1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me try to unpack what you said. COVID has been a gamechanger. Until COVID, you wanted people to come and be in Silicon Valley for the three-month program. What is your current perspective on geography? Can they be from anywhere?

Geoff Ralston: It is certainly true that the pandemic left us with few choices. The end of winter 2020 batch was entirely virtual. Our Demo Day had to be entirely virtual. It was impossible, in 2020, to bring a whole bunch of folks together. Our summer 2020 batch was entirely virtual. We completely rebuilt our summer 2020 Demo Day as an entirely virtual program. That’s also true for the next batches.

Our perspective on the future is changeable. We’re not sure. We’re trying to figure out what 2022 will look like whether there will be an in-person component. We’ve certainly learned a lot about how effective we can be as a virtual accelerator. I won’t commit to anything in particular for 2022, because I don’t know what that year will look like. As things settle down in the post-pandemic world, we’ll evolve YC again. I don’t expect it’ll be exactly like it was before the pandemic. 

Sramana Mitra: In the meantime, the investors are also investing all over the world.

Geoff Ralston: One of the surprising things about the pandemic was the investors’ willingness to invest over Zoom. I remember this like it was yesterday. We got together and said, “Our batch can no longer meet together. It’s not safe. We’re not going to be able to have a Demo Day.”

We wondered if investors will just stop investing. Is the world just completely shutting down? Investors recognized this as an extraordinary opportunity for the acceleration of the digital world. Investors opened up their wallets to meet and invest virtually.

Sramana Mitra: The other wonderful thing that happened is people are much more willing to do deals just over a Zoom call. 

Geoff Ralston: For startups everywhere, there are enormous efficiencies to be gained from not commuting. The reality is, I can do this meeting with you and then immediately go to another meeting. That other meeting could be virtually. I could be in India, France, or on the East Coast of US. and I could it instantly. If I you are starting a virtual startup and deciding not to be in a room together, there is a loss. If I were starting a startup tomorrow, I would rent a room together. That’s just me. Maybe I’m old-fashioned.

There are some amazing YC startups that have never been in person and have built incredible companies that way. Still, there is something to being in contact with a real human being. Finding the right happy medium will be the essence of effective ways of operating moving forward.

Sramana Mitra: We’ve built 1Mby1M as a virtual accelerator and as a virtual company. We have people who have been working with us for a decade and we have never met. We are very close. It’s a small team. We have been seeing this trend for a while, and COVID has accelerated this tremendously – bootstrapping with a paycheck. We see bootstrapping entrepreneurs getting quite far with revenues, customers, and even break even without quitting their jobs. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator
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