I'm at a YC startup that's successful. How do you look at early employees of such companies, and how I tactfully apply? There is no way I could without it getting back to my CEO (or so it seems to me)
YC is so big and has so many (1) existing portfolio companies and (2) applicants to go through that they simply don't have the time to even care about this. We graduated YC in S12 and, outside of fundraising, talk with partners on average once a year. I don't think we've reached out to YC or YC partners have reached out to us in any meaningful way for the past year or two.
Perhaps counterintuitively, this is even moreso the case the more successful a YC company becomes. There's little to nothing that YC can do to help Dropbox, but there's way more that YC can do to help a struggling 5 person company get off the ground.
Working at a successful YC startup can only help your chances.
I don't know. Sam was at a bunch of our parties/events, and has tweeted about us. My CEO and cofounder are great friends with a lot of the partners. Hopefully you're right, I just don't want to apply without telling them and they find out from that. But also telling them I'm thinking of leaving is hard too
Sam would be doing YC a huge disservice if he told YC founders that their employees were applying to YC. First of all, it doesn't even mean that the applicant is necessarily leaving. Getting in is pretty hard to begin with. Secondly, he would probably be missing out on a very talented pool of potential founders, which at the end of the day would return YC far more than a few employees at already successful YC companies.
I find this interesting as I thought one of the benefits of YC was the community, and it seems there has been a lot of talk about the community tools available to alumni. Have you not had any benefit from these at all? Or do you mean specifically you don't interact with YC partners?
The community (other founders) is amazing. We interact with them all the time via YC forums, which is extremely useful.
We just don't have much interaction with the partners anymore since their focus is better spent on the recent batch rather than helping 4 year old companies.
YC founder here. From what I've been told, employees of YC companies get a slight bump in the application process because the partners expect those companies to have a similarly high bar as YC.
I think that's a good attitude -- to a point. Wait until the right moment, okay, but don't give up your own dreams completely.
I think you should go ahead and tell your founders about your aspirations. They may very well be supportive; I've definitely read that many YC founders encourage their employees to do their own startups. Telling them will give you and them a chance to work out a plan for what you should get done before you start applying to YC or other accelerators in earnest.
And if they're not supportive, well, maybe they weren't so deserving of your consideration as you thought. I find this hard to imagine, though. It's not like you're quitting outright.
