MattMaroon.com

I hate flying. Since I’ve done it so much over the last couple years I’m not nearly as fearful of it anymore, but the anxiety has been replaced by annoyance. I’m starting to think my YCombinator submission should have been for a teleporter.

On the way to the airport traffic was at a complete standstill. I had left pretty early (definitely the first time I’ve ever given myself that much wiggle room) and barely got to the gate before boarding began. If not for my having learned to pack lighter and fly carry-on I never would have made it in time.

When I got the airport it turned out that our plane had had some serious maintenance problems and was replaced by a smaller craft, meaning 35 people were getting bumped. Luckily Chad had shelled out some change for a first class ticket and I am an Elite member, otherwise I suspect we both would have been bumped. We had to ride in coach (I already knew I wasn’t getting an upgrade) and Chad got a voucher for doing so.

So we got in, rented our car, and drove down to Mountain View. It was less than a half hour haul from the airport. I took a walk around just to see what the place looked like, and it was actually pretty nice. There were mostly smaller homes with very small yards (I’m not in Kansas anymore) but they were well-kept and well-manicured. It looks like the area I grew up in, only richer and whiter.

We stayed overnight at the Holiday Inn Express, which actually wasn’t a bad place. It even had a kitchen, and free Wi-Fi. Chad put the finishing touches on the demo while I tried to make up for lost sleep, since I knew I was going to be doing most of the talking and had been up for way too many consecutive hours. Thanks to a dose of Tylenol Nighttime large enough to tranquilize an elephant, I awoke well-rested and on a good sleep schedule.

I’m writing this now on the trip from Mountain View up to Napa (don’t worry, Chad’s driving). Our brief time at YCombinator was eye opening. First we talked to a couple of guys from Xobni, who have a pretty neat idea going. They were one of last summer’s founding groups I believe, and afterwards they came out to San Fran to live. One of the members actually made me think about how to lower the barrier to entry of The Project for people who aren’t familiar with that sort of thing. He said something to the effect of “make something 10x easier to use and 1,000x more people will use it” and I think that’s a great idea for us to keep in mind. Parts of The Project can be a little esoteric, so that in and of itself has probably made this entire trip worth it.

We got called in for our interview a few minutes behind schedule. It was very brief, and I really wish we would have had an hour to talk about all of our ideas. We barely got to scratch the surface of why we are so much different and better than our competition. We also didn’t even really get to show them the demo we’ve spent the last week and a half slaving away over, but I’m ok with that anyway, since not a second of that time was really wasted. It was all spent learning tools necessary to this and other potential projects, and if nothing else coming out here made us actually start laying down some code.

I personally thought the interview went very well. Jessica Livingston called out “Matt Maroon” and then told me she’d been waiting to call that one out all day. I guess she likes my name. Richard Brodie did once tell me it sounds like a rock star’s name, maybe there’s something to that.

The reception from the three (Jessica, Paul Graham, and, when he returned from the restroom, Trevor Blackwell) was rather warm. They asked us mostly questions about our idea. Why it was different from the competition, why we thought it would be successful, tons of other issues. They threw a few curveballs at us too, because our idea is basically taking another idea (which is basically an online implementation of a rather old brick and mortar activity that has had functionally no innovations in over 20 years) to the next level and they were sort of one more step ahead of us on that. That also gave us some food for thought, more for features to add down the line than for anything in the beginning I think, but still very helpful.

And Paul complimented me on my composure. He said that most of the founders were very nervous, voices wavering and all. Had I had more time I would have told him the best poker story of all, which comes from Shut Up and Deal by Jesse May. When the protagonist is asked what the difference between the small stakes games and the higher ones is, he says “the color of the chips.” Everyone thinks that’s a wiseass answer, but it’s not, it’s the truth, and it applies to every aspect of life. And once you internalize it, there’s no such thing as nervousness anymore.

So, on the whole, this has been a great experience whether we get accepted or not. It jumpstarted our project. It made us pump out a visual representation of our web interface, which definitely put us all on the same page. Whereas before we all had very different ideas in our head of what all it entailed, we now have a concrete representation.

At the same time, I think I want to be accepted more than ever into the program. From talking to the other founders, and even just the other prospective founders, I felt a strong sense of community, not just among the alums, but in the tech startup world as a whole. It’s very, very much like poker in that regards, the people involved all know each other. And even though everyone was there today competing for a spot in YC, of which I get the impression only about 1 in 4 groups will get, we all were rooting for each other. We left to another group saying they hoped we got to spend three months together in Boston, and we genuinely hoped so too. I met at least 10 people today, and all of them I hope to see again.

Also I found out that Paul Graham is somewhat of a gastronome too. Should make for some interesting conversations in Boston.

(*Note: all of the above was written on the car ride after the interview. Even though I wasn’t able to post before knowing the conclusion, which is soon to follow, I edited only for grammar*)

This entry was posted on April 22, 2007 at 1:10 am and is filed under Startup . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.