I’m a fan of this leaderboard

Trying someone’s product and giving feedback is probably one of the absolute most impactful things you can do.

I try to do this as often as I can even if they don’t ask.

Awesome. We love #taiwan. Joseph and I visited and worked from Taipei for a week last winter. We got to meet fellow Pioneer Harrison Lo in Tamsui as well! Too bad with coronavirus I think it'd be hard to visit again.

https://i.imgur.com/PttpI8x.jpg

A few reasons:
• Office hours and preparing for the livestream helped us hone our messaging
• On the application they ask about "previous accelerators" you've done and I think having Pioneer listed was a plus
• Daniel did a review of our YC application and a mock interview for us

The community and events are cool. I think it was helpful in getting into YC. Looking forward to meeting everyone in person after things go back to normal.

But it's just a milestone (hopefully one of many). There's no silver bullet that is going to magically make you successful. You have to put in the work and grind it out trying to get better one step at a time (usually over the course of many years). That motivation comes from inside of you (not from winning a contest, doing an accelerator, or raising funding).

Seemed like most companies in our batch didn’t have much (if any) revenue and some hadn’t even launched yet.

YC is looking for reasons they should bet on you being an exceptional outlier.

One way to show that is by having a lot of traction on your current company.

But there are other ways to set yourself apart as well (Eg maybe you were an early employee at Stripe, or maybe you previously founded a successful company, or maybe you graduated top of your class at Harvard Business School).

We're using Sidekick and it's pretty great. https://sidekick.video

Most investors won't give it much weight (if any) at this stage.

No, unfortunately not (or at least not yet).

Right now your options for deployment are 1) pay lots of money to have GPUs running and waiting even when you're not using them, 2) incur extreme latency booting up the instances when needed (and shutting them down when not), or 3) settling for CPU-based inference.

My last company used a (closed) Facebook Group to great effect.

It’s important to make it more about them than you. The vast majority of conversations will be about things completely unrelated to your brand and that’s Ok.