How to Apply to Y Combinator
ycombinator.com
How to Apply to Y Combinator
1–10 of 136 posts
Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator
#2Great info. Thanks a lot for this, pg. You've pretty much told us exactly what you are and are not looking for in the application.
Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator
#3Great info. Thanks a lot for this, pg. You've pretty much told us exactly what you are and are not looking for in the application.
It will be great info for everyone who decides to read it and pay attention. I bet you that over 80% of the applications will still be garbage.
Of course, I see this as a good thing for everyone who applies who has some clue as to what they're doing.
Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator
#4> Whereas if we can see obstacles to your idea that you don't seem to have considered, that's a bad sign.
If I listed the top 10 actual obstacles for a given project I'd bet half of them would seem totally unintuitive. I'm skeptical of anyone (even other hackers) trying to judge the specific technical or business obstacles of something they don't know much about.
Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator
#5It seems to me that there is some very useful advice here for someone trying to write a resume, even if that wasn't the intended purpose of the posting.
Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator
#6> Whereas if we can see obstacles to your idea that you don't seem to have considered, that's a bad sign. If I listed the top 10 actual obstacles for a given project I'd bet half of them would seem totally unintuitive. I'm skeptical of anyone (even other hackers) trying to judge the specific technical or business obstacles of something they don't know much about.
Yes, and in fact we look for that. We love it when people tell us things that are non-obvious. That's a sign they really understand the problem.
Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator
#7If anyone has any questions I didn't answer, please ask them on this thread. I still consider this essay a draft; if anything important comes up here, I'll incorporate it in the next version.
Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator
#8Great info. Thanks a lot for this, pg. You've pretty much told us exactly what you are and are not looking for in the application.
It will be great info for everyone who decides to read it and pay attention . I bet you that over 80% of the applications will still be garbage. Of course, I see this as a good thing for everyone who applies who has some clue as to what they're doing.
Are you privy to the applications ? 80% would seem to be a fairly high number.
I think that there is a nice benefit from applying to YC for many small start-up companies, which is that for the first time (on that level of funding I'm assuming it's the first time) you have to get precise about stuff. So even if you do not get selected you're still going to be a big step further.
Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator
#9If anyone has any questions I didn't answer, please ask them on this thread. I still consider this essay a draft; if anything important comes up here, I'll incorporate it in the next version.
It seems to me that to have people make videos and then discard a lot of them without ever looking at them (which the text suggests is the case) would be a lot of wasted effort ?
Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator
#10If anyone has any questions I didn't answer, please ask them on this thread. I still consider this essay a draft; if anything important comes up here, I'll incorporate it in the next version.
Yeah, I'm not sure if this is completely relevant, but we have a product that we're going to launch soon, and I was wondering whether you would prefer your applicants have products/demos not yet launched as that might be better for PR purposes, etc.