Useful IV

The types of founders you’ll meet at YC

These are some of the types of founders you’ll meet on YC Demo Day: Inexperienced non-elite college educated, inexperienced elite college educated, experienced non-elite college educated, experienced elite college educated, 2nd time YC non-elite college educated and 2nd time YC elite college educated.

2nd time YC founders have learnt about raising money and or exiting a company and would usually have no trouble raising money on demo day. Elite college educated founders would also do better on demo day partly because of the strength of their alumni network, Silicon Valley VCs are mostly educated at elite colleges and raising money is crucial to the success of your company. 

Even though people argue that work experience and academic education doesn’t affect the quality of companies that founders go on to found, your educational background is important; you make friends from school because that’s where you spent most of your formative years as an adult and before going into the workforce formally.

Your work experience is important because as you scale, you’ll need a network of people and friends you can trust and leverage their skills. Another reason experience is important is because experienced founders already know what to do with issues around company formation, managing scaling and growth, people management, co-founder conversations and even raising money. These are things that can crush your company if you don’t pay attention.

Inexperienced founders have a major advantage because they don’t know what not to do and people usually underestimate how important this is to innovation.