Just before entering YC, they had a handshake agreement with an angel investor for their seed round[0]. The YC partners convinced the AirBnBs to back out of that deal and have YC do the full round instead.
But the idea that Airbnb was "on its last legs" and YC was their one last chance because "investors didn’t think much of the idea" isn't true.
“I was one of the few investors who actively pursued this deal from August through October 2008, and the only among them to agree on a term sheet.”
“Over those extra weeks, however, the other investors who had been circling all dropped out of the deal…instead of a handful of us coming together as I expected, I was the one lone dude writing a check for the entire seed round. But ultimately that was fine by me — I was good to move ahead.”
It’s not like they had a particularly oversubscribed round or anything
The Airbnb founders seem to be good at Making Friends and Influencing People. Which is clearly a valuable trait in Silicon Valley but not all that admirable. Neither is the business they built, which has caused perhaps as much misery in the world as it has eliminated.
YC set out to create the next generation of tech companies like Google/Microsoft/Apple. Instead, YC has only helped to launch some pretty mediocre companies that will be hardly be footnotes in history. Sure, they made money, but they were already rich.
The Airbnb and DoorDash IPOs are evidence of YC's failure to achieve its real mission rather than evidence that it succeeded. If it had succeeded, we'd all be talking about the Google-killer or Apple-killer they launched, and not these super boring room rental and food delivery services they're left with as a consolation prizes.
It'd be awesome to see YC's original mission fulfilled. It was a grand idea and would be great for the world.
You can debate what "walked in" means but I think it's safe to say the story of Airbnb getting into YC is one of Winning Friends and Influencing People rather than any brilliant ideas or work they did on their actual startup, which is precisely what the blog post is saying.
Edit2: just saw on Twitter that @paulg posted the email that got Airbnb an interview. It's hard to imagine a stronger attempt at walking them in than they received. They got very special treatment from friends with connections.
YC’s goal was to make a tremendous amount of money. Without that, none of their other ambitions would succeed. Enough of their bets had to be right.
In that sense, it seems like YC was a success in their original mission. One does not kill google simply by wishing it.
That said, yes, you’re right about the special treatment. But that’s what the real world is like. It’s not meant to be a court with a judge. http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html
You (like me, once) can be uncomfortable with the idea of special treatment, but it’s hard to argue with the result. After all, Airbnb IPO’d.
EDIT: By the way, if you’d like to chat privately about the old days, feel free to DM me on Twitter. That 2008-era was interesting, and I remember you were there for it. I’m curious to get more of your impressions.
To say otherwise is cynical bullshit, and you guys should really pause before reinforcing talented-but-disadvantaged people's worry that they don't have a shot. They do have a shot, and if you had any idea how hard YC works not to overlook applicants who show up without special connections, you'd be ashamed of yourselves.
I doubt they were given special treatment afterwards. Their interview probably went like everyone else's. But how can it be true that there was no special treatment beforehand, when it was a special /apply2 endpoint?
Of course talented-but-disadvantaged people have a shot. None of this is to say that they don't, and no one implied that special connections were a requirement. I know how hard YC works not to overlook those.
My position is that there's nothing wrong with it being a special exception. Instacart seemed to be, too. But that's different than saying there was no exception.
pg replied with a link to let them apply, in spite of the fact that the round was closed. It was an exception to the normal rules. And the exception was accessed by having a personal intro from a YC founder.
The rest here is also false. The round was not closed. Application deadlines have never been enforced at YC. By accepting their late application he was treating them the same as anybody else.
Even the point about the intro email is overstated; I did that too upthread, but now that I think of it, it's obvious that pg would have replied the same way to any email he got at that moment: tell them to apply fast, be concise, etc. No good startup investor would say "sorry, you missed the deadline" because they all know that missing outliers for dumb reasons is the biggest mistake they can make, the one that matters more than all the others put together.
So really what this all boils down to is that Justin had pg's email address, and I don't think that's what the people arguing "special treatment" in this thread were talking about.
You know pg better than any of us here. Does /apply2 sound like an endpoint he'd make for the general public? The naming practically screams "special case."
Why don't we just ask pg? He'd reply to you. I trust pg implicitly. He's been many things, but never a liar.
For what it's worth, I completely agree with your points -- it would be dumb to reject their application due to timing, especially when you're getting such a strong signal from a YC founder that this application is worth paying attention to.
Scott and I were in the same YC batch as Airbnb. We had no connections and knew no YC founders. It's simply not the case that you needed "friends with connections" to get into YC, then or now. It's not necessary, and it's not sufficient either.
I don't mean to be a stickler but it's harmful when people imply such things. It discourages founders who don't have friends-with-connections from applying. That's really bad—what if they're just the sort of founder YC wants to fund? A lot of people are, who don't think they are—and maybe they lack the self-confidence to try, or they're teetering. If they run into HN comments or whatever that cynically say "it's all about connections", they may teeter away, and that could have a huge effect on their life. Getting into YC, knowing no one and having no special connections, changed my life bigtime, and that of many others as well.
We met the Airbnb founders in the waiting room because our interview was right after theirs. They were super nervous, as were we, so we bonded around reassuring each other that their startup was great. I remember Brian saying that they had never heard of YC, but they knew the guys at Justin.tv, who had encouraged them to apply at the last minute, and that was why they were there. So the primary effect of the "friends with connections" was not that it got them into YC, but that it got YC into them—i.e. it got YC on their radar in the first place.
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6t-how-to-apply-and-succ...
That was part of my 'official" curriculum in Startup School. I don't know a date on it, but I haven't officially finished Startup School. As far as I know, that is still their official policy to this day.