MattMaroon.com

So you’re one of the teams that got accepted into Y Combinator. Congrats. You’re in for a hell of a ride. I’ll try to give you a little idea what you’re in for over the next three months, and see if I can’t recall all of the things I wish someone had told me beforehand.

First you’ll need to find a place. In Cambridge during the summer there were virtually unlimited sublets on Craigslist. I don’t really know what the situation is like for subletting in Silicon Valley, but the rental outlook is extremely favorable right now due to the terrible real estate market. There are a large number of rentals floating around, many with month to month leases. If you have good credit you should have a pretty easy time of it. If you don’t, it’s going to require some looking and a bit of social engineering, but you can still do it. I have friends with worse credit than you who pulled it off.

Space is probably your number one concern in a rental. Get the biggest reasonably affordable apartment or rental home you can find. We had three people crammed into tiny quarters in Cambridge and it made for a lot of misery. Happiness and productivity are directly related, so don’t skimp. Bonus points if you land somewhere with a fitness facility, and double if you actually use it.

(Unlike the summer founders, air conditioning is not really a concern for you, so be thankful for that. Should anyone from a future summer batch happen upon this, do not wait to resolve that situation, and make sure to find a rental with windows suitable for portable ones. The Y C people will tell you that multiple times, but a lot of people won’t believe them. Trust me, it’s true.)

I highly recommend living down in the Valley, ideally in Mountain View, though Palo Alto and Sunnyvale are fine if you have a car. Living in the city is probably more fun, but you don’t have time for that anymore now that you’re in a startup. You can have fun after demo day. Your life is now focused around preparing for that.

It’s also a long commute from the city to the Y C offices, and you’re going to want to be there once, or often twice each week. Time is in short supply, so live somewhere that will save you a lot of it, which in this case is Mountain View. It’s actually a pretty cool area anyway, especially if you’re near Castro Street.

Y Combinator will be hosting the weekly dinners. Ours were always on Tuesday, I assume yours will be too. My advice is to go to every one of those. You will quickly realize that the most valuable aspect of the program is the community, and those dinners are the focal point. It’s where you will get to know founders from current and previous batches. In fact, since you’re on the West Coast, you’ll get to meet almost every Y C startup that’s still alive and kicking, and maybe some that aren’t. It may be tempting sometimes to lock yourself in a hole and hack away on your project, especially with demo day looming, but in the long run you would be missing out on the most important part of the experience. I never missed a dinner or tea, except when on my honeymoon, and I recommend you don’t either.

Get your legal paperwork done right away. Ideally it should be complete before you even get there. It’s a pain in the ass and took some ungodly amount of my time, but it’s worth it to get it out of the way. Y Combinator’s standard legal forms are pretty helpful and will make your life easier in the future as you seek investment. Take their advice and leave a chunk of your stock unpurchased as sort of a pseudo-options pool. It might come in handy, and if not you can simply purchase it later. We used just under half of ours, and the legal fees it saved made it well worth the slight dilution.

Don’t worry about bringing any nice clothing or the like, Y Combinator is as casual as it gets. You can give your demo in jeans and you won’t be out of place. I lugged a garment bag out there and ended up regretting it.

Live cheaply. You’ll hear this over and over, but might be tempted to ignore it. Don’t. Startups aren’t a sprint, they’re a marathon. Most of the groups won’t receive funding for months after Y C ends, so make what you have last. We all paid for our food ourselves, spending the investment money on nothing but rent, servers, and such, and continue that still. Do that if you can, if not, get used to Ramen Noodles. They’re kind of like shots of cheap vodka, after four or five in a row you stop noticing how bad they are.

Paul may get mad at me for this one because it will cut into his writing time, but spend as much time talking to him as you can. He’s a smart guy who has been studying the startup world intensely for a very long time. He knows a lot about what works and what doesn’t and he will tell you. Get his feedback on your project regularly. Get his feedback on your demo. Pretty much get his feedback on everything. Of course, he’s not infallible, so I’m not suggesting you take his advice as the word of God (some people go a little too far with that) but definitely give it due consideration.

Save him some effort and read every essay he wrote. He’ll appreciate not having to tell you things you should already know. Nobody likes repeating themselves. Also read Founders at Work for the same reason.

Don’t let yourself get burned out. If you need a day off, take one. Go hang out at the beach or play Guitar Hero all day. You’ll be better off in the long run. It takes twice as much down time to recover from burnout as it does to prevent it in the first place. And if you find yourself needing too many days off, perhaps you’re in the wrong line of work.

And last but not least, don’t fear demo day. You’ll hear a lot about how important it is, how it will define you in the eyes of the tech community. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ll hear the quote “Fear Demo Day” from Paul. The stuff about how important it is may be true to a large extent, but I don’t believe in fear as a motivator. I think the more proper attitude is respect.

Respect the importance of demo day, and as such, work like crazy to have an awesome one. For the most part, that means work on your product. At what point you cut over into working on the demo depends on what you’re building. In our case we were making a multiplayer game that doesn’t look like much outside of the live aspect, and won’t even if it becomes a multibillion dollar corporation.

So we realized long before demo day that our product wasn’t an obvious technological marvel like Weebly or Zenter, where users would be impressed by features. (It’s got its fair share of tech, but mostly behind the scenes.) So we went with something more conceptual, showing our site off only a little and explaining what it was and would become and why it was superior to the competition.

John and I set out to work with the site we had a little early and focused on the presentation. If your site falls more into the Weebly category, you might spend less time on the PowerPoint and more on the product itself. Where the cutoff is is yours to determine.

That’s all I’ve got, though I’ll gladly answer any questions. Now that you’re in Y C, you know how to reach me.