VetPronto’s experience with Y Combinator — unintended benefits
VetPronto was founded in mid 2014. Since we are intellectually lazy, we decided that we could copy & paste a human health start-up idea into the veterinary space. After a number of failed experiments, we stumbled upon the vet house call concept towards the end of 2014. This was about the same time that YC was accepting applications for the Winter 2015 batch. I assume they have since fixed the flaws in their application process that allowed us to be granted admission.
Now that we are about 1.5 years from the conclusion of the program, I wanted to reflect upon the benefits of YC. There are a number obvious benefits that have been well documented elsewhere; rock-star partners/staff, empathetic batch mates, helpful alumni, ego enhancing halo effect and the money.
My opinion is that YC adds most of its value if your company is doing very well or very poorly. Examples of the former would be help with things like 7–8 figure VC rounds, acquisition offers and guidance on how to hire your next dozen/hundred employees. These are things that only a few of us will ever have the fortune of experiencing. More often than not, the people on the other side of these interactions (investor, corp dev at big company, etc.) will have much more experience than the entrepreneur. YC has collectively dealt with these situations many times and can help level the playing field.
Unfortunately, VetPronto’s needs came in the latter category (i.e. the ‘doing poorly’ side of the spectrum). The first example was a dispute between co-founders. Without going into the telenovela-esque details, two of the co-founders wanted to replace the third co-founder. This is a messy process and all sides needed to agree on unvested stock options and back-pay. While they didn’t mediate or recommend terms, YC definitely helped diffuse a very emotional situation and allowed us to reach an agreement. Without their help, it is likely that this self-inflicted wound would have killed the company.
The next issue arose when a popular local ratings site (starts with ‘Y’, ends in ‘P’ and has ‘EL’ in the middle) decided that VetPronto’s profile pages were no longer compliant with their policy. This site generates a non-trivial number of new clients and removing the channel will have been detrimental. Even worse, the rational they were using was based on a misunderstanding of our business. We raised the issue to the YC community and they quickly connected us with the decision maker(s) at the company. Without YC, I am 100% certain that we would not have been able to explain ourselves and our pages would have been shut down.
To summarize, if you are considering applying to YC, take a peek at the video below.
P.S. I am happy to report that VetPronto is in much better shape these days. We are getting ready to expand to New York and expect to be cash-flow positive by the end of the year. We are also recently launched an equity crowd funding campaign at — https://wefunder.com/vetpronto
