For many founders, Y Combinator is a coveted milestone on the entrepreneurial road. As of January 2021, the accelerator has helped create 60,000 jobs, has 125 companies valued over $150 million, and has facilitated top exits totaling more than $300 billion. Past alumni include Airbnb, DoorDash and Coinbase – all of which are now publicly traded.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Getting into Y Combinator is notoriously difficult, with acceptance rates below 5 percent. But the real story is not about YC itself. It is about what the journey teaches you about building something that works at scale.
The same lessons that helped Waydev finally get accepted are the lessons that engineering leaders use every day to build predictable, healthy, high performing engineering organizations.
When I applied to YC thirteen times, I did not realize it at the time, but I was learning the core principles that later shaped Waydev’s engineering intelligence approach. These are the lessons that matter most for you, the VP of Engineering who is under pressure to deliver faster, adopt AI responsibly, and create clarity inside complex systems.
How YC taught me what every VP of Engineering already knows.
Early in my YC attempts, I focused on standing out. I believed the clever angle or the memorable story would help. It never did. One strange interaction with Paul Graham taught me this clearly, and for weeks I thought I had ruined my chances forever.
Years later I realized that YC cared about one thing.
Does the product deliver real value.
Engineering leaders live through the same filter inside their organizations. Every initiative, every AI rollout, and every transformation gets boiled down to a simple question.
Is this improving delivery, predictability, or business outcomes.
This is the foundation of engineering intelligence. Vanity metrics do not matter. Pretty dashboards do not matter. What matters is clarity around throughput, bottlenecks, predictability, and team health.
YC did not care about my story. Your CEO does not care about charts.
Everyone cares about value.
Why finding a co-founder mirrors building a balanced engineering organization.
For years I applied to YC with ideas that were not ready. It was not until 2016 that I found the vision for Waydev, and even then the idea was incomplete without a co-founder. My co-founders provided perspective, experience, and a way to challenge assumptions I did not even realize I was making.
Engineering teams face the same challenge.
The biggest failures happen because of blind spots.
Blind spots like:
• focusing on output while ignoring quality
• chasing speed without understanding predictability
• scaling teams without scaling processes
• adopting AI without visibility into where it actually helps
Engineering intelligence is the equivalent of a co-founder for your organization. It gives you an unbiased lens into what is really happening across systems, teams, and projects.
You cannot improve what you cannot see.
You cannot see what your current tools do not measure.
YC forced me to expand my perspective.
Engineering intelligence helps leaders do the same for their teams.
What YC alumni taught me about the power of aggregated knowledge.
Before we were accepted into YC, I reached out to hundreds of alumni. Their feedback shaped every iteration of our application. Their experience saved us from years of trial and error.
Engineering leaders attempt to do this informally. They compare processes with peers, read blog posts, join Slack communities, and benchmark themselves whenever they can. But most organizations lack structured knowledge or real comparisons.
You often do not know:
• how your AI adoption compares to similar companies
• how your bottlenecks rank against others
• how your cycle times stack up
• whether your teams are understaffed or just blocked
• what healthy predictability looks like
This is where engineering intelligence shines.
It transforms industry patterns into actionable insights.
It gives leaders visibility that normally takes years to accumulate.
YC alumni gave me clarity.
Engineering intelligence gives leaders that same clarity at scale.
The YC lesson that maps directly to engineering performance.
After eight YC attempts, we finally had real traction. We had users, revenue, and purchase intent. We believed we were ready.
YC did not.
Our metrics were too early to prove long-term value.
YC was not looking for volume.
They were looking for direction.
They wanted to see
• retention
• month over month growth
• quality of traction
• consistency
• real signals that customers cared
This mirrors engineering leadership today.
You do not need teams simply shipping more.
You need teams shipping predictably, with less rework, better throughput, and healthier processes.
Engineering intelligence focuses on direction, not vanity volume.
YC taught me that volume is meaningless without improvement.
Enterprise engineering operates exactly the same way.
At the 2024 YC alumni event in San Francisco, Alexander Wang from Scale AI shared how they pivoted at two hundred million ARR by leaning into AI. He described a future where engineering becomes less about manual execution and more about orchestrating intelligence across systems and workflows.
This insight stayed with us.
If the industry changes, engineering leadership must change with it.
After the event, we spent hours discussing how Waydev must evolve. We have been building in this blue ocean market since 2017, but the direction is now clearer than ever.
The next era is not about dashboards.
It is about intelligence.
It is about:
• predictive modeling
• reliable forecasting
• intelligent resource allocation
• unified visibility across AI tools
• engineering health metrics that actually reflect reality
• insights that proactively surface risks
• real AI adoption analytics based on data, not hope
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