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Disclaimer: if you're not sure what :) means, please google it before proceeding with the above suggestion.
Anyway I'm just joking. Your post is a nice way to get noticed. Good luck with your application!
In the spirit of showing you that we can thrive at Y Combinator, and that we are more than who we are on paper.
I have an idea. Within 72 hours you have to hack into the Y Combinator servers and mark your application as "invite to interview". Do that and you get an interview :) Disclaimer: if you're not sure what :) means, please google it before proceeding with the above suggestion. Anyway I'm just joking. Your post is a nice way to get noticed. Good luck with your application!
I have an idea. Within 72 hours you have to hack into the Y Combinator servers and mark your application as "invite to interview". Do that and you get an interview :) Disclaimer: if you're not sure what :) means, please google it before proceeding with the above suggestion. Anyway I'm just joking. Your post is a nice way to get noticed. Good luck with your application!
Have you ever tried googling for an emoticon...?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their offer is specifically for problems that YC itself faces. Give us a problem, a painpoint, anything that annoys you in day to day life, and we’ll hack it in 72 hours. Sending a phone to Mars and back isn't one of them, and is missing the entire spirit of the problem.
I don't know about you, but for me not being able to explore space by myself is a daily painpoint ;)
Being entrepreneurial involves you
1) generating ideas,
2) using your intuition to pick a good one,
3) testing it out to see if your intuition is correct (iterate if not), and
4) then execute that idea (and again, iterate as needed)
Or, in short: discovering and exploiting an opportunity
Edit: minor.
I don't think that YC is trying to identify teams that can create the maximum amount of value in 72 hours. They're looking for teams that will create the maximum amount of value over thousands of hours (or more). It's not at all clear that the former correlates with the latter.
Getting a prototype out in 72 hours is a pretty good start, from there you can validate whether the approach is good, and if it is go into greater resolution about specific parts of the pain point and solve those too in the next iterations And if the basic business premise is just plain wrong you've you've only lost a few days of dev time rather than months
Just starting to code some crap is exactly what's wrong with the current market. Anybody can do that. And for most, it won't turn out well.
What can you do differently? Invest more time and create something better.
Here's a hypothetical for you: how many people do you think have social permission to contact a YC partner and say "X is awesome and deserves a look." I'd ballpark that in the hundreds to low thousand range. Many of them are accessible on the Internets and less overwhelmed with suitors than the YC partners are. How about solving a meaningful problem for one of them and having the next application say "We built a $WHATEVER for $SOMEONE which increased their customer base by 10%, like they told you over email earlier."
P.S. This advice had wide application beyond YC and beyond "applications." Indeed, part of me thinks that applications (in general) are a backup filtering mechanism for people who haven't figured out a more effective way to get what they want yet.
The biggest difference between what he did and what you're doing is that he made it an open offer. If you chopped off "dear y combinator," and released the challenge to HN members in general I think your post would have attracted a much more positive response.
Also, I'm not sure if you guys have been paying attention but pg and paul have been vocal about YC painpoints recently. Search their comments. The one I've heard the most is "everyone is exhausted after demo day".