Y Combinator | Startup Experts Share Their Investor Horror Stories @ycombinator | Uploaded August 2023 | Updated October 2024, 6 days ago.
For this latest episode of Office Hours, the Group Partners are sharing stories from their worst investor meetings. We’ll outline some of the weird plays we’ve seen investors try to pull — but we’ll also confess times that we, as founders, bungled meetings we could’ve nailed.

We’ll discuss what differentiates a truly great investor, and shed a bit of light on something we rarely talk about publicly: the YC Investor Database.

Apply to Y Combinator: yc.link/OfficeHours-apply
Work at a startup: yc.link/OfficeHours-jobs

Chapters (Powered by bit.ly/chapterme-yc) -
00:00 - Coming Up
00:37 - Keeping Founders Waiting
02:23 - Status Games
05:16 - Advice For YC Founders
06:37 - Investors Leverage Before and After YC
07:46 - Have A Game Plan
11:31 - Who Is A Good Investor?
13:53 - Investor Updates
14:34 - Investor Known For Testing Founders
16:09 - Investor Meeting Is A Two-Way Street
16:44 - Who Is The CEO?
18:51 - Awkward Question Crossing Personal Line
20:58 - Worst Investor Meeting: Why You Are Doing A Company Anymore
22:36 - Being Professional
23:53 - Being Smart vs Adjusting Pitch Based On Investor Feedback
25:27 - Outro