YCombinatorI went to Boston this past weekend to pitch an idea with Phil to YCombinator, a venture firm started by Paul Graham — the guy who sold his online store to Yahoo in ‘98 for 48,000,000 dollars. The entire weekend was an incredible escape from school and work (unfortunately as I write this now I’m right back in the heart of it). We applied with a completely different idea than what we pitched. In fact, we had a few ideas so we didn’t really know what we were going to pitch until the day before. Regardless, we put our faith behind an idea that did have a lot of technical problems. While we could have touted the amazing user experience and the sheer amount of pain points that the product could have addressed, in the end we were pushing our beautiful pie-in-the-sky design that would have solved all of these technical problems. I think Robert Morris noticed that the most. Phil and I both agreed that we probably would have done a lot better if we had a demo or if we had come better prepared to tackle the technical issues… or if we had went with the idea that Paul had suggested we do!

The night before the interview we had dinner with about 10 of the teams that were interviewing. Seriously, I met some of the most diversely smart people in the bottom of that Italian restaurant. The guys who probably impressed me the most were the three-member Weebly team. They have an amazing beta of their product with an impressive userbase and a great team organization. A few days ago they were mentioned in TechCrunch and received another 2000 users.

While I was pretty disappointed in not getting YCombinator, it was still awesome getting the opportunity to meet Paul, Robert, Trevor, and Jessica. And hey, everything happens for a reason. I was always upset at the possibility of leaving my friends and abandoning my senior year to work in Mountain View on the startup — although I definitely would have done it if we were given funding from YCombinator. A few hours after Phil called me and told me the outcome I ordered Chinese for the people I was staying with. After good food and a good conversation, I opened my fortune cookie and broke a smile as it read:

“Your true wealth lies with your friends”.