Why YC? We asked 50 founders why they applied to Y Combinator

We applied to YC for the mentorship and support. Mentors. The mentorship. Top notch advice. Advisers who have you back. Accountability and advice. I mean, we wanted to get roasted by Siebel and the other group partners.

I think, like, talking to friends who did the previous batches, that direct honest feedback and being able to, you know, quickly iterate on your business very fast in that short three month period was very helpful for them, and we wanted to go through that same level of pain. So here we are. I was really excited to work with the partners. You know, it's kind of rare that a VC firm actually.

has partners that have gone through building a company. The best people to learn from are the people who've done it before and who've made all the mistakes. We knew some people who had gone through the experience and.

really just spoke about the community and kind of the support and and resources that are provided in this environment. I saw YC as a great way to have a community of like minded people. Being part of this network and this community. A great community. The community. Community.

You know, starting a company is hard. It's a long, arduous road that very few people traverse on and actually have the ability to persist. The amount of people that you find that can relate to your problems is very little now. Like, my friends now don't really relate. So just having that network of people that actually really understand what you're going through is super helpful.

We'd obviously followed Y Combinator and like had looked up to it for several years. I've been reading hacker news for a while. I've been kind of reading Paul Graham essays since I was like 14. Why did you apply to YC? Mostly because of the reputation. The track record and reputation. The name, the recognition,.

the power that comes with the YC network. I think as two female founders launching in construction and fintech,.

we needed all of the support and kind of rah rah around us that we could get. I think the brand as well. Right? I think for us, we wanna hire the best people in the world and we know the best people in the world wanna work for YC companies. Yeah. Being one hubs. It gave us the right amount of money, the right amount of time, a fresh start, three month time box target with demo day at the end.

So it's it's just setting us up perfectly. In this environment where funding is becoming challenging, sort of the validation that YC brings is very important, especially for founders in emerging markets where funding is not as readily available as it would be in San Francisco, for example.

We're also not in the Bay Area, we thought there'd be a huge advantage building up network, meeting some folks out here, and learning from some of the group partners that are here. So we are building Gusto for Middle East and North Africa. There's very few SaaS companies. It's very nascent out there, and tech is also very nascent.

NYC has funded some of the best and brightest minds out here, and we want to learn from that community and the the network that came before us. I've always known of of YC as just a fantastic place to build something and kind of unparalleled in the world of startups.