31–40 of 52 posts
What about a simple traffic light feedback: green for the accepted ones, yellow for the pretty good rejected ones, red for the rest. At least it would help to see if someone is on the right track...
So why don't we tell people why we didn't invite them to interview? Because, paradoxical as it sounds, there often is no reason. Maybe I'm trying to read tea leaves, but did the "You are the only founder" boolean play a bigger part this time around since you received so many qualified applicants? Working full time as a solo founder for the last four months (and 13k LOC of Java later), I understand why you would be he…
"The odds of being accepted are much greater (roughly 4x) with a cofounder, but it's not impossible to get funded as a single founder." - pg
What about a simple traffic light feedback: green for the accepted ones, yellow for the pretty good rejected ones, red for the rest. At least it would help to see if someone is on the right track...
So why don't we tell people why we didn't invite them to interview? Because, paradoxical as it sounds, there often is no reason. Maybe I'm trying to read tea leaves, but did the "You are the only founder" boolean play a bigger part this time around since you received so many qualified applicants? Working full time as a solo founder for the last four months (and 13k LOC of Java later), I understand why you would be he…
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145749 "The odds of being accepted are much greater (roughly 4x) with a cofounder, but it's not impossible to get funded as a single founder." - pg
I'm a bit annoyed with myself since I didn't apply to the previous rounds. I first read Hackers & Painters over two years ago, ah well!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=145749 "The odds of being accepted are much greater (roughly 4x) with a cofounder, but it's not impossible to get funded as a single founder." - pg
My prodding was more along the lines that since there was an order of magnitude more applicants this round and they only had a week to look over the applicants, was it nearly impossible to get in being a solo founder? I'm a bit annoyed with myself since I didn't apply to the previous rounds. I first read Hackers & Painters over two years ago, ah well!
What about a simple traffic light feedback: green for the accepted ones, yellow for the pretty good rejected ones, red for the rest. At least it would help to see if someone is on the right track...
It wouldn't work in practice. There are no sharp lines between these categories, and we'd be misleading people, one way or the other, if we insisted on drawing them. It already bothers me that circumstances force us to draw a line between green and yellow, because we're probably discouraging some people who should instead be encouraged. It would be even worse if we tried to draw a line between yellow and red.
Doing this might help at least some of the applicants get some idea. Not everyone is covered by these comments and no one is forced to take your opinion for it but it just helps to get broad feedback.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The concept of "fair" doesn't really apply here. YC can use any [legal] criteria they wish. We're just interested in learning what we could do to improve the application, so we're asking for a little more information, if possible. It's not a "tell us why not". It's an "if possible, give us some info to help improve efficiency of the process".
You can't give suggestions on improvement if you can't pick out anything that's lacking or needs to be improved. That's the point.
Important distinction between "nothing wrong" (below threshold) and "nothing to improve" (at max score).
When I see some of the groups that have made the cut from past cycles, I'm boggled as to what YC was sold on.