What are you biggest learnings from Y Combinator? Is YC worth it?
I'm curious about your journey at Y Combinator.
- What's the accelerator program like? What's your daily schedule while being part of Y Combinator?
- What are the resources Y Combinator provides to startups? What is the skillset Y Combinator intends to teach?
- What are your biggest learnings or takeaways after graduating from Y Combinator?
- Did being part of Y Combinator open up any new opportunities that you wouldn't have otherwise gotten?
- What's the success ratio of startups in general vs startups part of Y Combinator?
- As both Alex and Rahul have a high income before starting Taro, I'm guessing raising $500K money isn't the primary motivation to join Y Combinator. You also have a lot of technical and leadership experience being staff engineers. My feeling was that YC teaches entrepreneurship skills to founders in early stages of their career who doesn't have much expertise and financial base. So, I'm curious about your motivation to join YC. Is giving away so much equity at such an early stage worth it? Would you encourage other senior enginers who want to build startups also to join YC?
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Discussion
(1 comment)- 1a month agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
There are 3 main benefits of Y Combinator:
- Money: $500K is enough runway for a small team to survive for at least a year or 2 and find time to achieve the next milestone.
- Accountability: you work very hard during YC since you are put into groups with other startup founders all sprinting toward their own goals. This is very motivating. The group partners also help here.
- Credibility: You can easily talk to other YC founders and others outside the ecosystem by mentioning YC. This also helps mitigate risk in B2B deals, since going through YC helps larger companies take you more seriously.
Yes, I think YC did unlock opportunities that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise. In addition to the above, there's also a very tangible benefit that you get bookface access to connect with other founders and lurk on the internal forum -- this is very valuable and fun. You also discounts on common services a startup may use, like Stripe, Algolia, or emails providers.
The motto of YC is "build something people want." They do a good job helping you eliminate all the work that doesn't tie to that goal. We actually have quite a few YC founders in Taro now, I'd encourage you to connect with them! (e.g. Darwin Lo). See the responses to: What are the most important skills to learn to be a successful founder?
Some good thoughts from Alex here: "How did you decide to quit your job and make a startup?"
