I'm often asked "Is YC worth it?"
The response that many YC founders default to is a series of familiar tropes amplified by hustlers and builders on LinkedIn and X: "The network is unreal for customer acquisition. Fundraising is easier. You get legitimacy, and in some circles, the clout works wonders."
All of us in the YC community know, however, that these talking points are truths compressed into palatable one-liners. There is value lost in the squeeze.
Until recently, the prospect of going to business school was very real for me. I was fortunate to realize that Y Combinator taught me much of what I'd hoped to learn from graduate school. Instead of studying theory from textbooks, YC had us fly the plane while building it. The lessons I took away from day-to-day life in the batch were practical and valuable. In the first six months, I picked up the tradecraft of sales, product management, and customer success simply because I needed to meet revenue goals. There was no corporate ladder to climb or textbook to consult; instead, seasoned founders' advice and partners' wisdom guided our decisions. We failed a lot, and we learned from it. Ultimately, though, there is a deeper learning that goes beyond practical how-tos. It's the same kind of thinking I gained in the woods of Hanover and at the desks of Wall Street—a new way of approaching problems.
Y Combinator teaches you to move in the right direction and to recognize when your vector is perilous. Once you understand that, the famous YC maxims fill in the gaps: "Sell before you build. Ship fast and break things. Make something people want." The magnitude of your progress is the sum of the work done by those who came before you, and the direction is guided by the wisdom gleaned from their stories. I'm reminded of a question a friend's sister once asked me about being a founder: "How do you know what you're doing?" The truth is, we don't always know exactly who we are in the moment, but we have a sense of what we might become. Like builders before us, we move forward with a desire to explore, the will to keep trying, and the understanding that if we learn from others' stories, we inch closer to our north star.
So when I think of YC, I don't think primarily of the iconic orange logo's brand appeal, or the $500k check that lets you take the leap, or even the LinkedIn clout and legitimacy that might come with it. I think of Dubugras and Franceschi taking a shot at billboard campaigns for credit cards after their VR idea didn't work. I think of Chesky selling cereal boxes to keep Airbnb alive a little longer. And I think of those who took their swing and, for one reason or another, didn't connect but had the courage to share what they learned so the next generation might line up a better pitch. YC is the story of builders who look at the world and dream of what it might someday be. We're promised the swing, not the hit. Proud to be a small part of it.