A decade after being rejected by YC

About 10 years ago I applied to Y Combinator with Ghost. At the time we were trying to get $120k in funding for 7% equity — but got rejected (twice). So instead we launched on Kickstarter and then bootstrapped.

Today Ghost has earned over $25Million from customers for 0% equity, and all of Y Combinator's own blogs run on Ghost.

Most of the time things don't work out quite the way you thought they would, but often they work out just fine.