Interact-y thoughts on YC
I heard it’s YC season again!
..so I wrote some ramblings
for/against doing YC
in case it helps with any upcoming decisions 🙂
..and also because I’ve only really heard of YC as
this like “universal best-case for founders”
and something about that description
didn't sit completely right with me 🙂
[ insert usual disclaimers about counterfactuals, hindsight etc. ]
[ another disclaimer is that this is not a character judgement
about the staff or partners at YC. Everyone I've met there has
been nothing short of helpful and kind. I'm just talking about my
experience with a specific kind of endeavor I went to YC with ]
[ I also haven’t written about this anywhere. I’m only writing
and sharing this because Interact represents most of my
hopes for the future of humanity and I want the best for all of you
and the work you want to put out into the world. ]
1 ) “Alignment between You, Your Problem and YC”
YC usually talks about alignment in terms of
“there being a 1 in X chance that your
team builds a YC-scale company"
I think this is both a feature and a bug.
It's a feature because a lot of important work is risky like that and
it's great that there are programs like YC to take those odds.
But it's also a bug
..unless your objective function as a person / team is
"to do anything that would result in a big / important company
as measured by the economy / this specific set of people".
In my case, building a big / important company
wasn't my objective function at all.
I didn’t care whether hardware scaled or not.