| To jump in for a second as the OP. What is also interesting about me is that I do not need a single dime from YC. I value their input enough that I would easily give 7% for a $1 investment. Part of being where I am is that I have secured myself financially to the extent that my thinking about YC as an option wasn't at all related to startup money. I don't need it. I own a quarter million dollar industrial-grade shop perfectly capable of manufacturing just about anything I need. What I can't manufacture directly I can get made through myriad industry relationships for almost nothing. The primary value I saw in trying to enter YC was about driving the inflection point through a larger investment after self-funding everything up to and including getting product in front of prospective customers, booking some sales and demonstrating traction. At that point, I wanted to have both the financial horsepower and network available to push hard on the accelerator. My prior experience taught me that being starved of cash is the single most difficult hurdle to jump over. I put over $300K of my own money into my last serious startup. That money went a long way because I was able to wear so many hats (and I was working from my garage). The problem surfaced when I had to grow. I was starved for cash. It was as twice as painful as anyone could possibly imagined. The slope of your growth curve, at some point, becomes a function of financial horsepower. I mortgaged my home and pulled out another $250K. That helped, but it wasn't enough. Hardware is hard for a reason. You need cash, lots of it. The inflection point started to appear in 2008, it took an indescribably effort and unimaginable personal sacrifice to get there from starting in my garage in 2001. At the peak I closed a five million dollar sale that was going to provide enough money to truly put the business on the map and displace multi-billion dollar market-leader companies from the segment we were in. And then the economic implosion happened. Our five million dollar client defaulted on the contract. The company went from having an acquisition offer to the tune of tens of millions dollars on the table to being as close to bankruptcy as you can get by mid 2009. I almost closed another multi-million dollar sale that would have saved the business in 2010. In the end, the tail end of the financial crisis ended-up imploding that potential sale, and that was the end of it. Life can be an interesting ride for entrepreneurs. |