Sidney Hough

Walking through the doors of YC was a childhood dream come true. Especially after applying 6-7 times and receiving several "no" responses. I'm sharing this after attending the YC Climate Tech Meetup. When I received the invitation, a voice told me, "Maybe not now, but you're close to achieving it." I was so excited that I caught a 5 a.m. flight from Boston to San Francisco. After hitting the gym, I went straight to the event. The concentration of talent in the room was impressive: • People developing optimizations for electric vehicles. • Experts in UX, operations, and artificial intelligence. • Professionals in climate tech and renewable energy. • Software engineers focused on landfills. I had the opportunity to meet Gustaf Alströmer, a managing partner at YC who, two years earlier, had written a valuable document on climate technology. The experience was incredible, but it didn't end there… That same night, I took a flight back to Boston because I had a quiz at university the next day. I took the quiz in the same clothes from the day before. I didn't have time to change because, at 3 p.m., I had to attend this MIT Technology Review conference, which I go to every year. Interestingly, this is where I met Dalton Caldwell, another managing partner at YC. In less than 24 hours, I had the chance to speak with two managing partners about similar topics and receive their advice and perspectives on what they were looking for. It felt like living a very intense YC experience in my life and I know it's just the first part of a "yes" that I will receive one day. #Entrepreneurship #ClimateTech #Networking

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We have been debating for a while if it's appropriate to publish our inside jokes:) But since Jack started, we want to add a few things... 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗩𝗖 𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 Let me be transparent = I’m gonna lie to you now Let me be fully transparent = I’m gonna F*****g lie to you now When a VC or an angel introduces a portfolio company of theirs to another VC hoping they’ll invest in it: - They aren’t looking for money = they are always looking for money - They have a long runway = they are looking for money but you’ll pay more - They are raising and we see a lot of interest from multiple VCs = we are really concerned they won’t be able to raise - We are enthusiastic about this company = we’re not gonna invest another dollar in it - We are highly enthusiastic about it = not even a cent - The round is closed and it was oversubscribed = they barely managed to raise and still need money if you want to invest When a VC shares dealflow with other VCs: - We thought it might be interesting to share this investment = we have a problem making it alone Emails and WhatsApp between VCs: - Hi = I need something from you - How are you = I really need something from you - I hope this email finds you well = Can I get to business? What VCs say to entrepreneurs: - We want to move fast = this is going to be a long and excruciating process - We would like to follow = we will only invest if A16Z decides to lead

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3 Things I Learned Not Getting into YCombinator The last round of decisions went out yesterday for YC and we got our formal rejection. Below are some quick reflections on the process. 1. Understand what an investor's focus is As we began the application, I looked deeper into YC and started to get feelings that even if we got in, it would not be the right place for kaizen.place. There are very few music related companies that YC has taken on and by extension one can assume that they don't really have experience in the industry. More importantly, this was a clear signal that a music startup is not something they would be interested in. The best thing to look at to get a sense of what they're looking for is their Request for Companies page: https://lnkd.in/gcaH2BP6. 2. Don't spend enormous amounts of time on application As the deadline came closer and closer, I felt guiltier and guiltier each day building our product took away from writing the application. I reviewed the questions very early on, so knew what information was needed and made sure those conversations were happening, but we didn't really set out to complete the application until a week before the deadline. If there's only a small chance that we get in, we would be better served focusing on building and growing rather than crafting a perfect application. Now having a rejection, this 'decision' gave us several days of attention back to pour into actual development. 3. Refine the business model and pitch As per 1, I don't think this would have helped much in this situation, but one of the main reasons I wanted to apply was to force us to think things through from a pitching to investors point of view. As a person coming from a builder background and near zero experience pitching for investment, the only way to learn is to practice (and fail). The questions you don't have answers to become more clear as you write this all out. Which, in turn, will improve the pitch the next time we do so.

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Founder <> founder convos are the biggest unlock for company building. I spent the last 2+ weeks in SF. Besides meeting with customers, I spent a ton of time with founders / early stage builders that I deeply respect (shoutout to Abhinav Asthana, Christina Cacioppo, Kevin Van Gundy, Akshay Kothari, Yuhki Yamashita, Tara Viswanathan, Celine Halioua, & Michelle Valentine). I’m extremely grateful to have the chance to spend time with these folks. Some reflections from these brilliant people. 1/ People > everything. A company is a collection of people. Company success comes down to hiring the best people. 2/ Startup problems aren’t *that* unique. Startups are HARD and even if you think your challenges are specific to your company, they’re likely not. Someone else has faced the same thing, and you likely don’t need to reinvent the wheel. 3/ Let some fires burn. Focus > trying to do everything. As a startup, you can’t fix everything at once with limited resources (even if you want to). You need to focus on the stuff that will move the needle the most. Pick the top 1 or 2 problems, fix them, then move onto the next. It’s okay if some fires need to burn for a little in the meantime. 4/ Company operating cadences are key. We’re redoing our cadences now, so it was super interesting to learn how others run their board meetings, leadership meetings, all hands, etc. A consistent theme for board & leadership meetings is to have everyone complete a prompt in written doc, share with each other, then use the time to have meatier discussions. 5/ Be competitor aware, customer obsessed. Competitors cause unnecessary noise. Build products and make decisions based on customer / market need and founder intuition, never based on competition. Are these learnings helpful? If so, can share more founder learning posts in the future!

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Launch YC is one of the coolest pages on Y Combinator's website 💚 There, you will see some of the coolest startup ideas, built by world-class founders - many of whom I'm glad to be friends with. Every YC startup gets a chance to launch their startup there and have YC show it to the world. Launch YC's launches also get sent to thousands of people who subscribe to their newsletter - that way, early adopters can get a step ahead of their competitors by using innovative tools built by YC founders. Today was our turn: we just launched Briefer (YC S23) through Launch YC! If you haven't yet given us an upvote, this is your chance. Link in the comments 👇

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Halfway through our Y Combinator batch, over 60% of the startups in our cohort (including us) were stuck pivoting. That’s when Paul Graham flew in from England to talk about finding a great startup idea. Here’s what he told us: 1️⃣ Turn off the three ‘bad idea filters’: By turning off the ‘bad idea filters’ in your head, it instantly becomes easier for good ones to emerge. 1/ The sanity filter: Often, the greatest startups come out of ideas that originally seemed insane. So don’t shut down ideas because they seem impractical. For eg, when Airbnb started, no one ever thought people would let strangers sleep in their homes. 2/ The money filter: Money is important for a startup, but if you’re able to drive strong growth without generating revenue, don’t discard the idea. For eg: JustinTV (now Twitch), began with a guy live-streaming his life with a camera strapped to his head. There was no revenue stream initially. 3/ The schlepp filter: Don’t dismiss an idea just because it seems like too much work. For eg: Stripe had to handle unholy amounts of legal and regulatory work to get banks onboard their payments platform. Still, they did the hard work, and Stripe solved a problem that hundreds of their contemporaries were afraid to work on. Often, the impractical hard work becomes the moat that protects your startup from competition. 2️⃣ Don’t build for boomers   If you’re only building for boomers, your company will die with them. Whatever you’re building needs to become popular amongst the younger generation. If you’re a college student and you find a lot of your peers using what you’re building (and not just because they’re your friends), it could well be the start of something big. 3️⃣ Stop thinking all the best ideas are taken As founders, we often come up with an idea only to realize another company has already built it. We then find ourselves wishing that such other company didn't exist. You need to throw that mentality out the door. One quote I’ll always take away from PG’s talk is that there are billions of years of existence left. It would be practically impossible (and quite frankly depressing) for all the good ideas to run out by 2024. These tips really helped us zero in on what we’re building today. At our last startup, Desklamp, we’d spend weeks on end producing each feature launch video. During our pivot phase, PG’s talk inspired us to ask ourselves if we could automate that process using AI. That bold question led us to Clueso (YC W23): end-to-end AI automation for producing software videos for companies. #startups

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We set out several months ago at BloomTech to figure out what our software engineering grads should be doing to leverage AI. What we found was pretty jaw-dropping: Individual engineers who were using AI to become 2-5x as productive as they used to be, and people doing the work of what used to require entire teams. There was no curriculum or course that taught any of this; they’d learned by scrapping together random ideas and endlessly experimenting, each engineer picking up different pieces than the others. We took these learnings and built it into a course to make engineers hyperproductive using AI - ai.bloomtech.com. It’s a ten-week course, designed for engineers to attend outside of work hours, and with everything recorded in case there are times an engineer can’t make it. The course requires engineers to build projects that will be production-ready and (hopefully) very valuable for the company. Check it out, and let me know if you have any questions!

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Having done YCombinator after over ten years of startup experience, it was like going back to school to learn about something I love and plan to continue doing as long as I live. Here is what I agree and disagree with. YC is great at creating a sense of urgency. I am a big believer that growth happens when you are outside of your comfort zone, not when you are comfortable. YC does a great job of creating that urgency. In fact, even after the batch, a few of us in the batch have continued the biweekly office hours tradition where we get together every couple of weeks and review our progress and goals. In reality, it turns into a biweekly "founder therapy" session. The other thing that YC is great about is the emphasis on being lean and scrappy. At the end of the day you want to build a company where $1 becomes $10, not the other way around. So you have to pay attention to cost, doing more with less. YC emphasizes scrappiness as a fundamental principle, and how it applies not just in the early stages but even as companies scale. You're not going to turn $1 into $10 if you don't care about ROI, and you won't get ROI if you only focus on output, not input. Having experience with both bootstrapping and venture, profitable and unprofitable, I wholeheartedly agree with this. YC also emphasizes raising as little possible, not as much as possible. As a YC company we get a lot of investor inbounds. This year alone I've easily received 200+ investors inbound all the way from $XXB funds to micro VCs and angels. At this point they start to feel like AI SDRs reaching out so I ignore most of them. I bet a lot of them made funny faces when we asked them what's the smallest check they're willing to write. The reason is, if you want to go work for a VC firm, go get a job at a VC firm, and enjoy the ski trips and summer vacations in France. The last thing you want to do is spend ten years of your life building something and end up working for a board / investors. The best way to avoid that is to not need them in the first place. Another thing I love about YC is the focus on technical founders. It's amazing what a couple of people can build in such a short period of time. The amount of constant experimentation and innovation that happens every week in YC makes it more interesting than most research labs. If you like building and tinkering, YC is the place for you. So what do I not agree with? One thing YC can do a better job of is focus more on people, culture and leadership. That is an important part of building a company. Sure, getting to PMF is the most important thing in the early days, but without valuing people, culture and leadership, you're not going to build a great company. IMO this is something that is underemphasized during the batch. There is only so much a founder can do alone. Ultimately you need to build a great team, attract great talent, and for the right reasons (passion, purpose, love of the craft), not the wrong reasons (love of money).

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Today is the last day to apply to Y Combinator. I applied to Y Combinator three different times before finally getting accepted. Here are three things I wish I had known before my first application: 1. Every “co-founder” on the team should be ride or die. My first time applying to YC I had brilliant co-founders but we weren’t ready to take the leap. YC smelled it from a mile away. Quoting the email: "Our challenge is that you all don't seem to be bought in and committed to this idea or at least to working together full-time on a startup. YC cannot be the catalyst for a team to commit to the startup life." 2. Be able to build or sell, ideally both. Paul Graham once said that the only jobs of a founder are to build or sell. If you can do one of those, find someone who can do the other. If you can’t do either, focus on building up one of those skills. If you can do both, you are a force to be reckoned with. 3. Have strong opinions that are weakly held. Contrary to popular belief, the idea you start with doesn't matter. Instead, the make-or-break factor is your ability to translate conviction into results. Be open to shifting approaches, invalidating assumptions, and pivoting. There's a reason Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. P.S. Don't let any of these things discourage you from applying. If you want to work on a startup, you should apply no matter what.

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I’ve been keeping a running list on things I wish I knew or did while working in product before transitioning to founding Inari (YC S23) and here's the 2nd part! Note: this pic is me on our 1st day building in SF for YC. Smiling through how fun all the incorporation paperwork was 😂 Mastering growth and distribution 💌 I never truly internalized the adage “first time founders obsess over product and second time founders obsess over distribution” until we launched Inari for the first time last year and initially heard crickets. I hadn’t worked on growth in any of my prior roles and now I probably spend 60%+ of my capacity catching up, learning basic tactics, and experimenting with new channels for Inari. I think we could be much farther along if I had mastered in-product growth and activation tactics, had reps setting up outbound and SEO systems, and built a community and audience much sooner (I also never realized how fun engaging with people online could be 😄). No excuses not being “technical” in 2024 💻 If you’re considering working on a SaaS startup and you can’t code, just go and learn to. With the recent advances in LLMs and coding assistants, there’s literally never been a better time to learn to code, unblock yourself when you run into issues, and build an MVP. There’s nobody on the planet that will care about your product as much as you will. If you’re unable to be deep in the details, identify defects, and make fixes quickly yourself, then the overall clock speed and quality bar of your product will suffer. The quality expectations for ALL startups have increased over the last few years and it’s on you as a founder to keep that rigor and velocity extremely high, so being able to unblock yourself makes a world of difference. Managing your own psychology 🧠 Surprisingly, the toughest part when transitioning to founding was managing my own mental state. There’s a constant internal uncertainty on whether you’re building something that people actually want and spending time on the right priorities. Your view on finances also completely changes. Money used to be a resource I spent on fun discretionary spend but now money feels like “oxygen”. The stakes of each day feels much heavier when you feel like you’re running out of oxygen for your startup which you're pouring your heart into. Overall, be prepared for these internal influences before making the jump! That could be better carving out the right runway, validating your idea or building an MVP before leaving your job, or bumping up your skills around building and selling beforehand.

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🔥Raise Millions For Your Startup🔥 This is arguably the most valuable startup fundraising resource I've had the privilege of stumbling upon. It's from Tam Pham from hustlefund.vc and it's good... The reason why it's particularly useful is because the intel provided is ACTIONABLE: ● Should I raise from angel investors or venture capitalists? ● What do all the fundraising stages mean? ● What do equity, SAFEs, and dilution mean? ● How do I determine my startup’s valuation? ● Why are cap tables, shares, and vesting so important? ● Where should I incorporate my company? ● When is the best time to start fundraising? ● What exactly should I include in my pitch deck? ● How should I structure my first meeting with an investor? ● What questions will early-stage VCs ask me? ● How do I build authentic relationships with investors? ● What happens if an investor says no or ghosts me? ● What should I expect after an investor verbally commits? You guys can save this doc to your local computer by enlarging the PDF below and then by clicking the "download" icon in the top right corner of your browser. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 💡Join 30,000+ Amplified Investors: https://lnkd.in/eAYGMHRN ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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I’ve applied for YC 5 times before being accepted. My advice if you're trying to get in: From day 1, I’ve always wanted to be in YC. In fact, I’ve always looked up to other YC founders and their companies: John Kim @Sendbird (w16) Parker Conrad @rippling Each time we started a new company, the first thing me and my co-founders did was apply for it. Our first application was in 2019. (obviously, we didn’t make it.) After that, we applied about 5 more times until @relatecrm became the business it is today and we got in. Why did they pick us? Honestly, I can’t be 100% sure. But there’s one thing that differentiates Relate from our other businesses that got rejected: For the first time, we had a project with real, paying customers. The other businesses had pretty much zero revenue. I’m convinced that this played a big role in getting accepted to YC. After all, there’s no better form of validation for a business concept than paying customers. So if you’re wondering if you’re ever getting the chance to join YC, the fact that your company has paying customers or not should be a signal. Is it necessary? No. But it helps 100%. P.S. Link in the comments for the full story of our 5 failed YC applications.

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After being encouraged by multiple friends to apply to YC with our new AI Career Agent (shout out / thanks Omri Mor, Saroop, Alan, Roham + others!), Beier Cai and I put together an application last week. YC is obviously an amazing place to grow a new product category like AI Career Asssistants, but what I was NOT expecting was the application video driving so much interest. After seeing a spike in waitlist applications, citing “YouTube” as a source, I checked out the video and saw it had already generated >1k of views! If you’re curious, here is a link to the vid. Let me know your thoughts! We are passionate about building Commit: AI Career Agents for Developers into something that ALL tech workers can use to increase their growth and impact!

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Dear Fellow VCs who hate most VCs, The world needs us to step up. Predatory VCs are pillaging founders. They are thieves! Case in point: ACCELERATORS In my not-so-humble opinion, the best startup accelerator in the world is Y-Combinator ("YC"). Any startup accelerator offering deal terms worse than YC's standard deal is stealing from founders! YC's standard $500,000 deal is "$125,000 for 7% + additional $375,000 on an uncapped safe with an MFN" If you're capable and able, then let's please create more local accelerators that are ethical, effective, and entrepreneur-focused. The world needs it! There are one too many bad apple-accelerators out there. Let's change the game. Aim for higher ground!

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I feel that the concept of shipping fast is often misunderstood by early-stage founders. At Baselit (YC W23), we made this mistake with our first product about a year and a half ago. Our YC partners later referred to it as a "college project", lol. Startups do need to ship fast, but this often leads to the misconception that investing time in a decent UI isn't necessary. From my experience, that's just not true. Creating a bad UI and a good UI using pre-existing frameworks takes about the same amount of time. While you might not need to develop detailed Figma mocks, your app still needs to look good. Enterprise users might tolerate sub-par UIs because modern software hasn't fully penetrated that market yet. But don't compare your UI to enterprise tools like Salesforce, AWS, or Tableau. These tools were built at least a decade ago and have evolved into ecosystems rather than point solutions. If you're selling to startups or scaleups, a good UI is essential. It's important to gather the right feedback and that'll be very tough if users are turned off by your UI from the get-go. Personally, for me, I'll cut down the scope of a feature but not compromise on the UI.

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Good luck convincing the VCs on this. The platform VCs and visionary VCs do not exist anymore. There are very few who will come and support anything remotely close to this at the seed stage. Most VCs usually say they will come in "later...." once you become OpenAI probably🤷🏽‍♂️😄 Sam did admit to this openly: here is the video https://lnkd.in/gsFX_3DE #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Platform #Startups

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I still watch most of Y Combinator's videos in my pastime. Most people who have done YC or follow YC closely have heard that a lot of the advice they give is “common sense” or “simple advice”. It’s totally true - there’s no magical advice out there - and I realize the only thing that makes a difference is executing on the simple advice. For me I’ve noticed that it helps when I hear the same things over and over again, from different mediums, until I internalize it. Over the past weekend I was listening to YC’s new video on doing things that don’t scale. That it’s important to optimize for learning when you’re doing the 0 to 1 and eventually you earn the right to deal with scalability issues and tech debt. It’s funny to think back on some of the things we were doing that don’t scale: 👉 We had to share a Google sheet with our first few customers so they could list out all the tables they wanted us to sync.  👉 We then had a UI where customers could add tables, but all it did was send us a Slack message to actually kick that off in the backend. For the most part we did this fast enough so it would seem automated. What’s some really simple advice you’ve received that you value a lot? #ycombinator

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aim to have your first revenue in the first three months

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5 days until the application deadline to apply to Y Combinator! Claire and I started building our company Paradigm ~1 week before applying to yc, applied on the exact minute the application was due, and got in. Here’s how we did it: 1) Made a plan: We already had an idea, so all we needed to do was make as much progress as possible in the time we had. We were committed to not seeing daylight for an entire week to make our application as good as possible. We wanted to prove that we could both build and sell, so we came up with an ambitious plan to do just that in a week. 2) Played to our cofounder strengths: We both love working on product stuff, so we never split this up and always did product specs together. Claire took the lead on tech and I took the lead on design, user research, and selling. We both pulled each other in whenever helpful - I was always eager to push features as needed and Claire was always willing to hop on calls or review designs. 3) Became an expert in the problem we were solving: Even though we had felt this problem firsthand, I did a ton of cold outreach to people within our ICP to better understand their needs. I took >20 calls total that week, and the ones that really resonated with our proposed solution I followed up with and transitioned to start selling to. 4) Sold a product that didn’t exist: I made a Figma demo and got on second calls with any prospects that seemed interested. Just based on this Figma demo and the vision I described, I was able to get some people to sign LOIs or contracts to get early access to our product. We also had some service-based revenue we generated as a proof of concept for the software. 5) Made the product exist by the end of the week: I will give Claire the credit for beasting this one, but we basically were able to scope down the product to the most bare bones form such that it was possible to get something end to end working in a week. We leveraged past work we had done with agents to incorporate some more novel AI elements to our product. 6) Completed every optional part of the application: Even though we just started building, we got our product to the point where we could include compelling demo and product access in our application. We put a lot of time and effort into the rest of the application too, particularly the founder bios. 7) Got referrals from YC alums: We didn’t have any pre-existing connections to YC alums but we searched across the recent YC batches to find Penn alums that had done YC. We then found a way to get introduced to Mike Kijewski and Salomon Serfati (thanks to Jeffrey Babin!) and they were kind enough to put in a referral. We reached out cold to a bunch of other YC alums, including Nicholas Charriere who even emailed a yc group partner about us! 8) Continued working after we submitted the application: Once we got the interview, we were able to share exciting step-changes in our progress because we didn’t slow the pace once we clicked submit.

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