I wonder how much of this is a function of the W22 batch being remote.
We all know the benefits: The fundraising pop is great, the brand patina helps you hire better talent than you would otherwise, the advice can be useful, especially for first-time founders, you can sell into the YC network, etc. All of this pales, IMO, to the value of the personal connections you make in the program. It sounds like OP, by virtue of being 8,400 miles away, missed out on that.
I went through YC in S14, and I found the in-person experience to be invaluable. There were 80 companies at the time, so we had somewhere around ~200 founders in our batch. Even at that scale, you're not going to get to know everyone, and I found myself gravitating toward a smaller group of people who I connected with personally.
I'm not going to lie, YC was stressful. You're dropped in amongst bunch of smart and accomplished people who are sprinting as fast as possible toward the all-consuming Demo Day. It's a bit of a pressure cooker, but that's not unintentional. Those shared experiences formed the substrate of some amazing, life-long friendships.
I have 15+ close friends who went through S14. We talk every day. We've been in each other's weddings. We've watched each other have kids, shut down companies, start new ones, get acquired for enormous amounts of money, and everything in between. It's been incredible watching their trajectories over the last 9 years. Some are C-level execs at public companies, some are tier 1 VCs, a couple are billionaires, some are homesteaders and amazing parents. All of them are solid, kind, high-quality people, the likes of which you are unlikely to meet in the regular world.
I think you lose much of that in the remote-only format. If I were to go through a remote-only accelerator located in Singapore, I imagine I would make few meaningful personal connections. Like it or not, Zoom is a pretty thin facsimile of real human interaction.
My life's trajectory is meaningfully better for the friendships I made in S14, and I expect that trend to keep compounding over the next 30 years. If you missed that benefit, you missed much of what makes YC special.
> All of them are solid, kind, high-quality people, the likes of which you are unlikely to meet in the regular world.
This attitude may have something to do with the skepticism we low-quality people out in the regular world may harbor for the Silicon Valley startup sphere
I understand how easily this feeling can arise. It may not be obvious but we spend a lot of energy on HN trying to mitigate it. I don't want a high-status-insider vs. low-status-outsider dynamic on HN.
One thing I'd like to tell you is that as someone who came from little class privilege and a geographically provincial place, and had zero connection to the "Silicon Valley startup sphere" or really any other sphere, YC welcomed me and gave me a shot and a lot of help.
These dynamics aren't simple but I'd like to think (and do think) that YC is still one of the best ladders in the snakes-and-ladders game if you're talented, ambitious, and sincere. And at the same time, there are still lots of obstacles.
maybe my brain is sleed-deprived but this doesn't feel great to me either. can we not be high quality people without those connections, regardless of how those connections might be made easier for the rare individuals who participate in YC?
Who is saying you/we are not high quality people? No one is saying that high quality people don't exist outside YC, just that YC accepts high quality people. You are committing the logical fallacy known as the fallacy of composition [0].
I believe this was the offending sentence fragment that implied the sentiment you say is not there: "the likes of which you are unlikely to meet in the regular world"
I read that as 'There's a higher probability of meeting high quality people in a location that actively concentrates them, then just randomly going through life.'
Definitely could have worded that better, but my point is that I found YC to cultivate a density of smart + ambitious + nice people that I haven't found in quite the same quantities in most other networks I've been a part of.
Even if you can't have personal connections with the founders of 80 companies in a batch, having hundreds of companies in each batch--twice a year!--is seriously diluting my own worked-for-a-YC-startup brand equity. "Oh, yeah, I met Jeremy at $EVENT" becomes a thing of the past when there are thousands of founders with tens of thousands of early-stage employees.
This reminds of my college experience. My friends and I were always stressed trying to finish the next CS project or study for the next exam but we came out of it extremely close to one another. Nothing builds friendships like shared pain I guess.
It's a fairly time-honored tactic to redesign a brand that has lots of negative associations built up, and I could see Dara driving this as part of the overhaul. Typically that results in a full name change though.
Having read through this, it sounds like the brand team considered more radical changes but ultimately found that the broad name recognition and generally positive associations with the stark black/white aesthetic were too strong to ditch entirely. What remained was the ability to iterate on the original brand, and that's what you got.
I agree with ditching "the bit" icon in favor of a "U" though. That logo made zero sense, and always felt like a creative team stretching to imbue an abstract mark with some sort of meaning.
Thanks for that perspective, Jeremy. But I think hidden in that question was an underlying question: does changing the brand in non-radical ways change perception in people's minds?
The answer might be yes for Dara, but it seems unintuitive to me.
> does changing the brand in non-radical ways change perception in people's minds?
It definitely does for me. I'm not an Uber user (doesn't exist in Germany), but I know the previous design system. When I looked through this page, I also had the impression that their new CEO has to do with this because it evokes more feminine qualities than the previous corporate design. I cannot exactly pin-point this; I'm just going by the feelings it evokes in me. It somehow feels warmer and more empathetic to me (to the extent that a tech giant can be perceived as warm and empathetic).
It's definitely what Uber needs right now on the design front. Let's see how much it helps them regain trust.
If you actually believe that, go ahead and pick the ten companies you think are worth something, and I'll take the "unpromising" part of the batch. We can put a five year bet into longbets that the top ten companies of my group will outperform your ten companies, as scored by either exit value or value of last round raised.
Picking winners is hard, and most great companies today looked dramatically different when they were first getting started.
I like your comments @throwaway2018i. I’m the founder of Atlas (atlasdex dot org). If you want, shoot me a msg to compare if our picks overlap, that’d Be neat
Depending on what stage of growth you’re at, your Startup School mentor should still be able to be helpful.
Most companies in the program are in the 0-1 phase, but there were a few in my group that were 1-N. The program format is flexible, so it’s fairly easy to tailor content to your audience.
YC core has a similar dynamic, and individual companies in a batch fall along a fairly wide range in terms of stage / progress. They only break out a formal growth track once companies have >50 employees.
Lawn Love (YC S14, https://lawnlove.com) | Senior Software Engineer | San Diego, CA | FULL-TIME ONSITE
We're Lawn Love, a new type of lawn care service. We're building a software layer on top of the very large, thoroughly antiquated lawn care market. We're profitable, growing fast, and operating in over 100 markets in the US.
We bring software and data (truckloads of data!) to the sprawling, low-tech lawn care market. We’re hiring experienced full-stack engineers to help us reinvent this $83B/year industry. Our platform connects hundreds of thousands of lawn-havers with independent gardeners all across the country.
Market value is not some objective number. Any value between the smallest acceptable to the seller to the highest acceptable to the buyer would work.
More than half the people are trying to get the most they can instead of the least. The vast majority of people in this situation (the employees) are not getting what they want. Unless they start collective bargaining, Bezos has far more power than they do.
They are about 10x the next best (Techstars) based on valuation of the companies they've funded (~$80B vs ~$8B). Valuation isn't a perfect metric, but it's a reasonable proxy for performance.
I think the numbers make sense with or without the total number of investments figure since the large outcomes in venture are driven by a small number of companies, and not the pack.
It is so hard to actually get the VC business model. If in all these years, every single YC company had failed except for Airbnb, YC would still be 4X better than the second best competitor.
I'm guessing this is less about trying to avoid setting too high a bar, and more about taking the term sheet that offered a lower upfront valuation but with much cleaner terms and less overall deal hair.
Either way, this is super impressive from Ryan and the rest of the Flexport team. Kudos.
The answer to this is fairly straightforward: VCs don't actually expect (or need) every investment to be successful, they just need it to have the potential to be huge if everything works out.
Laypeople always seem shocked when a VC-funded company implodes. We should actually be surprised if we didn't see routine flame-outs, as that would mean VCs aren't taking on appropriate quantities of risk for the asset class.
As a final aside: I've lost count of the number of times I've pulled an about-face on businesses I initially thought were stupid -- once I had a chance to talk to the founders and better understand the vision. Many of these seemingly 'dumb' ideas have surprising depth.
Some, granted, are in fact dumber than a box of rocks.
The reason people are shocked isn't that VCs are willing to take a risk on an idea that appears ridiculous at first blanche, it's that Juicero had 4 rounds of investment before they launched, which amounted to $118.5M. That includes a $70M Series B in 2016-03 which was quickly followed by a $28M Series C one month later. [1]
Few would be surprised by a few million being spent looking for a market fit on a wacky idea, it's the scale and obvious demand to get involved at such a late stage.
You could say that same about Soylent as it's simply a Pediasure/Ensure marketed towards hipster 20-somethings. People love drawing the conclusion that superior marketing/design equates to better products.
Often times, if you can make a consumer happy with the experience, they don't care if they're overpaying for a terrible product.
The problem with Juicero is that their user experience laid bare how futile and ridiculous their product was by having consumers manufacture the product themselves.
If the Juicero simply made those juices in a bottle (EVEN IF the nutritional value was lost during bottling) I can see them succeeding based purely on their marketing and people suspending disbelief to support their idea they were being healthy while looking cool.
>The problem with Juicero is that their user experience laid bare how futile and ridiculous their product was by having consumers manufacture the product themselves.
Blue Apron and every other meal kit delivery business sits on the other end of the same road, yet they seem to be doing okay and without the same level of ridicule.
I wonder whether Juicero could have avoided this outcome had they mailed their customers whole fruits and asked them to peel and fill their own juice bags, that way people will not be able to put two and two together to realise that it is just another beverage maker with DRM.
P.S. I remember Juicero being rather well received by the resturant industry as it is fully automated and requires minimal cleanup, so perhaps they marketed to the wrong crowd after all.
I agree Blue Apron is equally ridiculous and I totally agree that Juicero marketed to the wrong crowd.
Juicero was too visible in high-standard markets and thus became an easy target. Whereas Blue Apron flew under the critic radar (mostly in Facebook mom feeds) before gaining enough market share for consumers to shrug off ridicule
As a former blue apron customer I don't think it was ridiculous. I churned when my wife was out of the country. There are still recipes that they sent that I still cook. Now as a business I don't think they will be able to compete with a hybrid solution that amazon/Whole Foods will be able to devise. But I see Juicero as completely different.
For Odwalla/Naked juice:
Do you pay 8 dollars per bottle, need to wait for it to arrive in the mail, pay $400 for the juice press to make it, and get locked into a single product for all of your "fruit juice needs"?
You don't need to convince me that juicero was stupid and unnecessary, just saying there's an analogue to gp's example in that there are already fairly expensive ($4/bottle) juices out there showing that there's a market for juice. There are also much more ridiculously priced juices, including, yes, $8 juices. I'm not the target market for those, but they exist at cafes and some other grab and go type places and have for a bit, so there must be at least a small market for overpriced juice.
I'm not sure it's analogous though. It'd be analogous if juicero were selling just another juice bottle ready to drink but maybe mailed to you instead of sold in stores.
What juicero did was sell you an expensive machine to essentially squeeze odwalla bottles for you into a cup... something ludicrous like that.
There may be a market for juice bottles, but juicero wasn't selling juice bottles.
The problem is a lot of disruptive businesses initially looked "completely ridiculous from the start".
VCs are not idiots, they are probably much more humble than what ordinary people think they are, because any active VC--especially if they're successful--would have run into at least several cases where they passed on a company because they "looked stupid", just to find out that they went on to become wildly successful.
Once you go through this routine several times, you generally learn to appreciate and not immediately discount seemingly stupid ideas. This happens not just to VCs but overall if you live in Silicon Valley.
Since ideas alone aren't enough, the only good measure in my experience is looking at the person who's working on it. And here lies a lot of mistakes VCs make, they just look at some guy who was successful in the past and just think it's safe to bet on them.
To be clear, I also think Juicero was a stupid idea, and I think it was stupid of them to waste so much money upfront instead of starting scrappy, but my point is that there is no such thing as an "absolutely stupid idea". Ideas are contextual.
