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How to Apply to Y Combinator

ycombinator.com

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Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#21

Post by jacquesm »

michaelfairley wrote: post #16
jacquesm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

The amount of effort that gets "wasted" per unwatched video is probably relatively small. Per the video instructions ( http://ycombinator.com/video.html ), producing the video really shouldn't take much time at all (my guess is less than five minutes for a group that a) already has well defined goals and b) has a macbook, where there's almost no overhead to record a video). Additionally, the very act of making the vi…

producing a half decent video, even if it is only 5 minutes worth of production is a lot of work.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#22

Post by araneae »

On the other hand, maybe you don't want to help people submit better applications, because you can still only select a few of them. As the overall quality increases, it becomes more difficult to select between poor and high quality work. At least in the case of my intro bio students, essay 1 is always terrible and therefore easy to grade. I give them lots of tips, etc., for essay 2. The essays all improve, but I still have to assign the same mean grade so all their grades are the same. Basically it just makes my life harder.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#23

Post by david927 »

Isn't this also an admission that the application process is a bit broken?

I think a lot of people would be open to submitting their application to others first, to help flesh out the weakpoints. On the menu bar, can we have "new", "threads", ..., and "YC applications"?

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#24

Post by minalecs »

lacker wrote: post #14

It would be great to see previous successful applications, if they don't mind. (Unsuccessful ones would be interesting too but that might be weird for them.)

I agree this would be very helpful, but I imagine they're would be a lot of effort on censoring things like personal info, other ideas. I think for example I would like to read just how the successful ones described they're accepted ideas.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#25

Post by Xichekolas »

araneae wrote: post #22

On the other hand, maybe you don't want to help people submit better applications, because you can still only select a few of them. As the overall quality increases, it becomes more difficult to select between poor and high quality work. At least in the case of my intro bio students, essay 1 is always terrible and therefore easy to grade. I give them lots of tips, etc., for essay 2. The essays all improve, but I stil…

I think you analogy with grading papers is flawed. Sure, it's easier to grade bad things than good things, because you don't have to look too deeply, but YC does not have to assign mean grades. They are reading in order to find useful information. If all applications become more concise and useful, that is a net gain, even if it makes the choice of who to interview less obvious.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#26

Post by ephermata »

jacquesm wrote: post #9
pg wrote: post #7

If 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 ?

When we applied during the last cycle, we made videos for each of the founders individually and edited them together. Didn't take much time at all, but it did lead to an interesting thought process about "how do I come across well in a short 'hello' video? what do I want to project?" and of course "what will grab their attention?"

In the end I shot my video with a cell phone camera. Took two takes and about 5 minutes. Finding the right location for it took a little longer, but fortunately the place just popped up one day while walking around town.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#27

Post by andreyf »

I remember reading about a study which showed that, at least for certain companies, judging from first-decade performance, hiring based on interviews was less intelligent than hiring based purely on GPA [1]. The reasoning was that judgment during interviews is suceptible to various human biases to which GPA's are not.

At least part of PG's reasoning seems susceptible to similar biases: for example, whether or not he recognizes a username might have a lot to do with how memorable the username is. I wonder if sorting users by a subset of their upvotes - say, those received from news.YC alumni - would make more sense in "highlighting" intelligent applicants.

1. Would appreciate if anyone who recognizes this links it for me.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#28

Post by zandorg »

jacquesm wrote: post #21
michaelfairley wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of effort that gets "wasted" per unwatched video is probably relatively small. Per the video instructions ( http://ycombinator.com/video.html ), producing the video really shouldn't take much time at all (my guess is less than five minutes for a group that a) already has well defined goals and b) has a macbook, where there's almost no overhead to record a video). Additionally, the very act of making the vi…

producing a half decent video, even if it is only 5 minutes worth of production is a lot of work.

If that's so, my skills at setting up lighting, choosing angles, and editing, learned on a A-level equivalent Media Studies course, would be more useful than my entire Software Development degree!

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#29

Post by benmathes »

As someone who interviews developer candidates, this is not just good advice for applying to YC, but to tech jobs in general. Putting bullshit on your resume in any form is the same thing as putting shit on your resume. As with all useful communication, you're limited. Cut to the essence.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#30

Post by alain94040 »

pg wrote: post #6
staunch wrote: post #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.

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.

The funny thing is that given the space allocated to cover all those scenarios, the applicant ends up in a situation very similar to game theory (a post yesterday on HN pops to mind).

You, as the applicant, have to figure out what PG will consider non-obvious so you cover those, but keeping in mind that if there is anything obvious that PG would have thought you should cover, then you should cover those as well, but don't cover stuff that PG considers truly obvious and not worth covering...

Just like game theory implies, winning at this game pretty much means that both you and PG are on the same wavelength (from a though-process point of view).

Which sounds kind of obvious(), once I reach that conclusion.

() extra credit will be given to people who cover the question of whether this post was useful from a game-theory standpoint. Was this post obvious in a useful way, or just plain obvious, or...?

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