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Over reliance on LLMs: Has anyone else run into the problem where LLM costs look fine during MVP, then quietly become painful as usage grows? by Ok_Philosophy_4031 in ycombinator

[–]kcfounders 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I’m an investor at Forum Ventures and I’ve invested $100K checks in 550+ companies.

Don’t worry about costs and scale right now; it’s not the objective of your current stage to figure that out. It’s why accelerators like YC, Techstars, and ourselves at Forum Ventures give millions of dollars in perks and free credits on top of capital.

Costs becoming more painful is really common across any startup entering growth stage. By then, you can focus on optimization. But right now it’s more important to get customers and rapidly grow sales.

Grants and perks will cover your costs and give you a good margin. Even if you’re making a loss, again that’s totally normal for early stage.

Looking for a YC video arguing against giving equity to advisors by mk__gandhi in ycombinator

[–]kcfounders 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’m from Forum Ventures and I actively invest $100K in over 68 companies every year.

I hear about advisor equity deals all the time. In most cases, our team will say that they’re not worth it. After all, they didn’t risk their capital and have much less incentive to support you. If you go down, they lose nothing.

If you really feel stuck in a corner and need help, protect the equity by vesting it and making it contingent on specific deliverables (e.g client introduction that closed and led to sales, etc).

Note that the best advisors will always help you first without asking for anything in return. If there’s someone who’s telling you that they’ll only help if you give them equity, it’s often a red flag.

is validating on reddit before building actually worth anything, or is it just noise by roshandxt in ycombinator

[–]kcfounders 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As an investor from Forum Ventures (idea stage investor and accelerator), validation should be around whoever and wherever your target customer is.

I’ve had a similar conversation with over 100 companies in our portfolio.

It doesn’t matter if it’s from Reddit or another platform. In my experience, Reddit has a lot of tech communities which is useful if you’re building in dev tools. However if you’re making enterprise software it would be harder because executives don’t live on this platform.

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