That was our pitch for Kimono Labs at YC demo day in Winter 2014. With demo day coming up this weekend, I wanted to reflect on what I learned from YC, 10 years on and another company in. The 7 minute espresso rule. Our first meeting with Sam Altman lasted just seven minutes. The batch hadn’t even officially started yet and my cofounder Ryan and I drove down from Mountain View to the tiny SF YC outpost to meet him. Sam was making an espresso when we walked in. He opened with – “have you launched”? We said no, too many bugs. Our product, kimono, made it easy to just point and click to build a web scraper. Our promise was to get you an API in 60 seconds, without writing a single line of code. But, the web is vast, and websites are very different. We needed it to work on a large enough spectrum of sites so that our first users would have a good experience. It worked on just a handful of sites at the time. Sam pushed us to make sure we were launched in less than 2 weeks. We debated, highlighting the complexity of the bugs and the limits of underlying headless browsing technology. The espresso finished brewing, he picked it up, looked at us and said, “well, you better get going then and fix those bugs”. We left, launched within those next two weeks and learned one of the most important lessons that day - speed matters. Ship something you’re embarrassed by.
I remember using it in those early days on a World Cup website at the time! Brings me back