, you'll know it well sooner or later, if you spend 1hr/day working out, you'll increase your stamina or muscles or whatever you're working on. If you work 1hr/day on a startup up.. well, its probabilistic, so all you're doing is tilting the odds in your favour, but you're never guaranteed anything - be it progress or success or whatever. So all the work on the app and all of the preparation for the demo/interview was for naught.
Anyway... it'd be a shame to throw so much work away, so we'll probably work on it a bit more, then release it as a side project or something. At least have a decent project to put on future resumes or whatever.
We got rejected last year too. It would be nice to be with YC but, over the last year, we found ways of funding ourselves and changed our business plan. We continue to look for great advice - which is often forth coming in videos, forums etc and networking opportunities.
YC gives -
1. Advice/guidance
2. A little money
3. Networking Opportunities
4. A high pressure environment to get the best out - quick.
Except for #3, we have substitutes for all others. And #3 is picking up too.
What were you planning on doing when the first VC you pitched to rejected you? Seriously, take the rejection, and channel that into drive. Prove them wrong. Drop them a politely smug mail when you do your IPO. :-)
As YC grows it's invevitable that they, like every investment group, are going to pass on something big, and I think the good folks running YC would be the first to admit that.
Thanks for posting. But on your probabilistic/deterministic thought, you did get something out of the startup experience. After all, working out one hour per day can make you more fit, but doesn't guarantee you'll make the team on the first tryout.
Working out is a bell curve thing, whereas startups and wealth and some other things like that are exponential. The fastest sprinter in the world can probably run...what...2, 3, 4 times as fast as I can? But the wealthiest guy in the world is worth many orders of magnitude more than I am, which is exponential, not a bell curve distribution.
Working at a normal company, doing a more or less normal job is more along the bell curve - you can make pretty good money as a top software guy somewhere, but (options aside), you're never going to get that lucky break and make zillions. On the other hand, you might well make more than the startup guy, if he spends a year working on his own thing, 'for free', and then fails.
You make a very good point. I really wasn't looking at it from the perspective of money, but rather the adventure and challenge. (It's probably a coping mechanism, because if I looked at my startup as trying to make zillions I would be constantly depressed.)
We were also among the group that were invited for a interview - but received at the end a rejection e-mail. As graduating college seniors, we had banked a lot on pursuing our startup idea. I spurned a offer to work at a blue chip company that would offer full-rides and time off for grad school in CS; my partner for the YCombinator application decided to skip his final presentation in a major class taught by his thesis advisor (effectively garnering an incomplete mark on his transcript and less-than-favorable reception for his future grad school recommendations) for our presentation.
We certainly do not blame Paul Graham for our setbacks. Our motto had always been, "you win some, and you lose some." We won some when we received an invitation to Mountain View. We lost some when we received a rejection e-mail from PG afterwards. But then, we won some more, when we decided to take the free advice offered by PG (think bona fide corporate consulting) and go ahead with our startup idea anyways. Thanks to YCombinator, we have learned a lot from our trip to Cali and our first presentation to VC's, that we are going to take away and put to use,
- The Silicon Valley is just a place. Coming from a sleepy college town on the East Coast, we relished the idea of coming to the tech mecca where everything came together. But driving down San Jose/Pal Alto on $4/gallon reminded me of the suburban sprawl/commercial park/new development of Washington D.C/Boston/Philly; riding the $12/one way VTA light rail and BART and witnessing scores of IT workers getting off at Cisco Way reminded me of the scenes of my arriving for work at BigCo, back in Connecticut. But I was reminded that unlike those around me, I didn't have a ID badge, all I had was my idea and the thrill of following through or failing with my idea. Being Silicon Valley did not dazzle me with its "glitz," but my idea was still exciting to me.
- Doing startup's sucks, in the "conventional sense". As a college student, you can't help but compare yourself with your peers; I secretly maintained a secretive competitive streak with my friends, who will be going to med school/law school/wall street firms. While I have been outwardly conceding that they will be obscenely rich soon in comparison to my "poor" startup-wanabe self, I was hoping that getting accepted into YCombinator would put me ahead of my lame corporate-sellout friends. As an result, I poured a lot of time in writing the application and preparing our presentation. Now that we have been rejected, I relish of having the opportunity to once again, sit in my school's computer lab - late at night, coding away.
- How little rejections matter. We were heartbroken when we initially read the e-mail from PG on Saturday evening. But the next day when we woke up, I and my partner went our respective way's for more startup job interview's we had lined up for our trip to California. On our flight back home, we discussed how we could address on our own, the valid concerns that PG had brought up regarding our startup. When we got back to Connecticut, I fired off a e-mail to my mentor for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) that my plans for VC funding fell through, and that I will be able to work on my GSoC project full time during the summer (Any GSoC people here?). During the course of my writing this, my partner in crime caught up with me in the computer lab and showed me some of his plans for the back-end of next iteration for our startup website.
I've just realized how lucky I am, and how much the trip to Mountain View was worth all the time and troubles I went through.
Your last paragraph strongly suggests to me that you were rightly rejected.
Here's the last paragraph:
Anyway... it'd be a shame to throw so much work away, so we'll probably work on it a bit more, then release it as a side project or something. At least have a decent project to put on future resumes or whatever.
Translation: "Because one VC firm rejected us, I...suppose...I can still use the incipient startup as resume filler. Or whatever""
That's a loser attitude if there ever was one, and I'm going to guess that VCs look for it.
"That's a loser attitude if there ever was one, and I'm going to guess that VCs look for it."
I'd imagine VCs look for it too, but it's important to remember that what people say and what they do often have no correlation, and it works both ways. There're some folks that are all "rah, rah, we're going to take over the world" and then they crumble at the first difficulty. Then there are others that are "well, maybe it'll work and maybe it won't, but if it doesn't it'll look great on a resume, so I think I might give it a try, at least for now", then they keep at it for 8 years and exit for millions of dollars.
I'm reminded of James Hong's "Happiness = Reality - Expectations, so I do my best to keep expectations low" post. Everybody chided him for being so blase and said that if he expected to fail, of course he would. But if you look at what James has actually done, it's clear that he hasn't failed, he just keeps his expectations low as a trick to stay motivated.
There's a funny disconnect that you can pull off though that I find quite useful. You can still be determined that you're going to take over the world without actually expecting it. It doesn't make much logical sense, but it's a pretty convenient way to approach things. From what I can tell this mindset is pretty prevant in i.e. sports teams.
Here's a way to avoid those slips: read the comment out loud and pretend you were talking to the person directly, with a straight face (since you're actually typing it, you don't get to say it with a smile and a laugh).
What you call a "loser attitude" is what I'd call being realistic. A lot of people get a little too caught up in the hype and hubris associated with startups, but its important to look at issues from both the positive and negative sides.
For example, you can take a rejection from YC and say "Gee, we got this far, there's something to this idea, we should definitely keep working on it" and you'd be right. But you can also say "Gee, we couldn't get into with YC their (relatively) lower standards, how are we ever gonna impress an Angel/VC?" and you'll also be correct.
So I'm just trying to be honest here. YC would have provided a great vote of confidence needed to put in a monumental effort into this (ie, quit jobs, take huge financial risk etc). Now we'll keep working on it and put it out, and maybe that vote of confidence will come in the form of enough users and growth to convince us to really get into this. Or maybe we've been wrong all along, all the criticisms correct and the thing will fizzle out.
But mindless hyperbole of the "we'll keep going no matter what and change the world" does little but stroke your ego, which I personally hate.
"But you can also say "Gee, we couldn't get into with YC their (relatively) lower standards, how are we ever gonna impress an Angel/VC?" and you'll also be correct."
I would argue that YC standards are, and can be, higher. They see a lot more companies each year than most VCs. They can't see as much of the potential of the founders because it is so early in the process...but they have a lot more to choose from, so they're able to pick the ones that seem about to explode from excitement about their business and seem smart enough and dedicated enough to deliver it.
pg has said that investors (including him) invest in businesses that are like a train leaving the station, whether the investor is on-board or not. Investors hate to miss a success, even more than they hate to bet on a failure, so if you aren't convinced of your own success with or without one particular investor, you aren't what they are looking for. It seems to me that you probably weren't convincing on this point.
Basically, we did everything we could on our end:
-Had a pretty good demo. We spent a few months working on it part-time and we had the entire thing up and running with enough features for it to be roughly usable and we had some nice mock-ups of the future stuff we wanted to put in. I even showed them that TechCrunch featured one of the UI components (that was released as a standalone widget) done by our UI guy.
-we prepared very well. We met with a few people from the local startup community (organizers of DemoCamp, a CEO and CTO of a local startup, etc) and had them pick apart our pitch. They did a very good job and brought up a lot of concerns which we worked out. People I emailed beforehand said to expect a lot of questions at the interview and to think on your feet, but because we had already gone through this 3 times with the local people, none of the questions during the interview were new to us and we had decent answers.
So why didn't we get accepted? Well, there were simply better teams around that day. The email from pg did give two reasons, but to be honest, they were pretty flaky. The first was the community aspect (ie, it depended on user generated content) and the second our planned revenue stream. We had good answers to these ready since we expected they'd be raised during the interview and plenty of previous YC startups had overcome the same problems. The way I see it, if pg's philosophy is "build something nice people want to use, then worry about the money" and he rejects you because of revenue concerns, then it's basically a nice way of saying "Sorry, I just liked the other teams better"
Of course this illustrates a one of the downsides of the whole startup thing. A lot of the things you do in life are pretty deterministic: if you spend 1hr/day learning Spanish, you'll know it well sooner or later, if you spend 1hr/day working out, you'll increase your stamina or muscles or whatever you're working on. If you work 1hr/day on a startup up.. well, its probabilistic, so all you're doing is tilting the odds in your favour, but you're never guaranteed anything - be it progress or success or whatever. So all the work on the app and all of the preparation for the demo/interview was for naught.
Anyway... it'd be a shame to throw so much work away, so we'll probably work on it a bit more, then release it as a side project or something. At least have a decent project to put on future resumes or whatever.