Y Combinator

We applied to YC twice. The first time, we got an interview but didn't get in. We were seeing rapid growth on the supply side — when the pandemic hit, we went from being at a handful of Rhode Island schools to over 1,800 colleges across the US almost overnight. But we couldn't tell a convincing story on the demand side. We didn't have enough companies hiring through the platform. So we got to work: we put our own talent base — our college students — to work helping us acquire companies as clients. Over the next six months, we grew revenue in a meaningful way, reapplied, and got in. W21 was one of the remote batches, so we did the whole thing from Rhode Island. But it was still one of the most exciting moments for the team — a real validation that what we were building mattered.

YC taught us better discipline around speed. The entire batch is structured around one question: what can you accomplish between now and Demo Day? They have you pick a single KPI and try to grow it week over week. That forcing function was exactly what we needed — it compressed our decision-making and cut out a lot of the noise. Being part of a peer network of other builders and founders was equally valuable. You're surrounded by people operating at the same intensity, facing the same kinds of problems, and that energy is contagious.

By Demo Day, we'd raised $3.3 million in total funding and were able to run at things much more aggressively. But the lasting value of YC wasn't the money — it was the network. I'm still deeply connected to the YC community. Through the NYC Founders Club, I helped run alumni happy hours every single month, and two of my batch mates became founding partners in that community. The relationships from YC have compounded in ways I couldn't have predicted, and they've shaped not just Pangea but everything I've built since.

YC gives you an enormous amount of advice, but it takes time for the lessons to actually internalize. People can tell you things all day — you still have to come to your own conclusions and figure out how to apply them in your specific context. The biggest tension I felt was around scale. YC really encourages you to think big — how does this become a billion-dollar company? And that's valuable, but it can also cause you to make decisions that sacrifice short-term growth for a vision that's still too far away. We leaned into being a product-led, self-serve platform because we thought we needed volume. In hindsight, being more sales-led, more consultative, more curated in our approach would have served us better in those early post-batch years. Sometimes the faster path to something huge is building a viable business first, and then scaling from a position of strength.