A letter to YC Hopefuls
A debrief on everything we've learned throughout our founder journey and answers to common questions that YC hopefuls ask us all the time - without the help of ChatGPT.
Introduction
The purpose of this article is to share some of the experiences and learnings that my cofounder, Justin Torre, and I have accumulated throughout our journey together working on Helicone.ai. Building any business is difficult, never mind a venture-backed startup with lofty expectations often placed on young individuals, and comes with inevitable challenges and bumps in the road. There will be days where you question your strategies, your product (very normal) and your yourself (even more normal). But at the end of the day, if you can answer the three questions below succinctly and clearly, then I genuinely believe that you’re well on your way.
Do you care about the problem you’re solving?
Do you care about the team you’re building with?
Do you know your non-negotiables in life?
These questions align with your MISSION, VISION, VALUES and act as a compass whenever you are making critical decisions throughout your founder journey. Lets jump into it.
Do you actually care about the problem you’re solving?
Save the Total Adjustable Market (TAM) stuff for your investors and your future TechCrunch Disrupt presentation. It’s very easy to say you care about the problem or to say you know people who have this problem, but those aren’t answering the question - do you care about this problem? Have you personally experienced the pain-points? Do you have an emotional connection to the problem that goes deeper such as a female-founder deciding to change a part of the women’s health industry due to being let down in the past? Although founder-market fit isn’t the end all be all, its incredibly important and critical to be able to tell the story about why you’re working on the problem at hand to customers, investors, and other founders.
At Helicone, we sought out to build the best observability platform for Large-Language Models with the easiest integration on the market. We are a team of all developers creating a developer-tool that started out as a tool for ourselves. With the rise of LLM’s in web applications, we built out projects such as Valyr Chat, CourseGen, AIRapBattles, etc. and we needed a monitoring and logging tool for ourselves to debug, identify key cost areas, and segment requests. Our earliest customers were ourselves and close friends also building in the LLM-space, so the depth of caring for the problem we were addressing - there not being an easy, out-of-the-box monitoring tool - was extremely clear and strong for us.
Do you care about the team you’re building with?
One of the most common pieces of advice from Y Combinator was that founder relationships mattered a lot more than you think. And to absolutely no one’s surprise, founders (including ourselves) ignore this as we believe that over time a person’s merit and ability will trump all problems. Yes, it is good to index heavily on someone’s skill and ability regarding product, sales, or engineering. But during the early-stages of your company, you will quite literally be spending more than half of your day with your team. I’m not trying to discourage anyone from doing “Founder Dating” or YC’s own “Co-Founder matching”, but there needs to be a deeper connection besides “they are qualified to help me build my product”. Do they share similar values to you? Do they share a similar mission? And most importantly, do you enjoy working with them?
I met my co-founder, Justin, at Northeastern University where he was a Computer Science major and I had a Computer Science minor. We were partners in a class together junior year and we became best friends during and after the class. A builder at heart, Justin was a major driver for my own development in software engineering and over time we would hack on projects that eventually led us to getting into YC. I’m by no means saying that you have to be best friends with your co-founder, but there has to be a strong semblance of trust within your relationship with your co-founders. As YC always says, the most common reason why startups die is because of co-founder disputes and founders giving up.
Do you know your non-negotiables in life?
As hard as it is to get into Y Combinator (<1% acceptance rate for the W23 batch), it is even harder to build a successful, long-standing company. There are inevitably going to be days where you doubt and question every decision you and your team make and there are going to be even more days where you are slugging through hours upon hours of engineering work to get a feature out to a customer yesterday. To avoid founder burnout and to avoid resenting the path you’ve chosen, its extremely important to know what your non-negotiables in life are. These will help you stay sane as well as guide you through difficult decisions as a company.
Theres two sides to this question, one being what are things that you will make time for no matter what. Personally, I dedicate time in my week to playing and watching sports because it is a big part of who I am. Others in the Helicone team spend time building side-projects, going out to eat often, or exercising. Whatever it is that brings you genuine joy, you need to make time for it and nurture that part of who you are.
The other side of this question revolves around what you stand for as a company. For example, within the dev-tools space, there is quite a large variance in how much founders actually care about individual developers and hackers. Is your plan to go up market as soon as possible to secure sizable enterprise contracts? Or does being open-source and working closely with indie-hackers and builders sound enticing to you? These things aren’t mutually exclusive, but it’s important to know what your company and team are building towards and what are the things that you refuse to budge on.
Conclusion
We get asked question about Y Combinator all the time that are often something along the lines of:
how do I get in?
what should we say to the group partners during our interview?
do you think this idea is good?
is YC worth it?
Although its annoying, the answers to these questions are often not as clear as a one-word answer. I always end up asking the 3 questions I outlined above in response to better understand if the founder that I’m talking to has their heart and mind in the right place. There is an endless supply of ideas and a large supply of engineers/designers/sales people to work on those ideas. At the end of the day, it comes down to execution which involves having the right people to build, the right relationships to get buy-in, the right solution to a problem, and the right convictions to be able to be unwavering when confronted with a problem. Easier said than done, but if you can answer the 3 questions above clearly, you’ll be in a much better place than many other early-stage founders.
If you would like to talk about YC, Helicone, AI, or anything related to the startup space, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at scott@helicone.ai. I’d love to help in any way that I can and I hope this letter helps you in your early founder journey!