In the run-up to the all-important Demo Day, entrepreneurs do whatever it takes to create momentum while staying cool.
In late February, Tom Harari sat down to do something he hadn't done for a few months: plot his company's revenue on a simple line graph. Harari's laundry-on-demand startup, Cleanly, had been in growth mode, rapidly expanding its laundry delivery service from two New York City neighborhoods in early January to cover much of Manhattan by the end of February. The number of orders had jumped by an average of 25% per week. He looked at the chart and saw an arrow skyrocketing to the top right quadrant. Even if everything fell apart after Cleanly completed Y Combinator's winter 2015 batch, a program organized by the ultracompetitive Silicon Valley startup factory that I've been writing about for the past few months, even if growth slowed considerably, Harari and his cofounders, Itay Forer and Chen Atlas, would have six or seven times the number of weekly orders they'd started with. His growth plan was working. In fact, in the parlance of Y Combinator, Cleanly had entered the rarified territory known as hypergrowth. "Oh, shit," Harari recalls thinking. "It's really taking off."
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