Advice for YC Applicants: Better Last-Minute than Late

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[up arrow] 2 points [down arrow] by stevejohnson 1 hour ago...

Greatly reduces the chances of accidental downvotes due to misclicks.

We (Adioso - W09) submitted our application in the last ~18 hours. The cut-off was 4pm Saturday Australian time, so we spent Friday afternoon on the application and submitted it in the evening.

I'd been aware of the impending deadline a couple weeks out, but as we didn't rate ourselves as a big chance we didn't make it a priority. At the beginning of that week I decided that if we had time, we'd spend Friday afternoon on an application, on the off chance we'd get through. Had something important come up relating to a paying client (we were both contracting at the time), it's quite possible we'd have forgotten about it.

It was only after finishing, that from reading through it ourselves and showing it to Fenn's girlfriend, we thought "hey, this actually isn't too bad, maybe we have a chance".

I (YC S09) applied about 20mins before the deadline I think. I didn't tell my co-founders. One was living in Malaysia at the time. They had persuaded me to wait till we were 'ready'. We are a UK based company. It was about 2/3am in the morning and I was lying awake regretting that. I felt it didn't fit with the fundamentals of YC mentality - 'screw it just do it'. I was overcome with a great sense of obligation, not just to my co-founders (someone has to make the big decisions) but also to my family and girlfriend who had supported me that far.

I crept down stairs with her phone and mine to video the pitch in the kitchen of the close-to-derelict-renovation job-extraordinaire of a house I'd just bought. Videoing with her phone and timing myself on mine, it took me 15 recordings, fumbling around with 2 phones. You can see the exposed pipe work and partially tiled and stained walls of the filthy kitchen in the back ground; we had no kitchen, bathroom or hot water. The lighting is terrible....it looks more like an interrogation.

A week later our Malaysian based co-founder was on a marathon 7 flight trip around the world only to land into a marathon of meetings I’d set up with YC companies (14 in total) first in London and then in the valley. 5 days later we'd hacked something together whilst meeting these companies and were sat in front of PG having spent the week sleeping on Justin Kans floor with about 5hrs sleep a night.

Live and hope......what better a reason to base decisions on.

AdGrok applied at the last minute. I happened to notice the 'apply now' message on the main Y Combinator page (I was trying to find one of PG's blog posts), which was a couple days before the deadline. We did the video literally at 1145pm on the last day.

What were we thinking? Get it out the door and done as quickly as possible. We were stil at our previous employer at the time and hadn't finalized an idea, so there was some doubt about applying. But once the momentum got underway, our only thought was submitting the best application possible, and fully sketching out our idea. I read the blog posts from other YC companies about the application process, and they were very helpful making us understand what was expected from YC, and what was coming in the application process.

Re-applying per se is definitely not a red flag. We often accept people on the nth try. But if you're reapplying with substantially the same thing each time, you're effectively just testing our consistency. It would be a better bet to change more than wording.

Video quality can be at least this raw:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=855057