While seemingly harsh criticism, I think you may be right. YC of the old (PG, Jessica, etc) was much more selective and smaller inner circle. However, even when PG was at the helm he said they passed on many insanely lucrative opportunities.
Picking startups is hard, like picking stocks. You aren’t gonna pick every winner, but frankly 2M in ARR after two years is not exactly a home-run for YC. So, perhaps them passing was the right call for YC.
Congrats though, sounds like you’ve built something useful and you can be proud of that. Plus, taking VC money ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you can bootstrap to get to a level that pay’s yourself $200-300k a year, that’s a win.
> frankly 2M in ARR after two years is not exactly a home-run for YC
It's been awhile since I looked at this deeply, but I thought the path of a good startup is to raise a seed with an 18 month runway, grow to 1m ARR, and then raise a series A. Assuming that's true, growing to 2m ARR in 2 years is in the ballpark.
$2M ARR is such a small part of the story though. You really have to look at things like cost of acquisition, churn, gross profit, along with understanding the market itself. Certain markets can be easy to create quick ARR either through enormous CAC spends and/or large amounts of churn, all of which means poor long term growth potential.
Picking startups is hard, like picking stocks. You aren’t gonna pick every winner, but frankly 2M in ARR after two years is not exactly a home-run for YC. So, perhaps them passing was the right call for YC.
Congrats though, sounds like you’ve built something useful and you can be proud of that. Plus, taking VC money ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you can bootstrap to get to a level that pay’s yourself $200-300k a year, that’s a win.