"Great, how much lemonade have you sold?"
"We have 50,000 lemons on backorder!"
One thing you're right about: we're not an incubator.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/16/why-the-first-yc-backed-bio...
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-in...
And that's not pejorative -- there's nothing wrong with that; you're not crying yourself to sleep at night.
Your whole application process reflects it: with tiny textboxes and the 10-minute interview time frame. It's perfect for saying "We're like MySpace for college students," but not at all appropriate for saying, "We use a new form of compiling search results that place ranking based on complex algorithm of reputation-based weighting."
A funny example was given by Noam Chomsky. A producer at CNN (IIRC) once told him they wouldn't feature him because "he is from Neptune and lacks concision." To which he replied something like that it was fair, because if you're saying something strikingly different, you look like you're from a different planet, and then you need to justify how you got there, and that means you have to talk a lot, so by definition you lack concision.
If these guys have spent years writing their own VM, they need a lot of time to talk about why they did that, the corner they turned and all of the complex differences their VM exhibits. A one-page application is fine if you're building Facebook for Cats but if you're doing something 'from Neptune', you can't have concision. They simply don't go together.
I suspect that a lot of that is because Drew actually went to the trouble of building a video and getting a few thousand signups before applying. Similarly, Google had significant traction at Stanford well before it became a company. While it takes years for world-changing ideas to become world-changing, it usually takes about 4 months for them to get an initial prototype out that can at least excite some users.
Now when Silicon Valley talks about innovation, it's about making it so much easier to store files on a server and metrics to gauge product/market fit. There is nothing about DropBox that changed the world. Simply and sadly nothing. But there is everything in that it's what is cited as "innovation" in 2015.
You don't actually use a mouse or web browser made by Doug Engelbart, do you? Do you get paid to program in Smalltalk? And I bet your laptop says "Apple" and not "Xerox".
It took 20-40 years for these innovations to actually "change the world". Check back in a couple decades on the status of YC companies and see what the world looks like then.
(A bit more personally - I used to think of Silicon Valley as the birthplace of the future in revolutionary terms. Then I realized that I was wrong - not about Silicon Valley, but about how innovation happens. There's no such thing as a revolutionary invention made by a lone technical genius, a priori. Instead, there are environmental changes, often years after the fact, that make the original tinkering of someone who dared to be a little different seem amazingly prescient. You can't predict what these changes will be, but you can tinker and you can capitalize on the tinkering of others.)
I made an effort to clarify there wasn't anything criminal about going from 1 to n, or with the companies that do that (such as Apple and potentially some of the YC companies). Sure, that can be part of the cycle. There's nothing wrong with "tinkering and ... capitalizing on the tinkering of others." There's a lot of money in that -- and YC is quite clear that that's what they're about. It's an accelerator for making money.
But it's not an incubator for innovation. It's not for those attempting to do something in the 0-to-1 space. But without those people, the 1-n's can't do much. Alan Kay famously asked on StackOverflow, "Has there been any new innovation since 1980?" and the answer was no.
Then we have to ask ourselves, "What happened in 1980?" Right? Where did it go wrong? I suspect that it is, at least partly, when the money exploded in a distributed way. There suddenly was a huge volume of customers asking to "get something working today, it doesn't matter how." Fast forward to today and we have -- at this moment -- hundreds of thousands of the developers, including some of our top minds, writing applications in HTML/CSS/Javascript, etc. And no one is laughing. Almost every app written today is on a huge, ludicrously stupid stack. And we smile and work hard to optimize it, without questioning the stack as a whole. Everyone is still trying to get 'something working today' because that's where the money is. At the last StrangeLoop there was only one presenter from the pre-1980's: Joe Armstrong. His talk? "We can do better" Everyone else's talk? "How to optimize or manage this part of the stack."
Doug Englebart's kids found out about his innovation from newspapers. He never talked about it. He said it was never about money or fame. Alan Kay is relatively unknown and relatively poor compared to people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who invented nothing but were better at marketing, and I don't think Alan cares. And isn't that the adult way? You give kids rewards: "Clean your room and you get a cookie." But as an adult, you just clean your room.
I think that before 1980, we got 0-to-1 revolutionary innovation because it was done for the reasons we do true science or art. It's not about childish rewards of money or fame. Artists/scientists don't do it for glory or gold. They do it because the mountain stands before them. Because they see a better world, they see something beautiful, and it pulls them forward.
This seems narrow minded. Dropbox completely changed how I use my computer. I use it every day and it's incredibly valuable. None of the competitors I looked at offer a similarly simple experience.
It's like wheels on a suitcase. Not a large innovation, but completely changed how people travel.
Gigantic innovations are great too, but there's no need to disparage things which radically change how people use devices.
There are always some ways to test concept. I've done a fair bit of indirect testing in my business, as my products take years to develop. I always found a way to test the most central aspects of them, usually in a week or two.
I don't know how you'd do it for the product these guys are trying to build, because I'm not familiar with their space. But there must be a way.
In their case there are many rapid app builders so it isn't crazy talk to enter that market. What is crazy talk is they haven't entered the market but are forming up on the beachhead (waiting for what?) and (critically) applying for YC before they have tested the market.
I'll agree you need bold commitment, but the last thing you want is to commit to a concept that doesn't have any outlooks on whether or not people want it, much less, pay for it.
WATCH his videos about hydrogen cells and why he thinks they are way too complex and not useful. He didn't start SpaceX by starting with a complex theory. He started SpaceX by looking at the basic principles of cost of production and using that as a starting point
Instead of aiming for "Making a crazy complex spaceship that will have more features than those made by NASA", he's going in the other direction, namely "cutting corners and reducing complexity to come up with a simpler, cheaper spaceship".
Just a side note, I'm ALWAYS noticing lately that there's a certain segment of people like to use the word "honest" as a justification for spreading their negative predictions and negative feelings.
Whether selecting these founders would have worked out well in the future for YC? That's purely a prediction. But somehow people like to throw in the word "honest" for predictions and then suddenly they can give cheap criticism without putting any real effort into making specific suggestions for how to do better.
Plenty of successful entrepreneurs have honestly thought that their success is undeserved and the whole thing is a bad idea that will collapse at any minute. Honest isn't a synonym for useful, in fact it's usually just harmful, for successful startups where 90% of the time everyone feels terrible and confused - because that's just the nature of the business.
This is my actual job, not a vague promise. I have a demonstrable track record and since all of my business comes from referrals, I must not be entirely out to lunch.
I suspect that you are internally switching out my use of the word honest for [something like "prediction"] which has nothing to do with my feedback. I don't predict what any of my clients will do, although I do certainly run the numbers in my head before I take on a new client.
When I say that I give honest feedback, it means that I don't pull punches — no matter how awkward it is.
Humans are trained from birth to tell people what they think that they want to hear. They want to be encouraging. Unfortunately, that means that you've sacrificed telling someone that you can see flaws in their logic for telling them selective truths that will make them feel good. This gets you off the hook socially and gives them no useful information about the hard road ahead of them.
Next time you have an idea, run it past me. I'm happy to give you 15 minutes over Skype. You can decide if I'm negative. The feedback I usually get is "awesome" but I do approach every conversation with the assumption that they have something to teach me.
> YC: How many apps has been developed with your software?
> Creo: As I already said and as I clearly written in our apply, we are currently in pre-beta so we just developed apps for internal usage, nothing is on the market yet.
So that means that after all those efforts, you haven't even tried yourself to create an app with the beta you have?
If the Creo guys are reading (and I'm sure they are), take a look at how these guys (http://www.atomic.io) show off their product - https://vimeo.com/120035868
It's also not a brand new paradigm they're inventing. Look at Game Maker which is pretty commercially successful.
Some ideas do require a lot of risk in form of up-front development for a shaky idea, but that's the only way to find out if that particular idea works.
There are some ideas where you can simply throw shit on the wall until something sticks and iterate from there but there are also ideas that you have to go all in on.
If someone says they're going to develop a "revolutionary new programming language" that will obsolete java/c# (or something) I'd roll my eyes and call bullshit, and in 99.9% cases it will be true, except for the one that isn't.
Its up to every entrepreneur and venture capitalist to choose what kind of idea to bet on. I'd only hope that the entrepreneur picks something they're passionate about.
You could say that you should at least be aware of the risk and scope of the idea your pursuing, but is that even true? Some might be better of not knowing or they'd never attempt it.
As George Bernard Shaw famously said: "People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it."
Heh, I'm saving this as a quotable quote. Very true.
I just want to see 10 new cool things every day and maybe buy some of them. So services like Meh and Massdrop make a lot more sense for my use case.
Now, go!
YC openly talks about how validating your idea and growing the business are big signals to them that you are worth the investment. But while that's the most common path, there are clearly alternatives. They are just giving advice on what might maximise your chances with them.
You repeatedly express frustration that the interviewers were not intimately familiar with your application, but it doesn't seem if you put much into familiarizing yourself with YC and their flavour of logic.
YC: Why are you spending so much time developing this application? Creo: It is not only an application, it is a compiler, a virtual machine, a new language and even a mobile operating system.
YC was asking why you ignored customer development and just jumped into boiling the ocean before doing anything to verify that there was an existing market opportunity in the form of real customers willing to pay you real money to solve a problem. It's not that they didn't understand what you were trying to do, or questioning whether you could do it. They were right to push you for proof that you had more than a few friends who were desperate to use it.
The answer that you gave to the question is just a hairball of red flags. You wrote half a million lines of code before validating your business case? Do you truly believe that your ability to see the future is so strong that you just don't need to back up your vision with data? That is not reassuring to a savvy investor who hears "500klc" and feels fear and/or pity.
Listen, it sounds like the experience was positive and that you are taking answering some of the hard questions seriously. However, I urge you not to move forward without questioning that your entire position that YC blew it on an obviously incredible opportunity might be significantly flawed.
As to your idea itself: I am deeply skeptical that a drag-and-drop UI for building mobile apps is going to turn non-developers into developers. You're not considering that 10% of writing code is syntax and 90% following a strong intuition of what to do first.
Perhaps the reason it doesn't exist is because nobody has that problem.
"What does it do?"
"Anything you can imagine!"
Most people don't understand what they are allowed to imagine. Sorry.