Why YC Companies Win

Agent Relay has been in YC for a week and a half. It already feels like two months, and we have moved the company further in that stretch than we did in the months before it.

Part of that is simple: my co-founder and I are usually remote. Being in the same room has created some magical moments. But that’s not the whole story.

A championship team#

YC recreates a feeling I only know from championship teams: my high school basketball team, and Cornell’s Ivy League titles in 2008 and 2009. When people trust each other, share ideas freely, and push toward one thing with complete focus, something rare happens. YC has built that environment deliberately.

It has decades of knowledge from thousands of companies, nearly unlimited access to people and companies, and hundreds of ambitious teams working alongside each other toward the same goal: “make something people want.”

Every founder I’ve met is incredibly bright, motivated, and ambitious. And when you know everyone around you is pushing with the same intensity, you push harder too. In high school basketball practice, seeing my co-founder sprint to the finish made me dig deeper and sprint a little harder. Seeing a batch mate land another customer or make a cool discovery does the same thing now.

Customers who push you#

I felt another part of this when I was the first engineer hired at Nango. Feedback from our earliest customers exposed holes we never would have found ourselves and helped make the product nearly 10x better. Now companies in our YC batch are using Agent Relay, and their feedback has already moved both the product and the way we think about it in leaps and bounds. Using their products gives us inspiration as well, pushing us to build a truly delightful experience for our users.

A partner in your corner#

Each YC company also gets a partner they work with closely. Ours is incredible. Every conversation leaves me fired up. He takes our problems, digs into them with us, and pushes us to look at them from angles we wouldn’t have reached on our own. His insights often seem obvious in retrospect, which is usually the sign of a great insight.

Feeling it firsthand#

I had worked at two YC companies before, so I knew something special was going on. Going through it as a founder hits different. You don’t just hear about the special sauce. You feel it.

The sacrifices my co-founder and I, and our wives and families, made to be here are worth it for one reason: YC does not just give you advice. It puts you on a championship team and tells you to sprint.

Once you have felt that, it is hard to work any other way.