What’s the acceptance rate, 1%, most with cofounders? So if you’re making a video by yourself it’s like 1/500 ?
Seems like a better use of time making a video and filling out the app once you have above average team and traction.
Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24
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Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24
#72What happened? Not enough people applied? Here's the last batch.[1] Gives a sense of what's being funded. Ideas: - MoneyNow - leverages the new FedNow instant payment system. FedNow is run by the Fed and transfers money in seconds with a charge of just US$0.045 per transaction. And they mean seconds . If the money isn't there in 10 seconds, the transaction times out. Few banks support it yet, but some do. It needs co…
Unfortunately the rust game engine idea (as much as it kills me to say this) is a perfect example of not YC material. Every VC, whether early stage or late stage, must fund companies that have a chance of growing by 5% every week. It’s remarkably hard to start anything that can maintain that growth. https://paulgraham.com/growth.html is worth internalizing.
But there’s a second caveat here: YC invests in people, not in ideas. From pg himself: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-reddits
> Their idea was bad though. And since we thought then that we were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt bad about it. Jessica was sad that we'd rejected the muffins. And it seemed wrong to me to turn down the people we'd been inspired to start YC to fund.
So it might be worth applying with a particularly bad idea. Or at least it used to be; I have no idea whether YC ever encourages strong founders with a bad idea to re-apply with a better one, or if you get any feedback from the partners that they almost accepted you but rejected because of the idea. (One of my neat memories as a 19yo is getting a thoughtful email from pg saying we almost made it to the interview with an idea that was essentially “blackboard sucks; make better school software," but the biggest factors against us were my age and the fact that selling to schools was about as hard as selling to governments back in 2008.)
Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Startup in W09, worked on it for 4 years, started saying no to pg about moderating HN, ran out of money, needed a job, said yes to pg about moderating HN.
Seems like it was a needed option for you at the time. Are you still enjoying it? Waiting for someone to take the baton?
You all talk about the work Dan does moderating this place, which, fair enough, but "Launch HN" is low key one of the coolest jobs in startups. The before/after on what those launch posts become after Dan gets involved would knock you out. A sibling comment asked him what his comp was (which is very funny) but it's a question with a simple answer: whatever he's getting, it's probably not enough.
Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24
#74YC is totally a non starter for non US aspirants and it's not YC's fault. Best case scenario - you end up having a company that's registered in US, would be paying taxes in US when it comes to that but you yourself wouldn't be allowed to set foot on the US soil, and even if that, would be shuttling for visa renewals every now and then.
Not a YC founder, but this is factually not true. YC allows Delaware, Cayman, Canada, and Singapore corporations [0].
Pre-empting the accusation that "cayman companies are about tax dodging": Cayman companies are a great fit for heavily international businesses that do not reside in the USA, but that want to be governed as if they were, because cayman corporate law is basically delaware's.
A good example is Nubank, which is a cayman corp that does most of it's business in LatAm.
The reason a company like this should not be a delaware c-corp is so that, in case of an acquisition of the companies assets, the holding company doesn't have to pay usa taxes (which is reasonable, since the company didn't have usa operations to begin with).
Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24
#75The market is tanking again and interest rates may go up and or continue into next year. YC graduates are expected to present and raise their seed rounds around Demo Day in 3-4 months. Raising any kind of money sets an interest rate that you pay with your equity % to investors (at high interest rates they expect to own more equity as time goes by.) What are the current fundraising terms you guys see for YC startups b…
Not only do I not know the answers, I am so devoid of such knowledge that you would find it hilarious. But from my perspective (FWIW) it's all sort of optimizing for the wrong thing. If you want to do a startup, YC is such a force multiplier that none of these details matter in the end.
I do know that one reason the YC deal is far larger than it used to be is to give founders resilience against market ups and downs. You get a lot of runway now.
Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24
#76As a long time HN reader, eventually participating in YCW21, the main thing i would like to highlight is there's so many misconceptions about YC on HN.
It would take too long to refute them all, but just remember the HN readerships' view of YC is pretty distorted. ("it's all about VC money" , "it's just for ivy league grads" etc).
I could go on, but just read Paul Graham's essays - that's probably the best way to understand how YC thinks.
Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24
#77you need to graduate from the "right school/alumni" and i would discourage anybody else from wasting their time
As much as the YC app is gamed (based on winning applications I've seen from friends and strangers), alumnist is only one piece of the puzzle of a few.
im not saying you have to graduate from ivy league to get into YC but bulk majority of people in YC are.
they are almost always going to favour people from their own league.
im basing this off people who are coming from YC and telling me how it is.
some folks applied to YC in the past, get rejected and then find some Harvard graduate running with their ideas they submitted.
Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24
#78I’d love to apply, but I’m building FlingUp.com and there is no chance in hell anyone would ever want to fund a lone founder hacking on this project when the kids have gone to sleep.
Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24
#79What happened? Not enough people applied? Here's the last batch.[1] Gives a sense of what's being funded. Ideas: - MoneyNow - leverages the new FedNow instant payment system. FedNow is run by the Fed and transfers money in seconds with a charge of just US$0.045 per transaction. And they mean seconds . If the money isn't there in 10 seconds, the transaction times out. Few banks support it yet, but some do. It needs co…
No idea how many people applied but I'm sure there's no lack - I just felt bad for forgetting to put the usual footer at the bottom a month ago. And I worry about the comments I see on HN interpreting YC as just for credentialed-elite applicants. It's deeply not true and I have a personal feeling about the question - being one of the uncredentialed-unelite-self-doubting types who could have been dissuaded from applyi…
This is just an empirical question, right? What are the proportions of credentialed elites among all applicants and successful applicants? If this number is surprising, it would mean a lot more to people than any amount of insistence.
Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24
#80As a long time HN reader, eventually participating in YCW21, the main thing i would like to highlight is there's so many misconceptions about YC on HN. It would take too long to refute them all, but just remember the HN readerships' view of YC is pretty distorted. ("it's all about VC money" , "it's just for ivy league grads" etc). I could go on, but just read Paul Graham's essays - that's probably the best way to und…
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