capocannoniere

> Frankly, I'm kinda surprised if an obvious optimization like that isn't already in place - let those who care about the shape pay more for the pretty ones, and let those who don't save by buying the rest.

Oh but that's exactly how it already works in existing supply chains: "imperfect" produce gets allocated quite well with food manufacturers, restaurants and food halls, or gets donated to foster homes, hospitals, etc. And many supermarkets do in fact stock up with "imperfect" produce.

"Reducing food waste" makes for good marketing. Except it's not that true.

In your parent comment you mention:

> not much of the strategy content applies to hardware companies

While it's probably a good idea to not blindly follow every single piece of advice (by YC or anyone), saying that not much of the content applies is probably a bit of a stretch. Considering how many successful companies YC has funded in the hard-tech space, I'd be receptive to at least some of their advice / insights.

You also mention:

> you have this de-facto "ship and iterate" model from the SaaS world which just doesn't apply to nontrivial hardware projects.

Again, it may be a good idea to question the advice of "ship and iterate", but saying _it just doesn't apply to nontrivial hardware project_ is again a bit of a stretch. As the above commenter mentions, the success of Cruise is a good counterexample.

While Airbnb is clearly going through a rough patch right now, there is a clear bull-case argument for why Airbnb will emerge stronger than it's ever been after this:

- Airbnb has sufficient cash in the bank to survive the crisis.

- A significant % of hotels and budget chains will not survive the crisis --> decreased competitor supply

- People will be looking for budget options when traveling --> increased demand for Airbnb

- People will seek to make extra income to make ends meet --> increased supply for Airbnb

Replit sounds awesome, especially once you put it this way ("view-> source for code, plus a server"). Kudos to the team.

PG tweet for context: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1256526589300441093

> I wrote this yesterday as an example for my kids.

> A lot of people learned how to make web pages using view->source. Replit is view->source for code, plus a server you can run a copy on. A generation of kids will learn to program from it.

This is exceptionally well-written. And it looks like YC's design has stepped up quite a notch too :)

Quick question: how to reconcile these two almost-conflicting views:

1) Raising money is the CEO’s job. If you are the CEO, you should plan for it to be your sole, full-time focus.[...] Do what you can to avoid distracting others with fundraising. Co-founders or other executives are typically only brought in to answer specific questions (e.g. CTOs handle technical diligence), and usually only at the full partnership stage.

Even in the rare case of co-CEOs, it’s best to have a single point of contact. Investors want to see a clear decision-making process, which generally requires a final decision-maker. (https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/prepare-your-company)

2) Signing on with a Series A lead is the beginning of a 10 year relationship. If all goes well, that’s how long your board member will have a say in your company. As such, optimize for your board member, not vanity metrics, like valuation. (https://www.ycombinator.com/resources/how-to-choose-an-inves...)

Given point 2), shouldn't non-CEO founders also be involved in at least some meetings with investors to weigh in on who they want to have as board members?

While I personally find Asana clunky and slow (I've used many tools for project management: Notion and Jira are by far what I personally enjoy the most, followed by Airtable at a distant 3rd), Sam Altman's perspective on Asana are interesting to look at for a more positive outlook on the company: https://blog.samaltman.com/asana

I'd argue the outcome of this will be that Facebook will launch their own payments infrastructure on top of WhatsApp. There was no need for crypto or a Libra association to begin with.

According to the leaked Facebook all-hands audio, Facebook is already planning to launch payments in Mexico by end of 2019 (https://qz.com/1719731/zuckerberg-confirms-facebook-payment-...).

I wouldn't be surprised if this goes extremely well for Facebook and WhatsApp payments becomes WeChat Pay / AliPay for the rest of the world.

While I don't know about Zenefits in particular, keep in mind that YC companies can opt out of this list:

> One thing to note is that this is not an exhaustive list of the top YC companies. We allowed alumni to opt out of being listed for any reason.

Erik Torenberg's Village Global [1] was started fairly recently and is already extremely highly regarded in the start-up community. Much more so than Techstars or any other non-YC accelerator in my impression.

[1] https://www.villageglobal.vc/ https://www.villageglobal.vc/network-catalyst/

Paul Graham wrote an essay on this topic, aimed towards high-school students. His advice: stay upwind http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

> Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

> Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

> Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.

Tagger News might be what you're looking for: https://www.taggernews.com/

It was a TC Disrupt hackathon project that generates tags using AI, and seems to still be functional.

Here's another fun one:

The _average_ Y Combinator company is worth ~100M [1]

The _median_ Y Combinator company, however, is worth closer to $0 (the majority of YC companies don't get to a Series A).

This just highlights how counter-intuitive power-law distributions are.

[1] Calculation:

Discard pre YC'17 companies for the purposes of this calculation, as these are still too early stage for meaningful analysis. Brex, Faire and Atrium are the only YC '17 or later on this list.

Numerator: The top 100 companies have a combined valuation of ~$110B, according to this list.

Denominator: There were 1,400 YC companies as of Summer '17 according to https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2017-stats/. Removing S17 and W17 gives about 1,100 companies prior to '17

Yes.

(1) is pretty close to being true. Will be true with Uber's $120B valuation

(2) is already true according to the list. Stripe and Instacart alone are already worth > $27B in aggregate

(3) might actually be already true, or at least close to it. Gitlab is worth $1.1B, and there are a few other YC W15 companies that are already worth hundreds of millions and are on track to become unicorns: EquipmentShare, AtomWise, RazorPay, Qventus, GrubMarket, among others.

> edit: There's another possibility here, which is that there are two curves that may have maximized for companies around that time period. The first is the batch size, which has increased from ~10 companies to ~100 over the years. And the other curve is that companies take something like 5-10 years to mature. Maybe it's just that the companies of that vintage are just old enough to be really valuable, and that there were enough companies in the batch to push them to the top of this ranking.

I think that's basically it.

It takes a while to reach a 100M or 1B valuation, so you wouldn't expect to see many of the most recent YC companies on the list just yet. On the flip-side, YC batches were significantly smaller early on before ~2011.

I wouldn't read too much into this distribution.

Interesting to note:

> In addition, we will continue to support the company in the priced equity round in which the safe converts, and subsequent financing rounds (priced equity rounds or bridge financing rounds) by participating in those rounds to approximately maintain our 7% ownership.

This has been the case since 2015 approximately [1]. This means YC's stake in many of these companies is in the order of 10s or even 100s of millions, since they keep their 7% through subsequent funding rounds. That's huge.

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/pro-rata/

Who are your target users?

My understanding is that Betterment and Wealthfront are primarily aimed for upper middle-class millennials who have some savings but are not extraordinarily wealthy so as to have their own family office or dedicated wealth management team in Morgan Stanley / Goldman Sachs / JP Morgan / etc.

Since the upper middle-class in LATAM is significantly smaller than that of the US due to greater inequality, are you going after higher net worth individuals?

You're right. I had seen similar FAQs in previous years and thought this was a repost

Is this FAQ still valid as of 2018?

In particular, is the following still true?

> Q: Can you apply to YC with just an idea?

> Yes. We accept companies at a wide range of stages into the batch. Cruise, for example, had been working on their idea for just two weeks when they applied to YC.

and

> Q: Can you apply if you haven’t launched?

> Yes. Fewer than half of the companies we fund have launched before they apply.

Looking at the list of YC companies in the recent batch, it seems like many of those companies have significant traction by demo day, significantly more so than YC companies in batches from a few years ago. Obviously, there are many factors that may contribute to this:

1) Advances in development tools as well as SaaS for startups: e.g. Stripe, Stripe Atlas, Clerky, etc.

2) YC's brand name / perceived value has gone up + YC's deliberate outreach efforts. This could mean more and better companies are applying to YC so the bar has gone up.

But even controlling for those factors, it seems like many of the current companies are still further along by demo day compared to previous batches. Are there any examples of YC W18 companies that applied pre-traction or at the idea stage?

I guess the more common question than

> Q: Is YC just for early stage companies?

is probably

> Q: Is YC just for companies that have already found product market fit / have shown traction?

Admittedly, this is a bit of an exaggerated conclusion. It is definitely possible that some subset of top CS MIT students would get anxious about coding interviews and would go to interviewing.io to hone their skills.

However, the following types of top students are significantly less likely to practice on interviewing.io, for example:

- Seniors who have already done internships at top companies (Google, FB, Stripe, etc)

- People who excelled at programming contests and generally enjoy algorithmic challenges: IOI, TopCoder, Project Euler, etc.

- People who have built awesome open-source projects that got significant recognition. For example, Feross Aboukhadijeh was a Stanford student who built Youtube Instant and immediately received an internship offer from Youtube founder Chad Hurley [1]. I doubt people like him would need to practice on interviewing.io

- In general, students who are regarded as top n% of MIT/Stanford/CMU CS are inundated with recruiting pitches (I speak from experience as a CS graduate from one of these universities. Most of us constantly received an overwhelming number of e-mails from recruiters, many of them offering to get us to get fast-tracked in the interview process).

Granted, not every top CS student at MIT/Stanford/CMU has done competitive programming or built really cool stuff that's widely recognized. But a significant percentage of the top n% of students do have this kind of background (admittedly, this is somewhat of a circular definition of "top" student). That's what I mean by selection bias.

[1] https://feross.org/youtube-instant-media-frenzy/

> What this means is that top-tier students are achieving the same results as those in no-name schools

This is an misleading conclusion that ignores a HUGE selection bias. I doubt top MIT CS students, for example, would feel the need to practice coding interviews on interviewing.io

Crashlytics got acquired for > $100M. It wouldn't be unthinkable for Buglife to reach a similar valuation if they execute well.

Yes, these companies seem far along. But do keep in mind that this is somewhat of a biased sample -- the dozen or so companies that "launch" on HN months before demo day are likely to be the companies that are the most far along.

There are ~100 other companies in the current batch [1] that haven't launched. I imagine many of those companies are not nearly as far along as the ones mentioned in this article, and some are still pivoting / navigating the idea maze.

That said, it does seem like in the most recent batches, YC companies get to demo day with significantly more traction than the early YC companies. I wonder to what extent that's because YC's reputation has gotten better over time (thus self selecting for startups with traction) or because it's gotten easier/cheaper/faster for startups to build a product and gain traction.

[1] I don't know the exact number of companies in the current batch. Last batch had 124 companies so using that as a proxy http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2017-stats/

You can take a look at Joe Lonsdale's Affinity [1]

[1] https://affinity.co/

I like this explanation of the Secretary problem (aka optimal stopping problem) by @lpolovets [1]

> The basic problem is this: there are N applicants for a secretarial position. The applicants are interviewed in random order, and you must accept or reject a candidate immediately after interviewing them. After you reject someone, there's no way to bring them back. There is only one position available, so as soon as you accept a candidate you are done. What strategy should you pursue in order to maximize the likelihood of hiring the best candidate out of the N applicants?

> It turns out that the best strategy is to look at the first N/e applicants (i.e. the first ~37%), reject all of them, then accept the first applicant that is better than all of the initial rejects. It turns out this strategy has a ~37% (1/e) chance of picking the best candidate, regardless of how large N is. This is counterintuitive. It means that even if you have one billion applicants in some random order, you will find the very best one ~37% of the time with this strategy, even though you will (on average) make your choice without meeting the last few hundred million candidates.

> I think this has some interesting practical implications. For example, as a VC, one possible strategy that I can pursue is to look for interesting sectors (3D printing, drones, bitcoin, etc.) and try to invest in the very best startup in each of those sectors. The Secretary Problem is a decent approximation of this. I can go on AngelList and see that there are thirty 3D printing startups in LA/NYC/SF, which are the markets I'm interested in. One way to pick the best one of these 30 would be to meet 11 of these startups, pass on all of them, then invest in the next 3D printing startup I meet that's better than all of those. Of course, this would be a jerk move. I'd be wasting the time of a lot of founders if I knew I was planning to pass on their startups no matter what. However, if I happened to pass on a dozen 3D printing startups by chance, and I knew that there were ~30 in total, then if the 14th one was better than the first dozen, I would know there was a pretty good chance it was the best one out of all 30 even though I had yet to see the last 16.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-are-the-most-interest...

Congrats on the launch! The tech is amazing

Quick q's (purely out of curiosity):

1) > We are [...] PhD students in AI at University of Montreal

Are you doing the startup on the side/planning on going back to school?

2) I don't recall reading about you guys in articles about YC S17 demo days. What are reasons why some companies might not participate in demo day or remain off-the-record? In your case, you seem to have had a working product long before demo day

Submitted this article as I'm curious about what the HN community has to say. Apologies if this is a re-post

You're right. Fixed

Reddit raised $200 million in funding and is now valued at $1.8 billion [1]

Q&A app Quora valued around $1.8 billion in $85 million fundraise [2]

Docker Is Raising Funding at $1.3B Valuation [3]

Twitch was acquired by $970M, so I guess not quite $1B.

[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/7/31/16037126/reddit-funding-200...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/21/uniquorn/

[3] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/08/10/docke...

> 10 YC alum are valued at over $1B and 64 YC alum are valued at over $100M.

Impressive. But off the top of my head I can count a few more than 10 YC companies valued at $1B or more:

1) Airbnb

2) Quora

3) Stripe

4) Dropbox

5) Instacart

6) Coinbase

7) Reddit

8) Cruise

9) Twitch

10) Gusto

11) Zenefits

12) Docker

13) Machine Zone

And a few more that are pretty close to $1B