4/22/2024 — 10 minute read
“It tends to be a great place to find fossilized remains of dinosaurs and other forms of life, and the reason why is that, apparently, these tar pit pools resemble fresh water ponds, and so animals will come across them, think they’re fresh water, step in, get stuck — because the tar is very sticky — die, start to decompose, that smell will attract more animals, and then you get this kind of cascading negative effect.” — Michael Seibel, Co-Founder of Justin.tv (now Twitch) and Partner at Y Combinator
This past week, Aemula applied to Y Combinator (”YC”), a startup accelerator and venture capital fund that has backed companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Reddit, and Stripe. To date, they have invested in over 5,000 companies that have grown to a combined valuation of over $600b.
Tens of thousands of companies apply to YC every 6 months, with less than 2% getting accepted into each batch. With those odds, we do not expect to get accepted to the accelerator — especially since YC rarely accepts companies as early-stage as Aemula.
Instead, we are using the application as an in-road to their Co-Founder Matching service, a networking website that pairs technical and non-technical co-founders. This is just one of the many avenues we are exploring in the effort to identify a CTO to lead the technical development of the platform. There is an ever-increasing demand from consumers for us to ship a product as soon as possible, so the buildout of the development team is beginning to take sole priority.
However, the YC application process itself brought up some interesting questions. As you can imagine, the Partners at YC are experts in evaluating early-stage companies given the sheer volume of applicants they screen through each year. I have followed YC’s advice for startups for a few years, and have found their warnings around common mistakes to be quite helpful.
Relevant to Aemula are their concerns for consumer-facing products and Web3 platforms. I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to answer their questions on these concerns, and I thought it would be helpful to communicate those here as well.
The above tar pit analogy comes from a conversation between Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell, Partners at YC. They use it to warn founders of opportunities that may seem too good to be true. If there is significant money to be made in a potential new business, should it be concerning that there is no competition? Of course, if we exist within an efficient economy, many people will compete to solve a societal problem.
As a self-proclaimed futurist, my preferred analogy is to the Fermi paradox. With no signs of intelligent life in the cosmos, should we be proud that we are the most advanced civilization or should we be worried that we are the only ones making noise in the dark forest?