Trevor Burnham

Yes­ter­day, I received a delight­fully under­stated e-​​mail from Y Com­bi­na­tor: “Your appli­ca­tion looks promis­ing and we’d like to meet you in person.”

Until a few months ago, I wouldn’t have believed such a thing to be possible. I’d tinkered with software as a hobby, but I hadn’t thought of it as a career. I was 24 and on track to become an academic, studying algo­rith­mic game theory. On Sep­tem­ber 19th, 2008, in the third week of my first semester as a doctoral student at the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan School of Infor­ma­tion, I wasn’t thinking about startups; I was thinking about science. Specif­i­cally, I was thinking about how sci­en­tists share their work; or rather, how they don’t. If you want to repli­cate an analysis that you read in a sci­en­tific paper, you’re in for a tough slog: First, you need to track down the data. Even if the data is osten­si­bly public, it may be impos­si­ble to find and convert to a usable format. Second, you’ll need a computer program for the analysis. If you contact the original authors, they might share their code, but you’ll probably need some expen­sive software (not to mention hardware) to run it. If you don’t hear back from them, you’re in for some har­row­ing reverse-​​engineering. And after all of that, you may find that the paper omitted several critical details.

That’s the sort of problem we talk about a lot at SI. So I proposed a solution: A YouTube-​​like hub where people can upload theories, for­mu­late hypothe­ses, and test them. On the off chance that I might want to turn this vague notion into a reality one day, I reg­is­tered the lengthy but friendly domain The​o​ryville​.com. And I sat on it. It got lost in a slew of other ideas (I would wind up turning one, a social book­mark­ing site called Quocial, into a rough but func­tional app over the summer) and my focus was on being a student, at any rate. Cer­tainly, the startup life appealed to me, and I loved Founders at Work, but I didn’t see myself dropping out.

That started to change last semester. My research was going nowhere. I had lots of ideas, but they felt unsat­is­fy­ingly abstract and remote from real appli­ca­tions. I began to suspect that my com­par­a­tive advan­tage wasn’t in the academic realm. When a local summer seed funding com­pe­ti­tion (RPM10) was announced, I thought I’d see if I could recruit some co-​​founders. On November 17, 2009, I sent an e-​​mail out to an SI e-​​mail list, asking if anyone was inter­ested in joining me to form a startup based on this concept: “X is to STATA as Google Docs is to Microsoft Office.” Obvi­ously this isn’t the best way to meet co-​​founders, but I was extremely lucky: Among the replies, two of them stood out as serious, and both prospec­tive co-​​founders—Noah Liebman and Tom Haynes, both SI Master’s students—asked great ques­tions that showed that they under­stood exactly what I wanted to achieve, how this small piece of software could have grand, world-​​changing impli­ca­tions. They were also talented, design-​​oriented coders with previous expe­ri­ence working for small software com­pa­nies. I proposed that we step up our ambi­tions a notch: Let’s not just apply to RPM10. Let’s start acting like a real company—having regular meetings, exchang­ing ideas and code—and let’s apply to every seed accel­er­a­tor we can to make sure that we’ve got a roof over our heads this summer and some con­nec­tions to VCs after.

With each appli­ca­tion we sent in, our ideas got better. The first inter­view we did, back in February, was for the Frankel Fund, a UMich invest­ment com­pe­ti­tion run by MBA students. The one who inter­viewed us had a lot of great ques­tions that we had no answers for. We waxed exu­ber­ant about the easy-​​to-​​use inter­face we planned, and he asked us: “Well, is that some­thing researchers actually want?” Of course! we answered, it’s easy-​​to-​​use! “But isn’t there a lot of inertia in the academic software market?” Well, yes… but that’s why we’ll use a freemium model! “Have you actually talked to any poten­tial users?” [Pause] Um… well, at SI, we’re trained to… we’re really good at… we will do that! We didn’t get a second interview.

When we met with Dug Song later that month, he raised the same concerns. We’d been talking with each other about the idea, but we hadn’t been talking to the people we were going to sell it to. We’d figured that customer feedback was some­thing you waited to collect until after you had a working demo to show them. But investors are wary of aspiring entre­pre­neurs who spend all their time tin­ker­ing with untested ideas—and rightly so! When that clicked with us, every­thing changed. We started asking for input from every poten­tial user we knew and sending cold e-​​mails by the dozen to UMich profs to ask them to talk with us about their software needs. Based on the feedback we were getting, our under­stand­ing of the market com­pletely changed.

Mean­while, we’d applied early to YC—just a couple of days after the appli­ca­tion became available—and Harj asked us to Skype just a few days later. We had a great informal inter­view, much longer and chattier than the official one that’s been compared to Guan­tanamo Bay. We men­tioned that we knew Ben Con­gle­ton, founder of Olark, whose foot­steps I’m inad­ver­tently fol­low­ing in. (He withdrew from the PhD program last year, his second year. He was even on the same fel­low­ship.) I’d barely known Ben while he was at SI—I was focused on course­work, while he was already doing Olark—but it was still some­thing. A little while later, Harj sent us an e-​​mail sug­gest­ing that we chat with Ben, with the clear subtext that he wanted to get Ben’s opinion on us. We had a fruitful con­ver­sa­tion, and Ben con­nected us to the founders of Lingt, the only YC-​​funded company (to my knowl­edge) that has expe­ri­ence selling to class­rooms. I don’t know what Ben told Harj, but I’m sure it worked in our favor.

We built a crude demo in the two weeks before the YC appli­ca­tion deadline, in hopes of showing that we can execute. However, this was our first time coding together, we had a lot of other things going on at the time (courses, midterms, an Ultimate Frisbee tour­na­ment…), and the result was far from stunning. Still, it was worth it for two reasons: It gave us some momentum, which we’re using to build a much-​​improved demo now (essen­tial to the YC inter­view, by all accounts); and it led us to grapple with some design deci­sions that weren’t apparent when we were just using white­boards and static mockups. That, in turn, gave us a more specific notion of what our product’s advan­tages are.

Noah and I went to TS4AD where, despite our intro­ver­sion, we got to make some great con­nec­tions and collect novel feedback. (Two separate people sug­gested that we tailor our product to the needs of MBA students, who currently—and appar­ently unhappily—use Excel for every­thing.) While TS4AD is a non-​​essential event (we were repeat­edly assured that there’s no sta­tis­ti­cal dif­fer­ence in Tech­Stars accep­tance rates between TS4AD atten­dees and those who stay home), it led to some unex­pected benefits. For one, a Boulder entre­pre­neur who saw my tweets from the event con­nected us to some high school stats teachers, allowing us to explore another poten­tial market.

Other factors: I had karma of about 500 as Trevor­Burn­ham on Hacker News, most of it from being the first to submit the fan­tas­tic Wired story on the slow, ago­niz­ing death of Duke Nukem Forever. I’d like to think that I avoided “karma-​​whoring,” resist­ing the temp­ta­tion to link to sala­cious fluff. I doubt that was a sig­nif­i­cant factor in YC’s decision, but it couldn’t have hurt. I also read HN vora­ciously, via the RSS feed. I watched a lot of the Mixergy inter­views, and the recent Jessica Liv­ingston inter­views. I’m an outsider to the startup world, so I felt that it was impor­tant to absorb as many founder stories as I could. That appetite for knowl­edge has def­i­nitely paid off during the various inter­views we’ve had so far, and I’m sure it’ll continue to pay off as we build our product and our business.

And that’s the story of The­o­ryville so far. No matter what happens after this, it is, as they say, an honor just to be nominated.

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