February 2020 – Positive Tenacity

Below is a post I wrote in August 2019 within Y Combinator community (which luckily received 300+ upvotes 🙇‍♂️). Now that I get a pretty steady stream of inquiries about fundraising and accelerator/demo days, I thought it might be helpful to repost here in public format. Hope it brings hope to a few.

Hi S19 founders,

Now that the demo day has officially begun, I just want to share our experience at SendBird (W16), so that perhaps some of you guys can relate.

I’ll admit upfront: We were not the hot company of the demo day. No where near. We didn’t get the overly enthusiastic emails from investors piling up in our inbox.

I thought we were doing okay during the batch, but on the demo day, the ones that got the most amount of ‘likes’ and ‘quickest raises’ were not necessarily the ones we thought did the best during the batch. Some companies raised a lot of money almost on the day of the demo day, while most of us felt like we were punched in our stomach, grasping for air.

One of the macro trends we’re seeing in the software industry today is the rise of the API economy. API (Application Programming Interface) allows implementation, operation, and maintenance to become simpler by providing a set of input rules to the developers outside of the API software and giving them functionalities and processed results in return.

As discussed in the management framework #2 — abstraction and reduction — API is analogous to hiring a good management layer in a company, to provide more leverage to the developer allowing productivity gain through an abstraction layer of software. This abstraction stage is a critical phase in any industry to grow exponentially, as in any complex-enough industry, building all of the value chain end-to-end becomes infeasible and the trade-off between control and speed/quality/resource gets exponentially larger.

Month: February 2020

It’s okay to be not liked on demo day.

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