
Tell HN: Rejected from Y Combinator? Don't be upset or quit - mrburton
I&#x27;ve spoken to a few people who got rejected by YC and they take it too personally.<p>In this business, you&#x27;re going to be rejected a lot! If you received the famous YC rejection email, keep pressing forward.<p>Honestly, if this slows you down, then you&#x27;re most likely doing something wrong anyhow.
======
BIackSwan
Would love to see the anti portfolio list of YC.[1]

FWIW - We have been rejected 3 times from YC over the last 3 years. We did not
take it personally as OP said, put our heads down and got working on our
startup.

After lot of hard work, setbacks and near death experiences, we are now
currently growing ~10% MoM and generating millions in ARR. YC or any other
investor/accelerator should never be the make or break thing for a startup -
it should be your own judgement call on whether you want to continue or not
based on market feedback.

[1] - [https://www.bvp.com/portfolio/anti-
portfolio](https://www.bvp.com/portfolio/anti-portfolio)

~~~
Mononokay
BVP's anti-portfolio is absolutely beautiful. It's so difficult to tell a
success from a failure.

Sequoia, on the other hand . . .

~~~
cbcoutinho
What do you mean? Those companies were all successes

~~~
Mononokay
Exactly! They failed to see the value in any of them.

~~~
m-p-3
To be fair it's almost like gambling.

------
Mononokay
There's something that was in the original rejection letter from the Summer
Founders Program that should ring true in the mind of everyone rejected:

'It's quite likely, in fact, practically certain, that groups we rejected will
go on to create successful startups. _If you do, we 'd appreciate it if you'd
send us an email making fun of us;_ we want to learn from our mistakes.'

Granted, this year it's been replaced with the less fun/personal:

'It's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create
successful startups. If you do, we'd sincerely appreciate it if you'd send us
an email telling us about it; we very much want to learn from our mistakes.'

Don't take your rejection letter as "You aren't good enough," take it as a
challenge to get to the point where you can make fun of them honestly and with
a grin.

~~~
Mononokay
It's worth noting that both 500Startups and Techstars exist, and are probably
the closest things to YC that aren't YC, if you're looking for something like
it.

~~~
TheSmoke
angelpad [0] too!

[0] [https://angelpad.org/](https://angelpad.org/)

------
wgerard
Some introspection from someone who did take it personally at first:

We applied to YC last winter and got an interview, but ultimately we weren't
accepted.

As a founder you're obviously incredibly enthusiastic about your idea and
think it's brilliant, and YC is usually an early stop in a company's life. So,
to hear a 'no' from a well-respected source before you even really get started
is definitely an ego blow.

What mostly sucks about getting rejected is that YC says repeatedly that they
accept teams, not products. So when we were rejected, I immediately took it as
a personal affront: Clearly they didn't like me, my co-founder, or our
dynamic, all of which inspired that (admittedly immature) defense mechanism of
"We're great people, so you're dumb and wrong!"

However.

Once we had gotten over it and gone through the ringer of raising funding, you
start taking it significantly less personally. Some VCs don't believe in
entire sectors of businesses, so it's an automatic 'no' if you're in one of
them. People can and will say 'no' because they're having a bad day, or you
remind them of someone they don't like, or they had a bad experience with a
similar company. Not that there aren't nuggets of wisdom to be gained from the
'no's, because obviously there are, but not every failure is a lesson
necessarily.

All that to say, I think it's ok to take it a little personally. Maybe you
should, even. But then you have to get back on the horse and get back to it.

------
deepGem
We applied to YC once and were rejected. Didn't take it personally but since
we were in a very early stage, we dropped the idea.

I've personally found the YC application extremely gratifying to write. It
does help you answer those key difficult questions that you'd have otherwise
glossed over because of complacency or over confidence. What I've thought of
doing is to fill the YC application for the next idea that I get and keep
refining it as I build upon the idea. Kinda use the application as a good idea
refining template. If at any stage you feel that you are confident in all the
questions, you can either apply - literally no cost or just keep building.
Having solid answers to all the questions - means that your idea has some
potential of turning into something big. Of course, your idea could turn out
to be a better business even without having all the answers. What I've
experienced is that as you write the answers, you'll feel really confident if
you are doing the right thing.

Another aspect in the application that I had a conflict with my co-founder at
the time was the amount of time to spend on the application. He was anal about
getting every aspect of the application right. We shot the video like a 100
times. I contented that was unnecessary but eventually agreed to disagree. I
feel that if you are on the right track, you shouldn't spend more than a
couple of hours on the final application, regardless of the stage you are
applying at.

It takes some practice to get the video right. This again depends on the co-
founder dynamics. I would use the video prep as a proxy to estimate the
efficacy of the co-founder dynamics. If you took really long to nail the video
- I'd spend some time introspecting. All said and done, if you take a really
long time just to nail a video, how would you fare in dealing with more
complicated company decisions.

So IMHO there is a lot of value in writing the YC app, regardless of whether
you make it or not.

~~~
estsauver
I was initially quite frustrated with the amount of time that my cofounder
spent on honing pitches.

I came to really appreciate it, having someone who can maintain that obsessive
focus on pitch decks usually translates quite well into an obsessive focus on
product. If a person is obsessive and has had a lot of past success, they're
probably obsessive about the right things.

~~~
deepGem
Yep, I agree but such an obsessive focus comes at a cost of execution speed.
In the early stages I'd rather be fast and a bit sloppy than be slow and
perfect.

------
curo
Don't be upset or quit, but I think it's also good to wonder why. Perhaps it's
just not a VC opportunity; are you okay with growing a more organic company
with smaller revenue? Maybe you're not a clear communicator; do you need to
work at it or is your idea hard to communicate? Is that indicative of a
problem?

We got a rejection letter this morning. Definitely not going to quit. We hit a
quarter million in our first year, cracked a tough technical problem, and are
significantly growing end-user usage every week. We got one video view, so
it's prompted to me to dial back the confidence and write a list of all the
reasons our application was thrown out and that process has been very helpful.

Also, remember YC has open sourced a ton of its knowledge (Startup School,
Stanford Course, PG essays, Sam Altman Playbook), so if you read a bit every
week you have their guidance for free. And maybe you'll be better prepared for
a Series A 9 months from now after getting into the next batch. Life's about
good timing.

------
gargarplex
Or maybe quit and re seed the DNA of your founding team. People get into YC
all the time without an idea. It's about the people.

I know someone who literally spent a year finding roommates and living with
them in advance in order to cultivate a better YC application.

It's competitive, and 99.9% of the rejected will end up failing.

It's hard to listen and put in the effort but it's worthwhile, having a chip
on your shoulder doesn't really make you more productive often it slows you
down because you're working in circles to address your emotional needs rather
than really listening to the business feedback.

OK, just some ranting from someone who has been rejected by YC for over 10
years now (not really something I want to brag about) but has been fortunate
enough to receive investment and grooming from other fine people in the
business community.

Keep at it (I kept at it and I'm honestly loving the results) but maybe really
change and listen.

------
kozikow
It's now overrated anyway. You can hear it from many people unaffiliated with
YC, but even some recent YC founders.

It's now mostly "YC stamp of approval" that increases your brand and access to
good investors on demo day.

Everything else (e.g. educational value, sense of community) gets degraded due
to huge batch sizes (294 founders in S17) and most of the things YC teaches
becoming public knowledge.

~~~
Clanan
> It's now mostly "YC stamp of approval" that increases your brand and access
> to good investors on demo day.

I have experience with small business, although not with YC. Those benefits
are MASSIVE and should not be underestimated.

~~~
kozikow
> Good investors on demo day

IMO investors ability to invest in startups have improved. If top investors
are not able to find you on your own, you are not likely to get the check from
them anyway. I speak it from position of not going to YC, but doing in-person
pitches with half of "top 10" VCs, and some of those with partners.

The only exception may be if you are not outside of current investment trends,
but you are making lots of revenue. In such case you probably shouldn't get VC
money anyway.

> YC stamp of approval

That would indeed have helped in some situations. It's case by case call
whether it's worth the equity. Just be sure you don't do it for vanity to show
off your friends that you got into YC.

------
yosho
We applied I think in 2010, got rejected. This was when YC was still fairly
young. so arguably competition was even less than it is today.

Our company now does over $100M ARR and still growing. We learned a lot along
the way, to be fair, I don't think I would have accepted us either at the
time. Just take it as a learning experience and get better, don't let
rejection stop you. I couldn't tell you how many "NOs" we've gotten in our
company's lifespan.

------
ultrasounder
Pieter Levels(pieterhg) is the creator of: \-
[https://nomadlist.com/](https://nomadlist.com/) \-
[https://remoteok.io/](https://remoteok.io/) \-
[https://hoodmaps.com/](https://hoodmaps.com/) Was apparently YC reject too
and posted this on his twitter today for some inspiration;
[https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/98653081431266099...](https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/986530814312660993)
He is super nice guy too.!!!

------
dtawfik1
This is a bit of a tangent, but if you don't get in, don't read into it too
much. The rejection could be due to many factors. It could very well be that
you were rejected by the stage of your company. You may not have built out
enough, or haven't had enough validation yet. I know a solo founder who didn't
get in, but went on to raise 20m plus for his company (tuition.io). The fact
that he was a solo founder and that he was still developing the product could
have been the issue of why he was rejected. He went along to create a company
that has 50+ employees. This is all to say you really have to develop the idea
and see where your traction is to validate your idea. YC is a great
organization to have backing you, but it's not always perfect in selecting
great companies. Learn from the rejection, and apply those lessons, but commit
to building a company.

------
joeblau
I've been rejected from YC at every stage, but I still think there is a lot of
value in building relationships with the community. There are tons of people
from all sides of the spectrum that you can learn from and apply again. Also
YC gives away so many of their secrets if you just pay attention and know
where to look.

~~~
mrburton
I feel the same way. I'm moving to Mountain View and wouldn't have an issue
helping companies that need it.

It's emotionally hard even with YC Family supporting you.

------
at-fates-hands
I've always felt more people should spend some time in sales to harden their
skin a little bit. Anything, including running a startup and being successful
is a numbers game.

If you change your mindset from, "Oh we got rejected, we must be doing
something wrong." to "Oh we got rejected, it just means we're now closer to
getting accepted by some other incubator, VC, angle investor, etc."

The guys I worked with in several startups took rejection as a badge of honor.
It just meant you were getting closer, not further away from your goal.

~~~
NetOpWibby
This is how I view the rejection. I was mildly disappointed and I mean _super_
mild. I look forward to getting my product better and reapplying.

------
z5h
My plan is to print and frame the rejection and use it as a motivator. For me
it was an accomplishment to reach a point where I felt I had a solid
submission. I know a few things (at least) I can improve for the next time I
submit. So, time to get to work.

------
ChicagoDave
I have a related question. I had an idea many years ago and I've poked at it
irregularly since. I have kids and I've already had one startup fail, so I
just kind of slow-rolled this one.

I still believe the idea has merit, so I keep poking at it here and there. I
spent money on design work and it's incorporated, but I don't have a partner
or support mechanism.

I had a BizSpark account, but I "graduated" in February, so I can't host the
API for free anymore. I was considering redeveloping the API in serverless
AWS, but that will take time. I have a working API in .NET Web API.

So I'm I'm missing a place to deploy my API (and an Identity Server
implementation for OAuth2) and an iOS developer to implement the designs.

Looking for advice...and sure, it may sound like I don't care enough and
that's the death of many a startup, but I do care. I want to see the app
completed and get a chance to work on the business model (and since it's a
social networking app, that's no small thing).

[http://wizely.net](http://wizely.net)

All the good and bad advice is welcome.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
How does this beat the results you would get from Google search?

~~~
ChicagoDave
If you use Google to search "I need clothes for college", what do you get? Is
it actually helpful? Google doesn't know what school you go to, who you like
to hang out with, what you do for fun, if you're male or female (well it does,
but it's not used in search results that I can tell).

It's all about context. A system of advice and recommendations curated from a
social network, heavily moderated and limited to short Twitter-sized pieces of
text could help people solve problems in under a minute.

As it is now, you often have to "manage" your search process because you have
to wade through all of the subjective material or you really don't know the
right question to ask or what your root need is.

How about this? "I need SSL on my stage website."

Good luck finding the answer on google if you can't get SSL to work and you
didn't know there was a load balancer stripping it out.

Quora and Yahoo Answers are a bastion of redirected content, incoherent
answers, and they're really just entertainment. They provide a largely hit or
miss solution.

With Wizely, for each Topic, the network gets to continually add context they
see relevant.

The proposed business model is that there could be ads found contextually. "I
need to replace a patio door" could lead to ads from Home Depot, Lowe's, and
Menard's. There would be an opt-in click-through to advertisers websites with
hard warnings about being tracked. All ads would be heavily moderated (no 100%
self-serve advertising).

~~~
ChicagoDave
Also, your external searches will have no impact on what you do within the
Wizely network and vice versa. So if you look "I need to buy a car" and
traverse the Q&A tree, you won't later see car ads all over your browser (for
those not using adblock). One of the core ideas is to flip the ad model so it
disproportionally benefits the user, not the advertisers.

------
codingdave
It is also worth noting that the difference between bootstrapping and getting
into an incubator is about speed of execution, not long-term success. YC is an
option, not a requirement, to start your own thing.

------
quantumwoke
There are many stages for a nascent startup to fail. Getting into the
incubator is only the first step, and perhaps the easiest to give up at. I
would encourage all people who got rejected to fail-fast and _keep trying_.

I have a friend who got into an incubator with a crypto idea and very positive
feedback on the idea. Six months after funding, the whole thing imploded due
to personal conflict. At the time, my friend had recently up with his
girlfriend of five years and the venture ran out of steam. They ended up
returning the money to investors. When the crypto bubble hit he was kicking
himself having just missed out.

After that, he took a break to go overseas and recuperate. As I write this, my
friend has just closed a $1m seed round for his next project and is well on
the way to rolling it out. Last night he popped the question to his now
fiance. It's important to remember that startups are a marathon, not a sprint.
Roll with the punches, learn from your mistakes and keep on hustling :).

~~~
Hydraulix989
On the flip side, the toughest thing sometimes with startups is to decide when
to draw that line in the sand where you can say "okay, this isn't working,
time to move on." You tend to bias yourself and your success. The YC partners
are smart and have generally been right every single time when something I was
working on wasn't going to work.

~~~
mswen
Your comment echos a conversation I was having with my wife the other day as
she was reading me bits from Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Book
by Angela Duckworth.

As you might infer from the title the thesis is that Grit is a very powerful
force. My comment in our discussion was that this whole body of social science
research and life/career advice comes into conflict with other bodies of
advice about cutting one's losses, the value of killing 'failing' projects
early, avoiding the trap of sunk costs.

How do we personally know or offer advice to others about whether current
difficulties are likely to be overcome by renewed effort and persistence and
when do we say it isn't working, try something very different?

~~~
jacquesm
There are some examples of people plugging away on a 'failed' project for
_decades_ and eventually striking it rich.

~~~
mswen
Indeed, and that is the lure. And, when we read stories like that we get
motivated to press on and never give up. But who writes the stories of someone
who worked on a failed project for 20 years and never got anywhere? If we
persist what are the odds that we will be the one for whom it works out?

The question of when to persist, how long to persist and how to pay the bills
while you persist are very personal to me.

In 2000 I and a friend did research and the very beginnings of development on
a semantic analysis technique that was notably better than anything we could
find at the time including from Google and other search engines. But we
couldn't find money fast enough and we both had families to support so we went
our separate ways and did other things that were more commercial.

About 7 years later VCs started funding similar technologies. And, somewhere
around 2010 to 2013 technology seemed to have caught up to where we were at in
2000.

So should we have persisted? It kind of seems like we should have. But, I have
seen enough of life to know that sometimes a group of people have a lot going
for them, winning awards, raising funding, rolling out product and still end
up running into a roadblock on the way to commercial success that sinks them.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Timing sometimes matters a whole lot.

------
ErunamoJAZZ
Participate in the Startup School is something that any rejected startup
should do, imho. It is true many rejected people will do great companies, so
invest time in knowledge is better that be down for a simple rejection.

[https://www.startupschool.org/](https://www.startupschool.org/)

~~~
NetOpWibby
Nice, thanks for this!

------
ikeboy
Been rejected twice, now on pace to do 5 million+ in revenue for 2018 without
giving up any equity. My business was never really a fit for VC anyway.

------
renegadesensei
Rejection is part of life. You lick your wounds and move on.

My cofounder and I don't regret applying. We did it mostly for publicity. We
already have pretty good traction and funding so the rejection doesn't really
slow us down. I never thought we had much of a shot getting accepted anyway
just because our team and product are really out of the norm.

Let your haters be your motivators.

------
tomhiggins
Rejected twice, now. I second this. It's annoying to be rejected, but it's
important not to be dispirited.

Keep pushing on and don't let a YC rejection bother you too much. As mrburton
said, if it slows you down, you're probably doing something wrong.

Honestly, bootstrapping can be very advantageous to your startup because it
keeps you on your toes.

------
time0ut
We were rejected this past winter. It was a little disappointing, but not
surprising. A lot of amazing companies apply to YC and we weren't really
ready. We learned a lot by getting rejected and might try again later,
especially since we got a "you were in the top 10%, try again" email.

------
Regiso
I'm very interested to see statistics on "% of people from the US who were
accepted" vs. "% of people from other countries who were accepted", divided by
country. YC's general statement "29% of the companies were from outside the
US" is not equal to my question. I feel the bias somewhere here. Non-native
speakers have much harder times because of different basic things like the
language barrier, but something tells me that the US-based people are in
priority.

~~~
Regiso
That's much more upsetting than rejection itself. You can make some garbage
like Juicero, and, being located in the US, still get investments and some
knowledge. And for outsider countries, as there are no adequate investors, YC
can provide much more impact.

------
djsumdog
There are tons of incubators and VC around the country. Surely these people
didn't apply to just one? or does YC have exclusivity requirements?

~~~
whistlerbrk
Because the distance between YC and the next best incubator is measured in
light years (imo)

~~~
LargeWu
I suspect YC has become similar to the Ivy League schools, in that its primary
value is in signaling and networking, rather than the education itself.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
Ironically this makes the whole thing very un-entrepreneurial. People
‘studying for the test’ to compete to get in. Almost employee/herd like. You
cannot be upset about not getting in, or at least minimise the time you’re
upset, give it 5 minutes and get back to work.

------
HiroshiSan
I highly recommend anyone doubting themselves to watch the g-eazy episode from
Netflix's documentary series Rapture.

If you quit, you'll never make it ( and that's ok ) but if you keep working,
keep honing your craft, you might just make it big. Take every failure as a
lesson that something needs tweaking. When you play a game, you only get
better by dying lots and lots and lots of times.

------
benrawk
This is ridiculous. Rejection sucks, and it will likely slow you down a little
bit for some time. That’s okay, and it is okay to feel bad. Over time,
however, you will get over it and become better because of it. But if you are
slowed down you aren’t doing anything wrong, you are human.

------
GFischer
I agree. They're so swamped with applications they don't even look at demos
sometimes - they didn't look at mine, which hurt, but I understand why they
rejected us (no growth even though we have a LOT of positive feedback, but we
really need money to make it grow).

------
san17
Do we have to refill founder info section while reapplying to YC or just
startup info and progress ? Didn't keep backup of founder info.

~~~
ScottBurson
My recollection is that some of the founder info fields got blanked. Save it
if you think you'll want it.

------
poster123
If YC is good at what it does, and I think it is, then being rejected by YC
should cause you to lower your estimated probability that your start-up will
succeed, at least a little. The question is how much.

~~~
dustingetz
"Attrition is a group statistic. It doesn't apply to me"

[https://josephwalla.com/attrition-is-a-group-statistic-it-
do...](https://josephwalla.com/attrition-is-a-group-statistic-it-dont-apply-
to-me)

------
whataretensors
YC is legacy, don't apply. ICOs are technically better and you don't have to
uproot your life to go to SF. Additionally it doesn't have to gate out 99% of
the public with the accredited investor scam.

The connections seem nice and everyone is talented obviously.

