Learning to Fish

Our Experience in the YC Fellowship

Late this summer, Y Combinator accepted around 30 teams into the first-ever Y Combinator Fellowship, an eight-week program for early-stage startups who would receive a $12,000 grant with no equity taken, and participate in a slimmed-down version of the full program. My cofounder and I are building Jetty, and this was our experience.

Starting a startup has become a bit of A Thing. It’s easier than it’s ever been, and there’s now a certain cachet associated with being an entrepreneur, but in reality, actually starting a startup is hard. And once you start, you don’t stop until something or someone makes you.

My cofounder and I had been dreaming, thinking, and talking about starting a company for months. But we needed a push to actually make the jump. We had pretty terrific jobs at a successful later-stage startup, and for all of the allure of starting a company and becoming our own bosses, we knew it meant giving up our steady salaries, our coworkers, and a hell of a lot of free time. For us, the YC Fellowship was that push. It was the shove off the diving board as we stood staring past our toes at the water below. And as we quickly learned, the water was deep.

From Nothing to Something

We applied to YCF with an idea. We had a reasonably interesting pitch, a prototype so dysfunctional that we wouldn’t show it to anyone and a rather unconvincing promo website. But for the Fellowship, that was compelling enough. Our idea was worth $12,000 and a subset of the resources of Y Combinator. We were thrilled. A couple days later we found ourselves on a flight to San Francisco and (much to our parents’ delight!) technically unemployed.

As soon as we got accepted, we naturally googled the names of the other 30 or so companies to get a sense of where we stood, and learned that we were more or less right in the middle: maybe 5–10 had fully realized products and were available for download or accepting signups, but almost everyone was in pretty heavy development and had yet to even soft launch.

At the kickoff event, we stumbled and mumbled through our first attempt at pitching our idea to a group, and as others (not all, but a fair number — sorry guys) did the same, it became apparent just how new everyone was to this. Some teams had been cranking away on their ideas for a few months, but most were so freshly in it that the core product or idea hadn’t solidified, and our product was about as half-baked as it could be.

By the time we left the kickoff, the mission of the Fellowship had become clear. It wasn’t to meet or mingle with peers, or make use of the YC network to build business relationships, but simply to launch. To get something (anything!) out into the world and get people to start using it. To go from nothing to something, nowhere to somewhere, no users to some users.

Guinea Pigs

A few things had been drilled into our heads before we arrived at the YC offices for the first time. Most importantly, the whole Fellowship was an experiment. It was an exploration of how to scale YC, how to make its resources available to more than the couple hundred teams who move to San Francisco to attend the full program every year. And this was its very first year.

The first Fellowship took the form of a pared-down YC. It was kind of like summer school: a lot of the professors (partners) are on vacation; some of the buildings, like the dining hall, are closed (no weekly dinners); there are way fewer people on campus in general (32 teams instead of 100+); but the underlying curriculum and energy are the same.

We were also told (with a frequency that one might describe as pointed) that we weren’t YC Founders. We were Fellows, which — inconvenient acronym aside — largely meant that we were visitors in the world of Y Combinator; our access to its resources and special treatment were only temporary. It means we can’t march into Airbnb’s offices and request Office Hours, or email Dropbox and demand free storage. Though YC Founders probably can’t do those things either. I don’t know.

Build, Test, Ship

Because there were no weekly dinners, it was the group office hours every other week that served as a sort of anchor for the program, setting a rhythm and tempo we could use to pace and track our progress. Being in heads-down development mode so frequently could feel isolating, and the echo chamber created by having the founders locked in a room together bouncing ideas off of one another at 3am while sleep deprived led to a couple (read: a lot) of questionable decisions. The office hours gave us a chance to come up for air. We received feedback on our progress, set goals for the next two weeks, and heard about how the other teams in the program were doing. They also forced us to be accountable — to the YC partners, to our peers, and to ourselves. It was this pressure that kept us focused, held us to shipping regular updates, and forced us to base our product decisions on actual feedback from users rather than gut feelings or which founder happened to be better at arguing that day.

Most importantly, the office hours taught us how to think and move quickly. By listening to the advice, suggestions, and questions discussed during those one-hour sessions, we developed our own mental frameworks for how to approach and confront the problems we faced on a daily basis. We learned how to think small, test ideas quickly, and more generally, that it’s okay if you don’t have a lot of the answers as long as you know how to start finding them.

Learning to Ship

Ultimately, this ability to think for ourselves and chart a sane course through the challenges we face was the greatest takeaway from the program. The title of this post is taken from a comment Kevin made at the Fellowship kickoff event, about how the constraints imposed by the program (eight weeks long, only a $12k runway) meant that the teams didn’t have time to keep coming back asking for the proverbial fish — no, they needed to learn how to feed themselves quickly or they’d starve and die. His actual words probably weren’t that morbid, but that’s how I heard it.

This ability to self-sustain is crucial. Like nearly all of the companies from the Fellowship, we won’t be continuing on to the full YC program this winter. We had a pretty great launch on Product Hunt, gave our first real pitch presentation to a roomful of YC alums and partners, and now it’s time to leave the nest. We’re incredibly proud of what we achieved during the program, but we still have a lot to do. And the seas are rough out here. Let’s hope the fish keep biting.