Site Menu:
Introduction
Traditional Businesses
Opportunities Arise Online
Micro Seed Funding
Y Combinator Alternatives
ADVANTAGES:
- Starting Capital
- Ability to Sell Early
- Relocation to Startup Hub
- Weekly Dinners
- Knowledgeable Advice
- Demo Day
- Experience
DISADVANTAGES:
- Low Valuation
- High Risk of Failure
MY EXPERIENCE
HELPFUL RESOURCES
This website was created
by Dan Veltri, an entrepreneur
and founder of Weebly.
My Experience
My name is Dan Veltri and I am a 22 year old entrepreneur living in San Francisco starting a company called Weebly. Weebly originated in early 2006 with the intention of providing an easy to use tool to create electronic portfolios for the students of Penn State. The goals have since expanded to enable many forms of content creation, from websites to social networking profiles, for the non-technical user.
The Weebly team is currently made up of three people: David Rusenko, Chris Fanini, and myself. In January 2007, we took the opportunity to leave Penn State and move out to San Francisco to join the Y Combinator program. With the ability to focus full-time on the product, we greatly improved Weebly’s interface and feature set, growing the user base from around 5,000 users to 20,000 users in 3 months. My experience in Y Combinator served as the basis of understanding for this website, which analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the program.
For those interested in a career in entrepreneurship, joining Y Combinator or one of the other micro seed funding programs is an outstanding opportunity to get acclimated to the startup scene. The advice and connections provided to startups in these programs give them a much better chance of succeeding. For Weebly, the Y Combinator experience made a true difference. Following the Y Combinator Demo Day, we had a meeting setup with Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. Steve, who works with Ron Conway, presented us with term sheet 2 days later. After about a month of negotiation and paperwork, we closed a $650,000 “Series A” round with a syndicate of angel investors that included Steve Anderson, Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail), Ron Conway, Mike Maples, and Aydin Senkut.
Steven Levy, Newsweek’s Senior Editor for Technology, wrote about our experiences joining Y Combinator, building our product, and raising money in the May 21st, 2007 edition of the magazine. The online version of the article is available here. Weebly also received Time.com’s distinction as one of the 50 best websites of 2007.
All in all, this has been an incredible journey so far, with hopefully more excitement to come. I’d love to answer any questions you may have about my experience. Feel free to contact me at dan@weebly.com.