We're pretty excited to be the first YC company to launch following the big funding announcement. It will be interesting to see if it affects the amount of attention we get from the launch.
It was a long term honeymoon - we gave up our flat in Brighton and just set off into the world with just our backpacks and laptops. We were also ill in Casablanca (and it was Ramadan so couldn't find any restaurants open) so we rented a flat for two weeks to cook for ourselves and built and launched the first version of Lanyrd.
Congrats on the site, didn't realise until now it was yc.
Out of curiosity (I was considering the same) where else did you travel to?. Being that my principle goals are to do a round the world trip and finish my startup, I figured the best way would be for me to do them both at the same time.
We spent six months travelling, starting in Europe (a proper honeymoon in Corsica, then through France and Spain) and then moving to North Africa: Morocco and Egypt.
We were travelling slowly - almost all overland without flying, and in no hurry to leave somewhere if we liked it. We ended up spending 7 weeks in Morocco because we were enjoying it so much (the original plan was just 2-3 weeks).
We would have kept going, but since the site was taking off we applied for YC from Egypt and ended up having to fly from Cairo to San Francisco for the interview - then back to Johannesburg for a pre-arranged road trip with friends.
Working on a startup while travelling actually worked surprisingly well for us. The two require different parts of your brain - startuping is very creative, while travel is very reactive. We'd go out and explore Marrakech for a few hours, talk about Lanyrd stuff, then head back to the Riad for a few hours to build things. It was actually pretty productive!
Hacking while travelling can be quite limiting though - you're carting around a lot of expensive gear, which makes some destinations / some cheap accommodation less of a good idea. We decided to put off our planned trip to Mali for a while for example.
I'm pretty glad we got out of Egypt before they turned off the internet though!
Congratulations! As someone who lives in a country where conferences are quite rare and scarcely publicized a tool like lanyrd (increasingly used here(italy)) helps really a lot.
