Something that I think a lot of people don't realize about YC is that it's not very fun. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of great YC memories, but the pressure was enormous. We had yet to raise and so we were operating on shoestring. My co-founder and I fought more during YC than any other time, before or after (and often over nonsensical and petty stuff).
That being said, you don't go through YC because it's fun. You go through it because it's good for your company. It gave us exposure to investors who probably wouldn't have given two first-time-entrepreneur yokels from Minnesota the time of day. We met a lot of people who had been through the pain of building a company before.
More than anything YC forced us to take a hard look at our company and a hard look at ourselves and decide that we could do this thing even when it wasn't always fun.
This gets to a critical question about incubators -- what is the value you actually get from the process? (the followup is, how does it compare to what was promised?) As you point out, "You go through it because it's good for your company," and that mainly means meeting the right people and figuring out where your company is going.
Martin, was YC ultimately good for your company even though Rapportive was in a different stage than your batchmates? Would you do it again?
Our product development was almost stalled for months on end.
Then you're doing something wrong.
Scaling, debugging, refactoring, customer support, prospect interaction, and even raising investment must all be done in support of product development, not instead of product development.
I am a notorious single tasker who loves coding more than anything else, so I used to have the same problem. If some other task took priority, all product development stopped.
Until a artist friend of mine told me the secret of his success, 4 words I have never forgotten, "I paint every day."
Now I code every day. No matter what else happens.
With 3 of you, I would expect that at least one of you could keep building something every day without any of you dropping any of the other eggs you must juggle.
Yes, we probably were doing something wrong. That's the point of the post: to explain how easy it is to get into a situation where you are making little progress, and our story of getting out of it. I sincerely hope that others will be able to cope better when faced with a similar situation.
It's easier said than done, though. Development takes significant ramp-up time; if you spend 10 hours a day on it, you get much more than 5 times as much done than if you spend 2 hours a day. We already did what we could in terms of distributing workload amongst people to minimize context-switching.
"Our product development was almost stalled for months on end."
Then you're doing something wrong.
I disagree. When we were fundraising we got no actual product development done, and from what I hear this is rather normal. "Months" may be a bit long, but they also launched around the time they raised, so combined with all the support emails (free products = lots of support...good reason to charge!) I can completely understand.
Our fundraising took around 6 weeks, I got nothing done. I tried to take on all the businessy things like support, so my cofounder could keep coding. He got work done, but it was mostly paying the technical debt we had accumulated when trying to launch quickly. I'm convinced that was the right thing to do, since it seems to have gone well for us.
I can definitely see the benefit in the "code every day" mentality, but personally the extra context switch isn't worth it for me. I'm very conscious of when I'm not pushing new code and it physically pains me, so I keep tabs on it and never go more than a day or two without coding, but I don't make any hard-and-fast rules about my coding time.
Beautiful. In Russian we have a proverb "Дорогу осилит идущий" that roughly translates as "he who walks the path will make it to the destination". It sounds much better in Russian, and I was struggling to translate this into English for a while now, retaining the simplicity and elegance. This might just do it.
Naw. Everyone who raises money learns the same lesson. Fundraising causes your product to nearly stop. It sucks, but I've never seen it not be the case. Add to this that these guys had an early crush of users and I can imagine how painful it was.
> > Our product development was almost stalled for months on end.
> Then you're doing something wrong.
Easier said than done.
I reached a point where I finally realized how deep in technical debt my startup was. Actually, that's not true. At some point I realized "OMG, I've got three months of work to do just to stop stuff from breaking every day". I was wrong. It was literally 12 months.
I'm now at the end of that 12 month slog.
I will never let stuff get as bad as it got then, so this was a wonderful learning experience.
...but to say that, based on where I was, it was the WRONG decision to put out the house fire before building more additions on the building is to speak without the detailed knowledge that someone in the situation brings to the problem.
I think it's interesting how different people view the same tasks as pleasant or unpleasant. I find breaking things, scaling infrastructure, and talking to (potential and current) customers vastly more pleasant than planning/managing development or writing code. Logistics (for moving bits, boxes, and people) is great fun too.
Recruiting is amazingly fun when you're not already under the gun for a specific position, because it's basically selling your idea and meeting someone new. It sucks if you're behind and need to hire a lot of people quickly, because you're going to have to make a lot of compromises you shouldn't be making, and you know it.
I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy admin, accounting, and immigration bureaucracy, but those people are not me.
Maybe figuring out what things your team enjoys (and presumably is good at doing) should inform what kind of product you build more than it usually does.
It all depends on the circumstances. I love hacking away on Playtomic and scaling it and talking to my users or potential ones, and everything else.
Until things go wrong. Logs aren't being processed, 100s of megabytes a minute are piling up, shit keeps on crashing... compile again ... deploy again ... hope this time the problem's fixed ... hope it really is this time cause it's 2am and I've been up since 7am. It looks like it's working finally ... I'm going to bed at last ... if it's not fixed tomorrow will be a fuck of a day racing to get those logs processing again before that server runs out of disk space, while people ask when their reports will be updating again or tell me there's some problem.
On a somewhat un-related note, I am interested in hearing about your immigration issues. I realize an immigration attorney's advice is probably golden, but I would like to hear what visa categories you considered and applied for and what problems you encountered while applying/gathering paperwork.
I was planning another post on that topic :) in a nutshell, we got H-1B visas. With a good attorney the paperwork is mostly tedium, but lots and lots of tedium. The process is very opaque and full of uncertainties.
Were you able to leverage the YC "old boys" network? (I mean that in the positive sense, not the negative one)
That is, did having access to talented former-YC people help you get over the technical humps and hurdles? I believe one of the main pros to joining YC (apart from getting mentoring from PG et. al.) is that many of the people that went before you are on tap to help resolve things in a "pay it forward" fashion.
Erm, the OP was explaining that if you have already launched, your YC experience differs from what you might expect. Fair point I thought, and might be useful for those considering the timing of their YC application. I have noticed that some people feel that having launched already gives them more "cred" in the process, and the OP points the downside to that.
Nothing is fun when it goes beyond a certain level. User support is interesting, but it gets a bit repetitive if you need to do it all day long. Scaling is really interesting, but getting no sleep because the database is on fire is not fun. Fixing bugs is not fun if they happen on other people's weird configurations that you can't reproduce. And raising capital... sure, it's glamorous, but in the end it's pretty tedious.
The amazing thing about a startup is that you can quickly translate your intuitions about a product you think that people want into an actual product. Making a good product and making people happy is what I care about. The other things are enablers.
On an unrelated note, that whiteboard graph disturbed me a bit. Does every YC startup hope to get bought out? Why would that even be a goal or something to aspire to?
It seems to be part of the definition of a startup that the end goal is either acquisition or IPO. PG has said (in an interview, might have been on Mixergy) that YC can't make a profit on a startup unless it has an exit.
On a mostly unrelated note, I installed rapportive and discovered that someone had signed up for a social network with my e-mail address that wasn't me. So I had the site send me a new password and deleted the account. Why do people do that?
* Answering many, many support emails and tweets
* Raising our seed round
* Stopping our infrastructure from collapsing under our user growth
* Responding to press and bloggers
* Reading resumés and interviewing job candidates
* Fixing gnarly bugs in production
* Applying for visas, so that we could work in the US
* Attending YC dinners and office hours
How is all this not moving the product forward? I am genuinely curious, to an outsider like me, this is what is the growth of the company. All these things have to be done one time or another.
The article mentions other companies frequently rolling out new features. In that context, the product wasn't moving forward because no new features were added during the YC phase. While scaling and bugfixing probably count as moving the product forward, the rest is arguably moving the company forward.
"The product" is defined as the activity whereby the engineering organization delivers new products and features to customers. All of the above activities are important, but they're not "the product".
[+] [-] jnovek|15 years ago|reply
That being said, you don't go through YC because it's fun. You go through it because it's good for your company. It gave us exposure to investors who probably wouldn't have given two first-time-entrepreneur yokels from Minnesota the time of day. We met a lot of people who had been through the pain of building a company before.
More than anything YC forced us to take a hard look at our company and a hard look at ourselves and decide that we could do this thing even when it wasn't always fun.
[+] [-] kirinkalia|15 years ago|reply
Martin, was YC ultimately good for your company even though Rapportive was in a different stage than your batchmates? Would you do it again?
[+] [-] edw519|15 years ago|reply
Then you're doing something wrong.
Scaling, debugging, refactoring, customer support, prospect interaction, and even raising investment must all be done in support of product development, not instead of product development.
I am a notorious single tasker who loves coding more than anything else, so I used to have the same problem. If some other task took priority, all product development stopped.
Until a artist friend of mine told me the secret of his success, 4 words I have never forgotten, "I paint every day."
Now I code every day. No matter what else happens.
With 3 of you, I would expect that at least one of you could keep building something every day without any of you dropping any of the other eggs you must juggle.
[+] [-] martinkl|15 years ago|reply
It's easier said than done, though. Development takes significant ramp-up time; if you spend 10 hours a day on it, you get much more than 5 times as much done than if you spend 2 hours a day. We already did what we could in terms of distributing workload amongst people to minimize context-switching.
[+] [-] bkrausz|15 years ago|reply
Our fundraising took around 6 weeks, I got nothing done. I tried to take on all the businessy things like support, so my cofounder could keep coding. He got work done, but it was mostly paying the technical debt we had accumulated when trying to launch quickly. I'm convinced that was the right thing to do, since it seems to have gone well for us.
I can definitely see the benefit in the "code every day" mentality, but personally the extra context switch isn't worth it for me. I'm very conscious of when I'm not pushing new code and it physically pains me, so I keep tabs on it and never go more than a day or two without coding, but I don't make any hard-and-fast rules about my coding time.
[+] [-] DenisM|15 years ago|reply
Beautiful. In Russian we have a proverb "Дорогу осилит идущий" that roughly translates as "he who walks the path will make it to the destination". It sounds much better in Russian, and I was struggling to translate this into English for a while now, retaining the simplicity and elegance. This might just do it.
[+] [-] rythie|15 years ago|reply
Also, it sounds like development was going on, improving architecture for scale and fixing bugs.
I've heard several people rave about rapportive so whatever they are doing is obviously working.
[+] [-] webwright|15 years ago|reply
Naw. Everyone who raises money learns the same lesson. Fundraising causes your product to nearly stop. It sucks, but I've never seen it not be the case. Add to this that these guys had an early crush of users and I can imagine how painful it was.
[+] [-] tjic|15 years ago|reply
Easier said than done.
I reached a point where I finally realized how deep in technical debt my startup was. Actually, that's not true. At some point I realized "OMG, I've got three months of work to do just to stop stuff from breaking every day". I was wrong. It was literally 12 months.
I'm now at the end of that 12 month slog.
I will never let stuff get as bad as it got then, so this was a wonderful learning experience.
...but to say that, based on where I was, it was the WRONG decision to put out the house fire before building more additions on the building is to speak without the detailed knowledge that someone in the situation brings to the problem.
[+] [-] rdl|15 years ago|reply
Recruiting is amazingly fun when you're not already under the gun for a specific position, because it's basically selling your idea and meeting someone new. It sucks if you're behind and need to hire a lot of people quickly, because you're going to have to make a lot of compromises you shouldn't be making, and you know it.
I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy admin, accounting, and immigration bureaucracy, but those people are not me.
Maybe figuring out what things your team enjoys (and presumably is good at doing) should inform what kind of product you build more than it usually does.
[+] [-] benologist|15 years ago|reply
Until things go wrong. Logs aren't being processed, 100s of megabytes a minute are piling up, shit keeps on crashing... compile again ... deploy again ... hope this time the problem's fixed ... hope it really is this time cause it's 2am and I've been up since 7am. It looks like it's working finally ... I'm going to bed at last ... if it's not fixed tomorrow will be a fuck of a day racing to get those logs processing again before that server runs out of disk space, while people ask when their reports will be updating again or tell me there's some problem.
Then it's not so fun.
[+] [-] gnok|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martinkl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sukotto|15 years ago|reply
That is, did having access to talented former-YC people help you get over the technical humps and hurdles? I believe one of the main pros to joining YC (apart from getting mentoring from PG et. al.) is that many of the people that went before you are on tap to help resolve things in a "pay it forward" fashion.
[+] [-] martinkl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frossie|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmaunder|15 years ago|reply
http://adam.heroku.com/images/posts/startup_curve.jpg
Are all YC startups encouraged to get acquired?
[+] [-] pg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] martinkl|15 years ago|reply
The amazing thing about a startup is that you can quickly translate your intuitions about a product you think that people want into an actual product. Making a good product and making people happy is what I care about. The other things are enablers.
[Edit - grammar fix]
[+] [-] razin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] batasrki|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pclark|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmoney|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] araneae|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedc|15 years ago|reply
The entrepreneurial mindset seems more geared toward building cool stuff, which makes the next stage of scaling/support much less fun.
[+] [-] rick_2047|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LiveTheDream|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axod|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffreymcmanus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shareme|15 years ago|reply
The product is great too I use it every day..