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I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#141

Post by comment »

Hi Sam,

I am an international founder. I want to join YC and incorporate in the US. But to avoid wasting time on visa things, I want to return to my home country (India) after YC.

1) Should I mention this in my application? 2) From YC's point of view, do you prefer international founders who want to stay on in the US or those who want to go back to their home country? Assuming they would kill it either way.

(PS - My startup is COMMENT.ws whereas YTERMINATOR.com, UNICOCK.com are light hearted hacks to get YC's attention)

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#142

Post by sama »

Fede_V wrote: post #138

Hey Sam, semi technical question here. NIPS, ran an experiments a few years ago where for 10% of the papers they had two completely independent teams of reviewers assess papers and score them - the agreement between the teams was very low: http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html (barely better than chance, actually). Would you consider doing something similar for YC? Obviously, you already have multi…

We have multiple people review each application (except the very good/very bad ones) and we look at the cases where the assessments are very different.

Some of the best companies have the most disagreement, which is why we have implemented our "strong yes" policy--if any single partner wants to fund a company, we fund it. It's much more important to our returns that we fund the next Airbnb than if we mistakenly fund one more bad company.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#144

Post by eranation »

Hi Sam. Will you consider a batch in other US locations? (For example in Atlanta). It can increase the applicant base due to lower cost of living and will allow a different flavor of founders to apply in my opinion.

I think the next billion $ enterprise startup will be more likely to come from such a batch. People who face enterprise software problems are not always in a stage in life that allows them to move to SF for a few months. YC might be missing out a large cohort of founders who work in enterprise software, outside of the Bay Area, and would disrupt their industry given the chance but are less flexible in moving to SF.

There are many "old tech" hubs outside SF that can generate great new startups. medical IT, medical devices, mechanical and aviation industry, enterprise software etc. Are Enterprise software ideas and founders with years of enterprise software experience adequately represented at YC?

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#145

Post by spike021 »

Education-wise, are you able to describe the percentages of applicants with backgrounds coming from top schools versus lower-tier schools?

Being in the Bay Area, I know that Stanford and UC Berkeley tend to have a decent amount of relatively successful launches/founders, but on the other hand I can't say I hear nearly as much about people who went to San Francisco State or San Jose State (or any other lower-tier schools that are not just located in SF Bay Area).

If there is a large enough discrepancy, do you have any ideas of ways to jumpstart or spark other educational communities to have a greater focus on trying out ideas, especially with YC (or other programs)?

Personally, I'm finishing studying at San Jose State and while there is an Entrepreneurship Club, the focus for that side of things (at least from what I've seen) tends to stay purely on the Business college end, rather than other potential high-impact areas (aside from the occasional mobile app here and there).

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#146

Post by sama »

comment wrote: post #141

Hi Sam, I am an international founder. I want to join YC and incorporate in the US. But to avoid wasting time on visa things, I want to return to my home country (India) after YC. 1) Should I mention this in my application? 2) From YC's point of view, do you prefer international founders who want to stay on in the US or those who want to go back to their home country? Assuming they would kill it either way. (PS - My…

Sure, mention it--that's fine with us.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#147

Post by danieltillett »

sama wrote: post #59
iMuzz wrote: post #16

YC has a giant application pool. This makes it very difficult for very early stage companies with no revenue / users to compete in the application pool. As a company with no revenue / users, How can we best stand out against those that do have growth / users? I understand that companies can apply for the fellowship. But what does a company lose by getting into the Fellowship over Core?

We fund companies with no traction/revenue all the time, though the bar is higher. A really compelling idea is more important to us than traction or revenue. We understand how quickly exponential growth happens.

Sam given the huge volume of applications you guys have to go through and the limited time you have to look at each one do you think that you are in a position to accurately judge if an idea is compelling or not? You can judge traction quickly, but it takes much more time to judge the quality of a pure idea.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#149

Post by foobarqux »

beeboop wrote: post #57

Do you think YC would have been interested in something like Minecraft back in its infancy if you saw how fast user base was growing? Does YC have any interest at all in startups (if you can call them that) whose main product is a video game of some sort?

Machine Zone (Game of War) is a YC company. I don't know why they never talk about it.
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