Some individuals describe the Y Combinator expertise as “fun,” “glamorous,” even “enjoyable.” I battle to narrate. For Anthony Krivonos and me, it was infinite ache. Every 2 weeks, our chat with Michael… | Monik Pamecha

Some individuals describe the Y Combinator expertise as “fun,” “glamorous,” even “enjoyable.” I battle to narrate. For Anthony Krivonos and me, it was infinite ache.

Every 2 weeks, our chat with Michael Seibel began with, “What are… you…. doing… guys?”

By mid-batch, some startups had ARR charts steeper than Himalayan cliffs. Ours appeared just like the flatline of a sleeping hamster.

Nothing ever labored. We lurched between weeks of infinite demos and burnout, and scouring the corners of Earth in quest of a single buyer.

It stings when nobody makes use of your product. But when somebody does and it breaks? That’s 10x worse. And now, think about that occurs throughout a gross sales name you travelled 1000 miles and 20 hours solely to listen to the prospect say “Does AI stand for Artificial Incompetence”?

We pitched 134 traders in a row and didn’t get a single verify, whereas many friends had closed their seed rounds earlier than we even had our first assembly.

YC took us to a Golden State Warriors recreation at Chase Center with “startup premium” seats. Everyone else was networking, buying and selling intros, clinking drinks. We simply watched the sport quietly, then went house.

At one level, we went 5 nights with out sleep attempting to repair a reminiscence leak. We gave up and wrote a browser hack to auto-restart situations as soon as reminiscence crossed a threshold. Eventually, we traced it to a downstream ORM library. But that’s a narrative for an additional time.