My life as I went through Y Combinator

I’m writing this post because I’m frequently asked what going through Y Combinator (YC) is like.

First, going through YC is a Silicon Valley stamp of approval. I believe YC is one of the best investors in the world. If you can have them on your cap table, you should. I also know just how helpful the YC community is—even outside of startups, as I’ll highlight below.

Leading to an interview.

Most of 2018 was spent in the trough of sorrow/valley of death for Nebullam. We co-founders (Danen, Mahmoud, myself) had moved our salaries to $0, were coming to the tail end of paid pilots, and didn’t have clarity in business model or how to simplify engineering.

We were grasping at straws for investors. We had earlier supporters interested in writing smaller checks, but we needed to secure more $ from somewhere else.

The only consistent cadence in my week-to-week during that time was going through YC’s Startup School. Our lead mentor was Joao de Paula, Founder at Glio (S13 YC batch). Joao’s accountability sessions and wisdom shared throughout our Startup School group helped us to begin prioritizing what mattered and what didn’t matter. We were inspired by peers in our group who somehow could simplify problems down to language that everyone understood.

Near the end of Startup School, our group discussed who was going to apply to YC. After talking with Danen and Mahmoud, we applied. You have nothing to lose in applying.

The YC application forces you to write clearly. Its questions are well positioned for someone to understand what you’re building, where you’re at as a company right now, why you think it’s a big opportunity, and why you’re the right team to build it.

I’m proud of our application, and I believe that linking our Startup School metrics and notes helped us to land an interview.

We were invited to interview near the end of October 2018. YC flew the 3 of us out for our 10-minute interview. We’d find out within a day if we were part of the winter 2019 batch.

Resource: Y Combinator Startup School, open to everyone

Prepping for our YC interview.

Joao immediately started helping us prep for questions we’d likely be asked.

We founders agreed on a divide and conquer approach on questions. Danen would answer hardware, Mahmoud would answer software, and I’d take numbers and team questions.  

We completed somewhere near 50 mock interviews over the coming 2 weeks leading up to flying out to California. Most of those mock interviews were from YC alumni. Most YC alumni are helpful when directly asked about something.  

The week before the interview, we presented to Iowa Economic Development Authority for Demonstration Funding of $100k—in which we were approved. That snowballed into investors coming in for another $75k that same week.

In a 10-minute interview, we wanted to focus on our strengths.  

a.       Team. We had all stayed lean, and we felt that roles were clearly defined.

b.       Traction. While it wasn’t a lot, we did have revenue from renting our growing prototypes. Many people are afraid to charge for beta or prototypes, but there is a BIG difference in mindset when you’re pre and post revenue.

c.       Funding. We could go into that interview and let YC know we had raised $175k in the past week, with $100k of that capital being non-dilutive.

Resource: Question bot for YC interview prep

The interview.

We landed the day before our interview, with Mahmoud flying in from Atlanta (where he was wrapping up his PhD at Georgia Tech), and Danen and I flying in from Des Moines.

We stayed in the cheapest place we could find; about a 30-minute Uber ride away from YC HQ in Mountain View. It was a motel with paper thin walls, front desk staff that couldn’t answer any questions, and a double dead bolt on each door.

Into the evening and night, we received alerts from our growing equipment back in Iowa that there were problems. There are somehow ghosts in the machine that know exactly when you’ll be gone. Thankfully other team members helped fix the problems, so we could go back to worrying about and focusing on the interview.

The next day, we arrived at YC HQ, to hundreds of other founders standing outside. Everyone was rehearsing and anxiously awaiting their 600 seconds of opportunity.

I remember my nervous energy and how it felt similar to big pitch competitions with KinoSol a couple years prior. Had I remembered all my lines? All the numbers? Which questions would come out of left field?

YC HQ—lined with past batch photos, bright orange walls, and well known guests attending dinners—had its own form of raw energy.

We were called into a small room to meet the YC partners who would be interviewing us.

And then, the questions started.

While the beginning dozen questions we were prepared for, most of the interview was fixated on the team. Were we the right 3 co-founders? Why would Mahmoud still finish up his PhD instead of just dropping out to focus full-time?

Reflecting as I write this post 4 years later, I can clearly see how YC partners have a superpower in seeing the future—after all, that’s what they’re placing bets on in every batch.

Mahmoud would go onto leave Nebullam about a year later, after he finished his PhD.

As we left the interview room and immediately power walked to a spot away from people, I felt an adrenaline dump like how most boxers are after their first round of a bout. I was instantly out of energy and deflated. I felt like we had failed the interview.

We received follow up questions over the next day. But when group partner Eric Migicovsky called me to let me know we had made it in, confidence leveled up and we felt overwhelmed with relief. First Iowa company to be accepted. Finally, a breakthrough in Silicon Valley after 3 previous trips yielding 0 traction. Some validity to how we think about the indoor farming space.

I was instantly excited to meet fellow batchmates. To be inspired by what they were building. And to witness how startups were built outside of the Midwest.

Go go Deel, fellow Winter 2019 batchmate and inspiration, now valued at $12 billion.

The batch (Winter 2019).

This is usually the part of a story where everything works out, and we could say that YC was the fuel before our rocket ship took off. But life doesn’t happen for you, it happens to you.

As we prepped to live in California for 3 months and figured out how that would work for the other team members, we realized Mahmoud didn’t want to be in California the entire time. It was agreed that he’d fly in for about 1/3 the time. Then be remote (like he already was, from Atlanta). Danen had hardware to continue building. It didn’t make sense on paper for him to be there the entire time either. It did make sense for me to be there. I was also the one who went through Startup School and wanted the entire Silicon Valley experience.

As the batch kicked off, we were all there for a weeklong stretch. Then Mahmoud and Danen alternated until the week before Demo Day.  

Reflecting as I write this post almost 4 years later, I missed the importance of having the founders together, experiencing YC together. Being remote and in different time zones, while building a hardware/software/living organism company, didn’t work for us. Today, we are a remote last company.

Demo Day and the day after.

Demo Day was an absolute blur. 1,000+ investors. San Francisco. 2 minutes on stage. As we started lining up investors for meetings post Demo Day, our plan was to show them our newest growing units via Zoom, or to welcome them to Iowa for tours. The morning after Demo Day, we had a fire in our space back in Iowa, where everything we he had sprinted toward building during the batch, was ruined. Thankfully, floods and fires haven’t stopped us.

Shoutout to Michael Seibel for giving us our one liner shortly before Demo Day.

My personal life during the batch.

I’ve been self-employed all but a few years of my life. My previous career in poker increased my tolerance of risk to its max—and an understanding of risk. I appreciate the hustle and grind. So, you’d think I would have been in a perfect state of mind during the batch. But…

• My dad was diagnosed with cancer and was going through chemo and radiation treatments at Mayo Clinic, where he and my mom stayed for almost 2 months. My dad is superman to me. I had never seen him cry. I had never heard him yell or raise his voice. He is my perfect example of a stoic. But he was in pain, and my mom’s strength was tested daily, as she was by his side for every moment

• Mikayla and my relationship was on the brink of ending. She was running KinoSol and had overlapping trips to Africa during the batch. I had a hard time watching the company grow in a different direction from when I was in the day-to-day of it. We grew unappreciative of our little downtime together

• One of our investors didn’t support us transitioning from Iowa LLC to Delaware Corp. He wouldn’t initially budge, so my evenings during the beginning of the batch were spent negotiating and holding back moments of rage against he and his attorney

• I wasn’t in the Iowa State University boxing gym, where I was a volunteer assistant coach a couple evenings each week. Being surrounded by athletes who are in peak condition for the world’s oldest martial art is inspirational. Working with those athletes is humbling. Without boxing, I was missing an outlet to destress

• I was fresh off my first ultra marathon, where I had literally finished last place (only ahead of those who did not finish). I hadn’t yet realized that running for more than 26.2 miles on trails required A LOT of mileage during training, and A LOT of dialing in my diet. My mileage and running around new neighborhoods should have been exciting while in California, but I instead let the unfamiliarity cut my runs in half. Without running, I was missing an outlet to destress

As all these stresses compounded, I felt unable to reach out to anyone—Danen and Mahmoud were often thousands of miles away, and Mikayla was even further away and couldn’t be reached by phone. I didn’t want to bother my parents with my problems, because theirs were bigger.

And then, one of the last office hours of the batch happened. I met with our group partner, Eric. He was wearing a shirt with a plane on it. It looked like one my dad had owned. In that moment, I asked if YC had resources on mental health. He had me connect with Amy Buechler, YC team member and founder coach. Amy pointed me to resources in the YC User Manual, as well as therapy options.

That led me to finding an awesome therapist, a founder coach, and a running coach. They’ve been the best investments I’ve ever made in my life. It’s never too late to find a coach.

My life since the batch.

Nebullam (now DBA Clayton Farms) pivoted entirely when the pandemic hit.

Our team today is stronger than ever—and entirely different from the team we went through YC with.

Last year we grew by 500%. This year we’ll have grown another 300%.

I’ve reviewed a few dozen YC applications and have watched a handful of friends make it into YC.

I volunteer coach for Iowa State University boxing one evening per week.

Tomorrow, I go after a world record for longest trail race (50 miles) completed while wearing Tesla short shorts.

Mikayla and I hosted my mom and dad for Thanksgiving at our house yesterday.

With grit and gratitude,

Clayton