This. From my YC experience, I know that starting with a niche is good advice and advice they likely would have gotten.
Looking at the Launch HN [1], I think the question should instead be "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?". When phrased that way, the answer seems obvious, given that YC started out funding current college students in Boston.
Having gone through YC in W19 with Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com), I think one of its best parts is how it invests in founders who are outside the typical VC hobnob. I remember meeting folks who'd worked in utilities in Texas all their lives, multiple groups of university students taking a leave, and other groups to whom VCs would simply say "you need more traction"
Like most early stage investors, they're not investing in an idea -- they're investing in founders! I do have to say that YC partners probably encouraged the founders to pivot (like we had been told), but the ultimate choice of what to pivot to is the founders'. So like another comment said, cut these 20-year old university students some slack!
Wanderlog (YC W19) | San Francisco, REMOTE (North America), VISA | Full-time Full-Stack Engineer | https://wanderlog.com/
Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com) is building tools to make planning leisure travel easier. We believe that travel makes us and the world better, and are trying to lower the bar to it. We're one of the top-ranked travel planners on web and Android (and rising on iOS), and have grown even during COVID.
We’re currently a team of 6, including 4 engineers (counting twin-brother founders Peter, ex-Stripe; and Harry, ex-Googler as engineers), a designer, and a growth marketer. Our stack is Typescript with Node.js, React, React Native, and excellent front-end and back-end test coverage. We're looking for either an intern who can stay for 6+ months and a full-time engineer.
We also love traveling. Whether it’s a short hop to Austin, Seattle, or New Orleans; or a longer jaunt to Australia, Hawaii, or Banff National Park (all places members of the team have traveled to in the past year!), travel broadens our horizons, builds empathy, allows us to bond with others on our trip! We’re working to bring these experiences to more of the world.
I'm totally on board with the overall message that building (i.e. engineering) your own internal tools come with lots of overhead, but take issue with this one point:
> My counter-argument to that is there is also lock-in with internal systems. The most common version of this is the keeper of the spreadsheet.
The author then disparages spreadsheets as becoming the exclusive domain of one employee who wouldn't want processes to change.
In reality and my experience, though, spreadsheets are one of the most versatile and accessible systems, and their close cousins (Airtable, Notion) great as well! You can customize it to your own processes and they're pretty universally understood, so the barrier to change is pretty low.
Author here I actually think spreadsheets are great because they are so accessible. What isn’t great though is when there is a business processs that is a spreadsheet and knowledge that exists in one persons head.
The issue with excel is that there's no standard construction that anyone can query; most likely it's extremely hacked together since it's not a database, but made to look like one. Spreadsheets are great for doing stuff related to exports or before importing, but so, so often they lead to data islands built to either actively or passively protect someone's job.
> their close cousins (Airtable, Notion) great as well!
Their close cousins are locked, proprietary, slow, bloated, exceedingly complex, poorly designed (ui/ux), emojized, vc-backed feature extravaganza and have a subscription fee.
Experts of Excel use keyboard exclusively, their keystrokes are a melody of efficiency, expressivity and productivity that is continued to be mocked in similar fashion as the 2007-era Mac vs. PC advertisements.
I found Notion to be fairly simple to get started. Whereas when I opened Airtable my head exploded and I closed it immediately and haven't revisited it since.
I agree. Notion is a lot easier to get started on. I also should mention that Notion/Airtable vs. Excel are somewhat different types of swissarmy knives to be used in different environments. One is used in the battlefield and space exploration, the other one in a children's playground. Jokes aside, Notion has some nice features like Wiki and it wears too many hats like a joker in a circus. I love the fact that I can write a recipe with tables and markdown -> publish it to the internet to be consumed. Can't do that with Excel.
And it's also important to keep in mind that if your team is using various external tools, there is a high chance that only a couple of people will actually know how those tools work and even less of them will be able or happy to use those external tools.
Wanderlog (YC W19) | San Francisco, REMOTE, VISA | Full-Stack Engineer or Intern | https://wanderlog.com/
Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com) is building tools to make planning leisure travel easier. We believe that travel makes us and the world better, and are trying to lower the bar to it. We're one of the top-ranked travel planners on web and Android (and rising on iOS), and have grown even during COVID.
We’re currently a team of 6, including 4 engineers (counting twin-brother founders Peter and Harry as engineers), a designer, and a growth marketer. Our stack is Typescript with Node.js, React, React Native, and excellent front-end and back-end test coverage. We're looking for either an intern who can stay for 6+ months and a full-time engineer.
We also love traveling. Whether it’s a short hop to Austin, Seattle, or New Orleans; or a longer jaunt to Australia, Hawaii, or Banff National Park (all places members of the team have traveled to in the past year!), travel broadens our horizons, builds empathy, allows us to bond with others on our trip! We’re working to bring these experiences to more of the world.
As much as I do feel COVID is a real threat and that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally probably helped spread it somewhat, this paper (and even more so, the article) far overstates the case.
Copying over some key points from the underlying paper [1]:
> In counties with the largest relative inflow to the event, the per 1,000 case rate increased by 10.7 percent after 24 days following the onset of Sturgis Pre-Rally Events. Multiplying the percent case increases for the high, moderate-high and moderate inflow counties by each county’s respective pre-rally cumulative COVID-19 cases and aggregating, yields a total of 263,708 additional cases in these locations due to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Adding the number of new cases due to the Rally in South Dakota estimated by synthetic control (3.6 per 1,000 population, scaled by the South Dakota population of approximately 858,000) brings the total number of cases to 266,796 or 19 percent of 1.4 million new cases.
> If we conservatively assume that all of these cases were non-fatal, then these cases represent a cost of over $12.2 billion, based on the statistical cost of a COVID-19 case of $46,000 estimated by Kniesner and Sullivan (2020).
The Kniesner and Sullivan paper cited [2] gets to the value of $46,000 by using the Department of Transportation's "value per statistical life" of about $10 million per death (scaled down to ~$11k per asymptomatic case), which is not a public health cost estimate. It's probably far higher than what hospitals and the health system spends per case.
Not only that, but the paper claims, without any controls, that ALL case count increases in counties that sent lots of people to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in the weeks following it were caused by the Rally itself. They did not control for any other factors (e.g., the baseline spread of COVID in adjacent counties with lower attendance.) This is unplausible, given that other factors and events (e.g., college parties, indoors dining) may have also contributed.
Wanderlog (YC W19) | San Francisco, CA | Full-stack Software Engineer, Front-end Software Engineer | Full-time
Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com) is building tools to make leisure travel easier. We believe that travel makes us and the world better, and are trying to lower the bar to it. Our product so far is a Google Docs for planning travel and sharing recommendations.
We’re currently a team of 5, including 4 engineers (counting twin-brother founders Peter and Harry as engineers) and 1 designer. Our stack is Typescript with Node.js, React, React Native, and excellent front-end and back-end test coverage.
We also love traveling. Whether it’s a short hop to Austin, Seattle, or New Orleans; or a longer jaunt to Australia, Hawaii, or Banff National Park (all places members of the team have traveled to in the past year!), travel broadens our horizons, builds empathy, allows us to bond with others on our trip! We’re working to bring these experiences to more of the world.
I'm a bit confused: the featured link here seems to be made by Google, and seems pretty performant in Firefox on a 6-year-old Macbook (albeit with a good Internet connection). Were you thinking of other links that had been shared before?
> Copy [means] to borrow an idea for its known useful results; steal [means] to take ownership of an idea and extend it to create some novel result.
> Copy the same sponge any cake could use, then using your own creative talents as icing to make something uniquely great (steal) in the areas that make a difference in your product's niche... Steal strategy! Copy tactics
As an engineer working on product, this is good advice. It's often appealing to reinvent the wheel and succumb to "not-built-here" symptom. Especially when it comes to questions like "what stack and language to use", often, the best answer is "whatever has worked before." Rather, what's worth reinventing is the actual features or user-facing aspects of the product.
Don't go crazy making your own global Javascript store: just roll Redux or MobX. As someone who loves engineering challenges, I find myself reining myself in a lot on this at Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com). But I realize whether we're successful or not isn't going to be our technical infrastructure. That needs be solid, but what really matters are the little things we can do to wow travelers
It also shows that where their experience comes from, adds validity. In this case, I can go directly to their website and see the results of them "reining themselves in" on a production website.
I’m more inclined to dig into his company if his comment offers insights but when you just plug your company in, it just makes your comment feel insincere like pr speak.
Am Googler, ex-FB, Uber, want me to list my resume?
I think since most of the people reading hackernews are the startup type most people here just sort of tolerate the shameless plugs out of understanding
> In particular, it is often difficult to make the (important) decisions about the organisation of the argument, and selection of good notation, until a large part of the paper is already written
This is very true. When writing a blog post in China during the earlier parts of coronavirus [1], I had drafted an initial version where I just went through my experiences in chronological order. Only after writing it all down did themes emerge in how I finally structured the article.
This really speaks to the power of interdisciplinary concepts though. Writing an essay by writing an outline first and then filling in the details probably predates rapid prototyping by eons. It's cool that it all circles back to writing academic papers only through this leap!
I'm glad they're moving Demo Day up. The whole point of YC is to level the playing field for all kinds of founders, and this would help keep the focus on Demo Day rather than the behind-the-scene investor meetings that tend to benefit connected, established founders.
Personally, as a YC W19, first-time founder of Wanderlog [1], I didn't do any fundraising before Demo Day. But I heard from friends in the batch about cold emails, "informal" dinners, and all kinds of shenanigans to get ahold of founders earlier.
Demo Day helps even things out by giving attention to all startups in YC, and not just the companies with connections. Everyone's given the same amount of time on stage, and off stage (in any other year), everybody's milling about in a huge hall. You can't tell who's the recent college dropout, and who's a former co-founder of a co. with a billion-dollar exit.
I can totally see investors really taking the coronavirus/lack of an in-person Demo Day [2] as an excuse to double-up on their outreach, leading to an even more imbalanced process. Good work on the YC Partners' part for short-circuiting this and helping the first-time founders and the traditionally disadvantaged
2) Herd Mentality: There is subtle signaling if a company being presented right beside you already has 50% of their round closed, vs a company that hasnt received this early interest.
These are not my ideals (I'm a fan of self-funding and sustainable growth), just the reality.
Have done demo day twice, and I can confirm. It was way, way worse the second time around. Lots of companies had filled out their rounds by demo day, despite the official YC advice (i.e. "don't fundraise until demo day").
Also, it's not a subtle effect at all, particularly now that demo day is split up into batches with similar companies grouped together. If you're presenting on the same day as some company close to your space that has raised millions, it looks bad. Investors routinely ask who else has invested in your company. If company X has a long list of name investors and you don't, investors want to put their money in company X. It's a downside of the dynamics of the feeding frenzy created by demo day -- investors have little to go on, so they make a big deal out of herd signaling.
Obviously, this doesn't matter for the hottest deals, but most companies in a batch aren't hot deals, and the hot deals don't need demo day in the first place.
Think on the margin. If there’s a particularly good batch of startups probably the amount invested will be greater than average but I doubt it will be exactly proportional to quality. In the long run the ecosystem would adjust to higher quality by attracting more funding. But a company only goes through Demo Day once and they’re all competing for the capital of VCs and angels, which capital is probably medium term flexible but isn’t in the short run.
But again what business is it of yours if someone else is faster out of the gate than you? This is like complaining that another company is better at marketing than you. I guess that's bad for you, but not their problem.
I guess the premise of his comment is that there is a finite amount of money to be invested across all YC participants each season and that “back room” deals prevent startups that are less connected from having the same opportunity. Demo day could be seen as a way for all startups to compete for that finite investment on equal terms.
That’s not to say that I agree with the premise that it’s a zero-sum game. At the same time I can see eager investors losing interest in hearing from other startups after securing investments in the hot startup earlier on. A lot of startup investing isn’t merit-based, it’s more about hype and gossip than you’d expect.
Capital is not unlimited. Many investors, particularly angels, only make x investments each demo day. If they reach x before you've even talked to them, that's bad.
Also - the first thing many investors asked us at demo day was "who else is investing?" - hard to answer this when you've specifically been instructed not to fundraise yet.
>and who's a former co-founder of a co. with a billion-dollar exit
I know your point wasn't entirely literal but it made me curious as to how many YC founders are in this position...Kyle with Twitch and then Cruise is the only one that comes to mind.
Suhail from Mixpanel (S19) and Laks from Zenefits (W19, my batch) were both in recent batches! So they definitely exist. Much more common is the non-huge-exit but still successful second-time founders
Despite posting on HN a lot I don't know much about how YC works. You seem to be implying that reaching investors before demo day is "cheating" somehow, and that it's not in the spirit of YC to do it. What benefit is there to your startup in trying to keep things balanced? Obviously you don't want to sabotage other startups in your cohort, but I can't figure out why talking to investors as early as you can would be seen as doing that.
The advice we get from Y Combinator (which I think is extremely valid) is to focus on our product and customers, because that's ultimately what investors are going to look at. Fundraising is distracting, emotionally draining, and unproductive if you don't have those. If you're spending half your time during the program fundraising, that's half the time not spent on more important tasks
Looking at the Launch HN [1], I think the question should instead be "has YC lost it's way when its latest company is founded by 4 University of Waterloo students?". When phrased that way, the answer seems obvious, given that YC started out funding current college students in Boston.
Having gone through YC in W19 with Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com), I think one of its best parts is how it invests in founders who are outside the typical VC hobnob. I remember meeting folks who'd worked in utilities in Texas all their lives, multiple groups of university students taking a leave, and other groups to whom VCs would simply say "you need more traction"
Like most early stage investors, they're not investing in an idea -- they're investing in founders! I do have to say that YC partners probably encouraged the founders to pivot (like we had been told), but the ultimate choice of what to pivot to is the founders'. So like another comment said, cut these 20-year old university students some slack!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425318