YC Co-Founder Matching Platform | Y Combinator

Running Gna! Business development
#1

@dachary profile Startup School - The Best Resource for Founders

#2

The profile is created and under review, it may take up to a week for the review to complete.

#3

@realaravinth you should have received an invitation. Did you?

#4

No, I didn’t receive an invitation yet. I have a Y Combinator account and am registered for startupschool.org but no invites.

1 Like
#5

It is being moderated so maybe you’ll get that once it is accepted.

1 Like
#6

The account is now active. I sent out a few requests and I must say it is a little confusing. The matching system is made in a way that does not help keep track of what was done. It looks like it is intentional so I’m at a loss to report here.

I had one reply which did not followup. And another with someone else and scheduled a videoconference so they can introduce themselves. I’ll propose transparency using an alias so their name is not published.

To be continued.

1 Like
#7

Here is a transcript of the conversation with person number 1:

one: Hey! I like what you’re doing but I’m not sure what kind of role I’d play? Seems more software for Engineers by Engineers? Prove me wrong.
loic: You would be the non engineer co-founder, of course :slight_smile: This is indeed about software tools for software developers. It is a quasi-monopoly of Microsoft who bought GitHub a few years ago for ~7 billions. And the goals it to make it redundant by replacing it with distributed software tools. We can do the technical part of it, and that’s what we’re doing. But we don’t know the first thing about business and communication, but you do. There is no way this project can succeed without someone like you. With you on board, it stands a fighting chance. It’s still quite an adventure but it might succeed.
one: That was pretty great. Do you want it to make money?
loic: Yes. With no money it can’t be sustainable. There is a fairly well established business model too: providing service on this software tools. I don’t know how familiar you are with the Free Software ecosystem. It is not very profitable compared to proprietary software, but it has the potential of changing society that proprietary software will never have.
one: Yes, I’m familiar-ish. My former co-founder and I looked at the space. So you build something and charge for the fees around setting up to use it. Let’s chat more. When are you available this week?
loic: What about August 11 or 12 or 13, 9am your time, assuming you are in [redacted]? I’m in [redacted] at the moment. We could use Jitsi Meet
one: 11th works at 9am. Can you send an email for invite? I’ll send a Zoom if you’re ok with that as I find that every new meeting program is 10 minutes lost.
loic: My email is loic@dachary.org However, I boycott zoom for ethical reasons, which I explained here Looking for a Free Software vegetarian developer position – Loïc Dachary In more than one way this project is similar to opening a vegetarian restaurant and food store decades ago, back when the trend was barely emerging.
one: Hey, This is like telling me that because you’re a vegetarian, I have to be a vegetarian. For me, I want to work with folks who have more empathy and flexibility, so this isn’t a fit for me.
loic: If I had accepted your invitation for a videoconference on Zoom to save 10 minutes of your time, I would have given up a lifelong commitment to only use Free Software. In that light your conclusion that I lack empathy and flexibility is surprising.

#8

Sent 15 contacts request today and was planning to add them to the topic but… I can no longer see the people I got in touch with. Maybe that’s because my contact quota is exhausted, worth checking next week.

Down to 350 possible matches.

#9

Friendly online discussion today with Startup School - The Best Resource for Founders and it continues in the chat.

#10

This pitch no longer matches Hostea business model.

2 minutes Hostea co-founder pitch:

  • online software development environment similar to GitHub
  • it is made of mature software components, not developped by Hostea
  • the easiest business model is to provide services to large organizations, universities or government agencies
  • all Hostea components are Free Software and there already are a number of services companies providing services, there is an proven product-market fit
  • marketing may be helped by providing shared hosting for individuals: this is what GitHub or GitLab do
  • it is not profitable but is a loss leader that helps selling services
  • Hostea is set to make GitHub obsolete and replace it with a thousands of smaller online services communicating with each other
  • this long term vision is part of a larger movement of federated services
  • it will allow Free Software developers to break free from GAFAM
  • this is actually my primary motivation: I boycott GitHub

#11

There are about 250 profiles left to browse. I won’t finish that because the results of the selection and contact attempts so far does not suggest it will yield good results. In a nutshell this is not the right place to look for a marketing person with a post-growth mindset. It is very oriented towards unicorn startups.