<p><pre><code>    Throughout the talk, the two YC staffers returned to the mantra of staying focused
    on building your company. Rather than thinking that a program like YC will be the
    ticket to success, Caldwell said the key is to start within. “If you want to start
    a company, the best way to be successful is to just start a company,” he said.
    Caldwell said companies at YC spend time focusing on what’s important, and avoiding
    the trap of doing things that are tangential to building a startup.
</code></pre>
Must be nice to have all that spare cash lying around to just focus on your company without an accelerator helping you avoid pitfalls.<p>I get the point of what they are trying to say. There are a lot of people who get an idea and then they think they need to be in an accelerator right away without having put any effort into the idea yet. But I think there are a lot of us out here who aren&#x27;t like that. And for us, none of this is actionable advice. This is all the sort of sound-bites that make sense <i>after</i> you&#x27;ve built a company, but to try to synthesize what to do based off of this is very-difficult-to-impossible.<p>Ship: ok, release early, release often. Until you&#x27;ve had some experience releasing projects and getting feedback on them (assuming they don&#x27;t get ignored completely), then you won&#x27;t know what the cutoff point should be. There is definitely a &quot;too early&quot;, if things don&#x27;t work right or only work for a small proportion (i.e. less than 95%) of people.<p>Grow: if people knew how to do that on their own, I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;d be looking for an accelerator. That&#x27;s the entire point.<p>B2B: I really don&#x27;t get the point of this paragraph at all. It sounds kind of patronizing, actually. &quot;Look at you little East Coasters, you&#x27;re so cute. Yeah, you can startup. You can do it, buddy!&quot;<p>I&#x27;m at a point in my project where I could continue to bootstrap as I&#x27;m doing and watch as my competitors pass me by because they got funding somewhere, somehow, even though they&#x27;ve started behind me, and now don&#x27;t have to worry about maintaining a day job, so they <i>can</i> focus 100% on their company. Or I can find investors who don&#x27;t just slough me off with &quot;you need <i>focus</i>, Daniel San&quot; and maybe make a run of it, especially if with that money I could hire an expert in marketing and sales, because dammit Jim, I&#x27;m an engineer, not the second coming of Leonardo Da Vinci.