Trevor Burnham

This Sunday, my team will be inter­viewed by Y Com­bi­na­tor. We’ll receive word of their decision a few hours later. If you’re reading this, you’ll probably be curious: Will The­o­ryville be YC-​​funded?

Well, whatever the outcome, I won’t be blogging or tweeting about it, and neither will my co-​​founders. Not for a few months, anyway.

Why? I’m a pretty candid guy. Keeping secrets isn’t natural to me. And in most cases, startups should be open about their achieve­ments; the benefits of buzz outweigh the poten­tial cost of fos­ter­ing com­pe­ti­tion. That’s cer­tainly the case for The­o­ryville. We want to get the word out as far and wide as we can that we’re going to change the way the world does science.

However, one YC-​​funded founder explained some­thing to me: If you say you’re YC-​​funded, that’s news. If you make news, that’s a launch. And if you launch when you only have a landing page? That’s a waste. You’ve burned up the “exclu­sive” launch story that each YC-​​funded startup tra­di­tion­ally gets.

Of course, The­o­ryville is going forward whether we’re YC-​​funded or not, and I’ll keep blogging and tweeting about our progress. But if you want to know who’s backing us, you’ll have to wait for our exclusive.

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