What You’re Really “Missing Out On” at YC

Recently Techendo published an article about “what you’re missing out on” in YC. Although the post wasn’t particularly negative (or perhaps it was edited), the response from YC alumni and partners was. This makes sense: the look into YC is shallow, and because of that, the advice given is misleading.

Rather than a founder’s perspective, yesterday’s post was from the point-of-view of a first employee. It was actually very a good explanation of the visible parts of YC, but as a founder, it was remarkably superficial.

Posts about Y Combinator will always be touchy within the alumni community for a simple reason: they’re heavily flavored by the experiences of that person. My experiences in scaling-constrained YCcan often feel dramatically different from descriptions from friends in the very next batch, and experiences of early alums.

Despite the changes, we’re still YC founders, and YC still carries the reputation it always has. The very visible bits have little to do with what makes the program as good as it is, yet it’s all someone close but still on the outside is likely to see.

I’ve struggled for a long time to describe the real YC experience to others. So far, I haven’t been able to. Describing the moving parts, as dpg did, is accurate, but only as much as talking about glass door fridges and ping-pong tables accurately describes a company’s culture.

Some slightly less obvious bits: the advice given by the partners is incredible — they have a lot of data, and are very good at correlating it. The network is fantastic, which wouldn’t be obvious from reading the mailing list.

Still, if it were so easy to have “what you’re missing out on”, why do so few programs have it right? There are over 1,000 incubator-type programs in the US. YC, 500, and TechStars are the only ones who have it right. (Mechanically, they’re all quite different from each other, too!)

You can’t replicate YC.

Being rejected really isn’t a big deal, but not because you can replicate what you missed. Trying to do so causes you to miss out on the real thing that matters: time.

Success has never followed from being in YC, success has followed from building a company. YC works because it’s effective at teaching how to effectively build a company. Don’t waste your time trying to replicate that, just build your company.