Thread by @justinkan

Before applying to @ycombinator, read this thread.

Here's the story behind my shitty first company, Kiko, our *almost* trainwreck demo, and what I learned from going through the very first YC batch.

Kiko was founded with no skills and no money by three clueless college students: myself, Emmett (CEO of @Twitch) and Matt. At that point, I had never even worked at a full time job.

We were inspired by gmail, which had just come out at the time. We wanted to create a similar outlook-style calendar app to sync and share events.

There was one problem: Matt and I had zero technical skills. So we recruited my childhood friend, Emmett, who was a CS major.

We later found out that he didn't know much more than us, he was just a little ahead.

A friend told us about Y-Combinator and @paulg - we quickly dropped out of our lined-up jobs to hack on Kiko full time.

We submitted our YC application form literally the night of the deadline. They decided to give us a shot, and we flew over to Boston with nothing to lose.

We weren't off to a good start.

We were almost late to the meeting and I was so nervous I couldn't speak. Emmett did most of the talking and arguing with Paul about whether complex client side web apps like Gmail would ever become widespread.

We had a somewhat serviceable demo that showed enough of our idea. (thankfully, the panel didn't ask us to show whether or not we could create new accounts on our application yet)

Wandering around Boston a few hours later, Emmett and I received a call from Paul Graham, who offered us $12,000 for a 4% stake in our company!

We were amazed that we had created something that was valued at $300,000 and we took the deal immediately.

In the following months, I learned a lot from my time going through YC. Here's 2 pieces of advice I'd like to pass on if you're a budding founder interested in YC:

1. Getting started > everything else:

Kiko’s demo was scrappy, but showing the barebones version was enough to demonstrate its potential, but more importantly, its founders.

No one on the team was a specialist when Kiko started, but a couple of months of hardwork resulted in a scrambled, albeit serviceable, demo

Getting started is necessarily the hardest step, but humans are momentum creatures by nature.

You will encounter the most resistance when you haven’t taken a step at all - but once you get started and get the ball rolling, nothing will stop you.

2. Be flexible:

Chances are, your initial idea will not be the best iteration of whatever you’re building. Don’t get too caught up and box yourself into one conceptual avenue - be welcome to new creative ideas and be adaptable in your approach.

Pivots are inevitable, but you're on the right path so long as you are constantly seeking inspiration, and communicating with your user-base on a consistent basis.

You can read the whole article, including a full feature of my conversation with @moseslo on my weekly newsletter: The Quest Digest

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thequestpod.substack.com/p/what-ceos-an…

I tell the whole Kiko and YC story here:

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