I've always been super curious about the YC application vs. accepted demographics. ESPECIALLY who gets told to come back with a co-founder.

I applied as a solo woman technical founder with a product that is already close to ramen profitability. Going in, I thought this already made me an outlier - especially because I'll be able to tap my network and hire a founding team with some cash in the bank.

The tepid response during YC interviews was jarring. I know the panels are an exhausting marathon, but my group partners acted like they'd rather be anywhere else than talking to me. I got the impression that maybe I'd been invited to fill a quota, and the Zoom interview was just going through the motions.

The whole experience made me sit down and reverse-engineer the actions needed to hit 10-15k MRR by Q2 2023. With that amount of cash flow, I can reach out to angels directly. Just 6 angels in for 30k/1% party round is 180k @ 3M post.

If you're a woman with a similar story, I'm an angel investor (B2B, Saas, manufacturing). Reach out (email in profile).

On th face of it, it doesn't sound like you need venture capital.

Angel investor is usually defined as a high-net-worth individual who provides financial backing for small startups or entrepreneurs.

With that in mind, if your product is at or near profitability, I'd have imagined that wouldn't been a good fit for YC?

I'm going to bounce this back and ask what you'd do in my shoes.

Your net worth is around 2M, you burn around 50k/year to eat, sleep, and be merry. You could retire tomorrow, but you weren't put on this Earth to just be idle.

Let's say (hypothetically) you worked somewhere that just announced they're laying off 10% of their workforce.

You want to make an offer to 2-3 product + infra engineers who were laid off. You know they do excellent work, and they're a god damn joy to be around.

However, you need at least 6 months of payroll, health insurance premiums, and incidentals fully liquid to extend those offers. Ideally you'd have 8-12 months banked - because you care.

Your startup is "Ramen profitable" - that means you're making around 7k/month revenue to cover 2-5k expenses. If you start saving 100% of profits NOW you can afford 1 of those engineers in (checks notes) just under 8 years!

What's your next move?

> You could retire tomorrow, but you weren't put on this Earth to just be idle.

nice

> Your startup is "Ramen profitable" - that means you're making around 7k/month revenue to cover 2-5k expenses. If you start saving 100% of profits NOW you can afford 1 of those engineers in (checks notes) just under 8 years! What's your next move?

Offer the engineers meaningful equity rather than the one or two points they might ordinarily expect.

Just curious, would you accept $1k/month salary + 4% with a 1 year cliff to hack on PrintNanny.ai?

The app stack is a mix of Python, Rust, Typescript deployed to a single-board computer like Raspberry Pi or Rock Pi.

New features are released monthly, via a rolling release embedded Linux distro based on Yocto/Poky (PrintNanny OS).

I know this is your baby and building it all out on a raspberry pi is pretty cool, but I feel like that could be a bottleneck long-term.

First of all customers will need a physical device so you have to figure out shipping. Second, the RPi puts a limit on your computation. If you ever want a bigger and better model, you’re out of luck.

Why not just make it into an iPhone/Android app? Either do the processing locally or use the app as a thin client for a SaaS ($$$). Hell, people are running stable diffusion on an iPhone these days.

If it’s an app, people can easily try it out, and if it works for them you have a new customer overnight. Plus you don’t have to deal with pain in the ass RPi supply chain issues. Maybe it already exists as an app in which case ignore everything I said.

So personally what I would do is spend $10k porting to a mobile ecosystem and go back to YC saying you need cash for a couple mobile devs and maybe a temporary designer. If you’re comfortable doing the ML yourself you can save on that too.

I would not, but I know some people who would consider a deal like that. At $12k/yr and your stage you’re basically hiring a cofounder, so four points is… not a lot. You sound like you probably still have most of the equity left, so I’d expect more.

And a cliff? Nobody does cliffs these days after big tech axed them.

Now you need to use this dataset and feed it into a ML model ;-)

Maybe they're doing female applicants a favor if they know guys like Marc Andreessen aren't going to give them an honest look when pitching.

This comment doesn't even begin to capture how off (and concerning) the data is. I'd love to see some demographic analysis of funding.

Don't you have to compare it against the ratio of women that studied computer science and got a degree?

It seems quite reductive to make some polarising statements based on seeing male faces in a founders directory.

What makes you think every founder has a degree?

Given that YC companies in general have a tech (as in software/computing technology) focus, and given the large number of technical founders, it is not unreasonable to assume that there will be a correlation with CS graduates.

There's a full generation of talented women software engineers who do not have computer science degrees.

I just happen to be one of them, and I worked my way into the top 1% of software engineers (by salary) in Silicon Valley. I've spent a lot of time wondering: how did this happen? How many more people out there just like me, and how do I invest in them NOW?

Here's a podcast that does a great job of explaining how PC advertising in the 80s/90s and onwards resulted in the current abysmal number of women CS graduates (in the US / English-speaking countries especially).

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/07/1141358586/women-coders-progr...

Also, this might be a wildly unpopular opinion, but...

As much as we glorify technical founders, a CTO is still an employee.

YC has an investment thesis that fixates on early technical talent, but I think software production is basically a commodity in 2023 (and onwards).

Here's an example of me generating an AsyncApi schema with ChatGPT (similar to OpenAPI / Swagger, but for systems built around distributed events/msgs). https://twitter.com/grepLeigh/status/1604935357832654848?t=X...

In a year or two, I'll probably be able to build a production micro-service by dictating to an LLM. That'll be the execution tool of choice for a Founder doesn't have much coding exp, but has 10-15+ years of line of business experience.

I say all this as someone who thought they'd be a CTO and has depended on software to put food on the table for 15 years.

If you are at the top 1% level why not quit and roll the dice like the other yc founders?

Do males take more chances?

I reckon you might have missed another one of my posts, with deets about the business I'm building.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267515

I wouldn't call it rolling the dice though. Starting a business is a calculated way to continue compounding my wealth all while doing something that I love and that I believe will be important in my lifetime.

PrintNanny seems neat!

I'm curious though about the business plan going forward though (after the beta). My assumption would be that PrintNanny is currently targeting hobbyists and smaller 3d printing services.

I say smaller, because I assume that companies like Shapeways either already have something similar or would build their own if you tried to charge enough. (E.g., for $XM/yr they could hire multiple engineers to work on it full time).

Is the angle to expand laterally into more manual monitoring opportunities? (ShopNanny?) Go deeper? Is this market bigger than people think?

Thanks for the kind words!

My target market is SMB manufacturers in the US and Germany. My ideal SaaS customer has 10-15 employees and 5M in annual revenue, around 50% coming from a mix of services and government contracts.

The United States is ramping up domestic manufacturing, since the pandemic revealed weakness in "just in time" supply chains.

Automation/AI-assisted production is the only way to make the unit economics work though. Picture Zapier, but laser-focused on automating service/production tasks.

Here's a rundown of the public-private programs committing resources to replacing imported parts with domestic 3D printed parts. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

The second line of business I want to add in 2023 is a white-labeled PrintNanny appliance, with a SaaS sub. A few 3D printer manufacturers have reached out to me and are interested in white-labeling PrintNanny for their large format printers, which retail for 5-10k USB unit. This will give me access to trusted/mature distribution networks while I'm building the business's credibility.

I've talked to 3D printer manufacturers who've tried to build their own stuff in house, since the margins of software (90%+) are VERY attractive to a hardware biz with margins around 30%. The tl;dr is:

1) 3D printer manufacturers are only willing to invest in in-house software for their hardware, but most manufacturing shops use like 10-20 different pieces of hardware from 5+ vendors. No one wants to spend money supporting their competitor's hardware.

2) Shapeways (consumer and pro-sumer on-demand printing) is not where the money is.

Compare to 2D printing: the overhead of print-on-demand t-shirts is not an attractive investment. Shapeways is the Rush Order Tees Dot Com of 3D printing.

The REAL money in 3D printing comes from companies who are manufacturing drone parts for the US gov, misc plastics for OEM and after-market automotive industry, satellites, commercial plumbing, Ag Tech. Ask someone who works at John Deere their ballpark budget for domestic manufactured parts.

The next 10 years of plastics and metal additive manufacturing on US soil are going to be important, and the stuff sci fi nerds like me used to dream electric dreams about

Good to know! The diversity on the shop floor is an excellent point.

I'm curious if you perceive white-labeling as a stepping stone or a reasonable destination. That is, it seems like you'd prefer for customers to buy directly from you, once you're ready for it. Precisely because of the diversity of vendors problem: you don't want them to think of the PrintNanny appliance/service as being from FormLabs or Inkbit or anybody else, you want them to know "We have our printers and then we have our PrintNanny". Right?

"There's a full generation of talented women software engineers who do not have computer science degrees."

Yes?

"I just happen to be one of them, and I worked my way into the top 1% of software engineers (by salary) in Silicon Valley. I've spent a lot of time wondering: how did this happen? How many more people out there just like me, and how do I invest in them NOW?"

My wife is an IT consultant (frontend), the most recent customer actively asked for women developers so both of the women in the company got the job directly without any interviews (they had other gigs at the time). The IT consultant company is making bank, she is not (happened to me too so I switched industry). So maybe start an IT consultant company? Seems to be quite the market for it.

Hey, I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful - but a service business doesn't produce the return on time investment I want. It's kind of like recommending I buy franchises near an airport. i.e. super time intensive, but can be very rewarding in the right conditions!

I used to run a WordPress services business before SquareSpace/Wix commoditized the space.

If your wife decides to start an IT consulting company, tell her to shoot me an email.

YC is NOT representative of CS, or most faang employees even. It’s extremely stressful, high stakes and high risk. I wouldn’t do it, and most people I know in tech wouldn’t either.

Out of extremely high stakes games, my understanding is this has always been male dominated. So you’d have to first take the prerequisite ratio (for instance if CS degree, it’d be ~19% women, in the US) and then multiply by some risk taking factor, perhaps by comparing to other ventures in domains with 50-50 to get some form of baseline.

I mean hell, we don’t even know the ratio of applicants.

What privilege exactly?

Get the fuck out of here with this bullshit.

Want more women founders? Go ask women why they don't want to work 80 hour weeks for below minimum wage for the chance to lose it all and start over.

To paraphrase what's been said before, 'A disproportionate percentage of people who are seriously disaffected are men. Most people in prison are men. Most people who are out on the street are men. Most victims of violent crime are men. Most people who commit suicide are men. Most people who die in wars are men. People who do worse in school are men.'

Men struggle uniquely in several areas of society[0]. So do women.

It's vitally important to acknowledge and address any systemic barriers that may prevent a group from fully participating in society and to ensure that all individuals are provided with equal opportunities regardless of gender. But to cherry-pick a single sliver or dimension of an increasingly complex society and economy and summarize it as "Male privilege!" is as silly as if I were to take the above (re prison, violent crime, etc.) and proclaim "Female privilege is pretty real!"

[0]: I'd recommend watching/listening to at least some of this interview with Richard Reeves on this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YepjMuSdB2M

I agree, both male privilege and female privilege are real and very serious problems. The existence of one doesn't negate the other. They are often interlinked, such as the male privilege of not getting lower pay and fewer career opportunities just because you have a child and the female privilege of being allowed to take more time away from work to raise that child and not being treated as a secondary parent. You can't solve one without solving the other.

The things you mention are not necessarily in that category, but seem to be because people are taught not to care about men as much. The flip-side could be our society's infantilization of women, but the harms of that are more subtle than the result of our society's indifference towards men, such as men receiving higher sentences for the same crimes and being refused help in situations where help is offered to women. Perhaps having fewer people encouraging women to take risks and fewer people being willing to invest in women is one of those harms.

I think the point is less about whether each type of privilege is real, but that this logic is incredible shaky. (i.e. deciding there is a bias against a group solely based on representation in outcomes)

Put another way (and I think the OP tried) if we look at prison sentences by gender and apply the same logic, then we have a huge bias against men in the justice system, yet no one seems to be making that case nor would it gain popularity.

Of course there is a huge bias against men in the justice system. That should be obvious to anyone, and is also confirmed by many studies. For example, from the US federal system:

> It finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.

https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

And the UK:

> We find significantly harsher sentences imposed on male offenders even after controlling for most case characteristics, including mitigating factors such as ‘caring responsibilities’. Specifically, the odds ratios of receiving a custodial sentence for offences of assault, burglary and drugs committed by a man as opposed to a woman are 2.84, 1.89 and 2.72

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/154388/

Also see this article regarding the huge gap between the prevalence of sexual violence perpetrated by women against men and the prosecution of those crimes: https://malesurvivorbop.nz/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Stempl...

The sorts of men who are thrown into cages are different sorts of men than those who are handed enormous sums of capital.

In some cases (see: SBF) they shouldn’t be.

neither category should be inhabited, so yeah.

It's self-sustaining at this point.

I wouldn't bother with an accelerator largely because I know I wouldn't find a social fit, and the informal connections are so much of the value prop. If YC had 25% women, they'd get to 40% pretty quickly. But so long as they're <5%, it's going to asymptotically approach 0%.

Also I'm confident that biases would factor into not only YC selection, but also (and more importantly) the investors who traditionally work with YC companies, since they just don't see women outside of "fem-tech" and fashion, in part because that's how YC selects.

My perspective may be as much a product of my pattern recognition of consistently having to deal with sexism as it is the valley being sexist, but either way I'm just done with it.

I wonder to what extent that is due to women being discriminated against after they apply, or women being less likely to apply. If there is a significant difference in the acceptance rate, they should consider concealing characteristics like gender as much as possible in the process and maybe inviting people with more diverse perspectives to assess candidates. If there is no significant difference, they should consider advertising YC places where they may reach a different audience and publish statistics that reassure applicants that they will be treated equally.

Feels like a quite a logical leap there.

We'd have to see applications by male / female to distill any type of bias. Even then it would be shaky, albeit often-parroted, logic.

Now do open source project founders.