Surge Vs YCombinator

I hope I don't get into trouble after writing this personal review.

So this review is around my experience with YC (www.ycombinator.com) and Surge(www.surgeahead.com) which is a Sequoia program.

My name is Jitendra chouksey and I founded Fittr back in 2016, accidentally on the back of a health and fitness community on Facebook. Since 2016, we've been profitable and had done a cumulative business of more than 100 Cr INR by FY 2020. Bootstrapped. Organically.

We've been talking to investors since a long time and let me tell you that raising funds in India is not easy. My cofounder reached out to some of the large investors as early as march 2016 at a time when we were growing exponentially. Investors waste a lot of time, sometimes they keep coming back to you again and again just to snoop on your data which we learnt over a period of time and started avoiding talking to investors overly and focussed on growing organically. Am glad that we did that because despite no funding we managed to create something unique. By September 2018, we started talking to some investors who even gave us the term sheet but we rejected that later on because of some philosophical and principle differences. We had also rejected a large acquisition offer from a big health and fitness company. In November 2019, one of my colleagues casually applied to YC on their website. We filled up the form and cleared the first round. The second round was an in person interview in Bangalore where I spoke to Tracy Young about Fittr. I think in about 2 days time, I got an email from YC team for more details on our MIS. We sent them the details immediately. After a few more days, I got a call from Tracy and we were in. We were selected to YC. We were amongst the very few Indian startups that had made it to YC. Once the news broke, we received dozens of investor emails, some willing to offer term sheets immediately. Yep, that's the power and reputation of YC. Around the same time we were also contacted by Surge team and they asked us to apply to their program as well.

Unlike YC, getting into Surge wasn't an easy process. There were at-least 3-4 rounds of meetings and discussions and negotiations. Numerous data exchanges, am glad my cofounder Sonal was there. If it was upto me, i'd have quit half way through the process.

While the Surge process was still undergoing, I went to US to YC, Bay Area on 1st of Jan 2020. It was a new experience. We were introduced to YC, the history, the mentors, everything seemed pretty exciting. I got a chance to listen to Brain, Joe and Nathan from AirBnB, it was a really good experience. We were assigned in groups and we were assigned mentors. We were supposed to go to classes twice a week. We also had group updates and group meetings with mentors. Pretty standard process. I remember sitting in one of the sessions and being told that community should not be the focus. Somehow no matter how much I tried, I could not explain my idea to the group mentors. Crazy isn't it? When you have a 100,000+ paying customers and you still can't explain what you do to someone. We went through more and more such sessions, meetings, more sessions, more meetings and I started to get a sense of what was happening. We were being prepared to pitch and impress investors for the big day. You see, YC doesn't take equity in your company. They issue a safe of 7% for a 100,000$. The safe converts only and only if you raise subsequent funding. So from their perspective as an investor, their focus was on making sure that more and more number of founders end up raising funds and they had a template for that. Areas, sectors, what investors like, what they don't like, they'd seen it all and they knew it all. They had a playbook and we were supposed to implement from their playbook. There were days when we were lined up one after the other going on the podium and pitching in front of other 500 odd founders and the judges/mentors. It was crazy. I'd be honest, I found it pretty bizarre and stupid. The initial hype started dying and the more I spoke to the guys at YC, the more I realised that it was a mistake. By week-3, I was suffocating. Back home, we already had a term sheet from Surge. Now the question was, would I give up YC for Surge? YC, the mecca for founders? I've made some pretty bold decisions in the past, but this wasn't like any of them. I turned to some of my mentors. They told me to go by my gut. It was around 3rd week and I had decided that I can longer tolerate YC. I had to go back to India and even if we don't make it through Surge due diligence, we'd figure something but definitely YC wasn't the right place for me. Once I quit, I got a call from Michael Seibel. he asked me about my decision and I poured my heart out. We both agreed that there's a lot of scope of improvement in YC. Now, without getting into the further discussion of why YC can be a dangerous choice for some, let me tell you some of the benefits of YC.

• Access to high quality network
• Several hundred thousand dollars worth of deals, the best ones being 100,000$ worth of AWS and Google credits
• !00,000$ no strings attached
• Immediate limelight.
• Tonnes of free resources

So you see, YC isn't half as bad for someone who wasn't in my position in-fact I'd say it has a much better appeal and is still far better than working directly with some VCs in India.

Luckily, when I came back, we were half way through the Surge due diligence. We had our fingers crossed. I was relieved that I had quit YC and focussed back on business. January usually is a good month for fitness industry. We broke our past records and focussed back on business. Finally the Surge due diligence finished and there were no reds. We were relieved. A few weeks later, the money was wired. Am not going into the details of the funding as it's confidential but surge invests between 1.5-2 million USD. Since I never completed YC, we didn't really have any trouble and our cap table was also pretty unambiguous. Legalities weren't an issue either. The whole process was without any issues and Surge had an amazing legal team to help us out. We also hired a legal firm, a childhood friend of Sonal to ensure that there were no hidden issues. I was pleasantly surprised when our legal team told us that they'd never seen such a founder friendly agreement. I 100% agree with them. I've received term sheets before. They didn't look anything like Surge. The detailed agreements were charted and we were finally in. The format was unlike YC, it felt more cozy. Apart from everything that YC offered, Surge had much more to offer in terms of access, free credits, easy access to hiring, network and so on. We actually hired 10 people with the help of Surge in a record time. Not just that, all 15 teams had a network of people from legal to PR, to hiring to social media to tech and they were all just message away. There were no fixed hours. People were there. I'll be honest, I didn't have very high regards for the investment community in India, it sucks. Most VCs are very narrow-minded and egoistic bunch of people however when I met people from Surge, the perspective changed. Now I know that there's good and bad everywhere.

It's been 4 months, Surge informally ended yesterday and we have an upsurge round in September. But nobody actually bothered us about anything. They only supported in everything we were doing. And they covered this in their every single mentoring session. They said that more than anything it's the founders that make or break a company. How can you not like people who understand this simplest thing and then live it? Most people say it, I'd say Surge lives it. Philosophy, Intent, community focus, there was hardly a mentoring session where these things were not focussed on. Exactly the things I keep telling everyone. I think it all boils down to basics and Surge team knows this much better than anyone else and that's why Sequoia is at the top. While YC was all about impressing the investors, Surge was all about focussing on the business and focussing on the customers. I learnt a lot from Surge would be an understatement. It was more of a self-reflection. Our business is stronger, our metrics have improved, our understanding of our customers have improved and we're all set to become an enduring company- something that Surge invests in.

Finally, if you're contemplating YC or Surge, don't blink. Surge is 1000x better than YC if not more. However like I mentioned above, it's not as easy to get into Surge as it is to get into YC. YC would probably invest in any company that's profitable and growing. Surge invests in companies that solve problems, they invest in the future, most importantly they invest in founders. So for them profitability is not as big a metric as founders, future and sustainability. I hope this article helps! If you have any further questions, please post them in comment section and I'll try and answer.

To apply to YC, you can visit https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

To apply to Surge, visit https://www.surgeahead.com/apply/

Best of luck!

Cheers,