The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Hughes: YC internal data proves staying in SF yields higher success rates
“When we graduated from Y Combinator on the last day, they just put up, like, all the data behind, like, companies who stay in SF and companies that leave SF. Even if you go to New York, like, it just, like, the chances of success are just so much higher if you…”
180 VCs rejected Bland AI in 2023, doubting phone calls would survive
“The total amount was roughly a 180 investors over three weeks I met with, and I got more or less all of them saying no, and their number one piece of feedback Which was soul crushing was we don't think people will be doing phone calls a year from now. This was…”
Walker: Post-money SAFEs primarily serve investors, not founders
“The switch from pre to post money was not a founder friendly thing. YC sometimes makes it sound as though that was in service of founders, and you can make some case that it is more transparent, it's more certainty, et cetera, but that is primarily in service …”
Tian claims Neo accelerator offers 2x better terms than Y Combinator
“NIO has like around two X better terms and it's like a tighter neck community, so it's like, it's only 20 20 startups per batch versus YC, I think it was like a 200 something.”
Palafox: HappyRobot pivoted away from computer vision on YC Demo Day
“On demo day, I literally slag Diana, like Diana, we're pivoting. Like demo day, like we have the slides prepared, the presentation prepared, and like we're pivoting, like away completely from this computer vision platform thing that we've built, this auto labe…”
Accepting introductions from investors who pass on your startup creates negative signal
“The other, like, common mistake I think people make is they will accept intros to investors from other investors, and I learned this from YC, that's, like, a big no-no. So, for example, let's say I talk to an angel investor, and they're like, oh, like, this is…”
Siqi Chen was Y Combinator's very first dropout
“I was Y Kilometer's very first dropout, and Y Kilometer was not cool.”
Akhund: Y Combinator is truly transformational because it invests when others do not
“I mean, there are some things like Y Cominator that like are truly transformational. Like they, you know, they make an investment when other people are not, or like they come up with a model that's different.”
Srugo: Happy Robot reached $2M ARR in one year after logistics pivot
“Ended up building And AI agents in the logistics space that answers calls from like fright, like basically if you have a truck and you're like trying to pick up loads, you call, but instead of a human answering, now it's their AI agent that answers. And they w…”
Y Combinator partners told Pylon founders their support idea would never work
“The next day we talked to YC they tell us the idea sucks, but that like, and they also say that they've seen this idea a million times and it never works for anyone.”
Walker: Carta data reflects immediate market adoption when YC alters default SAFEs
“Like literally you can go into our data and find the moment where YC changes what the default is on their website. And it's very obvious in the numbers. What people are using because they're just downloading it from YC.”
Slowe: Early co-founder equity disputes signal a lack of trust
“It's a really bad sign. It's a sign of lack of, it's like, it's actually, that's probably, it's like, it's a sign of like immediate lack of trust. It's like, they don't actually trust each other enough.”
Srugo: Getting into Y Combinator doubles startup valuations and eases fundraising
“And I've seen time and time again, like these companies get into YC and all of a sudden, like their price went up by two X and like, it's just so much easier for them to raise.”
Hughes: SolidRoad Met Series A Investor at SF Irish Meetup
“There's so many other examples of being over here of like meeting our series A investor while we're doing YC at like an Irish meetup event in San Francisco.”
Hughes: SolidRoad hit $1M ARR the night before YC Demo Day
“The night before demo day at YC. That would have been March, 25.”
Srugo: Pylon founder Marty used FOMO-engineered intro blurbs from founders
“What Marty from Pylon had in his blurb was he had founders reach out to VCs and say something like, hey, have you met Pylon yet? I know Marty. He's a great founder. They're in YC now. If you haven't met them yet, let me know and I can try to get you in.”
Englander: Fat Llama fixed unit economics a year after $12M Series A
“We got on YC, raised a twelve million dollar Series A. Pretty quickly after that, but it took us a good year or so after our series A for the unique economics to add up”
Englander: Fat Llama raised £1.1M across two rounds before Y Combinator
“I'd say that one of the things that we don't talk about enough was like, you know, between starting and getting on YC, we raised the million pounds and that was like straight scrappiness. I remember we actually raised two rounds, a 100,000 pound round, and the…”
Phadnis raised $6M for his crypto startup in one month
“And then by the end of the month, we ended up raising six million in total from like Y Combinator and like a bunch of other.”
Mercury wanted to do Y Combinator but the deal fell through
“I kind of wanted to do it for Mercury as well. It didn't work out”
Dearsley: Michael Seibel Accurately Predicted Team Would Pivot Every Three Months
“Michael Seibel, he was one of our group partners at YC. He told us quite early on, I'm Skeptical that you guys are going to continue doing what you're doing for more than three months if it isn't working after three months. And he was right every single time. …”
Y Combinator initially rejected Tian's first AI image generator idea
“We applied to YC with it, and, like, they weren't a fan. They were, like well, actually, we applied with the idea. And then they were like, how quickly can you build it? And then we built it in a few days but they still didn't accept us. They accepted us later…”
Yoo: Suger entered YC Demo Day at $30K ARR and $100K contracted ARR
“We got out of, you know, we went to demo day with 30 K in real ARR, but we had a, we were, we had a hundred K in contracted ARR.”
Yoo: Suger pitched a different idea during its YC interview
“When we actually applied for YC, it wasn't even around marketplaces. It was around usage and so lo and behold, like we show up to the interview and it's a 10 minute, like high pressure interview. And the first thing we see in the interview is just, hey, we're …”
HappyRobot raised $15.6M Series A from a16z after YC
“I mean, you went through YC, you raised a 15.6 million dollar series A from A-sixteen”
Reeves: Gusto raised a $6M seed round in spring 2012
“Like we had a fantastic fundraising moment in
that spring where, where we did a six million dollar seed round.”
Pylon retained $3.1M of its $3.3M seed funding before raising Series A
“We were already cashflow positive. And so we did not need the money. We weren't thinking about raising money. We were, yeah, we like had spent at this point, we had raised like 3.3 total with like YC's initial check. And we had like 3.1 in the bank.”
Pylon Reached $120K ARR by End of YC Batch
“In fact, by the end of our YC batch, we were at a 120 K in ARR, and so, like, turns out, like, people were buying Zendesk, they were buying Intercom, and it wasn't working because they did all their support in Slack, and so they literally were, in some cases, …”
Kausas: At least 10 startups in Pylon's YC batch built AI support bots
“So there were at least, like, 10 companies in our batch who were doing just that.”
Kausas: Pylon founders paid themselves $35K yearly salaries after YC
“After we got into YC, and we'll, we'll get there in a moment like, Advith Robert and I, we started paying ourselves 35 K per year, which is like the minimum salary that you can pay in California.”
Kausas: Pylon raised a $3.2M seed round led by General Catalyst in 6 days
“We end up you know, we end up raising a seed round from general catalyst right before the end of the batch. So, you know, we had like a big LinkedIn post about that where, Hey, we raised our seed round in six days 3.2 million dollars GC led it.”
Walker: Y Combinator no longer provides pre-money SAFEs on its website
“YC doesn't even offer the pre money safe on their site anymore.”
Fox entered YC as a solo founder 30 days past the deadline
“And so I submitted an application to YC for their summer batch. This is like summer of 20 17. And it was 30 days past the deadline. So I was like single founder past the deadline. There's no way I'm going to get in. You know, I was planning to just work on it,…”
AssemblyAI's post-YC seed round was funded entirely by angel investors
“No institutional funds invested. It was only angels that invested”
Fox: Post-YC founders should slow down and plan two-year horizons
“I would have advised my, myself to take a longer term view in the first year, especially coming out of YC, like slow down. Now that you're done YC, what do you want to accomplish over the next two years? Like, where do you want to be in two years? And then jus…”
Y Combinator rejected Wealthsimple's early prototype due to market doubts
“We applied to YC, little known fact about Wealthsimple's history at this stage. Got turned down because they didn't quite believe that anybody wanted what we were trying to build.”
Airbyte entered Y Combinator at the pure idea stage without a product
“Getting into YC, we were in an idea phase, which is, we knew what problem space we wanted to address, but we did not really have a solution yet.”
Amplitude founders pivoted from Android voice app Sonalight into analytics
“They had gone through YC. They were actually doing a text by voice company called Sonalite. And so they were trying to kind of do Siri before Siri's really a thing. And they were doing it for Android. And, you know, I'll go into that story a little bit more, b…”