If you’re not planning on building a Facebook. Shame on you!

My top 3 takeaways from Week #1 of Y Combinator Online 2018

Josh Anderton
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

If you’re not planning on building a facebook. Shame on you!

My SaaS project Upscribe was accepted to this year’s online version of Y Combinator. This year there are 15,000 companies enrolled! Tomorrow starts off week 2 so I thought I would note 3 of my takeaways from week 1.

1. Shame on you for not building the next Facebook!

It’s very clear from the beginning that Y Combinator is not encouraging anyone to simply start a profitable business. They don’t care if you build a sustainable 20-person company making 4 Million dollars ARR. YC is looking for billion dollar companies (err…or trillion dollar…thanks Apple).

Now I realize that I worded that in a fairly negative way. It’s not all bad. Hey, I wouldn’t mind starting a billion dollar company — but it’s not my top priority. My first priority is to start the company I will be working at 15 years from now. That’s a slightly different picture. You don’t need hockey stick growth and millions of dollars in funding to achieve this. So the expectation that I need to build the next Facebook or Google is a bit overwhelming. Even if I have all the right stuff, it’s still like winning the lottery (a 1 in 15,000 change?).

To clarify; there is still a ton to learn from the methods used to build a billion dollar company. I’m still finding a ton of value; nevertheless it can be a bit demoralizing.

2. The co-founder with the idea (in Upscribe’s case; me) does not get credit if it actually succeeds

This was an awesome point made in the first class on accounting and legal mechanics:

Just because I came up with the idea for Upscribe, does not mean I should get any of the credit if it actually becomes a successful business one day. The credit goes to the team that is able to execute and actually grow the idea into something.

3. Paul Graham is certain I will eventually stop listening to my own users…and he’s right

This was my favorite point from the first week. There was a “conversation” with Paul Graham. Essentially, it was a super organic interview. It was so good. Paul is one of my favorite communicators; he is just so good at getting his point across and he does it in such a refined way — most likely due to the hundreds of companies he’s had to practice on.

The whole interview was great, they talked about coming up with great ideas, picking co-founders, recruiting, and the list goes on. However, the point that drove home for me was at the end when PG was asked:

“What will be the first thing that these businesses are going to do wrong after they finish YC?”

Paul’s response was that we will all stop talking/listening to our users. Thus slowly loosing out on invaluable feedback to help consistently grow our ideas into one day becoming a giant, billion/trillion dollar incumbent (or in my case; a profitable business that will still be around in 10–15 years).

Feel free to check out Upscri.be for embeddable lead generation forms.

Josh Anderton

Written by

Full stack developer. Founder of @upscribe_ http://joshanderton.com

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