<story><title>Reflections on my time in Y Combinator</title><url>https://chrisfrantz.com/reflections-on-my-time-in-y-combinator/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alixanderwang</author><text>&lt;i&gt;We could easily have slammed together off the shelf components and potentially grown at a similar rate. Also potentially not, sales is hard!&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Seeing founders with less care for detail and more for the sheer growth of their user base was impressive and deflating.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;It felt like everyone I compared myself to, they were devoting 90% of their time to selling and 10% to building.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I share the feeling. There&amp;#x27;s success stories of companies doing the same (e.g. Notion, Replit), so I know it&amp;#x27;s not completely off-book, but I constantly wonder whether there is downside to that approach of focusing on sales in the beginning. I can guess things like less likely to be innovative, but is that true? Maybe since they average being alive longer than the ones that focused on product in the beginning, any potential downsides are negated in the long term (e.g. just innovate later with the infinite runway they now have). Would love to see some study&amp;#x2F;survey on this.</text></comment>
<story><title>Reflections on my time in Y Combinator</title><url>https://chrisfrantz.com/reflections-on-my-time-in-y-combinator/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>swyx</author><text>this was a great ad for YC :)&lt;p&gt;i think where people are more borderline is if they can raise at a decent seed valuation elsewhere already (eg based on existing revenue or prior reputation&amp;#x2F;technology being far more established).&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s well understood that YC has some value add. So the fun question is - what is the valuation you can raise at which it does NOT make sense to enter YC?&lt;p&gt;YC values you at ~2m when they invest (120k divided by 7%, 380k MFN SAFE aside). Lets say you come out of it worth $10-20m on average. Maybe the connections and other stuff gives you value worth $5-10m. so if your business is valued above 15-30m you should consider NOT going into YC.&lt;p&gt;Is that a good way to think about it? any of these numbers you would change?</text></comment>