Congrats on the startup success and (more importantly) I hope your daughter is well.
There's a really valuable lesson here for would-be YC founders:
> We had high hopes about getting into YC for the winter batch, but were rejected since we only had a non-functional demo of a product and zero traction.
...
> This amazing traction helped us get into YC several months later...
Same founders - traction = YC rejected
Same founders + traction = YC accepted
The same thing happened with Dropbox. So don't trust what YC says about how they evaluate founders themselves, trust what they actually do. Which is evaluating startup quality largely based on traction, just like every other investor does.
Plenty of YC startups have been funded without traction. Thousands, surely. Many haven't even launched yet.
I don't know what the difference was in this particular case, but you're overgeneralizing from it, and underestimating how much emphasis YC places on founders (a lot).
YC funded Dropbox before it launched, because they believed in Drew—so that's a counterexample, no?
I concur doctor dang. And well i blew that in my first YC application. Told how i got 50-100k euro seed, but didn't achieve anything after 1 year, and the review crew has seen me as one of those who just wants money but won't do anything to be worth it ever since, so hasn't considered my 11 applications since then. Heavy sigh
I'm pretty sure they've said multiple times that traction is the best indicator of future success. Very rarely do they fund startups without traction (if they do, it's usually someone from within their network).
They don't say that and that doc doesn't even mention traction. And, amusingly, it points to Dropbox's application as example of how to apply. When in reality it was due to traction on HN that Dropbox got into YC, Drew Houston was a solo founder so likely would've been rejected again on the basis of being a non-great founder since he hadn't even convinced anyone to join him.
Of course, one can always claim that "great founders have traction" but that's an obvious cop out.
This isn't malicious or bad. It's just an example of the common problem where people's view of themselves is different from their actual behavior. Something all founders should learn. It applies to users just as much as investors.
> This isn't malicious or bad. It's just an example of the common problem where people's view of themselves is different from their actual behavior. Something all founders should learn. It applies to users just as much as investors.
I did a bit of research and you're right; they clearly say in multiple places (including here on HN) that they fund non-traction companies often. I'd agree that this is stretching the truth and it's probably orders of magnitude more difficult to get into YC with no traction.
There's a really valuable lesson here for would-be YC founders:
> We had high hopes about getting into YC for the winter batch, but were rejected since we only had a non-functional demo of a product and zero traction.
...
> This amazing traction helped us get into YC several months later...
Same founders - traction = YC rejected
Same founders + traction = YC accepted
The same thing happened with Dropbox. So don't trust what YC says about how they evaluate founders themselves, trust what they actually do. Which is evaluating startup quality largely based on traction, just like every other investor does.