#80 - Office Hours with Adora Cheung

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast.
Today's episode is with Adora Chung. Adora is a partner here at YC, and she also co-founded Homejoy, which went through YC in the summer 2010 batch. For this episode, we took a bunch of questions from the internet, and if you have questions for a future Office Hours episode, you can just tweet them our way. All right, here we go.
All right, hey everyone. Today we have Adora Chung. She's a YC partner and co-founder of Homejoy.

**Adora Cheung** (0:28)
Thank you.

**Craig Cannon** (0:29)
How's it going?

**Adora Cheung** (0:29)
Good, how are you?

**Craig Cannon** (0:30)
All right, we're gonna do some Office Hours questions from the internet, so let's go. So first question is from Tofer Peterson, and he asks, how many users did you have when you applied to YC, and also how much revenue had you generated?

**Adora Cheung** (0:46)
So when we applied to YC back in 2010, we were a company called at the time, Pathjoy, not Homejoy, and we were a marketplace for online services. So we were trying to bring on typically offline services, like tutoring, life coaching, therapy, and all these legal services online. And our thesis was this was the time to put it to video and we would be the ones to do it.
And so when we applied, if I remember correctly, we had onboarded a lot of people for the supply side of stuff, so service providers, but had onboarded absolutely no one yet on the demand side. So we had obviously generated no revenue yet, but that's what we had when we applied.

**Craig Cannon** (1:30)
And this was 2010?

**Adora Cheung** (1:32)
2010

**Craig Cannon** (1:32)
Okay, and had you started a company before?

**Adora Cheung** (1:36)
No, I had previously worked at a company called Slide and I ran product there and we built Facebook apps. I started in 2007 when the Facebook platform just launched.

**Craig Cannon** (1:48)
Okay, and what made you want to start a startup?

**Adora Cheung** (1:50)
I think I've always knew that I wanted to create stuff, make stuff for the world and it just was a matter of finding the right idea. And so after a couple of years at Slide, I decided, it was the right timing also because my brother, who would be my co-founder, had just graduated college and I said, hey, you should just come out here, let's work on stuff. So we started working on stuff.

**Craig Cannon** (2:13)
Did you have any, I don't know, apprehension about starting a company with your brother?

**Adora Cheung** (2:20)
Not really. I think it's funny because my brother and I grew up kind of in separate worlds.
So it's not like we were together all the time or knew each other if we were compatible working together. So it was a little bit trawling around in the beginning. But having a sibling, working with sibling, you know you can trust them and they're not gonna do anything horrible to you. And so I think there was just that initial layer of trust that was pretty good for us.

**Craig Cannon** (2:45)
And also, I guess you were out here for only a couple of years so you didn't totally have a network either.

**Adora Cheung** (2:49)
Exactly.

**Craig Cannon** (2:50)
Yeah. So, makes sense. Cool.
Next question. Hatlii asks, how do you keep going if you can't raise any money?

**Adora Cheung** (2:59)
So, you just have to keep your personal burden really low. And I would say just from experience where my brother and I weren't able to raise much money for two and a half, almost three years. And we were just able to just keep going in terms of trying to find users and stuff like that. You just got to be incredibly scrappy because obviously you can't afford to acquire any users. Which is actually a good thing because it forces you to get out of your chair and you have to go talk to users because that's the only way that you can get them to use your product.
And I think going through a period of not having enough cash to work in your startup helps you develop a lean mentality, which is good to keep moving forward if and when you raise money.

**Craig Cannon** (3:45)
Had you raised before YC?

**Adora Cheung** (3:47)
No, we hadn't.

**Craig Cannon** (3:48)
And then you raised like a hundred?

**Adora Cheung** (3:50)
Yeah, we raised a hundred K around demo day. Yeah.
And then use that for the next two and a half years.

**Craig Cannon** (3:59)
Hmm. That's kind of, that's amazing.