Arthur Chang

Fanvibe Acquired by beRecruited

It all started in 2009, when Joe, Vish, and I took the leap and founded a new company: Fanvibe. That was easily one of the scariest decisions I've ever committed to, but also one of the best. Fanvibe evolved from a simple check-in to live games product (from any location) that notified your friends via an iPhone app, to a full blown social network for sports fans. The greatest highlights were our relationships with our users, the partnerships we had such as the NBA, launching of awesome iPhone apps, a cool automatic prediction question engine, and all the laughs and jokes we had as a company... I mean all the hard work we put into it.

Today we are excited to officially announcement that Fanvibe has been acquired by beRecruited. What this means for us is that beRecruited is buying all the intellectual property of Fanvibe and us! I am now transitioning over to being the lead of product and engineering of beRecruited. Mostly doing more or less the same stuff as before, but now with a whole new product. beRecruited is already an incredibly successful company with over 1 million users and making a good profit.

What is beRecruited? I'll use the little blurb I put up on my LinkedIn to give you a brief on us:

beRecruited is the nation’s largest online college athletics recruiting platform, connecting high school athletes to college coaches.

beRecruited.com has active athlete profiles representing more than 22,000 U.S. high schools and 180,000 high school teams. In the past two years, beRecruited athletes have reported commitments to more than 2,000 NCAA, NAIA and NJCAA institutions.

This is an incredible new opportunity that I'm really excited to take on.

Creating a great experience for student athletes to get into college is not only an exciting challenge but also an honor. It is motivating to know that our success in creating a great product will also help high school students find opportunities that they would have otherwise missed. The perpetually improving technology is improving the way the world works, and this is one area that I feel is incredibly important.

The experience I've had while starting and working on Fanvibe has been incredible. I've learned more in the last two years than I could have in thirty years of working for some other company. The people I've met and become friends with have been in magnitudes greater than I've ever expected, and the strengths of the friendships I already had have really grown stronger with all their genuine support.

The path through the early days at Dogpatch Labs, through the Y Combinator experience, and now being acquired has been quite the bumpy road.

It wasn't all easy and success the whole time, in fact it has been quite the opposite. I see so many stories where you hear about all the awesome times companies have, but what I didn't know is how crappy it can get. We learned early on, however, that failure is the only way to success. Today I'm still failing, but at least I know it and with that I can try to overcome those failures as challenges. I will always remember Etact's Evan Beard telling us at a Y Combinator dinner to remember that: "Your mind is a fortress of impentetrable happiness." In light of giving credit to those who've helped, big props to my family for the support, to my wonderful girlfriend Issa for being an incredible combination of understanding, supportive and inspiration, the YC family, all our amazing investors and advisors, and of course the Fanvibe team itself.

Overall this move for Fanvibe has been great, and I'm thrilled for the next steps in being a big part of beRecruited.

See some press coverage of our acquisition, and take a peep at the awesome infographic our designer, Tyler Bass, made to describe the reach beRecruited has.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/27/fanvibe-berecruited/

Also for the sake of photos, some pictures I posted of the early days of Fanvibe: http://flickr.com/gp/kinetic/Y2ceC3

Y Combinator Experience

Every company at any stage is a good fit for Y Combinator. If you're wondering if you're too early, or too far along, or too good for YC, you're just making things up. Even if you're well funded, making tons of revenue, or are some hot shit programmer with some amazing business guy with an MBA on your team, you'd still want Y Combinator. Our dream was to take a company through Y Combinator, but with Fanvibe, we already had funding and had a good group of users, we didn't think we needed it. Sure we might not have died as a company, but we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are today.

Let's cut to the chase, why was it so good for us? Fast forward 3 months, you have 300 of the world's best investors intently listening to your pitch all in the same week. Even if you don't want their money anymore, which is almost never the case, you want to show them what you have. Your pitch is also pretty damn impressive at this point because of all the mentoring, rehearsals, brutal feedback, and collaboration with an amazing class of other brilliant Y Combinator company founders. There is almost no way your pitch can suck by demo day, unless you're a total lame-o who didn't take Y Combinator seriously. If you are that kind of person, you wouldn't have made it into YC in the first place.

Now let's get to the 3 months that helped you prepare for demo day. It's sort of an artificial deadline, yes, but it's a really good deadline to have. Launching something new from scratch, or adding more features that are big enough to impress in 3 months is only going to help. The constant motivation during each Y Combinator dinner, helps you reach those goals. Making sure you impress Paul Graham every week, and other YC co-founders is probably the best way to go about your company.

Paul Graham challenges everything you do on purpose. There is no sugar coating involved, and he has so much experience and data in his head, that he has a pretty good idea of what's going wrong with your company. You learn to fail on an hourly basis, so you become very skilled at bouncing back and making good choices in how to move forward. No need to wait 3 months to figure out something you've done totally failed. Paul will always make sure you know you're about to fail on something the first time he sees it. When do you ever get someone like this to give you hard questions all the time? He's invested in you, and he actually cares enough to make you better.

The whole team behind Y Combinator are amazing. Jessica is the nicest person in the world, has great feedback, and just makes you feel happy. Harj works hard for us, getting us contacts, responding to questions right away, and gives amazing feedback. Kirsty does an amazing job at everything as well! Listening to Harj and Kirsty's accents alone are worth it. Trevor, John Levy, Kate, and the rest are just as amazing.

Y Combinator is fun. I've made amazing new friends, met celebrities (both tech and hollywood), become more successful and legitimate as a entrepreneur than I've ever imagined, all because Y Combinator kicked my ass and made me realize how much I harder it really is and what it takes to be successful.

Bottom line is, there's no way for anyone to tell you how much you actually want Y Combinator. The experience is epic.

Also, if you've read this far, here's a treat for those who know Harj. Took this video after the last session of demo day, after all the investors had left and we were just hanging out. It was a tough 3 days, but in the end it was a lot of fun:

(download)

Fanvibe Acquired by beRecruited

Y Combinator Experience

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