Founders at Work.pdf

450 Founders at Work
would be sending a junior guy, not coming himself. I don’t think he meant any
harm, but I remember feeling like such a loser.
I also remember thinking how weird it was that we had this totally groundbreaking
idea and yet no reporters cared at all. Ryan Singel of Wired News and
Jenny Lee at the New York Times wrote about Y Combinator early on, which
was really cool, but not many others. It wasn’t until the fall of 2006 that the PR
tides kind of turned for us. Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast about the same
time that Charles River Ventures announced a new program where they would
invest much smaller amounts of money. Suddenly, because a well-known VC
firm was acknowledging that some startups could get started with less money,
and one of our startups had been acquired, a lot of reporters began to write
about “new models” of venture capital. We’d been at it for a year and a half at
that point.
Was there anything that surprised you about startups, since you’d been
working at a big company before?
Livingston: I was surprised how much people could create in a short time.
There were only about 10 weeks before Demo Day, when the startups present
to investors, and every one of these groups started from square one. None of
them had a working product before YC. So it amazed me how much they
accomplished. Sometimes they’d come to dinner and say, “This is the first time
I’ve left the house in 2 days.” I’d never really seen that before. They could build
something in a week that would’ve taken an IT department in a big company
6 months—with about 20 different meetings to approve things.
There’s no bureaucracy at an early-stage startup. You want to test out a new
idea, you just do it. You don’t need to get anyone’s approval, build consensus, or
put together a proposal. If it doesn’t work, you try something else.
Also, I saw all the stuff startups would do to pretend to be bigger than they
actually were. It was new for me to be behind the scenes with startups. I
remember Alexis of Reddit would—this is a 2-month-old company that had just
launched—email reporters saying he was going on a “media tour” to San
Francisco and would they like to meet with him? Reporters were like, “Yeah,
we’d love to meet you.” I’d done PR for a long time and it was so amusing to me
that this 21-year-old startup founder could just email reporters at important
publications pretending to be a big deal.
Was there anything, looking back, that you’d do differently now?
Livingston: The truth is, Y Combinator worked out surprisingly well. I can’t
think of anything major that I’d change. I was going to say things are much easier
for us now, because we know so many more investors than we did at first.
But that’s not something we could have done differently. We grew organically
so it’s natural that we’d become more well known and more people would be
interested in investing in the new startups.
I remember the first Demo Day—called Angel Day back then—we contacted
every rich person we knew in the area and I was praying that the seats
would be filled. That first Demo Day, we had about 15 investors. Now we have
to have two Demo Days just to accommodate all the people who want to come.