Apply for YC S2017

[chadwhitacre]

← W2017

• https://apply.ycombinator.com/
• Working draft

[chadwhitacre]

Heh, received in private mail this morning. :-)

Subject: 10 days left to apply for Y Combinator

Apply for Y Combinator Summer 17

Hi Chad,

Thank you for applying for the Y Combinator Winter 2017 batch.

Of all the companies we accept, 40% have applied more than once, and some applied several times. We find that the best teams don't give up easily, and keep building their startups. These are the teams we love to see apply again.

So, if you've made progress with your startup, we invite you to reapply for the Summer 2017 batch. We've even made it easy - all you need to do is update your application with what's changed.

Applications are now open and the deadline is March 24th at 8pm PT.

[ Apply for Y Combinator S17 ]

We look forward to reading your application and hearing about your progress!

[chadwhitacre]

we’ll invite the groups that seem most promising to meet us in Mountain View in late April

[chadwhitacre]

I have it in mind to apply as a for-profit this time around, on the model of a two-tier legal structure.

[chadwhitacre]

And I am more than half-inclined to go out for interviews again, regardless of invitation. It was so great last time! That would mean being out there April 24-28, currently $900 on Orbitz for the direct round-trip.

[chadwhitacre]

Mountain View Airbnbs are actually quite reasonable.

[chadwhitacre]

I'm not going to go unless invited. The schedule on #987 is too tight. I'd rather hack that week than network!

Schedule

OSCON—May 6-11
$ustain—June

       March
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
   20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31   
 
       April        
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
                   1
 2  3  4  5  6  7  8
 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29 
30                    
        May         
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    1  2  3  4  5  6
 7  8  9 10 11 12 13    OSCON
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31         

        June
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
             1  2  3
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24    $ustain
25 26 27 28 29 30   

[chadwhitacre]

I am planning to fill this out as a for-profit, single founder. I highly doubt we'll get called, and I don't want to put too much effort into this, but I do want to keep trying for this. We don't have enough growth since last time to be interesting, but it at least potentially keeps our name warm for next time.

[chadwhitacre]

Monthly income:

=> select date_trunc('month', "timestamp") as month, sum(amount) from payments where direction='to-team' and team='Gratipay' group by month order by month desc;

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, I've filled out the application and profile. Here's the video. I'll post a Google Doc with the answers in a bit. I'm hoping we can land #1015 before submitting, because that'll be a nice feather in our "what have you done lately?" cap.

[chadwhitacre]

Draft linked in description.

[chadwhitacre]

This is due today. #1015 seems close but I guess we can't block on that.

[chadwhitacre]

Looking at Twitter engagement, their analytics dashboard is only giving us 90 days max at a time.

90 days prior to today: 51.3K impressions, 1.3% engagement
90 days prior to October 4, 2016: 19.9K impressions, 0.6% engagement

[chadwhitacre]

Application submitted! Updating public doc ...

[chadwhitacre]

Updated.

[chadwhitacre]

Your Y Combinator Summer 2017 application for Gratipay has been submitted for review. Though reviewers may start looking at your application right away, you can continue to edit your application until the application deadline (Mar 24, 8PM PT).

[chadwhitacre]

Looks like we should expect to hear back in about three weeks, or mid-April.

[chadwhitacre]

Got a nibble! One of the partners writes (through their web app):

Hi Chad,

Thanks for applying to YC again.

I like Gratipay. But you have been working on this for a while, and it hasn’t taken off yet.

What are you going to do differently in the future that is going to make it work?

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks for asking, []!

The short answer is, focus. :-)

The long answer is #987. :-)

The medium answer is that we're dialing in specifically on the problem of companies funding indie open source. Linux is fine. Webpack is not. The success of the Linux Foundation (e.g.) shows that companies want to support open source. The will is there. Existing funding models work well for flagship projects like Linux, but there's a long tail of open source that is vital but fragile:

https://dev.to/teabass/exploring-unseen-open-source-infrastructure

We're focusing on this long tail, helping companies connect with it at scale via aggregation.

Our product strategy is:

1. Prime the supply side by prepopulating Gratipay with all packages from npm.
2. Build out features for corporate givers (aggregation, prepayment, invoicing, etc.).
3. Build out features for project maintainers (payouts other than PayPal, distribution to contributors, etc.)
4. Expand to other ecosystems (Python, Ruby, etc.)

In terms of marketing, I did a bizdev experiment last week where I cold-emailed open source program managers at 17 top tech companies, and I received replies from eight (47%) of them, with significant engagement from four (24%): Google, Twitter, Yahoo, and Zalando. The interest is there!

We're headed to Austin for OSCON in May, and we're co-organizing sustainoss.org in June in SF. Our product target ahead of these events is to be able to say, "Give us $10,000 and a package.json, and we'll distribute the money for you." We're thinking of these events as our relaunch, and I'd love to bring our momentum from these events into YC this summer!

Am I answering your question? :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Okay, replied! I've updated my previous comment with what I actually posted.

[chadwhitacre]

It's been a week and a half and we haven't heard anything back (for what it's worth). I just posted again:

Three quick updates:

1. We moved from 24% to 35% on our bizdev experiment (meeting w/ Salesforce at OSCON, scheduling a call w/ PayPal).

2. I started conversations with two people at the Linux Foundation about partnering with them for fiscal sponsorship of small projects.

3. We are on target to release npm prepopulation before OSCON:

#987 (comment)

👍

[chadwhitacre]

Invites go out tomorrow!

[chadwhitacre]

Or not! :-)

Thanks for applying to Y Combinator. We're sorry to say that your startup was not selected to interview for the upcoming Y Combinator batch. Please don't take it personally. We carefully reviewed thousands of applications and since there's a limit on the number of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot of promising companies.

Unfortunately we can't give you individual feedback about your application. This page explains why.

We're always trying to get better at this. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the interview threshold ends up getting accepted to YC. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold.

It's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd sincerely appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we very much want to learn from our mistakes.

We hope you reapply for the next batch. In fact, we encourage it. Applying multiple times in no way counts against you and a surprisingly large number of companies are funded after applying more than once.

Best of luck,

—YC

Okay! Back to work! :-)