A Year for A Second
A proletarian’s essay on the art of recovering the lost enlightenment.
Last year we were awaiting to receive VC feedback on Quotta, our promising product designed for online collaboration. The idea was fantastic with huge potential, a lot of people appraised it during early discussions but we couldn’t introduce it to the public until we had a reliable partner to rely on. That’s why we decided to knock on the orange YC door.
Making a long story short, days were passing by, working and waiting for the verdict until one day, at 04:00 am, Kirsty sent us a polite rejection email on behalf of the team stating that they wouldn’t accept our proposal for funding. Uuugh… what? What we were working on was huge, we had a flying missile! How couldn’t they see it? Boy, that was a slap in the face! On the next morning, despite our frustration, we had a short get-together to discuss the future of our product. A little embarrassing to admit but we all decided to abandon the ship and move on. The reason was the combination of the rejection and the fact that we had several other interesting and creative ideas to work on that didn’t involve the monetising part of it.
A couple of months later, a TechCrunch article covering the S13 Demo Day presented the second batch of YC’s big shots and to our amazement, one of them was a product designed for online collaboration, just like ours. I beg your pard.. what? We clicked on the green link to read more, waiting impatiently for these damn data packets to fly over the Atlantic and settle upon our screen. We were reading word after word, scanning the whole page like a crazed machine to find out that every little detail of it was after all part of our application which had been sent to YC months ago.
I don’t know if you have ever experienced something similar in your life but this is a kind of major let-down. You know it is, when your heart spins like crazy and you stand like one o’clock half struck. The world paused for a moment. You think shouting “Oi! Keep your fingers out of my soup!” but in return and all of a sudden, you get a punch right in your stomach. Twice! Your eyes shut like there’s no tomorrow and you can’t move a f* inch.
Boy.. how the hell did that happen?
It took a while to recover from the shock but when we did, we eventually smiled. We smiled because we felt like we had it after all. Damn, we were on the right track! You have no idea how relieving this is, the strange feeling when your feet touch on the ground again. It changes everything. Sure, it may take a while but it feels great in the end.
So, now what?
Could this be the end of the world? No.
Could this be the beginning of a harsh race? No.
A revenge? No, no, no.
It’s not part of our culture and it couldn’t be, simply because we are creative people making things and solving problems, so by entering an arena just for the sake of making some money or harming anyone is way beyond us. Most likely, the YC team took the right decision for us back then. Only time will tell, but the lessons learned in a year were invaluable.
This year, a year after, we launched Second. Our nifty little 1-second game is available on the App Store. I know there is no such thing as an unbiased opinion but all we want you to keep in the back of your head is that recovering from a traumatic record, no matter how hard, is an experience worth living and at least for us, “a year for a second” was definitely worth it.
