The College Project That Became a YC Startup | Cedar

Ask most people to picture a Silicon Valley founder, and they'll describe some version of the same person: someone who dropped everything at nineteen, bet it all on one idea, and rode a single YC batch straight to a billion-dollar company. But SF is full of founders, and many of them even (gasp!) finished college.

We sat down with Isabelle Ilyia and Jesse Li, the founders of Cedar, a YC W25 startup that helps sales teams keep up with their playbooks, expecting something along those lines. We didn't get it; instead we heard a story that starts in a Georgia Tech dorm, not a garage, where they spent years building company-worthy projects long before anyone called them a startup.

Getting rejected from YC

Isabelle and Jesse's first pitch to Y Combinator was for an app that would let people comment on and save anything they found online, all collected into a single feed. Their interviewer killed the idea on the spot: YC had already funded an almost identical idea before, and it hadn't gone well.

That sort of rejection sucks. But Jesse describes it more like getting a paper back with a grade he mostly agreed with.

"We were like, is this our life submission? No," he told us. "[The interviewer] probably knows more about this than we do. That's something they're really looking for: coachability."

Rather than sulking, they called the interviewer and earned a rare second chance: a re-interview, one week out. "We both just dropped everything and locked in," Jesse said.

In seven days, they built a lawyer-matching app from nothing, ran their own trial, re-interviewed, and got in.

College projects to startup pipeline

Isabelle and Jesse met freshman year at Georgia Tech, on a trade that worked out well for both of them. Isabelle didn't know how to code, and Jesse had a project nobody wanted to touch. He offered to teach her to code if she'd help him for free.

"I was definitely getting the better side of the deal," she told us.

The project itself flopped: a social event-planning app that nobody ended up using. What survived was the habit of building something together, first a knowledge graph tool, then several other half-formed ideas. "It was never like the concept of a startup in my head," Isabelle said. "There's kind of a really fine line between the two: project versus startup."

Neither of them dropped out to chase any idea right away. Isabelle interned at Notion, her dream company at the time, and came away unmoved by life at a large company. "You obviously don't get to just work on whatever you want, whenever you want, as best as you want to," she said.

Jesse likewise took a big tech job at Intuit, moved to San Diego, and spent most of his time "hobby-maxing" in pottery, boxing, badminton, and writing. "It was not a very hard-working time in my life," he said.

What finally made them founders was just more of the same. They kept building side projects through college, then through internships and jobs, until one of those projects fueled a YC application.

"A startup is a project you're working on until it becomes a company," Jesse said.

Dorm room to SF apartment

Even with funding and paying customers, the project hasn't changed as much as you'd expect.

"We got an ice cream machine, so we make it every other day now, or it'll be the middle of the day, and you get to go work out," Isabelle said. "It kind of makes it feel like we're still friends working on a project, even though it's with real customers and revenue now."

The big difference, she says, is that the work now matters to someone besides themselves. Managing an intern made the company feel real, and waking up every day to solve customers' problems instead of their own did, too.

What keeps the project going?

Beyond just serving customers and growing a business, each founder has their own reasons for continuing to build.

Toward the end of our conversation, Jesse offered his own theory about founders: some are driven by a mission, some by ambition, and there are people who simply love the game.

"Why do you like software more than basketball?" he asked. "There's no mission, it's just balls and nets. But something about it is way more appealing to you." For Jesse, software projects aren'tall that different; it's the game he wants to play.

Looking back, that mindset explains almost everything else behind Jesse and Isabelle's founder story. From the freshman-year coding trade, to the app nobody used, to the week they spent rebuilding an entirely new YC pitch after getting rejected. Even today, they still jokingly describe Cedar as a group project, just one with customers, revenue, and an apartment overlooking the Bay Bridge.

Silicon Valley loves to romanticize the founder who drops out, raises money, and builds a unicorn. Jesse and Isabelle's story suggests something different: staying in school, learning to build, and never stopping can be just as valuable.

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