zillionize

As an angel investor solely focused on Y Combinator with more than 100 startups under portfolio, my observation indicates being rejected by YC can be equally inspiring as being admitted, because over the time, I found out some startups may survive and then thrive better if they are not admitted by Y Combinator. Therefore, I feel great that Y Athletics has been a $1m profitable business without YC or any other angel investor like Zillionize!

>>have invested in more than 60 startups in the past few years with a small seed fund (never lead investors), plus another 6 as an angel.

May you share some notable investments? I have invested in more than 100 startups and one of my most notable investments is Cruise.

>>Think of it as, in principle, a Twilio for real estate.

Twilio is famous for its simplicity - With one line of code or two, you can send a message or make a call.

In this case, may you show me some pseudocode to call your APIs for the most popular use cases? From that, I can know if it is a Twilio for real estate. Thanks.

>>We are a platform to digitally handle real estate titles (to start!) leveraging the blockchain, offering an API for companies so that they can provide their services to homeowners.

The idea looks cool. However, it will be even cooler if you can acquire some paid customers who pay you some money every month.

The reason is, the paid customers can indicate you are attacking a real problem, not a problem that does not exist.

As a note, nowadays blockchain is everything so the chance for blockchain to solve a wrong problem is not low.

>>We are now raising a seed round of $1M, at a $12M cap.

Have you joined YC? If yes $12m cap can make sense. Otherwise, as other angel investors said, you need to reduce it to half, namely, $6m cap.

Startup life is really hard - you will have to answer questions much harder than this every day if you do a startup. Therefore, based on my own first hand experience and observation on more than 100 startups I funded, only passion, determination and persistence can make your startup a success.

From this point of view, all the questions can come back to the root question - are you really passionate, determined and persistent by nature? If no working at Google or any other giant companies is way better than doing your own startup; Otherwise, you shouldn't come to Hacker News to ask this question but you have already quit Google because working at Google for one more day is just a waste of your time one more day.

If Cruise is our first most notable investment, Zapier may be our second most notable investment. I say that because over the years, we saw Zapier is so rare in many aspects that we can hardly find any other startup like that, except Zeplin.

Wade and the team, Keep on doing something different but better and I can safely assume you will be a great role model in the silicon valley some day!

Like marriage, it is worse to marry a wrong person than stay single. Therefore, if you do not really trust your cofounder, don't let her become your cofounder because a wrong cofounder is worse than a solo founder.

As a seed round investor, I do not view a solo founder as a negative sign since I am personally a solo founder so I know a solo founder can work well.

However, the ideal founding team shall be two cofounders - The product guy looks after products and the business guy looks after customers. Then the startup life can be much easier for both cofounders.

Awesome! When you raise your next round keep me posted - zillionize at gmail dot com.

Congrats! Flock vs Slack reminds me of Zendesk vs Freshdesk. Any thought on fundraising? Investors would beg to get in :)

Did you check out The Macro - http://themacro.com/ ? Yes the info disclosed by YC for each startup is still limited but better than nothing in the before.

>>what constitutes that homework for you

This is the homework we do:

https://www.zillionize.com/data/

>>do you feel like you can complete that homework prior to demo day

Yes the time is very tight so we have built an app to automate that.

I am an investor and my experience is, if you have done enough homework about the startup you want to meet, twenty minutes shall be long enough to clarify a few key things so you can make an informed decision.

Have you thought to do everything by software only? If yes that may help you acquire much more customers.

"There is a tremendous amount of excitement about the top 1% of startups, but there are hundreds if not thousands more startups that will make their founders and investors rich."

I cannot agree more with Justin and we have had several investment cases like that.