My Experience at the Y Combinator Induction Ceremony
When I was 20 years old, I dreamed of one day founding a start-up company that would be a part of Y Combinator. Y Combinator is the Stanford University of start-up accelerators. Twice a year, YC selects a class of 100 start-ups and facilitates their success by providing them with seed funding, access to robust resources and creating an environment in which cohort members can learn from one another. Y Combinator is extremely hard to get into, Stanford and Harvard reject around 95% of applications. Y Combinator rejects over 97% of applications. Y Combinator has a stellar class of alumni including Dropbox, Airbnb, Coinbase, Filecoin and Reddit. I am honored to announce that my dream has finally come true! Quantstamp was inducted into Y Combinator’s 2017 Winter cohort!
Yesterday, Steven and I attended the kick off event. During the opening ceremony while Y Combinator partners were giving speeches, Steven and I were the only founders on our laptops working in the back of the room. We were hammering away on tasks ahead of our token sale. In the start-up world, things happen very quickly, but, as you all know, things move even faster in crypto. Steven was working on our website backend with our engineers, I was strategically controlling operations from inside the YC kickoff meeting.
After the speeches concluded, the cohort start-ups were grouped into related fields in order to build relationships and become more familiar with each others projects. We were placed in the Fintech/SaaS group and Quantstamp was the only crypto company there. We all pitched our ideas to one another and then we took turns reciting each others pitch to one another. It was a great exercise in learning how to concisely share your vision.
By the end of the event, I was so inspired by the ways my fellow founders were trying to change the world through their bold and innovative ideas. One company was developing virtual reality technology that would provide therapy to people experiencing depression and other mental health issues. Another company was developing tools to make it easier for scientists to draw technical illustrations and bring their ideas to life. And there were so many more! It was very clear that being part of YC was going to open many doors, because of the sheer talent focused in that room, both from the founders and the YC partners.
Part of our responsibilities as cohort members is to attend weekly dinners every Tuesday and Thursday in order to build a stronger community. By the end of the event, I offered to host weekly hangouts ahead of YC to further get to know my fellow YC founders. We will host them in what we call our “Founder’s Bungalow”, a loft and office space for Quantstamp in Cow Hollow, San Francisco.
Here at Quantstamp, we view ourselves as solving problems that are essential to the future of blockchain technology. Enhancing the security of smart contracts is an essential step to making blockchain the backbone of the new economy. Y Combinator has the reputation to do whatever is in their power to make companies with innovative ideas thrive and I cannot wait to take full advantage of this partnership to bring our vision into reality.
Some pictures from the event:
