i am thankful to @eshear, he didn't have to email me anything past a rejection, but he did, and likely saved me years of startup hell.
goodluck to everyone interviewing in the coming weeks 🫡 you got this!!
Want $500k in funding?
I’ve met and interviewed with probably every top accelerator you can think of:
- YC
- SPC
- HF0
- Pear
- Betaworks
In February of this year I accepted $500k from Betaworks to build our agentic vision of the future for infra.
I got to meet some of the
the few lessons here are:
- don't avoid facing the deepest flaws you know about your business, it'll come up in the first 30 seconds
- be extremely focused on the core fundamentals
- understand rejection isn't the end of the world... reflect, change something, and come back
the next day i get an email from @eshear that changed my entire trajectory... and eventually led to my current venture backed startup
i'll summarize, but he said: i don't believe in pulling punches from founders, your team is smart, but you are wasting your time with this and
seibel continued poking holes in my business left and right, a business i thought i built from his advice watching the yc youtube videos for years....
the truth was... we did a poor job following his advice.
they say they constantly repeat the simply things during batch, and i
reflecting i realized they will push you on the questions that deep down you know you don't have great answers to, and based off hearing your idea, they have seen millions of the same, they know exactly where the holes are, and they are testing to see if you have some unique
it reminded me of the concept of stacking miracles... your startup being successful is a miracle, i was stacking a second miracle trying to time blockchain adoption reaching a maturity point that b2b infra would make sense.
you'll remember your first interview for life, the anxiety, nerves, excitement all happening at once... 10 min away from $500k and your dreams kicking off
for me, it was 4am and I was sitting in some remote village in kerala (forced family vacation), and i had no clue who my
as i am frantically trying to defend my idea with what i now realize was one that had no viable market, my power cut half way through the interview (s/o kerala)
they ended up cutting the 10 min short at 9 mins (this can happen) and i realized we never really got past "do people
24 Hours ago I got an invite and interviewed with @ycombinator. I was amped, but not nervous. It seemingly felt like a culmination of the work I've done the last few months... 🧵
i am let in the zoom room, and it is the pretty much the entire twitch founding team, michael seibel, emmett shear, and some other guy eating onion rings on mute (actually tho he was munching)... reminder, try not to get siked out by who your interviewers are, often times it is
