We are proud to announce our new advisor: Y Combinator!
Blocknify is humbled and honored to announce that we have been selected to Y Combinator’s Startup School — Advisor track.
We will be assigned an Advisor from YC’s fantastic alumni network. Not only will we learn from the YC’s team and mature as a company, but also help expand our network within Silicon Valley and worldwide.
This honor didn’t come without some proper drama.
If you haven’t heard, Y Combinator had a slip up resulting in about 12,000 startups receiving acceptance emails to only get an email a couple of hours later saying they slipped up the emails and they were not accepted. However, Y Combinator felt that they should own the slip-up and allow all the companies to participate for free without YC mentors.
We had a different experience, as we were one of the teams selected initially we received an email stating we were rejected. I guess they reversed the emails and sent acceptance letters to those rejected and rejection letters to those accepted.
Luckily the first email we saw was our acceptance email and not the rejection letter that was sent a couple of hours before. We got excited to be apart of the selected startups to receive an advisor, but that excitement quickly lead to confusion as we saw all the media attention about people being accepted when in reality they were rejected.
This created some confusion within our team slack with questions like ‘So did we make it?’ and ‘Should we celebrate or not?!’ After spending some time going back over the emails and re-reading the time-stamps, we were confident that we were accepted into the advisor track.
Unfortunately, this was not the ending for the other 12,000 teams who had their excitement shut down. These companies took to social media to announce this great achievement but to have Y Combinator follow up with an Oops email and then, accept them although without advisory. Everybody gets in! An experiment by Y Combinator results of which everyone is eager to see.
One tweet summed it up well ‘Welcome to #startuplife!’ All startups can relate too, as this path is full of these emotionally filled roller coaster moments.
In the end, our confidence has to come from our belief in the value we are creating, but this is whole a lot easier to say than remember. I believe that no moment is better than any other moment, but some are definitely more pleasurable than others 🙂.
Originally published at blog.blocknify.com on August 22, 2018.
