When we applied to YC, the three of us only had enough money saved up for two of us to quit our jobs. So two of us quit and Chris kept working in a cubicle and split his paycheck 3 ways. Even that plan didn't give us enough money to work on Wufoo full time because we needed all 3 of us. So that 2 of out 3 plan resulted in 2 of us making a web development magazine that we'd sell and hopefully make enough money for the 3rd one to quit.

The idea behind the magazine was that I calculated we could run it in a way that half the month could be spent on that and the other half on working on the software we wanted to build. I'm pretty sure that play would have taken forever to execute.

So we actually really needed that $18K that YC gave us AND the 3 dedicated months to blow everything off and only work on the software. Very different times back then.

Couldn't you have gotten ~$18K as a personal loan from a bank? Even if everything failed, working off that level of depth would have been easy in a silicon valley corporate job afterwards.

That $18K only covered our expenses up till Demo Day. The $100K we raised after that allowed us to get to launch and then profitability. Also, it's not like we could predict that it was all going to work out. From our perspective everything was a risk up until it wasn't.

Having the choice to not take on debt and work with people who'd done it before made way more sense especially considering we hadn't written a line of code when we got into YC and had no idea what we were doing. YC paid us to start our company and gave us amazing advice that kept us from making a lot of bad decisions. The loan option isn't exactly a great deal by comparison.

Plus, we were not from Silicon Valley at the time. We quit our jobs because we hated working in a fucking cubicle. It was probably irrational, but easy for some people was completely unacceptable to us.

Thanks for clarifying! I just wanted to know those additional reasons.

Certainly was. I kind of fell into my startup without really intending to start a business (I gave a pitch and someone literally wrote out a check on the spot and said go get to work), but I wonder if more founders would be better waiting and building up more capital before starting? If you only need 18K and three months full time then this should be within the reach of almost all founders especially if you are building a business where profitability is within relatively easy reach.

What is profitability? If you stop reinvesting your revenues into growth, you can be profitable. So what?