I realize that this is likely to be less illuminating than you would hope, but the Retool founders were relentlessly focused on getting their first users, building quickly, and getting to profitability as if their lives depended on it. Witnessing them go from 0-10K MRR was to witness someone walking through walls.
To give a perspective on how much of an outlier this team is, my recollection is they got to ~1M ARR very quickly and with just the 2 cofounders and one employee. That is rare.
I worked with Retool when they were in the YC W17 batch. They were previously working on a p2p finance app for the UK, and I remember sitting in the conference room when they told me they were pivoting to Retool.
The Retool idea made immediate sense to me because at my prior startup we used django-admin to crank out internal pages and it was amazing. So it seemed clear to me that having something along those lines that was available in every programming environment would be useful, but it was harder for me to wrap my head around competing with free. This sort of reminds me of Algolia competing with Apache Solr - as it turns out can be a great business if you build a great product and really understand your customers. Also I did not appreciate the power of having a drag-and-drop interface, all of the integrations etc.
David and the whole Retool team have done a truly brilliant job executing since then, excellent work.
I don't have much to add to all of the other YC-related information out there - I think having a cofounder is generally a good thing, but not every company we fund does.
My colleague Jared put together some great advice for hard tech/bio founders and we talk about a number of the companies we have funded here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/78 He talks specifically about what these companies do during the batch and fundraising milestones, etc
That's a fair point, and there are a number of situation dependent factors. I wrote this letter to myself because I know what I would do differently 12 years ago and I have the benefit of hindsight now. Obviously the crisis is different today, we didn't have a pandemic in 2008, there is definitely no one-size-fits-all advice, and every company needs to be figuring out the right thing to do right now. But keep in mind what ended up happening 12 years ago is that everyone lost their jobs. The letter is my thoughts about what could have prevented that outcome back then, at least partly.
For large dollar value contracts you usually have an account rep/point of contact you can get on the phone.
You can explain to your rep what you are dealing with, what your budget is, and make a concrete ask. I get the sense that the larger of a customer you are for someone, the more willing they are to work with you.
Hi, I am the author of this post. As I said at the top my intent was not initially to publish it widely, but here we are. If anyone has questions about what I wrote I'm happy to answer them here.
Hello HN, I am the author of this - it's part of a series of short posts about startups I that worked directly with at YC. This is the first one I have posted one to HN.
Let me know if you have any questions. Also I would love to hear if you are working on something ambitious like the Culture Biosciences founders are!
imagine we are talking about CPU clock rate - the rate at which founders are able to make progress - which means everything from how many customers they can talk to in a day, how fast they learn from running a test, how fast they can build a prototype, how quickly they internalize feedback from customers, etc.
Hey Dom, we worked together directly when you were in YC, and I deeply disagree with your assessment that having progress helps a startup succeed in YC.
The worst case scenario is a newly accepted YC startup with a little bit of traction... just enough traction that they aren't willing to change ideas/markets and not enough traction for them to actually know they have product market fit. It's the uncanny valley of product-market fit. These companies with a little bit of progress can spend months or years of their life chasing what they later realize was a mirage.
When a new YC company enters the batch with very little or no traction (and can move incredibly fast) they will longterm outperform companies accepted with small traction most of the time. Based on the hundreds of companies I have personally funded at YC, speed is the single most predictive variable of if a startup will succeed - not traction at time of accept.
Yes, you are off. Our apps submitted metric is growing.
The reason we started sending out emails to remind people of the deadlines is the sheer # of founders we talk to in person and over email that complain that they missed the application deadline and they didnt know when the date would be.
Questions about when the app deadline is, if you can submit late, when the deadline is for the following batch, etc is the #1 most common type of question in our support queue, and sending out reminders seemed like the best solution.
I'm the head of admissions at YC and I can assure you that a huge percentage of the companies that we interview and fund are at idea stage.
One explanation I have for why it my appear the startups we fund are "far along" at demo day is that the startups moved so quickly during the batch. For example, the startup Inokyo in the current batch recently put out a video of the autonomous store they built in Mountain View: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/inokyo/ When we funded this startup 3 months ago it was for a different idea and so they quite literally started from scratch.
Startups moving fast should hopefully seem far along by demo day, irrespective of their starting point :)