YC Series A Program

YC Series A Program(blog.ycombinator.com)

177 points by jameshk 8 years ago | 35 comments

jacquesm 8 years ago |

A good chunk of this information would be useful to non-YC companies as well, I really hope they will open up the bits that do not require physical presence in SV.

akharris 8 years ago | |

That's definitely part of our plan. We'd like to expose both data and some of the tools we're building.

jacquesm 8 years ago | | |

That's very nice, for all companies that are not part of the SV ecosystem this will be a major asset.

JohnHammersley 8 years ago | | |

Thanks for the quick reply to this - as has been said, that's a huge benefit, and it's great to see. How do you see it working in practice?

vjeux 8 years ago |

All the founding rounds are discrete events. I wonder if there's an opportunity to have a way to do funding in a more continuous way. You can get more people chipping in funding at random points in the life of the company that unlocks over time.

amasad 8 years ago | |

That happens in angel/pre-seed/seed rounds. They're usually much smaller contributions and are much easier to do because you're not giving out equity, you're technically taking debt which will convert to equity on the next equity financing round (usually series A).

Also after an equity round, investors typically have pro-rata rights so you can't take any money without getting their permission and ask them if they'd like to contribute more to maintain their share.

lacker 8 years ago | |

You can do that, it's just stressful. Big company analogy: it's like what if instead of getting headcount allocated just once a year, you had to re-argue about how much headcount your team deserved constantly. ;-)

madeofpalk 8 years ago | | |

Regular person analogy: what if you had to negotiate your salary for the week every Monday.

tmatthewj 8 years ago | |

The closest is convertible equity, adopted by a good number of startups during their seed stage. You can read about SAFE by YC and KISS by 500 Startups, 2 informal instruments / agreements used to do convertible equity.

CyrusL 8 years ago |

For people who don't read the article and jump straight to the comments: YC is not leading Series A rounds.

YC is creating a program to help improve outcomes for portfolio companies that go on to raise a Series A from other VCs.

noahmbarr 8 years ago | |

I’d be curious as to the details of this program.

The post is mostly focused on the “why”.

Duration, inaugural class start date, size of program, YC resources committed to program, cost in terms of cap table, criteria for eligibility, etc

akharris 8 years ago | | |

- Duration depends on the requirements of the company - No real classes, this is rolling - No cost to the cap table - Have to be a Y company

jforman 8 years ago |

I had assumed they did this already. As much as we hate to admit it, pitching (or "running a process" — see comments below) is critical to the success of a company and therefore a required skill for founders. And YC seems to be an ideal place to build a collective set of best practices.

akharris 8 years ago | |

The program isn't actually just - or even mainly - about the act of pitching. There's an entire process around running a successful fundraise that changes from round to round and company to company.

Pitching is part of that process, and what we've learned is that the A pitch is a different thing altogether from seed pitches. We have a lot of work to do to get great at that, and I'm grateful for the help we're getting from alums who have gone through it before and have been giving us advice.

jforman 8 years ago | | |

Indeed, "running a process" is the important skill, which includes the deck, storytelling, etc. I was using "pitching" loosely.

staticautomatic 8 years ago | |

It's not critical to the success of all the companies that don't raise money.

jforman 8 years ago | | |

I think everybody is aware that if you never need anybody else's money (as in ever, which includes an IPO), you can write your own rules.

Although YC companies seem by definition to already not be included in that group.

hamhamed 8 years ago |

What would be the requirements to get into this program? I.e team size, previous amount raised, etc?

bobwaycott 8 years ago |

> These often-discussed milestones have lead a lot of founders to believe they’re ready to raise when they’re not.

The word here is led, not its metallic homonym.

I do not understand why this mistake appears to be increasing in occurrence over the last few years.

akharris 8 years ago | |

Whoops! Thanks for catching the typo. Much appreciated.

eric_h 8 years ago | |

> I do not understand why this mistake appears to be increasing in occurrence over the last few years.

Autocorrect, perhaps?

bobwaycott 8 years ago | | |

Perhaps? I’ve never seen autocorrect suggest lead when I’m typing led, but maybe it happens to others for sure. On the other hand, I see it not only far more frequently in online usage, but far more consistently, as if people think lead is a homonym of the same-spelling sort, not the same-sounding sort.