Why do people say they got funded as if that's it.
Where did the OP say or imply this? In fact he even says this is only the beginning of the journey.
FWIW, I took his post as an inspirational thing. The demographic of YC applicants seems to skew towards younger people, sometimes with a bit too much pg-love. Getting rejected by your "idol" can be very discouraging, especially to an applicant who may not have gone through such a rejection before (eg: they've been mostly accepted to the schools and colleges of their choice) and/or has not had a lot of other career experience so their "one big dream" was just seemingly crushed.
IMO, I think it would be really cool for pg to create a roster list someplace of YC rejects that got alternate sources of funding and/or went to other ventures deemed successful. It could help some of the rejected applicants understand that YC is one option, not the option.
Yeah maybe I'm being harsh as usual. If I got funding I'd start panicking and thinking to myself "shit now I have to make them a return"... But it often feels like announcements of funding are more like "yay we have cash! Lets buy an office, some go-karts, etc"
My personal experience has been that there's only one group you need to impress - your users/customers. If no one else believes in you so what?
Likewise, if you manage to get funding (convince one person you might have future success), but have no users/customers, it's a bit "meh".
Being rejected from X but accepted at Y still doesn't demonstrate if the idea/person behind it/etc will be successful or not.
Agreed. Getting funded IS being profitable for some startups. It is as profitable as some startups will ever get, relative to the financial position of the founders prior to funding. And that's fine. Not all startups will be a success.
I think funding becomes the thing to do moreso than it becomes the right business decision. I'm more in the bootstrapping camp which is what I'm doing with my startup.
A few years ago I was involved in a start up in the medical domain (software, not hardware). My cofounders and I got "funded" by winning business school competitions. Although the amounts are not huge, getting funded was big help for 2 main reasons. First, it's nice to know that you're not the only one who believes in the idea. It, in a way, gives you legitimacy and the power (mentally) to move forward. Second, money is a great motivator because you now have to answer to someone. Anybody giving you money will want to know what you did with it. Some you really need to spend it wisely and make progress.
Fair questions.
A bit of a background first. My co-founders were: an MBA student with a healthcare concentration (Wharton), an MD/PhD student (Columbia), and me, the techie (grad student Columbia). Unfortunately for the start-up (and fortunately for my co-founders), they graduated and moved to Denver (to work at a healthcare company) and San-Francisco (residency), respectively. Although I wanted to continue working on things, with 66% of the founding team away and unwilling to commit to putting in the time, the project is bound to fail. Now, one may argue that I should have continued on my own, which is a fair point to make. However, what I've learned about healthcare is that it's a VERY tough market. It is not because of there exists some crazy technological challenge that the tech world has never seen before, rather because of the people in the industry and the industry's regulations. Physicians and institutions are VERY suspicious of anyone even remotely trying to enter their "domain," and they would thwart any attempt. Our intention was to help them with their workflow, so they could see more patients and thus make more money. When you approach MDs, for the most part, they fear that you may try to replace them (although that was not our intention). It follows with immediate resistance. Also, if you were to get into this domain, you should know that you can't just put up a website in 4 hours and start testing (Snowcolypse!! :-) ). Medicine is so "academic" that people want to run clinical trials, etc. In short, there's a lot of bureaucracy.
Interestingly, I now lead the implementation of the clinical data warehouse at a major medical institution in the US (though I was always a programmer, not a DB or BI guy. Sortta fell into this position). The other week I spoke to the director of the stroke center at a medical institute in Brooklyn NY. A 50-something year old guy, one of the only 1200 stroke experts in the US. Super nice guy, super smart (taught himself python and Fortran to have a common language with the technies and to know when they're trying to pull his leg). He's very much into technology and its applications within medicine (he's trying to push telemedicine to strokes, because every second counts). As he put it, "the problem with healthcare is that the stakeholders think that this is the most complicated domain in the world. People are so arrogant to think nobody has tackled these technological problems before." They, therefore, push off any suggestion for improvement (what worked for Pfizer, BMW, or Goldman Sachs, who have millions of transactions a second, will not work for us!) Same sentiment exists at my current employer.
It is a milestone, a worthy and notable achievement. I don't see that this post inferred otherwise. Actually, ycreject says: "Raising funding is only the beginning of this journey..."
I'm not convinced ability to get funded matches with likelihood of profitability.