Why did 30 year old former Microsoft engineers apply for YC?

Reasons for spending a week of precious start-up time and energy to apply for a position we are unlikely to get.

Let’s start by introducing us — both me an @Avilay are

· Engineers — in our 30’s

· Have spent all our engineering life @ Microsoft and Amazon

· Both have young families and are based in Seattle

· Have Non-existent open source profiles [Didn't we say Microsoft ☺]

· Do not have network intros to YC-Partners

· Started this January on a B2B problem with customer validation but no beta

Yes we did leave our mark on a variety of really cool projects at Microsoft, did our share of side projects/hack-a-thons and startup weekends to finally leave our job after getting our Green Cards. But really that’s not so important and statistically we have pretty low chances of getting in.

So why waste a week of precious start-up time & energy to apply for a position we are unlikely to get?

Below are our reasons

RESPECT for their OPINIONS

Respect for data comes naturally to engineers — however it’s far harder to develop respect for someone’s opinions. Simply put, it requires time and some combination of analytical resonance and anecdotal evidence.

PGs essays capture the ethos of YC well and we always experimented with those ideas. Over the years we would converge to similar conclusions albeit after our share of frustration and failures experimenting with the problem space. Over time we developed an analytical resonance with YCs approach to “Building a Company” — evidence for YCs success was surely a bonus but not the sole motivator.

You ask why this is important. Answer this —

As an entrepreneur would you listen to someone whom you do not respect? Especially when it is about a problem you have spent several months on and they may be several hours. Do you want to spend your 12 weeks doubting every bit of opinion thrown at you?

NO BS Approach to Why+What we were making

It took us 3 customer conversations to realize that customers wanted a no-frills approach to what we were offering NOW — not our potential in next 2 years. It could never have the word platform in it and almost always was derivative. To top it all we had 30 seconds or less to convey this.

Believe me it’s hard to distill your thoughts to 30 secs — but there is no choice if NOT for YC you will have to do this for your customers.

YCs application DEMANDED this, so will your customers.

They really wanted to know OUR story

This was one that required personal experience to appreciate. We had actively worked with each other for past 4 years so well we thought we were golden. Yet we had couple of weeks of futile debates and disagreements about topics not so important. Why?

It was like first time your girl-friend moved in with you, and well had an opinion.

It was draining, and needed a jolt to remind us that the whole point we got together was for the appreciation of each-others point of view and that it was different than ours. Since then we went from debating to discussing again, and our productivity shot up.

YC was INTERESTED in our story — if NOT already you will soon realize that you will have to develop a co-founder relationship. Avilay hates this analogy but it’s marriage all over again.

What did we know about the business that other’s did’t?

This one is hard especially when you have a simple text box staring at you. The fact is there is no escaping this one. It will be HARD landing a Pilot or making that first sale if you can’t answer this to your customers’ satisfaction.

Believe me you will face this in your sales calls — It might take other forms like how are you different from X and isn't Y same as you or can’t I use this open source project. Honesty is all you have to win this especially when you are a 2 person company.

It’s your choice dig deep to articulate it well else be prepared to MISS THAT SALE.

PROVE that WE could pull this off

Over the past months we got ~15% phone interview conversions from our 120 cold emails. Almost always the response was accompanied with a linkedIN profile hit. WHY?

They wanted proof that we could do what we were saying, before granting us that call.

The application wants the same it asks you to sell why you can do what you are selling.

YC CHALLENGED us to prove WE COULD DO THIS — so will your prospect before granting that cold call.

The fact is that we tried to fill YCs application about a month back but couldn't. We needed 12 customer interviews and multiple conversations to really form a clear understanding of the space and refine our differentiation and solution hypothesis. You might too.

YCs application provides a good framework for refining your thoughts. Approaching it honestly we found it improving our pitch, sales call & our recruitment pitch. We are using it as a framework and revisit it every 6 weeks. You can too — Better though APPLY — coz if they put this much thought in the application, more would have gone towards the program.

To distill it in a sentence.

We FELT they CARED about OUR success with our CUSTOMERS — and the questions echoed our customers.

So we applied.

Two more accelerators fit criteria and we would be applying there as well.