YC has both transformed by company and saved my role as a founder. I'll be completely transparent and say I disagree with a lot of the sentiment. I'll do my best to briefly explain why.
From talking to many YC alumn, I've observed a strong correlation with business success and YC opinion. Every founder that is no longer operating within 2 years of YC has a generally negative sentiment. Others are quite positive. Not sure what biases are at play, but the correlation is clear.
As others have said, YC is what you make of it. I (S22) did not ever feel like I was getting cookie cutter advice from my GPs. When I talked to my partners, we really honed in on our issues specifically. Every time the GPs told us something they were right, whether it took me 10 seconds or 10 weeks to accept it. And to be fair the cookie cutter and repetitive advice they do give is because people generally don't listen if they just say it once or twice, and it's also REALLY important.
> Hiring is waste of time, paid advertising is waste of time, content is waste of time, talking to investors is waste of time, getting media coverage is waste of time.
This is dangerously oversimplified, these are all things that they suggest at various stages. Their advice for you depends greatly on your stage. Early on they told us paid placement is innapropriate. Later they told us it would be a great way to quickly validate changes and iterations. Depends on where you are and what you do.
Yeah YC makes fundraising orders of magnitude easier. Yeah in person definitely makes it way better. I've no regrets, would do YC again every time.
I've also heard similar sentiment from investors! "7% it too much for $125k", etc. But it's the prestige of the brand, and the super powerful network. I'm not part of any other pre-defined networks so I don't really know how to compare, but YC is POWERFUL. Nobody I've talked with that had those opinions had alternatives to getting that network or valuation that quickly, unless your already a startup star.
The big caveat is that my timezone lined up and I had many in person options, I also did not shut down immediately after demo day. I'm sure that made our experiences dramatically different. Being in a group of founders with similar experiences and comfortable being vulnerable with each other is the greatest therapy any founder could ask for.
I would warn non-YC founders reading this that this founders experience is highly abnormal for YC, and to talk to many more YC founders before drawing your own conclusions.
From talking to many YC alumn, I've observed a strong correlation with business success and YC opinion. Every founder that is no longer operating within 2 years of YC has a generally negative sentiment. Others are quite positive. Not sure what biases are at play, but the correlation is clear.
As others have said, YC is what you make of it. I (S22) did not ever feel like I was getting cookie cutter advice from my GPs. When I talked to my partners, we really honed in on our issues specifically. Every time the GPs told us something they were right, whether it took me 10 seconds or 10 weeks to accept it. And to be fair the cookie cutter and repetitive advice they do give is because people generally don't listen if they just say it once or twice, and it's also REALLY important.
> Hiring is waste of time, paid advertising is waste of time, content is waste of time, talking to investors is waste of time, getting media coverage is waste of time.
This is dangerously oversimplified, these are all things that they suggest at various stages. Their advice for you depends greatly on your stage. Early on they told us paid placement is innapropriate. Later they told us it would be a great way to quickly validate changes and iterations. Depends on where you are and what you do.
Yeah YC makes fundraising orders of magnitude easier. Yeah in person definitely makes it way better. I've no regrets, would do YC again every time.
I've also heard similar sentiment from investors! "7% it too much for $125k", etc. But it's the prestige of the brand, and the super powerful network. I'm not part of any other pre-defined networks so I don't really know how to compare, but YC is POWERFUL. Nobody I've talked with that had those opinions had alternatives to getting that network or valuation that quickly, unless your already a startup star.
The big caveat is that my timezone lined up and I had many in person options, I also did not shut down immediately after demo day. I'm sure that made our experiences dramatically different. Being in a group of founders with similar experiences and comfortable being vulnerable with each other is the greatest therapy any founder could ask for.
I would warn non-YC founders reading this that this founders experience is highly abnormal for YC, and to talk to many more YC founders before drawing your own conclusions.