So that is not true. 9gag is from Hong Kong. Semantics3 is from Singapore. Strikingly is from China. Memebox is from Korea. Cleartax is from India. Those are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more.

That being said, I actually would love to see more Asian startups applying to Y Combinator. We should be funding one from each country EVERY batch, not just averaging one per batch. I've made several trips to Asia now talking with startups to try and better understand how YC can do a better job and what is it about their ecosystem that makes the Asian startup scene so different. For example, I did office hours with over 60 Japanese startups trying to understand why it feels different over there. What surprised me the most was how much we take for granted here in the US about our startup ecosystem and values.

My plan is to write this all down in depth soon and figure out what actionable things can be done by YC to help. Stories from companies like AnyPerk help, but so much more needs to be done by us to reach out to founders out there.

Some of the challenges or differences about Indian start ups which you might have to address are:

a) Visa related issues: This is taken for granted by applicants from EU and other visa-on-arrival countries but it's a huge Qn mark for Asians. eg: I still don't know if we're selected for interview will I have to arrange for a B1 or B2? Will we be able to get it within a month? (There's an elaborate application process with long waiting periods - US embassy is notorious for rejecting on flimsiest of reasons). If we get selected, I'm still bit unsure what visa will be applicable for the 3-4 months of incubation period. To what extent YC will be involved in visa process. What happens after that? Some of these things are not laid out upfront in YC FAQ as of now.

b) Incorporation: The more you branch out into Asian territories the more likelihood that for many startups it won't make sense to incorporate in USA. Or maybe have a dual structure with HQ + subsidiary in USA/$home country (Ours might be dual). On the other hand there are some SaaS cos who have a Delaware co just for ease of seting up merchant a/cs and ease in collecting recurring payments (We still don't have Stripe here).

I know this comes later in the picture but I think some of the uncertainty around these Qns would keep many an Asian startup from applying.

For someone in Boston, if he doesn't make the cut, he can always go back to his home and figure our whatever he wants to do after 3 months. He loses just 3 months of his time. For many of us it's not easy to decide to upend your roots/family everything for that one chance of making it big only to realise all the wind is out of your sails after 6 months due to some stupid visa/IRS issues or for that matter even FDI/tax guys back in our home countries (eg even huge cos like Amazon India with billions of dollars investment in their Indian arm, are still caught in Indian tax/FDI redtape - they're facing an ongoing struggle against authorities as well as entrenched local retail community. They are forced to operate as marketplace and still have to dance as music changes). There's a reason why we're #134 in ease of doing business and #179 in Starting a business (out of 189).

So I think a clearly thought out YC roadmap on visa/incorp in itself would be a huge bump to smart founders.

b) The type or quality of startups in India is slightly different than the typical SV co. The typical SV startup goes: Stanform/MIT grads, batchmates, started building a SaaS/app2.0 product in final-year from dorm -- where you first figure out how to get millions of users and then sometimes after SeriesA maybe think about monetisation. Many of them get acquihired, defensive acquisition before making a cent in revenue. The good startups here in India that I like are mostly revenue generating from day one. Enough to have founders earning 3x+ of his erstwhile salaried job. They might not have hockey-stick growth in millions within months. A hockey-stick chart of nonpaying users is as good as 1/3rd of same chart of solid profitable paying users I reckon.

c) The way you do due diligence has to be slightly different. Yes there are lot of smart founders but just due to our sheer numbers you'll also find more shady characters (which in absolute nos would be a huge jump from what you might encounter in SV, even if %wise same - so a perception problem), so you'll have to gradually build up your sniffing skills in other vectors and also set your internal founder-meter accordingly. Plus there's a lot more diversity here in social/living conditions hence the founder diversity that goes with it. Which also means the good founders might be disproportionately outliers on the map which YC or SV references. eg: IIT gets a huge mindshare in SV but I see more startups from non-IITians here.

There are lot of similar subtle things from an Indian founder's perspective. I know coz I've grappled with some of these until I studied and organically warmed up to an idea so strong that made me jump through all the hoops and decide to go for it.

Would be glad to discuss any further - my email is in profile. (or in person alongside YC interview :-)

1. Getting a US visa may sometime be difficult or take time. My best advice is to get the visa anyway when you can. This way you're ready to come to the interview if and when you're invited. Visa is just a way of getting here. Serious candidates are up for promoting their startup in any possible way. Many of these ways go through the US and especially SV (angels, VCs, acceleration programs, the big US market, tech giants, etc). Get it anyway if you can, regardless of YC.

2. I think you actually have a huge advantage as an Indian founder - you have a native access to a huge talent pool and a huge market. Since the ease of doing business in India is at the bottom of the global rank, this advantage is even bigger.

3. No Stripe in India? Difficult place to do business? Difficult place to start a startup? These are real problems. It sounds like a source of many GREAT startup ideas. And Indian founders are, again, in advantage here.

3. As for incorporation, I think it's about what makes sense to your company. Every place has it's advantages - many big US VC firms fund only companies with a US office while having an R&D and support site in India is cheaper than in most other places. I'm sure the that folks in YC have good advice about what's right for your company. If you must incorporate already - I don't think that getting incorporated in India will disqualify good candidates from YC.

4. From what I know and read on YC's formal posts, they can't get you a visa. Tourist visa should be enough to get here (it gives you the equivalent of what EU visa-on-arrival gives you, but for 6 months instead of 3). When your company will get US funding over some threshold you should be able to get a working visa. I used to have a tourist visa in the past (wasn't born in a visa-by-arrival country). My co-founder will soon be on a tourist visa, so I know what you're facing. One of the HackerRank (YC S11) founders didn't get a visa eventually. So his co-founder attended YC in SV and he stayed in India. They kept working hard & on remote during YC. They are very successful today. DONT let any visa stop you.

5. About your difference from a guy from Boston - you and I are not that different at all. Each of us will leave his place and life if accepted to YC. For you the opportunity may just be bigger and more important, because it gives you full access to the best place in the world to start a startup.

7. Forget about a 'Typical YC applicant'. Be the best applicant and founder you can be, regardless of YC. Their application is built to find great hackers. Graduating from a top US school/IIT can help to demonstrate your abilities, but it's ONLY one way and doesn't necessarily mean you're a successful applicant. Get a founding experience, keep hacking, contribute to open-source projects - all of these help and matter.

Read this blog post by a recent YC grad: https://medium.com/theli-st-medium/hi-im-a-mom-and-a-start-u.... Forget about typical applicant. She made it while having two little girls in LA. Read her words: Grits, Perseverance, Passion. Not visa, IIT or anything like that.

Msg me if I can be helpfull in anything else. Best of luck with your YC application!

On re-reading maybe I personalised those comments a bit too much or it comes out as litany of excuses which was not what I intended. Just wanted to let Kevin know what makes the Indian/Asian mkt different since he specifically asked for it.

1) Yep, that occurred to me & I started that process before YC results. (got rejected by YC btw)

2) Talent yes. Bottom ranking in start/ease of doing biz more than overcompensates for the talent part IMO.

3) Not necessarily. Our RBI/customs/payments by design at govt policy itself is screwed - much of it I don't understand. So yeah if you are a veteran in finance/payment domain with ministries in your rolodex and money to plough in for years - maybe. High risk, decade-long timeline, but ultrahigh payoff kind of bet if one can pull it off.

4) Working visa & HackerRank. This is exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks. PG has said multiple times that they insist on entire team to be physically there. And I can understand why from YC's pov.

5) Agreed. I overshot on that remark.

7) Yes, read her story. Very inspiring. That's what keeps us going.

Thanks again for your response and hope you got in for the interviews? Don't see email in your profile. Can you ping on mine?

As someone who has "Start a company in Tokyo" on their long-term plan, can you elaborate? I wish there was more out there about international startup hubs.

* Move to the valley.

* Come up with a really good idea. Or at least a gimmick that will be a fad for a time.

* Find a generous person from the upper echelons of the wealth distribution (or a club of them) who have enough money to fund your idea or gimmick.

* Make a deal with them so that your business becomes part of their diversified portfolio. The risk to them is hedged by being broadly invested. The risk to you is a real ultimatum of your time.

* Work tirelessly and thanklessly. If you do succeed you will give a large part of your company, and many times control, to your patrons.

* Furthermore, because you've waited as long as possible to IPO all of the initial growth to launch your business into 9 or even ten digit figures has been captured by the upper class - the common man never had a real chance to invest in your idea.

* That's okay though, the common man probably isn't paying you with dollars anyhow. You're probably collecting his data for sale and for advertisement (or rather partnering with a company that does for you).

Occasionally a founder will get screwed by a VC. It's happened to people I know. In retrospect it's very rare that they didn't see it coming, and usually it's more complicated than just "investor screws founder." Investors have to work with the small ecosystem of each other and new startups on an ongoing basis. It's an iterated game and truly bad behavior gets you shunned. It really does.

It's actually more often that I hear that people wished they'd raised VC. I have several friends who have bootstrapped successful multi-million companies who look back over how they got there and the challenges they face now and wish they'd raised money. Yeah there are a lot of great small businesses - and bootstrapped startups - that do well without getting investors involved. But I can tell you first-hand that investors can really add value and drive entire fields much faster than they would have otherwise matured, and at the end of the day come out successful in real terms.

Founders have ways to diversify. I've executed minor equity swaps with a few friends to create a portfolio of my own. It's more "downside protection" (hopefully) than designed to replace the possible returns from my own company, but those investments have actually done really well.

It boggles the mind that in this corner of immense wealth creation and the freedom to do really whatever we want to do - if you don't want to work on something, don't start that company - what people fixate on is "investor vs founder."

Just go do it. A lot of the stuff you wrote about above really aren't things you worry about.

This part of your very pessimistic comment is certainly true, and I would like to point out that this is the government's fault, not Silicon Valley's. People who aren't rich are legally not allowed to invest in startups. [1]

But the unstated major premise of your comment, which is wrong, is that investment in startups is some kind of magic bullet for making tons of money. This is demonstrably not the case. One of the common justifications for the law in [1] is the fact that high-risk investments like startups are not necessarily any better than traditional low-risk investments (like stocks in big companies), and (by some metrics) are worse.

1. http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm

Today's startups choose not to. Anti-government types will say that the only reason is SOX. Honest and intelligent people will admit that there are a lot of other factors too, mostly around the finance sector getting better at capturing growth stage value.

You may not realize that VCs are investing on behalf of the common man. Most of the LP's in VC funds are entities like pension funds who represent the common man's money.

You'll notice Insight Venture Partners (an investor in Twitter) and Khosla on the list, to highlight a couple.

I think a couple years ago a judge ordered Berekely to release the fund performance figures for the VCs they had money in, and most of them don't even do well (measured in terms of IRR).

Most of the big main stream IT's have a proportion of there capital in pe/vc - read the annual reports

1. Make a small niche app.

2. Market it ferociously.

3. Don't be a slave to your job, make it the other way around.

4. Be your own #1 customer.

[1]: http://kapeli.com/dash

http://blog.kapeli.com/dash-for-ios-android-windows-or-linux

It's always amazing to me that as tech entrepreneurs we largely sell to others the idea that technology enables us to do anything from anywhere, but simultaneously believe that there is exactly one place on earth where we must phyiscally be to get anything done. The ideal place to start a startup is anywhere that your day-to-day life issues can take a backseat to working on your startup.

A hundred times, this. Granted, with current technology remote is much less efficient than face-to-face collaboration. But then there is also the all-to-important courtiering side to it, which might be rather awkward to do with a telepresence robot (I guess).

I guess today you could call the Internet the city/town.

There is also something to be said about what seems to be serendipity. When there is a high concentration of people doing the same thing, you are more likely to bump into people who can help you turn your vision into a reality. This is why you hear the joke "Go to jail with a bachelor in theft, come out with a PHD in insert_high_level_crime_here."

I'm highly skeptical of this claim. Can you back it up?

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Insight-Understand-Unconscious...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster

Sorry for the late reply. I picked up a coffee table book titled "100 of the World's Most Beautiful Paintings," reading through it, I would quickly Google artists, and found a few lived close to each other and during the same era. I would have to go through it again, but surely I will add it here once I do.

Something more obvious would be Socrates -> Plato -> Aristotle.

Also Einstein's influential TOR work on the Atomic bomb when highly capable scientists advanced the same work in the United states at the same time.

It's something really dark in California's culture (I have lived my entire life here). From '49 to Hollywood to now Silicon Valley, its a reverberating call for people to come here and get rich quick. And in any gold rush, its always better to be the ones selling the pics and shovels than the ones buying them.

It's not just a story of impoverishment, its also story of adventure. If you were going to backpack around the world, you're certainly going to be sleeping somewhere dumpy, eating poorly, dealing with crazy situations, etc. But thats okay, because you've accepted that you're trading off comfort for some unique experience.

When I was a teenager, my friend would crash at my house and we'd just hack on our websites, play computer games, and occasionally step outside. For weeks at a time, that's all we'd do. And honestly it was some of the most fun and fulfillment I've ever had.

You don't really get to do that as an adult, except in extreme cases like when you try to build a startup. Life isn't about necessarily optimizing for comfort or salary. Sometimes its more fulfilling to do what you want to do, where you want to do it, on your terms.

But we already know that we all can't be winners, and most ideas will be losers anyway. In our subgroup of grinders, I don't know that there is a significant statistical difference in the outcome vs the normal population of startups. But heuristically, we know that people willing to put themselves through more pain are objectively tougher, and harder to kill. Traits that probably are pretty good to have for a startup entrepreneur.

Thus, I don't think its such a bad thing for entrepreneurs to do, even if its for the wrong reason. We don't need to protect anyone from themselves, startups are such an extreme experience that they'll quickly know whether or not they're happy with their decision.

What I think is a problem is the way that it is memetically emerging into a life narrative. To take an example that is probably not controversial - many people are going to college who really should not be. It isn't advancing their interests and often isn't even intangibly edifying for them. Why are they going to college? Because there's a cultural messaging telling them to go to college. Their ability to self-determine is being undermined by a larger sense of what they are supposed to do.

So if there's a narrative that you should eat ramen, work 100 hour weeks, so on, to try to catch the Zuckerberg lottery - well, who wins in that game? A few of the people playing, and also the VCs.

EDIT: I submitted it to the front page as well, for good measure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510967

Changing the press is not going to happen, but if you disagree with this story, I highly recommend flagging it and if enough people agree that will drop it off the HN homepage.

It might be more clear if you would describe utopia for us. If someone wants to try a zillion ideas without answering to anyone, who should pay them in the meantime? And would that money be enough to live comfortably in one of the most sought-after areas in the world?

So what fundamental, basic aspect of life are the authors giving up by temporarily lowering their cost of living? Is whatever they are giving up so important that it undermines the freedom that they gain? Does it make it impossible to join the "normal" life later?

I see a lot of smart founders give up even with a good plan. The reason? They don't have grit.

The determination behind it, on the other hand, is damned impressive.

Also, it seems odd to me that you would say that you don't want to take anything away from their achievement, because this seems to be the only reason you're commenting. I think it's very obvious that Taro has no agenda to perpetuate the mythology of SV. It just happened to be in SV that these series of events happen to him.

I've been on both positions. When I had no money coming in, it was always in the back of my mind and my business ideas were short-sited, not creative, and rushed. They all failed.

I go to tons of startup events where new companies are presenting and the majority of business and products I see are exactly this. I'm not sure if it's because of a lack of experience of the reasons above.

I only became successful when I had money coming in and didn't have to worry at all about it. I could focus on my business goals with a clear head. The money was a part-time consulting job. I was able to quit it after a year because I was making more with my business. It's been going strong for 2 years now.

I guess I'm different. I don't think I would ever go h ycombinator. My first business idea involves very-little up front capital, but has nice returns. I'm going to use the proceedsa to invest in my next idea, that requires some capital. My ideas are always profit-centric. If it's cool, but has little chance of making money, I don't even consider it. I consider those hobby projects I might create for fun.

Sharing a room with a few people for a little while to save the last bit of money? I just call that camping and adventure, which some people actually seem to like. Have the commenters here never been camping? Travelled on a small boat? Been in competitive sports? Hiked a mountain? And they cry about sharing a room for a little while? What a bunch of wimps!

After all the flak the word 'pivot' has gotten I'm surprised to see it used this way here. This does not seem like a pivot, but rather you just deciding to work on a completely new business. Were the two ideas related in any way? Did anything in the original dating business inform this new idea?

I've seen two kinds of people creating start ups so far : business school guys and "real job" guys. The first type are really focused to one thing : making money. The second type have a passion for their skills and had an idea on how to improve something in their field.

The first type can pivot to about anything, because ultimately the product is just a mean of getting rich. The second type feels the need for their product in their every day life. So profitable or not, they really want that thing done.

Somehow i've always found the "real job" type the most interesting to work with.

Edit : business school guys doesn't mean you went to a business school. It's just a mind set. Same for "real job", i mostly mean passionate about one specific personnal need.

Sometimes you just have to try something in order to find out whether it's working for you or not.

I'm a mix of the two. I only work on products that I know fills a void, but are also profitable.

I never once took advantage of anything in the booklet, as I was a salaryman and all of my waking hours were spoken for, which is one reason why prevailing rates for this are so low in Japan. Still, had I wanted to take advantage of the movie pass perk (50% off a ticket at a local chain), the process would have been "Call a toll-free number or log onto the website, speak with a rep for a minute, give her my membership number and the address of a local convenience store, and then consummate the transaction there." Note that at no point have I inconvenienced my HR department.

(Your offer as a perk broker to vendors is "Will you cut us a deal on N units of your service if we bring you happy, well-behaved, middle class paying customers with lots of disposable income?" The conversation goes like this: "Hello hotel chain corporate sales department. Can we buy 100 nights in your off season?" "OH YES YOU CAN." "Great! Make it worth our while." "WE CAN DO THAT." "And we'd prefer 30 day net payment terms, counting after use." "Umm could you maybe pre-pay for the whole block?" "100 nights." "30 day net it is!")

  * naive
  * exploitative of the funding climate
  * deluded into irrational personal sacrifice by dreams of riches
  * whiners for thinking their hardship was hard
  * bad decision-makers overall by coming to SF

Pretty weak article. I would have said that its not worth being on front page of HN, but comments are interesting.

Well done.

- By buying on a subsidized contract, you've effectively used a loan for an iPhone. It's not different just because the phone company issued the loan.

- By using a loan for something else (e.g. tuition, automotive, housing), and then buying an iPhone instead of paying down the loan

No, it's lower if you bring your own device with most carriers. http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/byop.html

1. What was your thought process when pivoting from a dating site to AnyPerk? They seem to me like two unrelated things.

2. You say that your burnout was very low, but living three guys in a motel room, surely it has to be hard from a mental perspective, how did you guys cope with that?

1. We pivoted a several times during YC days. Initially we were trying to pivot into similar ideas. (standard "pivots") but after discussing really hard internally, we decided to think what we really are excited about regardless of what we had been working on, and we felt AnyPerk is the idea that we wanted to work for the next 10~ years.

2. I have to admit that it was not easy, but when you are working on your best idea with best people you know is so exciting that you can feel so positive about everything.