asadjb

Hi. I'm evaluating an offer from a brand new startup (raised a decent pre-seed round and have runway for 2-3 years) that will be joining a YC batch.

I'm already working in a similar startup; just without the YC part. So learning on the job is going to be similar in my current role and the one that I'm evaluating. The teams at both places are also similarly great.

Would I; as a founding engineer, gain the ability to learn a lot about building and scaling startups by being part of a team that's going through a YC program?

I understand that YC is mostly for the founders, so I'm not sure if as an engineer I stand to learn and grow from this.

Does anyone who's worked as an employee at a early stage startup that went through YC have any thoughts on how the experience was for them? Were you able to learn and grow more because your startup was part of YC?

A 3rd party API we're hoping to work with need a Client Certificate for authentication of our backend servers. However, contrary to (as I understand it) the general practice of using self signed certificates, they are asking for a certificate issued by a trusted CA.

I've gotten in touch with a few of the largest SSL certificate providers, and all but one of them has responded to my query so far.

The one that responded has quoted a price > USD 2K for what they call "PKI infrastructure" setup, and around $50 for each generated certificate. The $50 is fine, the $2K is too much IMHO.

Has anyone on HN dealt with such requirements before? If so, which certificate vendor did you end up using, and what was the approximate costing and general experience?