_sentient workable.com
_sentient
Joined 1,251 karma
Founder & CEO of Lawn Love (YC S14, exited in 2021). Now building Cabana, a venture buy out in pool service.
I hold with those who favor fire.
@jeremyyamaguchi
- _sentient parentYC changed my life, and I'll be forever grateful to PG, Jessica, and the team for taking a chance on a homeschooled, GED-wielding solo founder.
- I wonder how much of this is a function of the W22 batch being remote.
We all know the benefits: The fundraising pop is great, the brand patina helps you hire better talent than you would otherwise, the advice can be useful, especially for first-time founders, you can sell into the YC network, etc. All of this pales, IMO, to the value of the personal connections you make in the program. It sounds like OP, by virtue of being 8,400 miles away, missed out on that.
I went through YC in S14, and I found the in-person experience to be invaluable. There were 80 companies at the time, so we had somewhere around ~200 founders in our batch. Even at that scale, you're not going to get to know everyone, and I found myself gravitating toward a smaller group of people who I connected with personally.
I'm not going to lie, YC was stressful. You're dropped in amongst bunch of smart and accomplished people who are sprinting as fast as possible toward the all-consuming Demo Day. It's a bit of a pressure cooker, but that's not unintentional. Those shared experiences formed the substrate of some amazing, life-long friendships.
I have 15+ close friends who went through S14. We talk every day. We've been in each other's weddings. We've watched each other have kids, shut down companies, start new ones, get acquired for enormous amounts of money, and everything in between. It's been incredible watching their trajectories over the last 9 years. Some are C-level execs at public companies, some are tier 1 VCs, a couple are billionaires, some are homesteaders and amazing parents. All of them are solid, kind, high-quality people, the likes of which you are unlikely to meet in the regular world.
I think you lose much of that in the remote-only format. If I were to go through a remote-only accelerator located in Singapore, I imagine I would make few meaningful personal connections. Like it or not, Zoom is a pretty thin facsimile of real human interaction.
My life's trajectory is meaningfully better for the friendships I made in S14, and I expect that trend to keep compounding over the next 30 years. If you missed that benefit, you missed much of what makes YC special.
- _sentient workable.com
- _sentient workable.com
- 3 points
- _sentient workable.com
- _sentient workable.com
- _sentient workable.com
- _sentient workable.com
- _sentient workable.com
- 5 points
- _sentient workable.com
- It's a fairly time-honored tactic to redesign a brand that has lots of negative associations built up, and I could see Dara driving this as part of the overhaul. Typically that results in a full name change though.
Having read through this, it sounds like the brand team considered more radical changes but ultimately found that the broad name recognition and generally positive associations with the stark black/white aesthetic were too strong to ditch entirely. What remained was the ability to iterate on the original brand, and that's what you got.
I agree with ditching "the bit" icon in favor of a "U" though. That logo made zero sense, and always felt like a creative team stretching to imbue an abstract mark with some sort of meaning.
- I was at Demo Day, and couldn't disagree more.
If you actually believe that, go ahead and pick the ten companies you think are worth something, and I'll take the "unpromising" part of the batch. We can put a five year bet into longbets that the top ten companies of my group will outperform your ten companies, as scored by either exit value or value of last round raised.
Picking winners is hard, and most great companies today looked dramatically different when they were first getting started.
- Depending on what stage of growth you’re at, your Startup School mentor should still be able to be helpful.
Most companies in the program are in the 0-1 phase, but there were a few in my group that were 1-N. The program format is flexible, so it’s fairly easy to tailor content to your audience.
YC core has a similar dynamic, and individual companies in a batch fall along a fairly wide range in terms of stage / progress. They only break out a formal growth track once companies have >50 employees.
YMMV depending on your mentor of course.
- 1 point
- Lawn Love (YC S14, https://lawnlove.com) | Senior Software Engineer | San Diego, CA | FULL-TIME ONSITE
We're Lawn Love, a new type of lawn care service. We're building a software layer on top of the very large, thoroughly antiquated lawn care market. We're profitable, growing fast, and operating in over 100 markets in the US.
We bring software and data (truckloads of data!) to the sprawling, low-tech lawn care market. We’re hiring experienced full-stack engineers to help us reinvent this $83B/year industry. Our platform connects hundreds of thousands of lawn-havers with independent gardeners all across the country.
Come join us!: https://angel.co/lawn-love/jobs/308895-software-engineer
- 172 points