Author: Christophe Pasquier / Source: The Next Web
A few weeks back, I wrote about what it means to be at Y Combinator on a pretty practical level: how the weeks are organized around YC dinners and office hours, the importance of focus and goals, and the resources YC has to offer.
But I omitted one of the biggest effect of YC: the roller coaster feeling.
This is something classic for any entrepreneur. Your motivation and certainty oscillate at a super high frequency between bulletproof optimism and feeling like everything is going against your best efforts.And to be honest, coming into YC I thought I might have gotten used to this roller coasteresque rhythm: I started two companies before my current one, and already experienced these entrepreneurial highs and lows. Their effects were becoming easier and easier to handle, so I didn’t think I would feel so affected by the YC rhythm.
But man was I wrong. The rhythm driven by the team, the partners, and the emulation of batch mates made me go through it all over again. Your rhythm increases dramatically, so much so that every week you have more ups and downs crunched together in a shorter amount of time, and the level of expectations and pressure simply multiply their impact.
This is an incredibly challenging experience, but also amazing. So if you’re interested in participating in the YC roller coaster, here are the ups and downs you can expect to go through.
The ups:
Visibility and credibility
Taking part in YC means you enter an elite network of startups and this comes with visibility and credibility.
You get press coverage when you launch as a YC company on a top tech website and the through demo day press coverage. You also get featured on the YC blog and get to the front page of Hackernews. 100,000+ other startups would dream of this kind of visibility at an early stage. It’s brought qualified traffic to our website and just being part of Y Combinator gives your startup a stamp of credibility when you’re talking to potential users and/or hires.This does not mean you’ll gain traction overnight or that journalists will come running at your door to cover your startup. These are short term ups and in no way should they become part of your long term strategy. Enjoy it while it lasts, but start preparing for the future.
Focus
Being an early stage startup often means being “default dead.” You’re looking for product market fit, have new ideas constantly, and must be agile enough to iterate on those. Sometimes though, ideas…
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