Always makes me tingle to think back about this. A friend and I had submitted for the very first batch — we had a working prototype built using Mozilla XUL of a “FileMaker for the web” (YC later funded something similar-ish — today, the closest would be AirTable..?). We had even wired the server to send us an SMS whenever someone opened the page (it probably emailed <phonenumber>@<carrier>, there was no Twilio back then).

The first YC form had a question about “do you have a working demo (bonus points if you do)”. We were confident the demo would be at least checked out.

You know where this is going. We didn’t get in, and never received any SMS. Years later, I saw PG at an event and asked him about it — he said that somebody other than him might have reviewed our application and regretted that this happened. That may have been a polite way of saying that we weren’t ready or the idea wasn’t good enough — who knows.

All good in the end, but definitely a “what if” moment that I’ve kept from back then...! :)