Ryan Petersen

So this, like, all of a sudden I had all these peers who were also building businesses.

And, like, that's, I don't know, that's just super valuable from a life experience standpoint.

I don't know how much it helped a business, but it just, like, made my life better.

And then it also, I guess that kind of understates like YC, if you're one of the top companies, I think it's very important to be a top company if you're going to do Y Combinator.

It is a bit of a competition.

A lot of people don't realize that.

It's like at the end of the day, there's only so many hot companies that can come out each year.

And you want to be, if you're one of those, then it's tremendously valuable for you because fundraising, I could have raised money.

I had built a successful, profitable SaaS business.

I'm sure I could have raised money, but I literally like tried at one point to raise money

And I showed up in Silicon Valley on Sand Hill Road wearing a suit and tie.

I just didn't know.

I think people just were like, who's this guy?

And tried to raise money for it.

I didn't try that hard.

I did a couple pitches, and they went nowhere.

And then with YC, it was a feeding frenzy.

It turned from an outbound sale, which is hard doing outbound kind of cold calling,

to an inbound sale where everybody was, like, eager to invest.

They heard about Flexport.