Candid Thoughts, 3 Weeks Into YCombinator

We’re about 3 weeks into the Winter 2016 batch of YCombinator and I thought I’d share some candid thoughts so far…

As background, my brother Idris and I have been working on Truebill.com, a platform that finds and tracks your paid subscriptions and recurring bills, and allows you to cancel any unwanted services with 1-click.

The first day of YC is orientation day, where you and around half your class meet in Mountain View for a quick briefing on what comes next and what to expect. Orientation wasn’t too involved other than explaining that we’d be getting some paperwork, and being introduced to our team mentors (we were divided up into 4 teams, each with a small number of mentors.

From there, it was straight to the airport back to the east coast, and a little over a month before the first official day of YC.

I must say, some of my preconceived notions of what to expect were already thrown into the air. For one thing, the schedule looked pretty uninvolved. I expected that all the companies would be working from the YC office which is definitely not the case, and also not allowed.

I’d heard people talk about how intense a program YC is, and how it pushed them to grow their businesses, and I was actually dubious about how demanding an essentially 1.5 day per week program could be.

Well, I got my answer.

Firstly, there’s no better motivation than being surrounded by dozens of hyper-fast moving companies all tackling majorly ambitious goals. It seems like everyone you talk to is on the verge of some revolutionary milestone that’s going to catapult their business into greatness, and try as you might it’s gets pretty hard not to contrast your own modest growth and metrics to the explosive numbers shared by others.

Secondly, office hours are… well, intense. Really intense. Once you’re part of the group the mentors really don’t pull any punches. In the first 10 minutes, you’ll fine out in no uncertain terms that your marketing emails suck, your site needs a redesign, and that you needed to launch new features last week, not next month. Of course what follows is constructive feedback on how to improve, but when you’re in start-up mode it’s very easy to start drinking your own kool-aid — office hours put an immediate end to that.

Thirdly, it’s amazing how willing to engage and help the network is. Essentially being in YC is like having a warm intro to hundreds of amazing founders. We’ve already reached out to a number of alumni founders for help and all have been not only responsive, but more importantly, surprisingly willing to help in a meaningful way.

Lastly, I guess I’m kind of struck by how focussed the program is on Demo Day. So the vibe is not “we’re going to help you for 3 months”, it’s “this is an all-out flat sprint to March 20th”.

So all-in-all I’m pretty pleased and impressed with the program so far. They know what they’re doing and they know how to get your company accelerated.

Thanks for reading and signup for Truebill.com if you haven’t already :-)

-Yahya