> Just before launch date, we stayed up the entire night fixing polish items. I remember going to sleep in a phone booth and waking up early in the morning to try to finish out some last edits while Michelle worked on the blog post<p>God damn, I'm old. That start up scene used to sound appealing to me but now makes me cringe.
John! Thanks for sharing your story. Anyone who ate as many Costco muffins as you, Doug, Max, Ted, and me during YC were destined for great things :) Congrats on the fundraise!
> For the next 6 months, I spent my extra hours before class (and during my least favorite classes) working on Rails bug reports... The core team members held every pull request to a very high standard, and I learned a lot about how to write good code.<p>My question is how he got anyone from rails core team to review his PR's! Maybe things were different then.
Hah what a similar story to my own - open source, Stripe then into YC. The energy at Stripe was unreal and I’m not sure I fully groked it until I started my own business.<p>> Everyone I talked to genuinely cared about their job and about me as a person, and everyone was high powered.<p>Simply walking around the office(s) was incredibly energizing for this reason. Fairly hard contrast with the last year of isolation and working alone! “Figure out what great looks like” is great advice, but I will say it does generate some imposter syndrome that I hadn’t felt before Stripe and YC, for (probably) better or for worse. Capitalizing on these experiences without getting caught up in comparison paralysis is a genuine skill that you seem to have mastered. Congratulations on the funding!
This stuff does make me uneasy, because it's what we all need, enough of a support system to be able to fail, but so few of us have it. When I failed I was homeless, and it still hurts. When I sock away a hundred thousand maybe I can have a journey.
Thanks for sharing! Sounds like you are having a lot of fun!<p>It seems like Zinc is highly profitable. Now that you are running Assembled - is Zinc on autopilot?<p>I am also curious to know..why you decided to go for VC funding for Assembled when Zinc could help bootstrap it.