
Reflecting on the founding, growth and maturing of Overleaf - JohnHammersley
https://clutter.errantscience.com/2017/07/31/reflecting-on-the-founding-growth-and-maturing-of-overleaf/
======
jacquesm
Super. Rather than taking rejection by YC as end-of-story they went on to
success.

Remember when applying to YC and other batch based accelerators: you might not
get in but in some cases that says more about the accelerator than it does
about you and there are _plenty_ of other roads to success.

~~~
quickthrower2
It doesn't necessarily mean YC were wrong to reject either. It's a prediction
game.

~~~
jacquesm
Well, if I were YC and I'd be trying to improve my betting average the ones I
bet on that were misses and the the ones I didn't bet on that were hits would
be studied very carefully.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
A couple points on this though:

1\. Whether you're an incubator or a VC, batting _average_ doesn't really
matter. All that really matters (from a financial perspective anyway) is that
you don't miss out on the super successful hits. I think it was one or two
years back that pg said that something like 70% of YC's _total_ return, since
founding, was Dropbox and AirBnB. Thus, while Overleaf has become successful,
at the end of the day it's not something that would really move the needle
much for YC. 2\. It's all about percentages, so of course you're bound to miss
some winners. It's also possible that since Overleaf's addressable market
(scientific paper writing) is not gigantic, YC might be less rigorous in
finding "diamonds in the rough" if a startup's addressable market is not that
big (pure speculation on my part). 3\. Numbers 1 and 2 should highlight that
the needs and goals of investors and founders are not 100% aligned. Investors
want to find the few mega home runs, while I think most founders would be
happy with a double or a triple. Kudos to Overleaf for their perseverance and
success!

~~~
Grustaf
While the math here certainly works out, I don't think it's the whole truth,
at least not with regards to YC. While they probably want to maximise the
chances of betting on the next dropbox, they also fund plenty of companies
that very clearly are not the next dropbox, probably because their mission is
also to fund good, profitable ideas in general, and that each of these
clearly-not-dropbox bets is quite cheap.

So I would guess their strategy is more like 'try to fund all potential future
unicorns, and fund a bunch of others that seem cool and in a way so that those
don't lose money on average'. That's certainly the strategy I would have
chosen!

~~~
edanm
This is probably not true, though. Many of the people at YC have said, many
times, that what they're trying to do is find the next Dropbox, and everything
else doesn't matter. They pretty explicitly talk about how hard to do this is,
but how their efforts should go towards that anyway.

The thing is, it's hard to to tell, especially from the outside, whether a
company can viably become a billion dollar company. Sure, you've seen plenty
of YC companies that ended up either not going for it, or not looking like
it's possible for them to end up as unicorns, but this is in some cases too
late - you aren't hearing their pitch, in which they explain why they _could_
be the next billion dollar startup.

Investors who want to make money take _seriously_ the idea that one real
success is the only thing that matters.

~~~
Drdrdrq
Also, in this case (and presumably others) rejection is exactly what founders
needed. Judging by the write-up they were ill prepared and rejection is what
forced them to take a huge step back and re-evaluate their approach. Would it
happen if they were accepted or let go less harshly? Who knows.

------
heyrhett
Maybe it's a tangent, but Overleaf is hands down one of my favorite services.

It follows UX designer, Bret Victor's suggestion that creators need to be able
to see what they're creating. It also has a ton of convenient features like
forking, auto-saves, and inviting people to edit through private links without
requiring that your collaborators sign up for an account on Overleaf.

LaTex creates beautiful documents, but it was too difficult for me to use
before Overleaf. Also, I only use the free version of Overleaf.

Thank you for creating Overleaf!

~~~
JohnHammersley
Thanks for this amazing comment! Overleaf definitely came from us solving a
problem we had ourselves, and we've always continued to use it, which
definitely helps you catch bugs and UX issues.

We've also hired a great team who have expanded on using Overleaf with clients
-- for example, we use Overleaf for documentation when onboarding a new
institution or publisher. It's really helped, and it's broadened out the type
of feedback we receive too.

Thanks for using Overleaf! :)

------
harshalizee
Overleaf is an amazing service that needs more exposure. Right off the bat it
takes away the steep learning curve of setting up a local LaTex creator. The
real time generation is actually a lot faster now too.

~~~
JohnHammersley
Thanks, and yes, we've been doing a lot of work on scaling over the past few
years to help with the compile times :)

We've just announced some exciting news too -- the ShareLaTeX team has
recently joined Overleaf! More details on that here if you're interested:
[https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-
sharelatex-i...](https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-
is-joining-overleaf)

~~~
adventured
Consider adding a link in that blog post to Overleaf, eg in the third
paragraph where you say "(now Overleaf)." Clicked through to check it out
after some of the positive comments in this thread, and found no direct link
to it.

~~~
JohnHammersley
Good suggestion, thanks -- I've just added an update to the top of the post,
and mentioned it there :)

Edit: just a note to say that I added this update to
[http://johnhammersley.com/?p=428](http://johnhammersley.com/?p=428) as that's
where this HN story originally pointed to.

------
wolco
If they were accepted they might not have become the success they are.
Programs like YC can put different types of pressures on a business.

------
sonofaragorn
Interesting read.

I've been using Overleaf almost every day for about a year (and absoultely
love it!) and I am still not sure how it can be profitable :D

~~~
JohnHammersley
Glad to hear you've been finding Overleaf useful!

Re the business model: we don't rely on the user subscriptions for revenue --
we provide services for institutions (e.g. Overleaf Commons:
[https://www.overleaf.com/universities](https://www.overleaf.com/universities))
and publishers (e.g. templates and direct submission links:
[https://www.overleaf.com/publishers#!publisherslist](https://www.overleaf.com/publishers#!publisherslist)),
as well as private cloud / local installs for companies:
[https://www.overleaf.com/enterprises](https://www.overleaf.com/enterprises)

(and that allows us to provide a solid free plan that works well for most
users, especially those just starting out with LaTeX)

But yes, the "how does it make money?" question was always one we found
difficult to articulate well -- we certainly didn't do it in the YC interview!
:)

~~~
wamatt
_> that allows us to provide a solid free plan that works well for most users_

The fact that you offer a _real_ (i.e. full-featured) free plan is really
nice. Congrats on your success and finding a business model that works. :)

------
blfr
Browsing through their gallery of templates I found this lovely material
CV/resume

[https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/material-
cv/rnrnhvm...](https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/material-
cv/rnrnhvmfxyrw)

Does it look very unprofessional or just slightly? I'm not actively looking
but I like to have something up-to-date to send when people ask and this is
tempting.

~~~
ATsch
Personally, I think it looks unprofessional. It's often hard to not cross the
border from Material Design to Fisher Price, and in this case I think they
crossed it a bit.

~~~
ClassyJacket
Material design was so nice when they showed off images on the website
advertising Google IO, and had shadows and subtle textures on things.

It turned out it was just using the MSPaint filled rectangle tool with bright
colours. And then spacing everything so far apart that your 6.5" phone screen
is pointless.

------
zanalyzer
Overleaf just rocks.

One of the things I wish existed earlier. The new default for collaborative
research paper writing.

------
neoecos
After getting into YC, you can see the large amount of different companies and
markets and products they try to reach, but for sure the one thing the all
share is billions market size.

Also, they are always clear that not being accepted into YC should not be the
end of the company and you can try later even with the same idea.

------
Rainymood
Overleaf/ShareLateX are really great tools ...

However ... god I hate working with them if you have a lot of images that need
to be compiled each time. It gets really really slow. That's my only gripe
with Overleaf/ShareLaTex: the slow compiling.

