TechCrunch interview
In an interview with TechCrunch, Atman talks about YC’s Fellowship program:
I think we all get a little screwed up in the way we think about money in Silicon Valley sometimes; $12k is actually a lot of money to most people. It should be enough to live on, build a product, and get initial users. I think it’s fair to say that YCF is targeting people with low personal burn rates. These are often younger, but certainly not always. And I’ve met some 24 year old Google engineers that get their personal burn rates up pretty high…
On giving advice to startups:
We usually (but certainly not always!) give good advice. This is surprisingly hard to get for startup founders… The general principle is to identify the startup’s single biggest current problem, and help them figure out how to solve that. This is hard because a) most startups have a lot of problems and b) most founders are bad at knowing what actual problems vs fake problems are. For example, most founders worry a lot about competitors, but not much about users not staying engaged.
Regrets not funding Indiegogo
Livingston talks about not investing in Indiegogo:
We didn’t interview Indiegogo when they applied to YC back in 2007 or 2006. We didn’t even invite them to interview, so I guess that would be a dumb business move. In our defense, they were raising funding for indie movie projects, so it isn’t the same thing as it is now. But I really love their founder, Danae Ringelmann. I think she’s awesome. So I’m equally sad that we didn’t fund her, from a personal perspective.
‘Monopoly’
Altman discusses whether Y Combinator has a monopoly on early-stage startups with former TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. Arrington:
You consider yourself a monopoly
Altman:
Yeah, sure.
CNN interview
Altman talks about meeting Steve Jobs, working with startups in the risky early stages, and the challenge Y Combinator faces in convincing people to start their own companies instead of joining Facebook and Google:
How do we convince that brilliant engineer that has the idea he’s really passionate about, that can change the world, to start a startup and not go work as an engineer at a big company?
Startup School interviews
Graham and Altman host a chat with three Y Combinator startups: George Saines and Nick Winter of Code Combat, a way to learn code though gaming; Karen Cheng and Finbarr Taylor, of giveit100.com, a site where users share their progress at different skills, and Ryan Petersen of Flexport, a digitized customs brokerage.
VCs should take less equity
In an interview with Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch, Graham discusses the value of the YC investments, how the accelerator dealt with too many companies in a previous batch, and why venture capitalists should move quickly:
Well VCs have financial models for how much they need to invest, and what percentage of the company they need to buy for it, in order to get positive returns. And they’re really nervous, somewhat justifiably so, because if you’re going to lose money as a VC firm you wont know it til about six to eight years later. So these models, they become sort of religious about them. But, they really feel like they can’t buy less than 20% of the company in the Series A round…and in a competitive deal since that number can’t move, then the only number that can move is the valuation.. That means that the amount invested increases, arbitrarily. These companies would like to sell half as much stock for half as much money, but that’s not one of the options. If there was a VC that broke ranks and said they would give companies the money they actually need instead of it being determined by random external forces, they would get all the good startups.
New York Times feature
The newspaper profiles the firm’s Demo Day, speaking with Graham, Altman, and Livingston about the company’s strategy for picking startups to support. Graham:
Imagine an assembly line where Facebooks and Googles come along every few years. You can either pick that cookie off the assembly line or not. If you pick it off, it’s market price, which varies. But if you don’t pick it off, you’re out of the game.
Tech Crunch interview
Graham says Y Combinator is now focusing more on people than ideas, as a team of founders who have been friends for some time will keep what seems like a difficult idea alive in order to not let each other down:
At the stage we’re funding people, at the beginning, the founder is more important than the idea…We’re looking for people who have been friends for a while and worked together on things…Almost every startup has some point where it seems like the startup is doomed, the startup is worthless
