[dalton]

Hey Dom, we worked together directly when you were in YC, and I deeply disagree with your assessment that having progress helps a startup succeed in YC.

The worst case scenario is a newly accepted YC startup with a little bit of traction... just enough traction that they aren't willing to change ideas/markets and not enough traction for them to actually know they have product market fit. It's the uncanny valley of product-market fit. These companies with a little bit of progress can spend months or years of their life chasing what they later realize was a mirage.

When a new YC company enters the batch with very little or no traction (and can move incredibly fast) they will longterm outperform companies accepted with small traction most of the time. Based on the hundreds of companies I have personally funded at YC, speed is the single most predictive variable of if a startup will succeed - not traction at time of accept.

[d0m]

Hey Dalton, thanks for the answer, that's fair. I totally agree that in the long-term, moving and failing fast is a net positive for both founders and YC. I wonder how different the YC three-months experience is between founders who have product-market fit vs the ones who don't? It seems like there's a "cadence" to the program highly focused on growth culminating to demo day?

[dalton]

Tons of examples of no traction/fast moving teams out-performing, ie Brex pivoted and had no growth or traction at demo day and it worked out pretty well for them :) https://twitter.com/daltonc/status/1138952277404790784?s=21

Doing YC at their early state was perfect because it was the perfect environment to come up with an idea like Brex.

[baxtr]

Thanks for sharing! Great insight.

May I ask which speed exactly you are referring to?

[dalton]

imagine we are talking about CPU clock rate - the rate at which founders are able to make progress - which means everything from how many customers they can talk to in a day, how fast they learn from running a test, how fast they can build a prototype, how quickly they internalize feedback from customers, etc.