There are so many lines in the post series that don't make very much sense if you understand the YC program.
> We'd aim to have 4 to 6 developers on the project within the first few weeks, and had a substantial budget to achieve this.
What budget?
> The hiring process began immediately with advertisements going up on social media
As the CTO, would you not be able to contribute more to this project?
> One of the huge benefits of the YC program is the ability to experiment with scaling ideas.
Talking about looking into scaling before having anything usable or users? Time would have been spent better actually building a prototype to prove the concept.
> As the first Demo Day approached, despite being a director and CTO, I was instructed not to attend due to not being part of the initial interview process.
I kind of suspect at this point in the post series, that the author wasn't really a "director" or "CTO".
After reading the lessons in the third post, sounds like the author just jumped at the chance to be part of YC without much knowledge of what he would actually have to contribute.
Three mistakes that lept out at me, some of which the author seems to identify towards the end: using new technology, allowing themselves to get politically sidelined by missing meetings, and getting too heavy into process.
It seemed like they'd have been better served by pushing back on the YC advice (requiring them to be at meetings), by picking boring technologies (python, Java, JS), and by stopping work on all of the other stuff (studio projects, etc.) that proved to be a distraction.
That said, the introduction of the Dwayne fellow really seemed like the root of most problems that weren't YC-caused.
That, and the fact that he wasn't meeting with the YC teams. If you're the CTO, it doesn't matter that you missed the initial meeting. The founding team should all go and meet.
(Apologies in advance for sounding harsh. I have extreme empathy for the author. But this lesson is so easy to ignore that I had to really amp up the contrast before I could focus on it myself. So it seems worth stating plainly.)
"You must have at least 10% equity in the startup to be considered a founder by Y Combinator. Only founders can come to interviews if invited or attend batch events if accepted." -- https://www.ycombinator.com/apply
If he couldn't attend, it was probably because he didn't have the requisite equity.
Joining as a founding member with less than 10% equity in a startup without a product or customers -- after being ambivalent about joining -- seems like a really bad decision.
One hard lesson I've learned over the years is that status matters. And in the startup world, equity is a huge marker of status, outside of its potential monetary reward. The initial conditions under which you join a project act as a non-negotiable upper bound on how much say your collaborators will let you have on the big picture. Regardless of how much you contribute afterwards.
Some reading on status for other aspirational-Vulcan types like I used to be:
Tl;dr - humans are pack hunters. They can't survive outside packs, not really. As a result, the topology of the pack has a powerful warping effect on our brains. You can't break out of it. It is as real for humans as gravity. Within a group there's no "being so good they can't ignore you."
This is not to say that being low-status is always bad. Just that it's worth being very clear-eyed about your status in a group. If you aren't going to the YC dinners, you aren't the CTO. Not really.
>To make the situation more difficult, we were told that, even though we still had no product, the target for the next Demo Day, in 2 weeks, was a working messaging product, with secure file storage, “like Dropbox”, and 15 business customers using it.
This doesn't seem... real? I've been involved with three different companies during their time in YC and while I never attended any of the actual YC functions this kind of a deadline for such a lofty target seems out of line with my experience. Maybe things have changed in the past few years.
My internal "What would PG/JL do/advise" model seems to really suggest the opposite of what I'm reading in this article. Weird.
We've reverted the title from "How to destroy a startup by applying to YC (as well as other mistakes)". Submitters: the HN guidelines ask you to please use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait. We sometimes make exceptions for blog posts when the submitter is also the author, but it's not clear if that's the case here, and making the title more baity isn't the right way to customize it.
> We'd aim to have 4 to 6 developers on the project within the first few weeks, and had a substantial budget to achieve this.
What budget?
> The hiring process began immediately with advertisements going up on social media
As the CTO, would you not be able to contribute more to this project?
> One of the huge benefits of the YC program is the ability to experiment with scaling ideas.
Talking about looking into scaling before having anything usable or users? Time would have been spent better actually building a prototype to prove the concept.
> As the first Demo Day approached, despite being a director and CTO, I was instructed not to attend due to not being part of the initial interview process.
I kind of suspect at this point in the post series, that the author wasn't really a "director" or "CTO".
After reading the lessons in the third post, sounds like the author just jumped at the chance to be part of YC without much knowledge of what he would actually have to contribute.