Death of a Hacker (From Hacker to Developer)

On 16 April, I got an e-mail from Kirsty Nathoo of YC that my application is rejected. I still remember it was 5:35 Pm and I was in the bus. I came to know about YC last Spring and ever since then getting into YC had become my dream. I did so many side projects/freelancing that I had never done in my four years of Undergrad cause I was preparing myself. After my last summer internship, I realized that instead of being a developer my traits were more aligned to be a hacker. I applied to YC last year. My application was very amateur. I was bound to get rejected. I never left hacking. I was still at school getting my M.S but after Spring of last year I took my credits in such a way that in my last semester I could do just what I wanted to, hacking, without any coursework.

Few weeks ago, precisely three weeks from the YC application deadline, I got this idea. It is something that has never happened before and it was B2B. I had nothing to show off at that time but a hope that the idea may get me in for an YC interview at least. I met my best friend since years and now co-founder and we discussed over the idea. He is a hacker but the kind of guy I guess today’s companies would die for. He has no Facebook or LinkedIn profile and both of us sleep only 5-6 hours every day.  He is a *nginx and AWS ninja. We have had countless 17 hour days and brainstorming sessions all over Skype, Google Hangouts and ScreenHero because he is in the Bay area and I am in LA. In two weeks we came to know why the idea was difficult and why no one was into it. We also realized that the customer touch points of our idea were dynamic and we would have to strategically order them to get faster users. We developed our model on AWS, decided on the backend, and bootstrapped a part of it too. YC was our hope but we failed.

I had mixed feelings about my application. I was not sure about the end result but I there was hope.  It was very important for us to get through because we are international students. We want to hack and if we would not get in this time then we would be working at some Software development firm (E-verified) waiting for our Visas. It took me a while after the rejection. Start-up is what I want to do because I think that is in our blood. I will work on this idea but I am really unsure on what our next steps would be. I guess we would have to at some point of time become developers again.