(Part of the One Month to the 1% series of posts)

You might be wondering what happened to my one-month-to-the-1% project that I first mentioned three weeks ago.  Been pretty quiet since then, right?

Well, the reason wasn’t that I had given up.  Rather, Tyler and I found out that we had been invited to interview with Y Combinator in Silicon Valley.  For those unfamiliar with YC, it’s basically the Harvard of the startup incubator world (even though it’s arguably not an incubator).  Companies like Reddit, Dropbox, and Airbnb have all come out of it.

Like Harvard, YC is highly selective.  Exact numbers are not published, but consensus seems to be that less than 3% of applicants are accepted.  For comparison, this year Harvard took 5.9% of its undergraduate applicants.

Thus, Tyler and I were thrilled to have our venture make the first cut: YC would fly us to California to interview, meaning we had beat out enough people to have about a 20% chance of making it in.

Frame grab from our YC application video

Everything else took a back seat to preparing for the interview.  I rationalized this because the expected value of getting funded was significantly higher than my goal.

Late last week, we had our interview in Mountain View, CA.  It was a good experience, but unfortunately, we did not get accepted.

Tyler and I remain convinced that we’ve identified a great market opportunity, and we have the technical skills to craft a product to address it, so we will be pushing forward anyway.

As for my other project?  Well, the month isn’t over yet: I turn 30 one week from today.