
How Y Combinator Started (2012) - yarapavan
http://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html
======
gregsadetsky
Always makes me tingle to think back about this. A friend and I had submitted
for the very first batch — we had a working prototype built using Mozilla XUL
of a “FileMaker for the web” (YC later funded something similar-ish — today,
the closest would be AirTable..?). We had even wired the server to send us an
SMS whenever someone opened the page (it probably emailed
<phonenumber>@<carrier>, there was no Twilio back then).

The first YC form had a question about “do you have a working demo (bonus
points if you do)”. We were confident the demo would be at least checked out.

You know where this is going. We didn’t get in, and never received any SMS.
Years later, I saw PG at an event and asked him about it — he said that
somebody other than him might have reviewed our application and regretted that
this happened. That may have been a polite way of saying that we weren’t ready
or the idea wasn’t good enough — who knows.

All good in the end, but definitely a “what if” moment that I’ve kept from
back then...! :)

~~~
andruby
Did you end up doing something with your prototype?

~~~
gregsadetsky
No. We started doing more general web “consulting” (i.e. work for hire) which
then morphed into doing web mapping sites/applications (“mashups”!) which
became a startup specialized in this field.

Having worked a bit with AirTable, I do find that it fills this really great
and interesting niche of diy table/database systems.

------
kareemm
I was writing code at ESPN two hours down the road from Cambridge when the
summer founders program launched. I had been following pg and his essays for a
while and thought he was the real deal. So I tried to convince a co-worker to
apply with me as we were batting around business ideas. He wasn’t up for it
and I didn’t end up applying.

I don’t have many professional regrets, but not applying is one of them!

~~~
neilv
FWIW, I don't know how likely it is that any team that applied would've been
selected, anyway.

I think it was that first summer founders event, when a team of four of us
Lisp-ish hackers in Cambridge/Boston applied. We were mostly young (mostly
early-mid 20s, though I think one guy was 30+), but already had a little
experience, and university affiliations like PG might value, had done some
early Web stuff already, and PG had talked about Lisp and hackers and such,
and at least I was ready to go all-in on a startup with subsistence funding...
_so_ I thought we had a good chance, but I don't recall we even heard back.

PG might've already been looking for only college kids. Although we were
young, some of us started working/school unusually young, and might've looked
older on paper than we were. Or maybe it looked like we already had career
starts we might not want to risk. And/or probably our proposal sucked badly,
because I don't remember a single thing about what it was, and there weren't
so many VC courtship conventions to tell us what to do then.

(Incidentally, the young thing was something PG was pushing around that time
(e.g., encouraging people to interrupt college to do a startup, when they
supposedly have few obligations, and perhaps are very malleable). But I don't
recall ever hearing of _favoring_ hiring 20yos in software or Internet
industry before. What I'd seen in industry was both skill and experience being
valued, and a good amount of meritocracy that didn't care about things like
university degrees if you could do good work. It was only later that I'd start
to hear things like a certain dotcom CEO saying publicly that they only wanted
20yos, and the industry-wide institutionalization of hiring processes that
appeared designed to select for currently or fresh out of undergrad,
preferably from Stanford. PG seemed immensely influential on startups, perhaps
even moreso then than in new ideas now, and I wonder how much the current
recent-grad emphasis is because of ideas he first planted.)

I wish that early startup team had gotten funding. With that initial
disappointment, we each ended up doing other things. I was totally ready to
rapidly build out innovative and working dotcom tech, like not many startups
then could; just didn't know how to get funding for living expenses and
servers&pipes. Thankfully, many years later, I'm working in a fresh startup
team, of very skilled and nice people, all working on something constructive.

------
lioeters
I _love_ the photos from the early days, especially of the first batch. Humble
beginnings, great future ahead!

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170609041739/http://old.ycombi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170609041739/http://old.ycombinator.com/yc05.html)

------
sokoloff
I think it's nearly impossible for many of us to read that essay and not think
back to "what was I doing in March 2005 and what would have been different if
I'd heard about and pulled the trigger to join that first batch?"

~~~
jacquesm
That's right along the line of what if I had entered the right lottery numbers
or bought Apple when it was low. You can regret any decision you make in life
with hindsight.

~~~
sokoloff
True. Doesn’t stop humans from acting human though.

~~~
cmonnow
It might stop them though. Can't say categorically that it doesn't.

If I am feeling down about not joining YC 15 years back, and someone says 'why
don't you feel bad about not buying bitcoin 5 years back, or GOOG 20 years
back, or AAPL 40 years back, or X Y years back', I'll soon realize a pattern
that I can feel sad about ANYTHING if I put my mind to it

And since it's our natural state to feel happy, and not feel sad, above
knowledge might stop me from acting 'human' (depressed) over
inevitable/infinite things.

------
razvanr
Many people ask me how I knew about YC back in early 2007. It was Founders at
Work for me. It took me a few years to get my hands on a copy of the book
(Amazon didn't deliver in Romania back then), but the content was incredibly
useful and completely original.

Reddit also had a play in it. At the time it was the competing Digg Upstart,
or that's how everyone saw it. I distinctly remember a blog post after Reddit
was acquired by Conde Nast, where the founders said they went out for ramen
and for the first time ever it didn't matter who picked up the check at the
end of the meal. That pushed me to apply to the program.

It might have been the early days looking back -- but YC seemed like a big
thing even back then if you were into the startup scene. Between Reddit,
Stripe and Auctomatic (Founded by Harj Taggar and Patrick Collison, which to
me meant european founders are welcome in the program) you could sense that
everyone involved with the group was continuing the stories I read about in
Founders at Work.

------
lawrenceyan
> If we'd had enough time to do what we wanted, Y Combinator would have been
> in Berkeley. That was our favorite part of the Bay Area. But we didn't have
> time to get a building in Berkeley.

Huh, I didn't know Berkeley was the place they originally wanted to
headquarter YC at. That definitely would have been very interesting had it
happened, especially given the proximity to such a strong research university.

------
j45
Looking back, it really stands out that YC did all that it did with starting
with only $200K.. and it was more about how execution happened.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3711008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3711008)

------
adam
We were in that first California batch for our old company Inkling Markets. I
remember going through our interview and being asked very few questions about
our actual idea, and instead Paul asking a bunch of questions about a
political blog I was writing at the time. Being consultants at the time
working for big companies we walked out thinking what the hell was that and
questioning if we even wanted to make this leap if we were offered. But that
night at 9pm as we were aimlessly wandering around Cambridge waiting for a
call back (or not) we decided we'd do it if they called. "We want to invest in
you. You have 5 minutes to decide if you want to come. If we don't hear back
from you by then, we'll assume you're not interested." We called back, flew
home, quit our consulting jobs and two months later drove out from Chicago to
live in a rented house in Cupertino.

We did YC again in 2011 and it was kind of a shit show, but I'll never forget
my time out there Jan - Apr in 2006. Probably still one of the most
productive, eye opening experiences I've ever had in my entire life.

------
rmason
I actually remember when pg made the announcement for YC. I'd been following
his essays and was quite impressed with him as I tried to figure out what I'd
been doing wrong with my previous startups. I thought then it was a clever
idea but never imagined it would blow up like it did.

~~~
kak9
Do you have link to original announcement?

------
social_quotient
Unrelated: should a site like this be running ssl/https? What’s the case for
not? It’s certainly not for a lack of skills and this is not meant to be a
dig, just thought maybe I’m missing something and safari made sure to tell me
that it was “not secure”.

~~~
madiathomas
Mine is running HTTPS. Even when I try to force it to use HTTP, it redirects
me to HTTPS. I am on Chrome.

~~~
tuukkah
Chrome on Android says: "This site can’t provide a secure connection
paulgraham.com uses an unsupported protocol.
ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH"

Edit: This is when I try to load
[https://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html](https://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html)

~~~
madiathomas
Sorry. I thought you were talking about Hacker News. Maybe it doesn't require
HTTPS because there is no transmission of any sensitive data.

~~~
huseyinkeles
It's not just about sensitive data, your ISP can easily inject some crap into
the website if it's not on HTTPS for example.

(it happened in the past many times)

Here's an example; [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/157828/my-
isp-b...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/157828/my-isp-bsnl-
india-is-injecting-ads-using-phozeca-which-spoils-websites-and-mak)

~~~
wolco
If possible change isp to another provider. If they are doing this I can
imagine what else they are doing in private with your traffic.

~~~
huseyinkeles
Not my ISP. I’m mostly on VPN anyway :)

------
LemonAndroid
*How Y combinator started according to pg at that time thinking about writing a blog post to people that will be read even in a few years.

meaning:

This is not really the truth, about how y combinator started in case you want
to clone "their secret formula" based upon this blog post.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
The "secret formula" probably looks something like this:

Be rich. Be well connected. Invest wisely. Be lucky.

~~~
wolco
Know someone with a huge location in mountainview that you can use as a backup
to a sf location.

