
How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator - mparramon
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-i-f-ed-up-in-ycombinator-35a19e7ace68?hn=1
======
charlierguo
Hey everyone! Author here.

First off, thanks for reading! To be honest, I really didn't expect to get
this much attention. This is a story that I've wanted to share with friends
and family for a long time, and was thoroughly surprised when it was picked up
by Backchannel (and then posted here).

Regarding some of the points made here, I (mostly) agree. Getting into YC or
raising money is not success. Changing your idea completely isn't really a
"pivot" (but I don't know if the industry has as concise of a term for
throwing everything out and starting over). In my mind, the real failure was
squandering the opportunity of YC, an opportunity I know many people would
kill to have. Clearly we should have stuck it out with our idea, but we were
21 years old, stressed out, and foolish.

I also want to note (in case anyone was wondering) that my experience hasn't
diminished my opinion of YC at all. PG's advice was spot on, and YC remains an
amazing program for founders. We simply didn't make the best use of our time
in it.

Hopefully reading about my experience is helpful in some way. If not, sorry
about that. Give it a downvote and send it on its merry way.

~~~
Meekro
Cool story, great read! I'm surprised how negative some of the comments here
on HN were. They're probably just envious about how _they 're_ not getting
that sweet, sweet investor money!

~~~
scobar
Most probably aren't just envious. However, those who wrote negative comments
weren't afraid to announce seemingly definitive conclusions without enough
data to justify their assurance. Keep in mind that the author and his
cofounder were interviewed by YC partners and all of the cofounders. While
their selection system has flaws, most probably agree that it's one of the
best that exists right now. Perhaps they saw strengths in the author's
founding team that the author himself had not perceived.

Based on the author's age, I assume he considers this the greatest failure in
his life. He wrote this shortly after exiting an educational system that
indoctrinates students to believe that success occurs without failures. So his
perspective may have been from a point of low self-worth making it difficult
to see his own strengths that will help him recover and succeed moving
forward.

Thank you for writing about your experience Charlie. I hope the traveling has
been beneficial, and I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

~~~
Meekro
For some of the negative comments, the data actively contradicts their
conclusion. Many here seem to think that only an idiot would "invest in a 21
year old with a half-baked business plan." The people posting that have
probably made less from whatever they're doing, than PG/YC have from their 21
year old founders.

~~~
larrys
"The people posting that have probably made less from whatever they're doing,
than PG/YC have from their 21 year old founders."

So it's all about money then, right? Well if you want to take that to the
logical extreme then you would take advice from, say, Larry Ellison or Carl
Icahn (over PG) because they have much more money than PG does (at this point
in time at least). My point is you have to be very careful about putting
people up on a pedestal (which is what happens at HN so often) and thinking
that their advice ranks over someone who, by the standards of this community
appears to be "less successful".

------
birken
This post really misunderstands what both success and failure are.

Getting into YC or raising money isn't success. And trying an idea out for a
few months before giving up on it isn't failure.

Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots of years. Maybe
the idea is bad, but giving up on it after a couple of months really proves
nothing. All it has proven is that the founders are the type of people that
are readily willing to bail out at any moment, and that is a quality that
doesn't lead to startup success. The "nightmare" described in this post is a
joke compared to the depths some highly successful startups have gone through.
_Techcrunch wrote a bad story about me?_ Really? Try having to decide whether
to lay off people to make payroll or having spent years on an idea only to
still be not sure if it is working on not.

~~~
yesimahuman
Having been in an accelerator before, I definitely related to their sense of
dread that they might mess up this opportunity and never be successful again
because of it. Watching peers strike it big must have been super hard.

I quickly realized after that most "success" is exaggerated in the media, etc.
and true success takes a lot longer than we expect. Raising $1M isn't success.
Hell, raising $5-30M in today's climate isn't success. "Success" is such a
vague concept that it's best to just focus on being happy and building cool
shit and growing it year after year. It takes time.

~~~
31reasons
>>"Success" is such a vague concept

Actually its not in terms of business.

Success = Profit + Long term sustainability in doing so.

~~~
CPLX
Actually it's not that either.

Success in a business context means a positive rate of return on the resources
invested. Or to refine one step further, a return that is positive and
superior to the next best alternative for the deployment of said resources at
a given level of risk.

~~~
31reasons
So Profit.

~~~
GoLocalApps
ROI /= Profit.

See Amazon (or as noted below, Instagram).

However I also think that is a problem for many people who want to startup.
They don't usually think about how they'll show a profit and manage to run
their business within that profit. Investor money gets them started and an
exit by selling an unprofitable yet growing business to a larger company is
the goal.

------
edent
Am I missing something here? You can get $$$ and top quality advice for an
_idea_ and then just turn around and say "bored now - let's do something
else"?

And then, so it seems, when that idea runs out you just say "uhhh... let's do
_this_ instead!"

So, what are the YC people investing in? Two guys who seem pretty smart?

I appreciate that you might need to pivot from "a social network for dogs" to
"a social network for pets" or even "a dog training forum" \- but this just
seems like they were given investment for one idea, then immediately dropped
it to do something else.

Or, like I say, have I missed something vital?

~~~
wpietri
I had similar questions based on this: "In college I had started an ed-tech
company, ClassOwl, that raised nearly a million in seed funding. My two
cofounders and I attended StartX, an incubator affiliated with Stanford, but
ultimately decided to finish our degrees instead of pursuing the startup
dream."

Am I understanding that right? Twice in two years this guy took other people's
money for something and then quit?

I know we are in another bubble, but this really worries me. What, as an
industry, are we doing if recent graduates see their basket of choices as "a)
go to grad school, b) work at a big tech company, or c) attend a prestigious
startup accelerator"?

On the one hand, I love entrepreneurs, and think that anybody who feels the
calling should be supported in doing it. But on the other, I really feel like
it is a calling, like being an artist or a religious missionary. People who
are the kind of people who will be happy taking one of life's default choices
should probably just go do that. If people are becoming entrepreneurs because
they see it as another convenient, high-status, high-reward option, then I
think we're doing something pretty wrong.

And kudos to Charlie Guo for being honest like this. It's sure not easy, but
it's very valuable to the rest of us.

~~~
_delirium
Unless there's some kind of actual contract (leave before X years and you have
to return Y% of the funding), I don't think that should be very surprising.
People start on something (even a funded something) and then change to other
things all the time, if their interests change or another opportunity arises.

For example, a portion of the people who win $30k/year National Science
Foundation graduate research fellowships take a year or two of the funding,
and then decide a PhD isn't for them. Some of those people, after taking $30k
or $60k in PhD fellowship funding, leave grad school to start a company
instead. I don't think it should be that surprising that people might go the
other direction as well, taking $30k in Y Combinator funding, trying a startup
for a bit, and then deciding to leave the startup and go to grad school
instead.

~~~
untog
A research fellowship is not seed funding, though. YC doesn't "give" people
$30k, it _invests_ $30k in their business.

~~~
_delirium
It's not identical, but it's not like the NSF "gives" people $30k of the
taxpayer's money just as a gift ether. The goal is to invest public money in
future researchers. In both cases there's a clear _intent_ that you will use
this as seed money to jump-start a project that will achieve the funder's
goals (monetary return and positive PR for Y Combinator, production of
research & PhDs for the NSF GFRP). But there's no requirement that you
continue to do it indefinitely, and no ban on bailing out if you decide it's
not for you after spending $30k of the funder's money. I don't see this as any
more morally binding in the Y Combinator case than the NSF case.

~~~
cfallin
In addition, it's not like leaving a PhD funded by an NSF GRFP leaves zero net
positive impact. Funding research leads to papers (hopefully with valuable
insights) and to knowledge and training passed down to other researchers. I
don't think it's a very good analogy to startup funding in that sense.
(Although I suppose one could make the argument that alums of failed companies
have hard-earned experience so some of the value is still there, diffused out
to wherever they go next.)

~~~
_delirium
In the best case I think that's possible, but in the usual case someone who
leaves a PhD program after a year does very little research. US-style PhDs
don't typically require a master's degree first, so first-year PhD students
are doing mainly course work and "figure out what I want to do for my PhD"
project-shopping. If you do that for a year and bail, it's pretty common that
you wrote zero papers and did very little research. If you leave after two or
three years, it's more likely you will leave _some_ kind of research
contribution, although it's also pretty common for people who realize they are
going to leave to just "pivot" to full-time MSc coursework, so they can leave
the program with a master's degree. In that case, the NSF basically funded
someone to take MSc courses, which is arguably not useless, but isn't what the
NSF intends to fund.

I think with this amount of money it's just a risk of funding people. Putting
in strings requiring repayment if the person changes areas, when you're giving
someone <$100k, is pretty heavyweight for either the NSF or Y Combinator, so
they just try to pre-screen for people they think are going to use the money
as intended and stick with it, and accept that some percentage of people will
instead use the money to flail around for a year or two and leave. If the
percentage gets too high, then I guess reconsider the screening process.

~~~
cfallin
Yes, that's true. For full disclosure, I left a PhD after 4 years to work in
industry (I was frustrated by some aspects of academia), having spent three
years on an NSF fellowship, so I may be biased here :-) I absolutely didn't go
into it thinking I would do that, and I try to bring a researchy perspective
everywhere I go now. I also think it depends on the school and the field.
Where I was, it was common for first-years to get on a project right away and
help churn out results. Probably guided closely by older students or advisors,
but still doing productive work.

I think you're right re: clawbacks, though. I can't imagine the mental
pressure were the scenario to be "you MUST stay in academia or you owe the
government $XXXk". I actually know a PhD student on a (non-US) government
scholarship who has a clause like that. He calls it his "slave contract".

Getting back to the original topic, I think that for any venture with a high
rate of failure (startups or grad school or...), there has to be some room to
allow the funded person/people to say "this isn't working" in good faith and
pivot or leave. That's totally different from someone taking funding without
the intention to use it properly, or just deciding they're bored or whatnot.

------
HorizonXP
What a great story. Charlie is very brave for telling this, and it's something
that more people need to hear.

Getting into YC is not an achievement. Even if you get in, you're not special.
You still have to bust your ass like everyone else trying to build a company.
Not getting into YC isn't a big deal either, because you're still not special.

Stories like Charlie's should help others highlight this fact. He said that he
felt impostor syndrome. I've felt that too. I don't have a great solution for
that, but what it should tell you is that even people who you feel are
smarter/better than you really are not. We are all the same, and we all face
the same struggles, albeit in different circumstances.

PG's advice to Charlie about focusing on an idea they're passionate about, and
an idea that they could see themselves working on for the next 5 years is
sound. Don't chase trends. Don't chase money. Chase your passion. When you're
really passionate about something, it's infectious to others around you. They
want to help you. The success and money will usually follow.

I'm glad that people like Charlie tell these stories, since we seem to focus
on the success stories. Those are few and far between. Charlie's story is
likely more prevalent than we perceive.

~~~
larrys
"PG's advice to Charlie about focusing on an idea they're passionate about,
and an idea that they could see themselves working on for the next 5 years is
sound."

Except for one thing. Passion about something is not something that you wake
up in the morning, think about a bit, and then go pursue it.

You won't find a single story in legacy business history of someone who
started a wildly successful business because they woke up one morning and
thought "I want to start a business". It happened the other way they were
going about their business and noticed a need or had an inspiration or idea
and then decided to pursue making it a business. Only exception is now in the
current day and age we have so many people doing so many things with ease of
entry some people are able to pull this off it seems.

In the case of YC or other incubators we now have people who are attempting to
just "come up with an idea and fill a need" and while some are succeeding it's
not the way businesses have started ever before. Generally. And the process of
finding something takes time as well and there is much serendipity involved
(and that doesn't operate according to a schedule either).

Now it is possible to "think up" a business but that process can take years.
In the case of my first business I had the inspiration one day while in
college, pursued it out of college and then thought of a better idea which is
the one I actually did. The process took time and there was no particular
deadline. That idea worked and I sold the company (9 years later).

The 2nd business on the other hand took me 4 years or 5 years to come up with
an appropriate "inspiration" as I investigated various possibilities (flying
around to trade shows). There was no deadline that I was working under ("demo
day"). Just whenever I found something I would do it. And I finally did and it
worked out as well.

My point is, I don't think you can say to someone "focus on an idea you are
passionate about" and they go off and "think" and come back with "yeah we want
to do X we are passionate about it".

~~~
sokoloff
>You won't find a single story in legacy business history of someone who
started a wildly successful business because they woke up one morning and
thought "I want to start a business".

I don't know that it's woke up one morning, but the narrative I'd read on
Amazon suggests that Bezos did something along those lines. As I recall it, he
didn't care what he sold, he just wanted to sell something on the internet and
searched for something that made sense to sell that way, settling on books.

Obviously, it's morphed and expanded since then, and I doubt he literally woke
up one morning and decided to move to Seattle and start Amazon, but it's not
like he was already running a web company and decided to add commerce, nor
already selling books and deciding to add an online channel.

------
bkeroack
This is what happens when people want to "do a startup" more than they want to
build a business doing X. The passion for the idea/product should come first,
with incubators (if deemed necessary) being used as a tool towards achieving
that goal.

~~~
ferrari8608
This is something I've been struggling to understand with some of the startups
I read about on here. My lack of understanding is probably to do with the fact
that I'm not an entrepreneur, nor do I desire to be. What I'm missing, though,
is why these people want to simply start a company.

I get wanting to start a company around your idea. In that case, the company
isn't the goal but rather the medium for pursuing the goal, which is to push
your idea/product. I don't understand wanting to start a company for the sake
of having a company.

~~~
hodgesmr
HBO's "Silicon Valley", Arron Sorkin's "Social Network", TechCrunch, The
Verge, Hacker News and tweetstorms brought to you by Marc Andreessen glorify
the tech-startup entrepreneur. People within our industry have been taught
that the best of the best start tech companies. And the best of the best are
20-somethings! It seems so reachable. So everyone thinks this is what they're
_supposed_ to do. Anybody who's anybody has launched a startup in San
Francisco, right?

------
nakovet
I don't get it, I have been working with web development for the past 10
years, I never had problems finding a job but I wouldn't know how to do remote
consulting while I travel around the work to "take a break", nevertheless the
tone set from OP is confusing you don't know if he is humble, spoiled or
bragging. It's all mixed up, and like other people noted pivoting is not
changing your idea completely, this is starting over.

~~~
reledi
I'm also interested in how he's travelling the world while doing consulting
work. Travelling (for leisure) and working don't go well together in my
experience, curious how he's pulling it off (so I can try too).

~~~
jerguismi
I have seen pretty many doing that. However, don't except a work like in a
stable, salary-based job, with a little risk. More like shorter freelancer
gigs, maybe some small software products/apps/websites which generate some
passive income along the side, etc.

Also I wouldn't say that you can travel just to have fun, you also have to get
the work done. That means settling for some place longer than you would
recreationally. I have met these guys in coworking places, for example.

------
nkangoh
I find this paragraph interesting:

"From the outside, it might have looked like I was crazy to feel this way. I
had graduated from Stanford, I had a CS degree, and I knew how to play the
startup game. In college I had started an ed-tech company, ClassOwl, that
raised nearly a million in seed funding."

Pardon my ignorance, but if a startup is a game, wouldn't knowing how to play
be knowing how to win, i.e. an exit? I feel like getting venture capital would
be the equivalent of prolonging the game, which is a +0 type of action. Is
raising money really "playing?" From what I've read raising money just results
in needing to raise more money.

~~~
thoman23
I was going to make a similar comment. There is an undercurrent of "raising
money = success" in this posting. The whole concept of throwing money at
21-year olds and hoping they find an idea still seems bizarre to me, but
obviously it has paid off for the YC guys.

~~~
cheepin
"For the first time in my life, I had impostor syndrome: I convinced myself
that I did not deserve the success I had achieved."

This particularly struck me as ironic. Maybe he felt like an imposter because
the other people had an actual plan and he didn't.

------
sparkzilla
The article makes it clear that the YC interview selection process is deeply
flawed. Leaving out the idea that they were selected because they told a story
about the sound of biting a bottle, surely at the interview stage, if the
entrepreneurs do not know what the company is making, or the business looks
weak the interviewer should just say no. It's not enough to say "here are two
bright people that can pivot". Bright people are everywhere, good business
ideas are rare. All this does is cause the stress that the author has gone
through as he and his partner have to desperately search for a business idea
that may not come. This kind of stress, based on unrealistic expectations, can
lead people to kill themselves, and seems to me to be borderline unethical.

Meanwhile there are literally hundreds of other companies and thousands of
smart people with great ideas that would gladly take their place _and
succeed,_ including many of the readers here.

~~~
pjlegato
It's probably true that the YC interview process is deeply flawed, but OTOH
there is no known better way to select worthy investments yet. Good startup
business ideas are not only rare but also impossible to identify a priori. The
only way to tell whether a business idea is good or not is to actually try it
out in the market and see what happens. (This doesn't mean that any crazy idea
is good, but it does mean that some good ideas seem crazy before they are
tried.)

If there were any methodology that could identify worthy investments with
anything close to high accuracy, there would not be stock markets and there
certainly wouldn't be a VC industry.

VC investment works differently from other forms of investment due to the
outsize gains on the rare successes. This market requires many comparatively
small bets with limited losses and a few low-probability but huge payoffs.
Compare this to a Warren Buffet style investment methodology of a few large
bets in well-established companies and industries with high probability of
moderate payoff. Neither is "right" in an absolute sense; it depends on the
investor's risk tolerance and the nature of the opportunities.

The VC business model is to apply some coarse-grained filters to screen out
obvious scammers and gross incompetents, then give the remainder of the cohort
some money, knowing in advance that 99% will fail completely. The remaining 1%
will pay for the losses on the 99% many times over.

Moreover, in YC's case, the amount of money they invest is so small compared
to the massive returns on their few successes that they can now afford to take
many of these small risks on "two guys who seem smart." Most of them will
fail, and they know that going in. It doesn't matter. They're betting that
sooner or later, they'll wind up with another AirBnB or Reddit that will pay
for many thousands of these small bets.

~~~
jsonchen
Honestly I think that YC is opting to make fewer risks these days, not more.
The days where you can get funding without traction are numbered, and with it
go the real crazy idea startups like AirBnb, Stripe, and Twitch.tv.

------
dasil003
I don't think you should call it a pivot when you are effectively starting
over. Pivot literally means one foot planted and moving the other to a new
spot.

~~~
replicatorblog
Totally agree, see also: [http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/07/before-you-make-
that-pivot/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/07/before-you-make-that-pivot/)

------
Noelkd
> I would have to talk to my cohort and confirm that no, we hadn’t found an
> idea yet and yes, we were still super excited about our “company.” I did
> little else but eat, code and sleep.

If you don't have an idea what you're doing what are you doing coding?

~~~
DenisM
_a prototype is a conversation with yourself_

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html)

------
thoman23
Please tell me that this Ryan Lawler from TechCrunch is writing in that style
to insinuate his utter disdain not only for the FanHero business model, but
for the whole "free money for 21-year olds with a half-baked idea" industry.
He can't possibly write that way for real, could he?

~~~
nhjk
I think he's writing that way on purpose and I share his disdain for "free
money for 21-year olds with a half-baked idea"...

------
mb_72
This post seems to neatly encapsulate a lot of what I feel is wrong with the
entire start-up / accelerator scene. I've always felt that capable people with
a good idea will succeed 99% of the time anyway - and if that team in
particular doesn't succeed, then another group will, and hence no net loss to
humanity of the 'idea'.

OTOH, this kind of process seems to rescue half-baked ideas, or throw money at
people that can perhaps program but can't actually run a business, or
glorifies killing yourself working for hope of a huge payday. Perhaps I'm in
the minority, and perhaps it's because I'm old (44) and 'get-off-my-lawny' ...
but I am so not down with this kind of approach to making money.

------
guynamedloren
Not sure why the author didn't consider a fourth option when graduating from
college:

    
    
        4) Join the ground floor of a startup *as an early employee*
    

It would've yielded invaluable experience and a whole lot of personal growth,
leaving him in a much better place to run a company years down the road.

At this point, I don't really think he's learned anything at all, and he won't
learn much about running a company while he's galavanting around southeast
asia humblebragging.

~~~
gravedave
I agree with this, but I don't think it even has to be a startup. Big
enterprises may also provide good learning environments, possibly even with
experienced developers/marketers/whatevers as mentors, as opposed to a
startup's possibly few young, inexperienced recent grads, hellbent on
revolutionizing The Way You Think About Shoe Storage with their product called
Shoely™ or whatever. Big companies also pay consistently.

I don't know though, the guy seems quite dishonest to me, more interested in
means rather than ends, yet still claiming that he "never wanted to start a
company simply for the sake of starting a company". To me, he never seemed to
question whether he even had anything to give in the first place and address
this issue first, if needed, but simply expected to run a successful startup
fresh out of college.

Not sure I'd call his closing statements to be humblebragging though, it seems
to be just a passing thing for him.

------
mediaright
..."professional hoop-jumper" ...He means being a kid?

There's a self-importance and arrogance to all of this that really comes
through from this type of rhetor. I think the imposter syndrome might not be
that much of a syndrome in the case of far too many startup teams sadly.

~~~
bsdpython
When I read that line - "nearly two decades as a professional hoop-jumper" \-
I pictured in my head a guy in his early 40s. Professional means you get paid
for your work. Hoop-jumper is a strange way to describe your education.

------
pavlov
The "impostor syndrome" meme would have us believe that if you feel like an
impostor, don't worry -- it's a positive sign that you're actually a modest,
shy kind of genius.

But sometimes it just means that you really are out of your depth.

~~~
kethinov
Impostor syndrome is also frequently abused by successful people who want a
socially acceptable way of denying that much of their success actually was due
to luck and timing.

------
researcher88
When I read about FanHero on techcrunch, I thought it was a good idea despite
the article's tone.

Mainly because I watch a lot of alternative content and listen to podcasts,
and I want a way to support what I like. It wasn't an original idea but with
awesome execution I think it could had worked.

~~~
Meekro
I agree! And if you read the comments on the TechCrunch article, many of them
agree about the article being badly written.

I get that it's sarcasm, but what was the TechCrunch writer's message supposed
to be? That nobody needed this product? That it was badly built? That the
author just doesn't like YC kids? Whatever the author was trying to say, there
was probably a better way to say it.

------
myohan
"I don’t want to start another company until I find a problem that I care
about. A problem that I eat, sleep and breathe. A problem worth solving."

i agree with you but you shouldn't wait for these ideas to come by out the
blue moon, you should be constantly searching, trying/testing, and keep
living/experiencing a lot of different things...because there are a lot of
problems out there that you DO NOT know they exist, and how would you know you
care about these problems if you don't know they exist.

good luck.

------
rubiquity
The author sounds spoiled and entitled to everything in their life up until
YC.

------
georgeecollins
This seems like a parody of entrepeneurship. Like instead of defying the odds
to be an entrepeneur he's defying the odds to avoid getting startup funding as
a recent CS grad from Stanford.

The world it full of things that sound appealing. But you may find when you
get a chance to do them it isn't your thing. You may enjoy art, admire
artists, but not really enjoy or be suited to the work of an artist.

------
lesingerouge
Through some very strange twists of fate it seems to me that bot programming
and starting a business ended up being "fashionable" things to do. And
obviously as all fashionable things there's quite a lot of people that want to
ride the hype train.

Statistics tell us that there will always be a certain percentage that are on
the train just for the hype.

My 2 cents: getting on the train just for the hype is a clear indicator that
you do not have a very good knowledge of yourself. Internal, time-tested,
hard-earned kind of knowledge.

------
Disruptive_Dave
Does YC ever accept business / growth people or just "tech"? I ask that in
seriousness, as my take - in my very limited time as a startup founder &
employee - has consistently been that many startups fail due in part to an
obvious lack of business sense and skills. I'm regularly surprised by the
sheer amount of startups out there, many of which are funded, with coders and
designers who have no damn clue how to sell.

"We were a solid team, a designer/developer combo." Is that a solid "build a
business" team or just a solid "engineer the product" team?

~~~
phkahler
YC is supposed to help with things like that. They teach techies the business
side of things and I would imagine they'd say "you need to hire someone to do
sales" if that's what they needed. In this case they said from the start
something like "we're concerned about your product idea" which was their
primary problem. I suppose having someone with sales smarts may have helped
them figure it out, since their idea was to help you-tubers sell stuff
apparently.

~~~
Disruptive_Dave
I suppose teaching techies business is easier than teaching business folks
tech (or maybe quicker?). Still, I continue to be perplexed at the absence of
"business" in startups. I'm not convinced that injecting "business" into a
startup is an option for a later date.

------
jokoon
Hey, I have ideas too!

[http://zonas.free.fr/?p=pages&pg=ideas](http://zonas.free.fr/?p=pages&pg=ideas)

~~~
phkahler
Those seem like things that you'd like to make. Some might even be interesting
to look at, but What problems do they solve? Why would OTHER people want them?
Go to each one and write what it does for people rather than what it is.

~~~
jokoon
thanks for the suggestion :)

------
rsp1984
Aside from some other great comments here (some of it which really _nail_ it)
I'd like to point out that the greatest difficulty of the author seems to be
being in charge of things.

Throughout the entire story he is denying control.

Being accepted into Y Combinator? Pure luck. Most critical interview factor?
Sound of biting a plastic bottle. It doesn't surprise me a tiny bit that he
thought he had impostor syndrome since he probably felt he is getting rewarded
for something that is seemingly totally out of his control.

Then all the "pivots". Again feeling that startup success is something that
will magically come just by "waiting a bit longer" or "having a slightly
better idea" (i.e. being largely out of one's control), of course you re-set
the course right away if the odds seem against you. Even if it's just some
objections by interviewers who know you for about 10 minutes. Because they
surely know better, right? No way to to prove _these_ guys wrong, right?
Probably much better to try something different...

The author ends by saying he wants to get back into startups once he's found a
suitable problem to work on. That's cool. Even better would be to find a
problem he knows he _can_ solve, by being in charge.

------
onewaystreet
Did anyone at YC talk with these founders after investing in them? It sounds
like they never understood why they were accepted. Getting accepted into YC
should be a confirmation signal, not a signal that you should pivot (yes, YC
invests in people, but if that was the case in this case then I would've
expected a partner to have helped them find a new idea).

------
smurph
Am I the only one who thinks it's insane that someone can go from an undergrad
CS degree to a failed startup and then directly into (presumably well paid)
consulting gigs? I'd be pretty wary of a consultant who's only work experience
was starting their own company and failing.

------
GoLocalApps
I think this is both an indictment of "squirrel" syndrome (the dog from Up),
and YC not choosing well in the first place. maybe that's the environment
there, but I would guess if you brought in a new team with an idea, gave them
money for that idea and then they went and dumped the idea right off and went
to something new and shinier, they shouldn't have been funded in the first
place?

And with two previously abandoned businesses in his past, someone should have
asked about commitment to the idea. Sure you can work on something you don't
love, but then its a job not a career or a self focused business, not
something worth others investing in without a really clear business plan and
exit strategy.

------
zeeshanm
Thanks for writing the article. One thing have bothered me for a long time is
why tech startups think TechCrunch or any other high-speed news website
writing about them is an indication of early success. It may help you get
early customers via the write up if your customers are actually those clicking
through these clickbaity links. But this probably doesn't apply in all cases.
A lot of the times those reading such viral stories more often than not are on
the lookout for the next big big idea to copy. So why bother? May be I don't
get as it is some sort of a Valley thing.

------
rdtsc
> We researched Bitcoins, smart devices, 3D printing, biometrics, and a host
> of other industries.

Is this common? As in people first decide they want to do a "startup thing".
Then they fish for idea. Just curious, is this how most startup idea begin?

I kind of thought it was always someone first having a burning and interesting
idea that eventually they want to develop and it gets developed as a startup
or patent or something like that.

~~~
GoLocalApps
Probably more common than you'd think. Brainstorming for new ideas or looking
for something that doesn't work as well as you think it should or seems to be
"missing" is a valid way of trying to start a business. You may not be
passionate about it, but if it can make money, you can be passionate about
that.

------
juanbyrge
Thanks for sharing this story. I know it was a tough decision to leave the
company. If you were in a situation that causes you a lot of stress and
unhappiness, there's no shame in leaving.

There are a lot of people being critical here. It's easy to look at the
situation from the outside and feel entitled to make comments. I bet if some
of the commenters here were in you're situation they'd feel differently.

------
paulvs
An idea may be worth less than the potential of the founders, but a well
thought-out idea reveals a lot about the founders themselves, in my opinion.

------
rl3
Developing an idea that you feel comfortable genuinely committing yourself to
is _hard_.

Usually it takes six months from coming up with an idea to researching it and
getting to the point where I believe in it.

Most of the time, you start with only a vague notion and have to further
develop that into something concrete.

No wonder that it didn't turn out well for them doing it under pressure in
just a few days time.

------
Animats
Now YC gives startups less money, so they can't try to "pivot" after the first
failure. Win big or die fast.

Comment below: "Building a success startup takes a long long time. Years. Lots
of years." Not in the YC world. That's not the model.

------
ricardobeat
So what was FanHero? The website is now redirecting to imhomeapp.com (their
latest pivot, I suppose), and the article doesn't explain at all.

------
blazespin
They seemed like good guys who had no sense of wherewithal. I liked the
FanHero idea, it seemed pretty good.

~~~
dougabug
Having youtubers hawk goods seems not so different from
advertising/endorsements/affiliate links. I think something that might be more
useful for people would be low friction engagement of
consultation/services/speaking/musical performances etc.

------
mortdeus
I wrote a lengthy blog post in response to this post in hopes that it will
help aspiring founders avoid a similar fate if their startup gets accepted
into Y Combinator.

[http://mortdeus.blogspot.com/2015/01/y-combinator.html](http://mortdeus.blogspot.com/2015/01/y-combinator.html)

------
haky_nash
Wow. Aspiring Founder here. What a read. Loved this:

"I don’t want to start another company until I find a problem that I care
about. A problem that I eat, sleep and breathe. A problem worth solving."

