Y Combinator HQ. Winter ‘18, Mountain View, California

Y Combinator as a solo nontechnical founder

My experience and biggest takeaways from the program

YC regularly and publicly shits on solo founders, and even more so on nontechnical founders. So I was very surprised to have been accepted, because most others I’ve seen get in this way had a ton of revenues or traction, but we did not.

In all fairness, we did have 3 amazing developers abroad working with us full-time when we got in, just not as co-founders.

All I can say is that when you’re a solo nontechnical founder, you’re at a disadvantage to your peers in some key areas, but you also get to build your team from scratch with the YC badge, which can be powerful in recruiting amazing people as the core founding team.

Being a solo founder in general is tough, with YC or without. Specifically during YC though, I found that being a solo founder had the following pros & cons:

Pros

• Quick decision-making (just you) at critical times during the batch
• Less dilution. YC co’s raise at really high valuations and as a solo founder you get even less dilution
• You learn almost all the startup functions yourself (product, growth, customer support, fundraising, sales, etc.). Painful to do alone, but an invaluable experience
• You will be forced to become very close to your batchmates because you can’t huddle up and hide behind your cofounders at YC events. This is a great thing; your batchmates are great people to learn from

Cons

• Morale is hard to keep up when you’re alone or when things go bad, especially in boring old Mountain View, California.
• Fundraising sucks because your business will most likely suffer even more than regular startups do (i.e. no one is really running the show while you’re taking investor meetings)
• You cannot whip up technical MVP’s really fast during the batch yourself

Overall, as a solo nontechnical founder, getting into YC was one of the best things to happen to me.

I now have tons of resources, mentorship, and a powerful network to tap into to help me speed up my learning curve for things I don’t have the time to sit and learn. It even helps if you choose to recruit a tech cofounder later on.

I also now know tons of other solo founders who did YC, some of which are doing extremely well who serve as role models that this can be done (even though I still think it’s amazing if you can find a great partner to share the ride with).

My biggest takeaways from YC

YC was a transformational experience for me both as a founder and as a person. Here are my top 3 takeaways from going through YC:

1. All that truly matters is building a good business. Sounds obvious, but it’s not. YC will get you paranoid and make sure you don’t focus on “fake successes” (press, fundraising, hype, conferences).When you truly internalize that most startups fail (even well funded YC startups with impressive founders), you get paranoid about not failing. YC makes you somewhat obsessed with focusing on having a good business, and nothing else. Basically this means calling you out on BS when you’re wasting time on unnecessary things or tricking yourself into believing you’re making real progress, when you are not. This is a great and infectious learning.
2. Even your idols cannot solve your problems for you. YC partners are people I have long idolized. I truly do get incredibly valuable advice from all of them, but it’s been humbling to learn that even they cannot solve my problems for me. At the end of the day, the only people with all the context around the nuance of their business are the founders. Therefore, only the founders can make decisions, and often that means deciding between conflicting advice from multiple people you admire and respect on very important decisions.
3. Fundraising is incredibly counterintuitive. You have to be 2 types of people simultaneously to raise venture capital: a) the visionary who paints the big picture in a decade and b) the hustler who gets shit done and meets this week’s goal. This cognitive dissonance is hard to fathom if you’ve not gone through it, and solo founders experience it more acutely since they’re leading every part of the business simultaneously. It’s also fascinating to learn that seed-stage fundraising is driven mainly by storytelling, emotions, FOMO, and about running a good process as the key levers instead of having a pretty investor deck or a perfectly memorized pitch.

All in all, YC was a life changing experience that I highly recommend to anyone looking to build a high growth technology company. If you’re looking to apply, here’s my advice on getting in.

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