As an angel investor solely focused on Y Combinator with more than 100 startups under portfolio, my observation indicates being rejected by YC can be equally inspiring as being admitted, because over the time, I found out some startups may survive and then thrive better if they are not admitted by Y Combinator. Therefore, I feel great that Y Athletics has been a $1m profitable business without YC or any other angel investor like Zillionize!
>>Think of it as, in principle, a Twilio for real estate.
Twilio is famous for its simplicity - With one line of code or two, you can send a message or make a call.
In this case, may you show me some pseudocode to call your APIs for the most popular use cases? From that, I can know if it is a Twilio for real estate. Thanks.
>>We are a platform to digitally handle real estate titles (to start!) leveraging the blockchain, offering an API for companies so that they can provide their services to homeowners.
The idea looks cool. However, it will be even cooler if you can acquire some paid customers who pay you some money every month.
The reason is, the paid customers can indicate you are attacking a real problem, not a problem that does not exist.
As a note, nowadays blockchain is everything so the chance for blockchain to solve a wrong problem is not low.
Startup life is really hard - you will have to answer questions much harder than this every day if you do a startup. Therefore, based on my own first hand experience and observation on more than 100 startups I funded, only passion, determination and persistence can make your startup a success.
From this point of view, all the questions can come back to the root question - are you really passionate, determined and persistent by nature? If no working at Google or any other giant companies is way better than doing your own startup; Otherwise, you shouldn't come to Hacker News to ask this question but you have already quit Google because working at Google for one more day is just a waste of your time one more day.
If Cruise is our first most notable investment, Zapier may be our second most notable investment. I say that because over the years, we saw Zapier is so rare in many aspects that we can hardly find any other startup like that, except Zeplin.
Wade and the team, Keep on doing something different but better and I can safely assume you will be a great role model in the silicon valley some day!
Like marriage, it is worse to marry a wrong person than stay single. Therefore, if you do not really trust your cofounder, don't let her become your cofounder because a wrong cofounder is worse than a solo founder.
As a seed round investor, I do not view a solo founder as a negative sign since I am personally a solo founder so I know a solo founder can work well.
However, the ideal founding team shall be two cofounders - The product guy looks after products and the business guy looks after customers. Then the startup life can be much easier for both cofounders.
Thank you for your kind words. We are currently flush with funds, however we are certainly open to raising future rounds externally and will be doing so.
I am an investor and my experience is, if you have done enough homework about the startup you want to meet, twenty minutes shall be long enough to clarify a few key things so you can make an informed decision.
I personally like asking a lot of questions, so I'd still prefer >20 minutes. I 100% agree with you though that preparation can save a lot of meeting time. One catch with YC companies in my experience is that they rarely have detailed pitch decks or significant web presences, so there's often not that much to research before a meeting.
Did you check out The Macro - http://themacro.com/ ? Yes the info disclosed by YC for each startup is still limited but better than nothing in the before.
Definitely helpful, but AFAIK only about a dozen startups from the 100+ startup batch have been covered so far (https://www.google.com/#q=%22meet+the+batch+s16%22+inurl:the...). I can imagine the coverage will double or triple by demo day, but I'm skeptical that all startups will be covered. Btw, I love the /data subsection of your website!
I typically do 1-hour meetings and that works pretty well. 45 min would be okay. I haven't tried 20 min before, but that feels a little short. To apply the over-applied analogy that fundraising is like dating, 20 minutes would be enough time to tell if a date is terrible, but I'm not sure if it's enough time to distinguish between a B date and an A date.
Two ideas related to Investor Day that I'd be interested in:
- let investors ask for one or two consecutive 20-minute slots. Founders can just allocate one slot to someone asking for two, but asking for two slots would be a good signal of investor interest and/or investing style.
- don't automate scheduling, but instead host all founders at a single location for a few days, and make it easy for investors to book slots on founders' calendars once those founders opt-in to meeting up. Maybe this could use something like https://calendly.com/
Roughly speaking, our investing process is: 1 hour one-on-one meeting, then 1 hour full partner meeting, then decision.
The way I think about the math:
Current scenario: 25 1-hour one-on-one meetings -> 10 full-partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.
Worst case for Investor day: 25 20-minute meetings -> still don't have enough info -> 25 1-hour one-on-one meetings -> 10 full partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.
Good case for Investor day: 25 20-minute meetings -> 10 companies don't seem like a fit -> 15 1-hour one-on-one meetings -> 10 full partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.
Best case for Investor day: 25 20-minute meetings -> I get all the info I need -> 10 full partner meetings -> 2-3 investments.
These four cases represent 25, ~33, ~23, and ~8 hours of one-on-one meeting time, respectively.
40-min meetings might be a little awkward because usually the first 5-10 minutes of a meeting are social / chit-chat, so it might feel a little weird to immediately start a 2nd meeting exactly where you left off on the first meeting. Also, most of the time a 40-min meeting still takes up a full 1-hr time-slot since most people schedule meetings on the hour.
This is probably sufficient for many angel investors, a few seed investors, and very few series A investors. No matter how much homework you've done on a company you can't responsibly deploy $5M after 20 minutes of diligence on the team.
