I suspect people think YC was better in the early days because some companies from that era are now household names like: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.airbnb.com//">Airbnb (w2009) and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.dropbox.com/">Dropbox (s2007). However, in reality it often takes 10 years or more for startups to achieve that sort of impact. Even so, in the past 5 years we have funded a number of startups worth noting, including: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.coinbase.com//">Coinbase (s2012), <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://getcruise.com//">Cruise (w2014), <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.doordash.com//">DoorDash (w2013), <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.flexport.com//">Flexport (w2014), <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ginkgobioworks.com//">Ginkgo Bioworks</a> (s2014), <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://about.gitlab.com//">Gitlab (w2015), <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://gusto.com//">Gusto (w2012), <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.instacart.com//">Instacart (w2012), <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.podium.com//">Podium (w2016), <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.rappi.com//">Rappi (s2016), <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.rigetti.com//">Rigetti Computing</a> (s2014), and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.zenefits.com//">Zenefits (w2013).</p>\n<p>Having done YC in 2007 with Justin.tv/Twitch, in 2012 with Socialcam, and joining as a partner in 2014, I thought it would be helpful to describe how YC has changed since I first took part in the program.</p>\n<p>In 2007, if you wanted advice, you sent an email to PG and waited for a reply. Now we have software for booking office hours with partners. And it’s also likely that you’re in a chat group with your YC partners so you can message them in real time.</p>\n<p>In 2007, if you needed advice or intros from YC alumni or batchmates, you sent out an email to the entire alumni list. Now you post to Bookface and get replies within a day.</p>\n<p>In 2007, if you had a B2B startup, you had to reach out cold to potential customers. Now there are over 1000 YC companies you can sell your service to and all of their contact information is in Bookface. As a result, YC alumni companies are often over 50% of your new sales during YC.</p>\n<p>In 2007, there were 50 investors in the room for our Demo Day. My company, Justin.tv/Twitch landed a grand total of three angel meetings and was able to raise $150K at a $3.5M valuation. Today, 600-800 investors attend demo day<sup id=\"footnoteid1\"><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnote1\">1</a></sup> and a thousand more watch online. A typical company in the batch raises $500K-3M at a $6M-15M valuation.<sup id=\"footnoteid2\"><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnote2\">2</a></sup></p>\n<p>In 2007, if you wanted to raise a Series A, your batchmates/friends/PG would provide intros. Now we have the Series A program that helps evaluate if you are ready to raise, helps you craft your story, allows you to meet and learn from other companies also raising their Series A, and helps you understand and negotiate your term sheets.</p>\n<p>In 2007, if you wanted to hire employees, YC couldn’t offer much assistance. Now we have <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com//">Work at a Startup</a> and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs/">Hacker News jobs postings</a> which help many of our startups hire their first 10 engineers.</p>\n<p>In 2007, if you needed help scaling your organization, you could reach out to a batchmate or alumni friend who was slightly further along than you. Now there’s a YC Growth Program where you’re batched with companies at your stage and aided by much more experienced YC founders and advisors.</p>\n<p>In 2007, the YC Standard deal was about $20,000 for 7% of your company. Now it’s $150,000 for 7%.</p>\n<p>For me, there were two amazing things in the early days of YC that are different today. First, in 2007, batches were much smaller so it was easier to meet all of your batchmates. Today, you have to work harder to meet and become friends with all the talented people in your batch. We put companies into groups of about 30-40 in order to replicate the feeling of the past. Second, getting to work directly with PG was special.</p>\n<p>So when thinking about whether to apply to YC and talking to alumni who have attended in years past, keep the above changes in mind. Having been a multiple time user of YC myself (and I know I am biased), I can honestly say without a doubt that I would prefer participating in today’s program because of all the additional value that has been built over the past 13 years.</p>\n<p>Counterintuitively, the 7% you give to YC today becomes a better and better deal every year of your company’s life because every year we add hundreds of incredibly talented motivated founders from all over the world, new software, new programming, and new changes based on the feedback of our 4000+ alumni. I think of YC as an amazing piece of software that gets better every year and remains the same price.</p>\n<hr />\n<p><strong>Notes</strong><br />\n<b id=\"footnote1\">1.</b> Demo day is now 4 days long. Day 1 is YC alumni demo day and YC alumni invest about 20% of the dollars that YC companies raise. Day 2 &amp; 3 are investor demo days and Day 4 is investor day where we arrange over 1000 meetings between investors and YC companies.<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnoteid1\">↩</a></p>\n<p><b id=\"footnote2\">2.</b> Starting in the w2019 batch, we are moving to a post money SAFE standard. Stating the typical valuations in post money terms, YC companies are now raising at $6.5m-$18m valuations.<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnoteid2\">↩</a></p>\n<p><em>Thanks to Craig Cannon, Geoff Ralston, Jon Levy, and Kat Manalac for reading drafts of this post.</em></p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1102913","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-09-28T03:05:09.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:03:08.000-07:00","published_at":"2018-09-28T03:05:09.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7116d","name":"Essay","slug":"essay","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/essay/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7116d","name":"Essay","slug":"essay","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/essay/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/yc-has-changed/","excerpt":"As YC grows, founders are wondering how it’s improved over time. This is a valid line of questioning – clearly much has changed about YC over 13 years. We have new leadership, much larger batch sizes, we invest more money, we have a growth fund, a series A program, a massive MOOC, and an internal social network for YC founders named Bookface.","reading_time":3,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71a11","uuid":"c73c984e-b24a-4399-af2e-05cfc97a2a68","title":"YC Alumni Who Paid It Forward","slug":"yc-alumni-who-paid-it-forward","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>As the YC community grows we have to continually make the choice to help one another. I know that as your company progresses, it becomes harder and harder to respond to that quick question or favor from another YC founder. This holiday season I wanted to give shoutouts to founders in the YC community who went above and beyond to help out their fellow alum.</p>\n<p>And before the rest of the stories, I’d like share one of my own. I&#8217;d like to thank <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://twitter.com/gustaf/">Gustaf Alstromer</a> (Heysan W07, now a YC Partner). At Socialcam Ammon, Guillaume, and I wanted to learn how to grow our little video app. We knew we needed to be data driven, a/b test, and iterate quickly but to be honest these practices were not part of our culture at Justin.tv. We met with Gustaf in the fall of 2011 and he basically taught us what to measure, when to test, and how to grow a social startup. I really stretch to remember another time when 1 hour of advice has been so impactful.</p>\n<p>Below is a collection of stories from YC alum.</p>\n<p>Happy holidays!</p>\n<hr />\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/tao_tristan/">Tristan Tao</a> (Leada S15) basically stepped in when my company was in need and acted as our CTO. He did code reviews, built features, and worked with me on spec-ing out parts of the product. He gave me feedback as both a manager and a product owner. He didn&#8217;t ask for anything in return, other than that one day, I help out other YC companies and pay it forward. I will be eternally grateful to Tristan. He totally saved us, was super generous with his time, resources and spirit.</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/alannaeve/">Alanna Gregory</a> of Vive (S15)</p>\n<hr />\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-olsen-78567387//">Will Olsen</a> and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/stormstillman//">Storm Stillman</a>, founders of Luminist (W16), have gone above and beyond for me. It wasn&#8217;t really one single action, more a collection of small things that has resulted in big impact. They were the ones to encourage me to apply for YC, and when I did apply, they provided very nice recommendations. However, their assistance didn&#8217;t stop there. Since last summer, they each independently continually reach out to check in on how I&#8217;m doing and offer any help they can give. I have taken them up on this in the form of many extended phone calls where they help me problem-solve, prioritize, and step back from the proverbial ledge at particularly hectic times. In addition, they offered lab space and even to purchase lab equipment to get me started when I first started out, although I didn&#8217;t have to take them up on that. I recently brought on a co-founder, but while I was still a solo founder, Will and Storm were often the first people I turned to, and they helped me work through some of the most difficult early challenges for my company. ZBiotics would not be where it is today without their support.</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/zaabbott//">Zack Abbott</a> of ZBiotics (F3 + W18)</p>\n<hr />\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/ceciliacorral//">Cecilia Corral</a> of CareMessage (W14) for being an insanely supportive human being and helping us prepare for our YC interview!</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/vineetsingal//">Vineet Singal</a> of CareMessage (W14) for giving me super practical tools and tips that I can use for fundraising and really taking me behind the curtain to understand what it takes to be successful in the nonprofit/tech space.</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/iankushgrover/">Ankush Grover</a> and the Innov8 (S16) team for kindly donating some desk space to me and my team while we are in Delhi.</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/karamlakshman/">Karam Lakshman</a> of Wifi Dabba (W17) for letting our Bangalore staff member crash your office space without any questions asked.</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/ChaseAdam17/">Chase Adam</a> of Watsi (W13) for answering any and all of my dumb questions about the admin side of starting an organization when I first incorporated and continuing to be an incredible source of advice. (Oh and Chase also helped us get a discount from our lawyer on some fees!)</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/snehaksheth/">Sneha Sheth</a> of Dost Education (W17)</p>\n<hr />\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/justinkan/">Justin Kan</a> getting up on stage during our demo day pitch and saying &#8220;Justin.tv integrated this API in like 5 minutes and it&#8217;s something we&#8217;ll definitely pay lots of money for.&#8221;</p>\n<p>Things were a little more unstructured back then (S11), but it was still not common to bring a guest with a live testimonial up on stage. It got a huge reaction from the crowd and was the highlight of our pitch. PG came up with the idea and Justin agreed to do it basically on the spot the day of.</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/ndalexander//">Nick Alexander</a> of Freshplum (S11) and Yoshi (S16)</p>\n<hr />\n<p>We bought a lot of heavy materials for our demo day prototype last summer. Unfortunately we didn’t finish it on time and ended up with a 400 pounds pallet full of copper and molybdenum plates that we had no idea how to ship back to France quickly. After reaching out to the YC hardware group, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/friedparts//">Jonathan Friedman</a> from Assembly (S15) offered us to store our pallet in his warehouse while <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/pmg/">Paul Gerhardt</a> from Lockitron (S09) let us use his Fedex account with amazing rates (1/4 of the price we were quoted by Fedex !). They also put us in touch with a compliance expert to make sure we would be able to export the molybdenum without issues.</p>\n<p>It took everyone a LOT of efforts to coordinate everything but the pallet finally arrived on Monday. We are extremely grateful for their help!</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/francklahaye//">Franck Lahaye</a> of Airthium (S17)</p>\n<hr />\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/mattjackrob/">Matt Robinson</a> from GoCardless (S11) is unreal with this. I worked for him as an intern, and he&#8217;s mentored and advised us since day 1 of Permutive. Cumulatively he&#8217;s easily spent >50 hours teaching us how to build a business and has never asked for a thing in return.</p>\n<p>He helped us write our first sales deck, write our YC application, ran mock interviews for us, guided us through our first fundraise, had the hard conversation with us to tell us our initial product wasn&#8217;t working, taught us how to listen to customers, checked-in on us, helped us hire our first employee, gave us the blueprint for letting our first employee go, role played this with us, shared job specs, benchmarked our KPIs, introduced us to investors, guided us through our second fundraise, worked out our VP Sales compensation, helped us set cultural values.</p>\n<p>I really can&#8217;t overstate how kind he is too us. He couldn&#8217;t embody paying it forward anymore.</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/joeroot?lang=en\%22>Joe Root</a> of Permutive (S14)</p>\n<hr />\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/raviparikh2//">Ravi Parikh</a> from Heap Analytics (S13) has helped us quite a bit during the early stages of our launch from pricing, shared order forms and agreement templates, provided insights into go-to-market, made intros, etc.</p>\n<p>He spent many hours spending time with me over multiple sessions. Was really nice of him and I owe it to the community.</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/doshkim/">John Kim</a> of SendBird (W16)</p>\n<hr />\n<p>Our story is about <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/automin/">Paul Sawaya</a> of Captain401 (S15). If anything speaks louder than actions, it&#8217;s probably results: our understanding is that Paul&#8217;s SUS17 group yielded more companies continuing into YC than all the other groups combined! This is entirely due to the focus and thoughtfulness Paul showed throughout SUS and beyond. In our case, we needed to course correct and get some momentum; Paul pointed this out immediately and helped us reset through a series of ambitious and well-directed goals. We were continually surprised that he provided the same level of clarity to every group, every week! Paul&#8217;s support continued on as we left our jobs and applied to YC: he gave us advice on getting off the ground, comments on the application, and a mock interview. We can&#8217;t thank him enough!</p>\n<p>– Jeffrey Warren &amp; Gopal Ramachandran of DeepMed (W18)</p>\n<hr />\n<p>Wanted to share how Cyrus Lohrasbpour helped us acquire Markhor.com domain. It was over a two month long process and he advised us through every step of the way. We scheduled multiple calls and he did some research around the domain and its history. All without expecting anything in return. At the end of the process we successfully bid and got the domain for ~$1600. Boom!</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/waqasali/">Waqas Ali</a> of Markhor (S15)</p>\n<hr />\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/mlmilleratmit//">Mike Miller</a> of Cloudant (S08) basically brought me to Silicon Valley from France by sending my resume on the YC founders mailing list in 2013. I got 25 interview offers in 24 hours from that one blurb. One was with Bo Lu at FutureAdvisor (S10), where I worked for almost two years as head of comms and recruiting.</p>\n<p>In 2015, Adam Gibson and I raised our first money for Skymind, and I left FutureAdvisor, which was acquired by BlackRock a few months later.</p>\n<p>At that point, Mike encouraged us to apply to YC. We got lucky, and were admitted to the W16 batch. His firm, Liquid2, invested in us in 2015, and again at the end of YC, introducing us to SV Angel and some other important investors in our seed round.</p>\n<p>Both Mike and Bo have provided a lot of support and reality checks, a long trickle of small and large favors that helped us grow the business and navigate the fog of startup life. Everything from introductions to speaking events to strategic advice on fund-raising and product.</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisvnicholson//">Chris Nicholson</a> of Skymind (W16)</p>\n<hr />\n<p>There are two YC alums that I can think of in particular that went out of their way to be helpful to us:</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/bolu/">Bo Lu</a> from FutureAdvisor (S10). Bo took several phone calls from me as we were exploring adding investment capabilities to our HSA offering. He was so intrigued by what he was doing that he made several calls on our behalf and eventually connected us with TD Ameritrade. They ended up being the partner we integrated with and as a result, the industry feedback of our offering has been fantastic! I honestly don&#8217;t know where we would be if we didn&#8217;t get that intro from Bo.</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/automin/">Paul Sawaya</a> from Captain401k (S15). Paul not only helped prep for our YC interview but post-YC, Paul was really helpful in helping us navigate the world of scraping payroll systems and various techniques to automate the payroll syncing process. He shared lessons learned, best practices, etc. It was incredibly helpful and saved us a ton of cycles so we could concentrate on the things that mattered!</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/shobinu/">Shobin Uralil</a> of Lively (W17)</p>\n<hr />\n<p>Smarking has been struggling for a long time to get the smarking.com domain name since the beginning of the company, as the original owner was not accessible and held it for more than 7 years. On Mar 16 2016, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/cyrus/">Cyrus Lohrasbpour</a> of LeanMarket (S12) reached out to me via founders@smarking.net cold after seeing the domain name open for bid on &#8220;dropcatch.com&#8221; and offered free help to acquire it for us. I almost missed the opportunity suspecting this a phishing message. I checked bookface immediately, and decided to chat with Cyrus on phone.</p>\n<p>Cyrus turned out to be our hero. He not only provided his own bidding portal for us, but also shared with me tremendous amount of knowledge and strategic tactics, and finalized the bidding strategy together with me. Four days later, Cyrus operated the bidding process, with a cap we set at $12,500, Cyrus won the domain name for Smarking at $4,250, while my original thought on the threshold was at $40,000. What a win!</p>\n<p>We will never be able to get the .com domain without Cyrus&#8217; generous help. Cyrus reached out to me without knowing me, and he then helped us all the way through the entire process, offering all kinds of advice and hands on help, without charging us a dime, or asking for anything as a return. This probably would only happen in the YC community.</p>\n<p>– <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/sang_wen/">Wen Sang</a> of Smarking (W15)</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1101550","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-12-19T18:00:10.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:18:24.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-12-19T18:00:10.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/yc-alumni-who-paid-it-forward/","excerpt":"As the YC community grows we have to continually make the choice to help one another. I know that as your company progresses, it becomes harder and harder to respond to that quick question or favor from another YC founder. This holiday season I wanted to give shoutouts to founders in the YC community who went above and beyond to help out their fellow alum.","reading_time":7,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a719ed","uuid":"e1c8cb28-1661-4eb7-b25a-ca6012577c85","title":"Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee","slug":"three-paths-in-the-tech-industry-founder-executive-or-employee","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I’m leaving out investor because the best path to being an investor that I’ve seen starts with being successful (or failing) at one of these three first.</p>\n<p>Below I’ll outline what I see as the pros/cons and useful strategies for each role.</p>\n<p>I wrote this post though because when I talk to people about their careers I’m surprised at how often they focus on only one of these paths without taking the time to consider other options. Often when they get advice, people tell them to follow the path that they followed (as a YC partner and former founder, I’m very guilty of this).</p>\n<p>I don’t attach value judgements to these three paths. In my ten years in The Bay Area I’ve seen friends lead successful and fulfilled lives following all three.</p>\n<hr />\n<h2>Founder</h2>\n<p><strong>Pro</strong><br />\n• Work on something you’re passionate about<br />\n• Bring something new into the world<br />\n• High level of responsibility often inspires extreme productivity<br />\n• Choose the people you work with<br />\n• Learn new skills at an extremely fast pace</p>\n<p><strong>Con</strong><br />\n• Incredibly stressful. Even success hurts<br />\n• Probably won’t maximize your personal earnings<br />\n• significant financial/skillset/location hurdles to get started<br />\n• Large scale success often requires decade plus commitment<br />\n• Commitment level can significantly hurt personal relationships</p>\n<p><strong>Strategy for People Who Want to be Founders</strong><br />\nYour initial goal is to accumulate the prerequisites to being a founder.</p>\n<p><strong>1&#46;</strong> Identify potential teammates you can work with who have the required technical skills to help you build your MVP.<br />\n<strong>2&#46;</strong> Figure out the financial plan. I.e. Do you have enough money in savings, do you have friends/family who can provide seed investment, can you bootstrap, can you reduce your spending and save enough give yourself 6-12 months to work on your idea?<br />\n<strong>3&#46;</strong> Identify a problem that you and your potential teammates are passionate about solving.<br />\n<strong>4&#46;</strong> The least important (but still required) is having an idea on how of how to solve the problem.</p>\n<p>Many people who want to be founders have one or more of these prerequisites missing. A popular mistake is trying to hustle <em>around</em> a missing prerequisite instead of <em>solving the underlying issue</em>. If your team doesn’t have the technical skills to build your MVP, don’t work with a dev shop. Make friends with people who do have these skills. Convince them to join you.</p>\n<p>Often times there are hard barriers preventing people from starting a company. In these cases my best advice is to move to a tech hub (preferably the Bay Area) and work for a tech company until you can save the money, make friends with the right potential teammates, or discover the problem that you are passionate about. It usually takes at least 10 years to build a large and impactful company. It’s fine to delay your start date in order to give yourself the best chance of success.</p>\n<p>Notice that one of the prerequisites isn’t experience. Experience is over-valued (not completely unimportant &#8211; but massively over-valued) by people who are thinking about starting a company. In almost all cases, no matter what knowledge you bring to the table, you will learn most of what you need to know about your problem, your customer, and the best solution after you start your company.</p>\n<h2>Executive (Senior Manager at a Large Company)</h2>\n<p><strong>Pro</strong><br />\n• Stable income/benefits/etc.<br />\n• High level of prestige (only very successful founders have more prestige)<br />\n• A higher likelihood of having a huge impact (given that most startups fail).<br />\n• Doesn’t require building a team and acquiring money to get started</p>\n<p><strong>Con</strong><br />\n• Producing results isn&#8217;t necessarily how you move up the corporate ladder. Internal politics are usually as important, if not more so.<br />\n• Success can be hampered or even prevented by others inside of your organization<br />\n• Requires the ability to pick companies that will be growing and successful for a long time<br />\n• Takes a long time to get a significant amount of responsibility</p>\n<p><strong>Strategies for People Who Want to be Executives</strong><br />\nI actually see two strategies within this path.</p>\n<p>The first strategy is to pick a company that is growing quickly. If you do manage to pick a company like this early, then you’ll get more responsibility as the company grows &#8211; I also assume you are a friendly and productive team player. For example, if you were one of the first 100 people at Facebook and you stayed there for ten years, you would have many opportunities to become an executive. The hard part here is that picking a company that will grow rapidly for many years is extremely difficult (in many ways your task is similar to a VC).</p>\n<p>The other path is to go to work for a more established company. The people I’ve seen do this effectively don’t think about working their way up within one company alone. They often think about moving diagonally up between a set of established name brand companies until they eventually land in an executive role. For example, you start out of college at Google, get hired at Dropbox as a team lead, move to Yahoo to become a director, move back to Google &#8211; so on and so forth.</p>\n<p>People on the executive path either have to think like VCs and pick a company that is going to be one of the winners over the next 10 years, or have their head on a swivel to constantly look for better and better opportunities both inside and outside of their current company.</p>\n<h2>Employee (individual contributor / middle manager)</h2>\n<p><strong>Pro</strong><br />\n• Stable income/benefits/etc.<br />\n• More work and fewer meetings<br />\n• More often directly affecting the customer through your work<br />\n• With a high demand skill-set you have flexibility in where/how much you work<br />\n• Often have more time to spend with friends and family</p>\n<p><strong>Con</strong><br />\n• Productivity can be blocked by bad management<br />\n• You often don’t have control what you work on<br />\n• Often don’t get a voice in major decisions &#8211; even when you “know the right answer”<br />\n• It’s harder to become very wealthy<br />\n• It can be boring<br />\n• If you don’t maintain a high demand skillset or your productivity drops it’s easier to be fired</p>\n<p><strong>Strategies for People Who Want to be Employees</strong><br />\nYour strategy for picking a place to work is similar to an exec’s. You either need to spot and join a quickly growing company or find a way into a well known successful company. It’s much easier to go between brand name companies when you start with a brand name company. Also, in my experience, it’s much easier to optimize this path as a software developer.</p>\n<hr />\n<p>The last thing I’ll say is it takes time to be good at each role. When you’re in college there is this idea that you should take your 20s to discover yourself and the find the work that is most enjoyable to you. The problem is that if it takes 5-10 years to truly get good at something and you spend 10 years discovering what you want to get good at…it’s going to take a long time for you to feel like a highly skilled productive person (and to recieve the rewards that come with this). It’s not that you shouldn’t explore, it’s that you need to understand the costs of that exploration and plan accordingly.</p>\n<hr />\n<p><em>Thanks to Daniel Gross, Aaron Harris, and Craig Cannon for reading drafts of this post.</em></p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1100874","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-09-28T01:00:04.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:52:25.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-09-28T01:00:04.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/three-paths-in-the-tech-industry-founder-executive-or-employee/","excerpt":"When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I’m leaving out investor because the best path to being an investor that I’ve seen starts with being successful (or failing) at one of these three first.","reading_time":5,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a7199d","uuid":"56da7397-ed4f-4755-a643-765a49a1deb6","title":"Welcome Eric, Gustaf, and Jocelyn","slug":"welcome-eric-gustaf-and-jocelyn","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>We’re excited to welcome Eric, Gustaf, and Jocelyn to the YC Team.</p>\n<p>Gustaf Alstromer is joining YC as a partner. Most recently, Gustaf spent 4.5 years at Airbnb where he worked as a Product Lead on the Growth team, a team he helped start in 2012. Before Airbnb, Gustaf was Head of Growth at Voxer, and prior to that, he was CEO &amp; cofounder of Heysan, which was part of the YC W07 batch.</p>\n<p>Eric Migicovsky is joining YC as a Visiting Partner. Eric founded Pebble Technology (YC W11), which was acquired by Fitbit in 2016. While studying engineering at the University of Waterloo in 2008, Eric began building smartwatches with a group of friends. In April 2012, Eric and his team launched Pebble on Kickstarter, where it became the most successful crowdfunded project in Kickstarter’s history. Pebble sold over 2,000,000 watches and generated revenues of more than $200 million.</p>\n<p>Jocelyn Robancho is joining YC as the Assistant Batch Director. Prior to YC, she was the Director of Business Operations for Hack Reactor and the cofounder/COO of a food recommendation app. Jocelyn holds a bachelor&#8217;s in Economics and another in Politics from UC Santa Cruz.</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1099723","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-06-21T01:00:33.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:03:18.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-06-21T01:00:33.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/welcome-eric-gustaf-and-jocelyn/","excerpt":"We’re excited to welcome Eric, Gustaf, and Jocelyn to the YC Team.","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a7193e","uuid":"e100ebd5-302e-4cff-9c35-b7bb83261ae2","title":"Fundraising Rounds Are Not Milestones","slug":"fundraising-rounds-are-not-milestones","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>When meeting with founders for the first time I sometimes hear, “We’re a Series A company.” Meanwhile, YC alumni I talk to tell me that their angel investors regularly ask them, “When are you going to raise a Series A?”.</p>\n<p>I’d like to make the point that success isn’t the same as raising a round of financing. Quite the opposite: raising a round should be a byproduct of success. Using fundraising itself as a benchmark is dangerous for the entire community because it encourages a culture of optimizing for short term showmanship instead of making something people want and creating lasting value.</p>\n<p>I believe founders, investors, and the tech press should fundamentally change how they think about fundraising. By deemphasizing investment rounds we would have more opportunity to celebrate companies who develop measurable milestones of value creation, focus on serving a customer with a real need, and generate sustainable businesses with good margins.</p>\n<p>Optimizing for funding rounds is just as unproductive as optimizing for headcount, press mentions, conference invites, fancy offices, speaking gigs or top line revenue growth with massively negative unit economics.</p>\n<p>A financing round is not a milestone. It is literally cash. Sometimes it goes to great companies, sometimes it goes to bad companies. Sometimes it’s given for good reasons, sometimes investors wish they could take it all back. The best early stage founders focus on staying lean, talking to their customers, iterating on their product, and discovering product-market fit.</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13581089\%22>Discuss this article on Hacker News</a>.</p>\n<p><em>Thanks to Daniel Gross, Richard Kerby, and Craig Cannon for reading drafts of this post.</em></p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1098459","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-02-06T00:34:59.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:15:22.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-02-06T00:34:59.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7116d","name":"Essay","slug":"essay","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/essay/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/fundraising-rounds-are-not-milestones/","excerpt":"When meeting with founders for the first time I sometimes hear, “We’re a Series A company.” Meanwhile, YC alumni I talk to tell me that their angel investors regularly ask them, “When are you going to raise a Series A?”.","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a7192f","uuid":"54cc415d-5695-44f7-8d49-fb2338a35775","title":"VR","slug":"vr","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>About a month and a half ago I tried the new Oculus and was completely blown away. Even though there were clear rough points &#8211; expensive computer, not wireless, limited apps &#8211; I was amazed. The next morning I had two thoughts:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>Because VR games are so physical, gaming will no longer be perceived as an unhealthy activity. I could have used this growing up.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Because VR is so immersive, I can imagine myself spending significant amounts of time (hours) with a headset on, every day. As a result, gaming will not be the only significant use case for VR. My headset will steal time time from other screens (tv/laptop/phone) and as a result there will be an explosion of VR consumer apps, entertainment apps, developer tools, and more.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a number of VR companies apply to YC but because of the lack user base it was hard for them to build software. This is about to change.<sup id=\"footnoteid1\"><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnote1\">1</a></sup></p>\n<p>If I were starting a company today, I would look at the home screen of my phone and ask how many of these apps will have to be rebuilt for VR and which of the traditional incumbents are going to be too slow to adapt.</p>\n<p><strong>If I am right, over the next five years we will see the following:</strong><br />\n1&#46; Lower price point and maybe the ability to finance the hardware (like your cell phone).<br />\n2&#46; 100 million devices distributed. Without a significant number of users the best founders won’t get serious about building for VR over building for web/mobile.<br />\n3&#46; New frameworks. Building and iterating VR apps is going to have to get a lot easier.<br />\n4&#46; Large companies solving the primary hardware problems: headset and input innovation plus distribution. I think this might be too expensive for startups to tackle.</p>\n<p><strong>The Result For YC</strong><br />\nRecently I’ve heard a lot of investors say “There isn’t a whole lot of new stuff to do in consumer. There’s already an app for that.” With VR, there isn’t already an app for that.</p>\n<p>I think we are no more than two years away from an explosion of new consumer startups and I cannot wait to start funding them at YC.</p>\n<hr />\n<p><b id=\"footnote1\">1.</b> <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.statista.com/statistics/458037/virtual-reality-headsets-unit-sales-worldwide/">https://www.statista.com/statistics/458037/virtual-reality-headsets-unit-sales-worldwide <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnoteid1\">↩</a></p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1098183","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-01-13T01:55:34.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:16:22.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-01-13T01:55:34.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7116d","name":"Essay","slug":"essay","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/essay/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7116d","name":"Essay","slug":"essay","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/essay/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/vr/","excerpt":"About a month and a half ago I tried the new Oculus and was completely blown away. Even though there were clear rough points – expensive computer, not wireless, limited apps – I was amazed. The next morning I had two thoughts:","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a7192d","uuid":"46a4ff1a-6f4e-4473-a195-4960fe7a4bd4","title":"Welcome Daniel, Nicole, Stephanie, Steven and Tatyana!","slug":"welcome-daniel-nicole-stephanie-steven-and-tatyana","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>We&#8217;re excited to welcome five new members of the YC team:</p>\n<p><strong>Daniel Gross</strong> is joining YC as a Partner. Daniel co-founded Greplin (YC W10), a search engine that let users find content across their online accounts (Gmail, Dropbox, Salesforce, etc). In 2012, the company renamed itself to Cue and launched additional predictive search features. Cue was acquired by Apple in 2013, where Daniel continued to lead ML efforts across iOS and OS X for three years. Daniel is also an angel investor in Cruise, Gusto, Color, Triplebyte, Forward, TrendMD and others. An avid runner, Daniel&#8217;s ambition is to beat both Turing tests: in machine intelligence and the lesser known <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/danielgross/status/769986483855953920/">marathon time</a>.</p>\n<p><strong>Nicole Cadman</strong> is joining us as Associate General Counsel. Previously she was a Managing Associate in Orrick&#8217;s Technology Companies Group, and she has a JD from Stanford Law School. Nicole ran both the Boston and Budapest marathons in 2016—the latter two days before starting at YC. She loves to swim.</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://stephsimon.com//">Stephanie Simon</strong></a> is joining YC as Admissions Manager. Most recently she was building software at Earnest. Prior to that, she was cofounder and CEO of Murmur, a local recommendation app. She also likes naming companies and products, and has won some awards for it. She graduated from Scripps College and sings/plays guitar in the band The Long Walk.</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://stevenchan.co//">Steven Chan</strong></a> is coming on board as YC&#8217;s Office Manager, working on the operations and software team. He is a self-taught photographer and designer from NYC where he&#8217;s worked with clients like Airbnb, Hackers of NY, and Startup Weekend. He previously cofounded an education nonprofit while in undergrad. Steven holds a BS in Applied Psychology from NYU.</p>\n<p><strong>Tatyana Veremyova</strong> is joining as Finance Controller. Prior to YC, she spent years consulting with startups on finance and HR topics. She has a BS degree in Economics. She enjoys reading, traveling, studying languages, psychology and dance.</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1098159","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-01-10T04:00:54.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:16:37.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-01-10T04:00:54.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710af","name":"Michael Seibel","slug":"michael-seibel-2","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Michael-1.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Michael Seibel is a Group Partner and Managing Director, Early Stage at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO Justin.tv and Socialcam. Socialcam sold to Autodesk in 2012 and Justin.tv became Twitch.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/michael-seibel-2/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/welcome-daniel-nicole-stephanie-steven-and-tatyana/","excerpt":"We’re excited to welcome five new members of the YC team:","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71921","uuid":"02c25b4e-8997-48e9-abb0-882e7d85453f","title":"The Scientific Method for Startups","slug":"the-scientific-method-for-startups","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>When people discuss startups they tend to talk about inspiration and creativity. This leads founders to believe they can imagineer a solution to any problem they’re trying to solve. In reality, executing a startup is a balance between creativity/intuition/instinct and the scientific method: hypothesize > a/b test > conclude > repeat.</p>\n<p>Inspiration will help you find a problem to solve. Creativity will allow you to brainstorm potential solutions to that problem. The scientific method will guide you toward which of these solutions will actually solve your customer’s problem.</p>\n<p>Running a scientific method requires having measurement in place. It requires that you have pre-existing analytics measuring what your users are doing every day. And it requires that when you build new features, you immediately add them to your analytics system–minute one. In order for this to work you cannot have the attitude: “This is obvious, why would we measure it?”</p>\n<p>Many companies make the mistake of only using internal analytics. They think that if they need an answer they can just write a DB query to get it. Unfortunately, the harder it is for you to ask a question, the fewer questions you will ask. By using a standard analytics product (we’ve funded a bunch of them at YC) you enable everyone in your company (even non-programmers) to ask an unlimited number of questions and get the answers quickly. This is hugely important. I actually think it would be a good idea for companies to measure employee usage of their analytics product. Measurement and talking to users improve your ability to be inspired, creative, and break the rules.</p>\n<p>Here’s an example: Tim Robinson, one of our employees at Justin.tv, was building a payments funnel for a new product we were releasing. When trying to figure out what to put on the header and footer of the payment flow the obvious idea was to use the standard header and footer from our website. But instead of thinking, “this is obvious, why would we measure it”, he measured everything users did when going through the flow. By measuring he realized instead of moving through the flow with the “obvious” next buttons, users were clicking on the logo at the top of the page, the links on the footers, everywhere! So he started removing these items. A designer might say he was screwing up the aesthetics of the site but as an engineer he could see through the analytics that every time he removed links, payment conversion would increase. By applying the scientific method of hypothesize > a/b test > conclude > repeat he was able to build a product that produced a third of our revenue at JTV. What made his work even more amazing is that Justin.tv at that time wasn’t really data driven at all. Perhaps it was his background as a scientist led him to this method or perhaps it was common sense, but without this feature Justin.tv would have died. Thanks Tim!</p>\n<p>The best companies (and employees) are willing to use data to back up their decision making. They don’t believe that standards or aesthetics are rules written in stone. They don’t believe that only product people or founders know the solutions to problems. 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Recent Posts By Michael Seibel

Request for Startups: Government 2.0

In 2018, Pew Research Center reported that 57% of Americans believe that children in America today will be worse off financially than their parents. ...

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YC Alumni Who Paid It Forward

by Michael Seibel12/20/2017

As the YC community grows we have to continually make the choice to help one another. I know that as your company progresses, it becomes harder and harder to respond to that quick question or favor from another YC founder. This holiday season I wanted to give shoutouts to founders in the YC community who went above and beyond to help out their fellow alum.

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Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

by Michael Seibel9/28/2017

When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I’m leaving out investor because the best path to being an investor that I’ve seen starts with being successful (or failing) at one of these three first.

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Welcome Eric, Gustaf, and Jocelyn

by Michael Seibel6/21/2017

We’re excited to welcome Eric, Gustaf, and Jocelyn to the YC Team.

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Fundraising Rounds Are Not Milestones

by Michael Seibel2/6/2017

When meeting with founders for the first time I sometimes hear, “We’re a Series A company.” Meanwhile, YC alumni I talk to tell me that their angel investors regularly ask them, “When are you going to raise a Series A?”.

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VR

by Michael Seibel1/13/2017

About a month and a half ago I tried the new Oculus and was completely blown away. Even though there were clear rough points – expensive computer, not wireless, limited apps – I was amazed. The next morning I had two thoughts:

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Welcome Daniel, Nicole, Stephanie, Steven and Tatyana!

by Michael Seibel1/10/2017

We’re excited to welcome five new members of the YC team:

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The Scientific Method for Startups

by Michael Seibel12/5/2016

When people discuss startups they tend to talk about inspiration and creativity. This leads founders to believe they can imagineer a solution to any problem they’re trying to solve. In reality, executing a startup is a balance between creativity/intuition/instinct and the scientific method: hypothesize > a/b test > conclude > repeat.

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