Transitioning from Engineers to Founders -- How YC Shaped our journey

As some of you may know, Skyvern is actually our third attempt at building a startup, and we’ve made every mistake under the sun in our path to get to where we are. I’m happy to say that applying to YC was not one of them, as YC has given us 3 competitive edges we didn’t expect when we first got in. Want to know what they are? Scroll to the bottom to find out 🙂

Applying to YC was the easiest choice we ever made. We knew the odds of us getting in were slim, but it was a low-risk option to try and apply.

Our first startup idea, Ikonomos, was a product that helped software engineers onboard into companies. While we were building Ikonomos, we made all of the mistakes you could imagine

We didn’t realize we were approaching startups incorrectly until we started watching YC’s startup school videos, and YC’s how to start a startup stanford lecture series. We realized that startups could be approached with a pretty reasonable framework:

We also came across several blog posts Paul Graham wrote about starting a startup, which all help shine a light onto something we knew very little about: the mechanics of actually starting a company from nothing.

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