# After the Fact

23 August 2026

![Karim Rahme and Tobias Herber standing behind the Y Combinator sign](https://karimrahme.com/essays/after-the-fact.webp)

With Tobias, outside Y Combinator.

One year ago today, [Tobias](https://x.com/tobiasherber_) and I got into [Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com).

Thirty minutes before the call, I was kicked out of ETH Zurich. Twenty minutes later, I was unplugging the speakers at a Starbucks because the music was too loud. Fortunately, YC accepted us, so I am permitted to call what happened in between resourcefulness.

Two days earlier, I had about five hundred dollars in my bank account, no apartment secured in Switzerland, and one viewing booked after two months of desperately searching on Facebook Marketplace.

I was supposed to begin a master's degree at [EPFL](https://www.epfl.ch) in Lausanne.

This was not an entirely novel financial situation. For most of university, I had been doing a triple major in computer science, mathematics, and philosophy while working on startups and spending parts of my summers doing research. I was interested in too many things, unwilling to give most of them up, and also had the more prosaic problem of needing to earn roughly twelve thousand US dollars every semester to pay for the next one.

It is difficult to sustain a prolonged inquiry into the nature of freedom when tuition is due.

So I built things, usually with my co-founder Tobias.

We met when we were roughly fourteen at technical high school in Austria and started working on projects together soon afterward. Over the next ten years, the projects have become increasingly less innocent. Small pieces of software became products, products acquired users, users acquired expectations, and eventually expectations acquired contracts and lawyers. The mechanism has remained suspiciously stable: one of us notices something stupid, tells the other we could probably build it better, and some nontrivial portion of the following year disappears.

[Metorial](https://metorial.com) emerged from one of these episodes.

We first applied to YC while I was finishing university in Abu Dhabi. My family flew over for graduation, the first time in four years that they had all visited me there, and they were staying for four days. Naturally, YC scheduled our interview during those four days.

Tobias and I took it. We were rejected. I wrote more about that [here](https://metorial.com/blog/open-sourcing-the-yc-application).

Had YC accepted us, I suspect I would now remember the same choice as evidence of focus. Because they rejected us, it mostly meant that I had missed celebrating graduation with my family.

Success over failure has this useful property: it improves the adjectives without changing the actions. What looks reckless before the outcome becomes conviction afterward. Obsession becomes focus. Social neglect becomes sacrifice. A sequence of choices that would concern your relatives acquires, once sufficiently rewarded, the dignity of a founder biography.

We spent one day believing YC had misunderstood us. Then we considered the less flattering possibility that if intelligent people failed to understand why the company mattered, explaining it badly was actually our fault. So we kept building.

A few months later, I graduated from NYU and moved to Lausanne to begin the degree. Or, more precisely, I arrived in Lausanne with five hundred dollars, no apartment, and a strong theoretical commitment to living in Lausanne.

For two months I had been trying to find housing through Facebook Marketplace. This provided a surprisingly rigorous introduction to practical epistemology. All the landlords were apparently abroad, the apartments could not be viewed over video, and almost everyone was nevertheless confident that a bank transfer would resolve the remaining uncertainty.

I avoided being scammed, mostly, and eventually booked exactly one in-person viewing, which was good enough for me to justify taking the trip. I booked a hostel in the olympic village for 3 days and then found the cheapest train route. Just before I arrived, still in the train, YC invited Tobias and me to interview again.

The obvious solution was to book a quiet hotel room. I could not afford one. Going back to Austria also made little sense because, if YC rejected us again, I still needed to return to Lausanne, find an apartment, and begin the degree. Now with even less money.

Paul Graham has written that investors should look for founders who are formidable.[^1] There is a romantic interpretation of formidability in which founders bend reality around themselves. There is also a cheaper reality in which you have five hundred dollars and cannot afford the obvious solution. Airbnb, to be fair, built an entire company around this discovery.

My uncle lived in a small village close to Lyon, and a train ticket to France was cheaper than a hotel room in Switzerland. So I went to France.

My uncle and I do not quite share a language. He speaks Bosnian, French, and no English; I speak enough Bosnian to communicate the general architecture of an idea while leaving its finer details to charity. Shortly before the interview (5 minutes, to be precise), he returned unexpectedly from his shift, and I had to explain why Tobias and several Americans were about to appear on my laptop, why this mattered enormously, and why I needed him to temporarily leave part of his own apartment.

He understood enough, went upstairs, and Tobias and I did the interview. Afterward, I stayed awake until around 3 a.m. refreshing my inbox. This had no causal influence on YC's decision, which I understood perfectly well. So I slept. At six the next morning, I woke up to: "Let's do a follow-up call today."

This was not, strictly speaking, an answer to the question I had been asking. It could have meant an acceptance. It could have meant another interview. It could have meant YC had discovered a more intimate way of telling us no.

I also needed to get back to Austria for my brother's birthday. I had missed the previous four because of university, and four seemed sufficient. Ambitious people are unusually good at describing absence as temporary; the difficulty is that other people continue aging while your justification is in progress. This had already cost me a lot in my personal relationships.

My uncle returned from his night shift around 6:30 a.m. and drove me to the station. I had about twenty minutes to work out how to get from Lyon to somewhere in Zurich with reliable internet, take a call whose purpose I did not know, and continue to Austria before my brother's birthday became, once again, the day after my brother's birthday.

I chose [ETH Zurich](https://ethz.ch) because universities have Wi-Fi and Eduroam meant my old NYU credentials should still work. For a while, the plan did too. Then, thirty minutes before the call, I was told to leave because the building was being cleared for exams. So I left, tried a few nearby places, and eventually found a Starbucks with reliable internet and speakers loud enough to make the call unusable, so I unplugged them.

I put my suitcase down, opened my laptop, and joined Tobias. Then YC told us we were in.

I had imagined the moment often enough that I expected it to feel more physically consequential. But the facts had barely changed. A few hours earlier I had been broke, effectively homeless in Switzerland, and unsure whether I was beginning graduate school. Now I was broke, effectively homeless in Switzerland, and fairly sure I would soon make myself homeless somewhere else, probably San Francisco.

This was progress.

I plugged the speakers back in and went to catch my train.

By the time I reached Austria it was close to midnight.

The party had almost ended. There was still cake.

Near the end of YC, I told one of the partners this story. By then, I could already hear myself improving it. The empty bank account became hunger. The improvised travel became resourcefulness. Missing family occasions became sacrifice. The whole mess was acquiring the clean causal structure that successful stories tend to receive after the fact.

I was probably preparing to extract some respectable lesson from it when the partner laughed and said, more or less: "Yeah. That's the fun of it."

It was annoyingly unserious, and probably correct.

Had YC rejected us, I would have taken the same trains, slept the same three hours, unplugged the same speakers, and arrived at the same birthday. Only the adjectives would have changed.

Success does not prove that your decisions were sensible. It merely makes people more generous when deciding what to call them.

[^1]: See Paul Graham, [What We Look for in Founders](https://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html).