Summary: The number of good/compelling ideas+team >> Available spots
The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
#12I think that the reason people want to know is not that they are looking to be graded, (they already have,) but that they would like to know how to do better. They want to improve their chances of getting in next round or succeeding while going solo. It seems to me that a "why I wasn't excepted" would be the first piece of advice I'd get from YC.
Re: The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
#13Would it be possible to see an example of a stellar application? You'd only have to put it up once, and it would help all of us understand what we're up against.
Re: The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
#14This seems to answer the recent questions about movements and competition for YC. With 200-250 rejected applications that are "pretty good", there should be more than enough material for XCombinator (where X!=Y) to work with.
Re: The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no limit on the percentage of groups we interview that we can accept, but there is a limit on the number we can interview.
So this is the first scalability bottleneck you have hit?
It's the current one. There have been others we hit and overcame. We used to review applications printed out on paper, for example; now we have software for it.
We also have software for keeping track of all the startups, for communicating with them, and for generating all the documents for startups we fund. We'd have ground to a halt by now without these apps.
Re: The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
#16Would it be possible to see an example of a stellar application? You'd only have to put it up once, and it would help all of us understand what we're up against.
I think we can just look at who's been accepted in the past.
Re: The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
#17only a suggestion but since there are many aplicants, the selection proccess could be done in more stages.
This seems like a good idea on the surface, but in practice I don't see how it would work. There are only two real categories of information being collected, the information about the idea and the information about the team. And it doesn't really make sense to separate the evaluation into two different phases since the variables are multiplicative; that is, if the value of one is zero then the value of the whole equa…
true, but what i was thinking is that way you would know which one failed. your idea, your team, etc...
Re: The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
#18Would it be possible to see an example of a stellar application? You'd only have to put it up once, and it would help all of us understand what we're up against.
I think we can just look at who's been accepted in the past.
Sure, but that only gives you information about the people and ideas you're competing with. It doesn't give you information on how to present yourself on the application, which really is the bottleneck when conveying information to YC.
Re: The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
#19If you think you were rejected unfairly and that your idea is a good one, then build it. PG is telling you that many didn't get rejected for any defined faults or voids in your app. There were good ideas and good applicants, and some were just a rung above you. If anything, that's more encouragement to pursue your idea.
So you got cut, big deal. It happened to me before, and it happens to hundreds every year. Just move on and be productive. In my case, I realized I needed to get more into coding, and get a better grasp of everything, which is what I'm doing.
Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, Digg, Revision3, Ustream.tv, Qik, Meebo, Delicious, Twitter, Craigslist, HotorNot, etc. all are successful/profitable/growing in popularity and all did it without YC.
If you're confident in your team and idea, stop asking for feedback, you already got the best feedback you could get, that there's 'literally nothing wrong' about your app.
Congrats to who made it, and congrats to who didn't, it's a kick in the ass that should launch you forward.
Re: The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we can just look at who's been accepted in the past.
Sure, but that only gives you information about the people and ideas you're competing with. It doesn't give you information on how to present yourself on the application, which really is the bottleneck when conveying information to YC.
Good point. I think I did a pretty poor job on mine.