Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

ycombinator.posterous.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 55 posts

Re: Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

#11

Post by pg »

mlinsey wrote: post #7
someone_here wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I submitted my application a year ago literally minutes before the deadline, and was eventually accepted to the W2010 class. Is YC funding really considered a class? Edit: Sorry, I accidentally downvoted you. I really did not intend to. I hope someone may come along and vote you back up to 1.

class, batch, round, whatever you want to call it really.

Most people seem to say batch. Since batch sounds a bit informal I often say cycle in stuff I write about YC, but no one ever uses that.

Re: Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

#12

Post by emmett »

sahillavingia wrote: post #2

Can you give any examples of late applications that eventually become YC-funded companies? Just curious.

Justin and I applied for Kiko Calendar (YC S05) just before the deadline. We only found out about 2 days before that it even existed.

I think we convinced the airbnb guys to apply for YC on the day of the deadline.

Re: Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

#13

Post by bkrausz »

sahillavingia wrote: post #2

Can you give any examples of late applications that eventually become YC-funded companies? Just curious.

We applied approx. 4 days before the deadline. I knew a lot of apps come in last minute so I set a mental deadline of before the final weekend. We're from the most recent batch (GazeHawk, S2010).

The problem was my cofounder and I were 300 miles apart, so we needed to get online and record a video. I was working long hours and he was finishing his masters, so it was hard to both get online at the same time. We ended up recording it around 4am.

Re: Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

#14

Post by thomaspun »

sahillavingia wrote: post #2

Can you give any examples of late applications that eventually become YC-funded companies? Just curious.

Why not thou? There is simply no downside of applying. If you don't already know some of product related questions on the application, you should be thinking about those anyways.

Re: Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

#15

Post by anson »

sahillavingia wrote: post #2

Can you give any examples of late applications that eventually become YC-funded companies? Just curious.

We applied last-minute for Cardpool (W2010) and Anywhere.FM (S2007). Applying last-minute is certainly better than not applying, as YC has been great for us both times :).

We were REALLY worried we'd be way behind everyone else, because we started later (or didn't even have an idea yet in the Anywhere.FM case), but turns out that the pressure of being behind helped us launch by month 2 both times.

Re: Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

#16

Post by brianchesky »

sahillavingia wrote: post #2

Can you give any examples of late applications that eventually become YC-funded companies? Just curious.

We applied 1 hour before the deadline. The Justin.tv guys convinced us to apply that night at dinner but we were worried we might have missed the deadline. I asked Justin Kan to ask PG if it was too late. Below is the original email thread. Once he gave the go-ahead, we applied, and the rest is history.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Paul Graham Date: Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 5:57 PM Subject: Re: yc applicant To: Justin , Jessica Livingston

Tell them to go to http://news.ycombinator.com/apply2 and apply. They literally have to do it tonight though because we are deciding tomorrow.

Tell them to be concise and to explain how they'll make money; the former is always rare and the latter we're looking more closely at these days.

--pg

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Justin wrote: Hey PG,

Are the YC applications for the next round completely, 100% closed? There's a company that Mike, Emmett and I have been advising for months that I think would add a lot of value: Airbed and Breakfast (http://airbedandbreakfast.com/). They are basically a CouchSurfing.com for money, where users can list rooms in their houses/apartments for rent to travelers. All of us at JTV are big believers in their business and they've proven that they can knock stuff out and are well on their way to product-market fit (and are making money). Any chance you want to take a look?

Justin

Re: Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

#17

Post by cloudmike »

sahillavingia wrote: post #2

Can you give any examples of late applications that eventually become YC-funded companies? Just curious.

We submitted for Simperium/Simplenote (S2010) at the last minute. Since we were already happy and making money, it didn't really occur to us to apply until a friend invited us to apply with him (for something else). We decided it could be a great opportunity to learn new things and meet great people, and it was.

Re: Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

#18

Post by stevejohnson »

kloncks wrote: post #9
macrael wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, are you on a touch screen device? I've accidentally downvoted a number of times because I missed the little arrows with my fingers. It's frustrating that I can't change my vote afterwards. Does anyone else feel like this is a problem? Seems fixable.

I've accidentally down-voted only when using my iPad to browse HN. That and accidental Facebook "likes" can be a terrible ordeal. How would you fix that though?

Five second "oh crap" window?

Re: Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

#19

Post by pg »

brianchesky wrote: post #16
sahillavingia wrote: post #2

Can you give any examples of late applications that eventually become YC-funded companies? Just curious.

We applied 1 hour before the deadline. The Justin.tv guys convinced us to apply that night at dinner but we were worried we might have missed the deadline. I asked Justin Kan to ask PG if it was too late. Below is the original email thread. Once he gave the go-ahead, we applied, and the rest is history. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Paul Graham Date: Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 5:57 PM Subject: Re: yc applic…

Actually it looks like you guys applied not just before the application deadline, but just before we actually made decisions. You can only do that if you know Justin Kan.

Re: Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

#20

Post by kineticac »

sahillavingia wrote: post #2

Can you give any examples of late applications that eventually become YC-funded companies? Just curious.

Fanvibe (YCs10) was a late application. We interviewed at the late interview weekend round.

Joe and I had applied the year before with an idea that didn't make it. We were a bit discouraged, and our next venture, which was Fanvibe, was already doing pretty well. We didn't think we needed YC, but boy were we wrong.

YC was the best thing we could have done for Fanvibe! We had metup with Harj the week before the late interviews, and he let us know that YC would absolutely be perfect for us.

That was good enough for us to immediately try for it.

I made a blog post about our experience here: http://artchang.com/y-combinator-experience

Post reply on HN