#ycombinating

So, today I jumped head-first into the pool and did what that voice has been telling me to do for years.

I applied at YCombinator.

It'll still be two weeks before we hear back, but that's fine. I don't plan on taking any sort of break or anything. I think the main thing about people who get in to YC are that they would have done it anyway. It may take longer, it may be harder, but if you're applying for YC then it had better be because the thing you wanted to make desperately needed to exist.

I realize, though I think I've known it subconsciously for a while, that my main reason for failure in the past was that I was alone. This isn't a world that you can be alone in - the stress alone of running a startup is enough to crush anyone. So this time I'm very fortunate to have someone willing to brave the dangers with me, someone I can rely on to make sure we're going in the right direction.

The idea we applied with is called CodeWheel. If you boil it down to basics, CodeWheel is just a community-driven snippet repo. In reality, it's much, much more than that. CodeWheel is the solution to the programming gap.

When you start, say, web development, you start in 1990. You have to learn the best practices all the way from the start, and as we progress, this journey becomes harder and takes even more time. We've tricked ourselves into thinking we've made it easier because we have all these tools, but we forget that most of them don't have instruction manuals - we figured them out, so those who come after us should be able to figure them out, too.

But that's not the right answer. The next great idea doesn't come from someone who thinks like all the others who got to this point; if it did, we would already have it. The next great idea comes from someone who thinks differently than we do, and CodeWheel is the apparatus for bringing that person to the edge.

If every tool we build is a boat that lets sailors cross a river, CodeWheel is a bridge that anyone can cross.

Why is CodeWheel so special? With a driven community and a clear goal, we can work together to fill in the gaps of our knowledge. We can create snippets to make gradient mixins in LESS or even SHA-256 algorithms in Objective-C. We can make customized toast notifications or an Oculus Rift "Hello World". We can push ourselves forward, stand on the shoulders of the great problem-solvers before us, and achieve the unachievable.

All this just by sharing a little code. All this just by sharing a little idea.