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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

#241

Post by dang »

april192024 wrote: post #236
rachofsunshine wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms to be made of YC and of VCs in general (please do not take this as me going "there is nothing wrong in the VC world at all", because I absolutely do not believe that!), but I don't think excessive academic elitism is one of them. If anything, I think they're quite a bit better about avoiding that elitism than the average you'll find among organizations of comparable wealth and…

>>> "YC is pretty explicit that they try to pick founders, not ideas, most of the time. That approach is all over the Startup School videos, for example; they don't exactly make a secret of it." If Y Combinator truly prioritizes founders over ideas, as indicated in their Startup School videos, repeated rejections might suggest a fundamental mismatch. If you haven't been accepted after one or two tries, it may be a si…

It's exactly the other way around.

You'd be right if YC were perfect at assessing founders every time, but of course they're not. Applying repeatedly gives you a chance to prove that they got you wrong the first time (and the second, and the third, and so on, if need be). Not only does this work, it's the majority case (I just double checked this). Most founders that YC funds are repeat applicants.

Applying repeatedly demonstrates persistence, which is one of the qualities YC looks for. Better still, if you can show continued progress since your previous application, that demonstrates resourcefulness, another core quality. Repeated applications can move the needle on what sort of founder YC thinks you are. Especially if you were a borderline call the last time—keeping going, and applying again, is a way to get on the other side of the line.

Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24

#242

Post by andrewstuart »

dang wrote: post #217
andrewstuart wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> ideas are supposedly not worth anything If ideas are worth nothing then a great team executing well should be able to create a billion dollar company selling dog droppings. Anyone who says ideas are worth nothing is flat out wrong.

I think the claim is rather that idea is not the high-order bit in an early-stage startup funding decision; founders are. There's no success without eventually finding a good idea, especially since 'successful in the end' is practically the definition of 'good idea', or close enough to be inseparable. So it's not so much "ideas don't matter" as " starting ideas don't matter", as long as you're the type of founder who…

A great idea is incredibly valuable. In fact the idea is the key to great success.

However, it is true that without great execution, timing and luck, a great idea will go nowhere.

Trouble is there are many people who have heard "ideas are worth nothing" and failed to understand that the full sentence is "ideas are worth nothing without execution" - that is certainly true, but it is a totally different statement to "ideas are worth nothing".

Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24

#243

Post by reagan83 »

eggbrain wrote: post #101

I'm going to post something vulnerable, but I hope people take my comment in the right light, as in general I love YC and what it has done for the startup community. I've been building startups for a long time, and have applied to YC several times, mainly with the same idea (although I've always listed 4-5 other ideas I'm interested in as well). I have always gotten rejected, and while that was disappointing, I 100%…

I love a lot of what YC has done but their application process is fundamentally broken and has been for years. It appears to just be a just a factory and numbers game now, all clinging to previous successes from when PG and Jessica used to run things.

Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24

#245

Post by reagan83 »

maxrumpf wrote: post #114

The weirdest thing people do is make up criteria that YC supposedly uses to reject people. There was such a huge diversity in our batch: From 20 y/o to 40+. Foreign, domestic. Credentialed, not credentialed. $1M rev run rate, $0 run rate. Just apply.

This comment scares me that YC is desperate for applications now after burning through so many early stage founders for years. Has YC peaked?

Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24

#246

Post by andrewstuart »

dzink wrote: post #29

The 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…

Who cares?

Your deepest motivation should be to build something amazing that people want to use, to create a great business, to have fun, to go on a great adventure.

If stock market performance plays a major role in your decision to start a business or raise capital then perhaps your motivations might need a rethink.

Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24

#249

Post by dang »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #167
dang wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would work on what I was most passionate about. Which btw is also the advice that pg and Jessica (specifically Jessica in this case) gave at their last YC talk, and you can't get more YC than that.

Did they? It’s surprising because your description can’t possibly be a recipe for generating startup ideas. pg was most passionate about lisp. There must be more to it than what you said. I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand, but this seems like bad advice for someone explicitly trying to become wealthy. It’s great advice for YC to be giving, because it would maximize YC’s returns over decades: if everyone works on…

I was probably too concise. What I mean is that if I had to choose between two different ideas for what people want, I would pick the one I was more interested in, even if it seemed smaller at first, over one that had a better cover story but which I was bored by. And yes this is what Jessica said, advising a particular founder who had grown weary of what he was working on.

I think the basic philosophy is that your starting point is not so important—you can get anywhere from anywhere, as long as you are (in pg's phrase) relentlessly resourceful. Given that starting point isn't so important, you're better off starting with something you have a lot of energy for. You're going to need it.

Of course I would work on Skysheet again! When did spreadsheets stop being the most important thing in programming?

Re: Tell HN: Ever think of applying to YC? Do it this weekend for S24

#250

Post by [deleted] »

jacobwg wrote: post #47
_akhe wrote: post #23

Re: "won't get in" How do I balance this encouraging advice with everything I've heard online about YC basically being a post-Ivy League thing? Seems like there's basically a 0% chance a random person would get into YC. And often those who did get in went to Stanford, Harvard, etc. and don't even have a product - sometimes they don't even know what they're going to build yet. I wrote the idea of VC stuff off long ago…

I mean, I didn't even graduate college :P > So we're just doing it on our own. IMO if you can become a $100M household name without VC, that's absolutely the way to do it. Even if you do take the VC path, YC for me was a massive boost in network, knowledge, and resources that I didn't have before, but it's also not the only way to acquire those things. You can even find that YC knowledge online, e.g. https://www.star…

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