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If it's confused me, chances are it may confuse others as well.
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.
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.
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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…
I see you are subscribing to philosophy of no planning required and only one take. I once spent about 3 hours to do a 1 minute pitch.
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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…
Trying too hard to pitch in the video is actually a mistake, because it makes the video stilted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, I'd definitely be interested in hearing how much a demo matters when it comes to choosing. I felt like that was a major weakness my group had the one time we applied in the past.
Thanks pg! I was worried that entering too many secondary ideas would almost appear as a drawback. As if the team wasn't truly dedicated to the idea they were submitting the application for. Its nice to know the team itself is more important. Also, I'd love to know what percentage of teams have business people, rather than 100% hackers
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"?
The idea of having everyone look at one another's application sounds like a minefield, though. Plus I don't want to clutter up HN with YC stuff. Only a minority of the users of this site are even interested in startups.
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I see you are subscribing to philosophy of no planning required and only one take. I once spent about 3 hours to do a 1 minute pitch.
I agree that it take lots of time to make a "professional" looking pitch, but based on the instructions, it looks like pg wants as much spontaneity as is practical.
We're doing a little 1-2 minute video explaining our stuff at the moment and staying rather lo-fi and plan at least 10 hours of work on it.
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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…
What do you understand about your business
that other companies in it just don't get?
One thing that's confused me about the "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." question is the parenthesis. My guess is that they're included because you'll accept either a computer, or non-computer related example. If it's confused me, chances are it may confuse others as well.