

What happened to you after you were rejected? - palish

Has anyone applied to YCombinator, been rejected, then built something popular?<p>There was a line from the rejection email:<p><i>"We realize this process is fraught with error. It's 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."</i><p>Has anyone done that?  If not, YCombinator picks the winners pretty well.
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uuilly
If you apply and get rejected and don't go after your idea anyways then they
were right to reject you. I know that sounds harsh but failure and rejection
are common-place in startups, YC or not. If your idea can't sustain rejection
from a program as competitive as YC then it is the wrong idea or you are the
wrong person to make it happen. It's like saying, "I didn't get into MIT so
I'm not going to engineering school."

~~~
rms
College students are an exception. There's a lot of social pressure to not
drop out of college to start a company and YC provides a socially acceptable
excuse for postponing college. This made PG and co increasingly uncomfortable
over time which is why they started preferring college graduates. I realize
that someone truly dedicated could still work an idea full time while in
college. But this is hard, and it's even harder to get a team to hack with
you.

~~~
uuilly
Agreed. You bring up an interesting point about social pressures b/c they are
the driving force behind this whole thing. I'd like to run w/ this for a
sec...

It is NOT socially acceptable to not attend college. It IS socially acceptable
to not get funding for your startup. So what happens when someone wants to go
to college but they don't have the money? They get loans, they work two jobs,
they do what they have to do to make it happen b/c they will be socially
rejected if they fail. The same is not the case for funding. If you are
committed to your idea, treat funding like a college loan: Not optional. Once
you get in this mindset you'll figure it out. You may not get a full ride at
MIT (YC) but in state tuition + a TA job at U Mich isn't so bad either.

As of now nobody has commented on a sucessful YC reject. I think that is b/c
YC applicants tend to be straight A students (blind generalization based on
instinct.) Straight A students have other options that involve less social
risk. I know of a number of successful entrepreneurs who were thrown out of /
barely made it through college. Since they didn't have other options, they HAD
to make it work. And since they had been failing their whole lives they've
realized that failure is just someone else's or some organizations opionion
about them. For good or for bad, they tuned those opionions out.

People need to realize that the currency of "failure" is just a bit of social
rejection. Running your startup into the ground will not give you cancer. And
a big fat 'F' on life's report card is just a sign that at least once, you
weren't afraid to push the limits...

~~~
rms
I'm coasting along now with a 2.8 GPA and a willingness to let it slip to a
2.0. I'm an industrial engineering student and you may remember us as the
efficiency experts from movies such as Office Space and American Beauty. The
salary for an Industrial Engineer in Pittsburgh is almost constant for anyone
with a QPA over 2.0. Those with better grades just get to work for a more
nationally known firm instead of a local manufacturer.

College is so aversive to me because all it does is prepare me to work for
someone else, at a guaranteed salary of 55k per year (sixty by the time I
graduate?). True failure for me will be taking a job as an Industrial
Engineer. I can't think of anything I want to do less. But if I haven't become
successful by the time I graduate from college and no one is funding me, I
won't have much of a choice.

I'm running my current startup like a business. We're not seeking funding and
we're growing very slowly. We have no costs so everything we make is profit.
We haven't made any profit because we haven't actually sold anything but we'll
get there eventually.

~~~
rms
Note -- there are many things I would rather do less than work as an
industrial engineer, like a McJob. It still represents one very specific kind
of failure to me.

~~~
falsestprophet
Actually, a lot of really well payed industrial engineers work at McDonald's.

~~~
rms
Great... I bet they were the guys who decided to outsource the pickup windows.

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portLAN
> _If not, YCombinator picks the winners pretty well._

Impossible to say without knowing what the selectees would've done on their
own. A lot of the winners might have opted to stay in college, for example, if
they hadn't been picked. Simply being selected is automatically going to
influence the result -- having all that support behind you makes it more
likely that you'll succeed.

There's a certain amount of being made, not born, so to speak; you might think
of it as being a bit like the Spice Girls.

    
    
        *Cough*
    

~~~
rms
My idea for YC was a very large project... one of the many reasons we were
rejected was that I didn't agree with PG during the interview as far as making
a smaller subset of the idea. I of course recognize his point as valid but we
really didn't have time to talk about it.

We didn't get in, everyone stayed in college, and no one devoted themselves to
the project in the way that YC hackers do.

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wensing
I'm very happy with the way things are going. I wouldn't call us a 'winner'
(yet), but I don't think YCombinator's "rejection" is going to be the reason
we fail, if we do.

Plenty of successful technology companies have been started outside of
YCombinator. In retrospect, it's kind of a funny question.

~~~
chaostheory
I like your site man - very useful (I have family in FL)

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brlewis
I don't think any of the applicants, accepted or rejected, are ready to rest
on their laurels just yet.

I've gained users in the past few months, but am nowhere near popularity.

~~~
blored
We've just released our 'News Feed' www.clutterme.com/public

------
awt
We got rejected, then started a site that got Techcrunched a few months later
(thought it didn't end up taking off). Now we're working on another company
that is funded and has a growing user base on Facebook.

~~~
palish
Just curious, how'd you attract TechCrunch's attention?

~~~
SwellJoe
Presumably they made something interesting with nice design. The bar isn't
that high--TechCrunch covers very early Web 2.0 startups. If you write to
them, and your site is worth a crap and in an interesting space for them,
they'll probably cover it. It does help to be in the Valley and actually run
into a TC writer in person (they're all really nice folks, in my limited
experience), but it's obviously not mandatory.

~~~
awt
Our design sucked.

------
ivankirigin
YC folks describe the accelerator effect of getting into the program. I think
that makes sense. People expect non-failure from an openly declared intention
to start a company. Founders respond to the fear of failure by working hard.

Many of those rejected probably don't consider themselves startups, just
working on side projects. No build-up of expectation.

I have every intention to continue if not accepted into the next YC round.

~~~
palish
If most people succeed because they openly declare their intentions, the
reverse seems true too:

You're more likely to succeed if you openly declare your intentions to
succeed.

And it's true. I'm not sure we'd be able to launch tomorrow if we hadn't
posted our intention to. Now we have all your expectations to live up to, and
it motivates us.

~~~
Keios
From my experience - likelihood of succeeding because you tell people and all
the other variations of this are just hoopla.

You will succeed if

1\. You have a market

2\. You service that market better than most or better

3\. You can do what you are doing for years at a length. And then keep doing
it some more without even thinking about it.

~~~
palish
Sure, the idea has to be semi-solid. I was referring to the part of "Get this
thing done, now. Get it out there and in front of people. Then we'll see if
they bite."

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ratsbane
That line you quoted from the rejection email is just perfect. It also shows
quite the opposite attitude of the average big company. Reforming corporate
America seems like a lost cause. It's time to start taking over.

~~~
SwellJoe
"It's time to start taking over."

Y Combinator tends to fund companies that will be acquired, rather than become
companies that displace existing huge corporations. Just a rule of thumb, of
course, and there are a few that could run to IPO in three to five years if
they don't get acquired (and a very few for whom that's actually the pretty
firmly held goal).

Nonetheless, corporate America is a hundred+ years in the making. We're not
going to take over with Web 2.0 features. You'd better start thinking bigger,
much bigger, if that's your aspiration.

~~~
ratsbane
Right-O!

"Bluto's right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards.
Now we could do it with conventional weapons that could take years and cost
millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this
situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on
somebody's part."

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christefano
One startup I joined was rejected by YC, and when we got the news the founder
bought a car. This made it hard for me to take him seriously (and get paid)
and I quit.

This was a while ago and the startup still hasn't launched. I hope he succeeds
at some point. The founder's idea is brilliantly disruptive and democratizes a
multi-billion dollar industry we all take for granted.

~~~
Laurentvw
Since you quit, do you mind telling us the idea or their website?

~~~
christefano
I signed an NDA so I can't talk about his project, but we nixed the non-
compete clause (it was so broad it was unbelievable) so if he fails and closes
up shop, I might look into running with the idea.

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rokhayakebe
Well, first you get to rethink your idea and ask yourself" WTF is wrong here?"
Then you start tweaking it here and there, making it simpler (but better) and
a few months later you find that maybe the original idea wasn't all that, and
the current one is more solid. Now you have been working hard to make the
necessary changes and you are going to launch this Fall. BTW the letter hurts.

~~~
rrival
I'm sure it all varies by degrees, situation by situation, but the idea isn't
the point - ideas, as has been repeated ad nauseam, are everywhere.
Recognizing opportunities (the factors that make a team predisposed to excel
where others with the same idea would not) is much more valuable. A large
(possibly larger?) part of the equation should (must?) be team-specific. From
everything I've read, the idea will change in the YC process (as it should),
the team could drop the original plan entirely and should still be strong
enough to do something else better suited to their strengths.

It's hard to read "it's not the idea, it's the team" or "I don't invest in
ideas, I invest in teams" and not want to prove someone wrong out of ego or
passion/drive. It's difficult to appreciate the truth there without having
realized it on your own, no matter how many times you hear that.

