41–50 of 136 posts
Simple thoughts.
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 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…
Would YC consider accepting founders who can't work full time on their idea? We have been working part time on our product for the last few months and will launch later this year. We don't expect to clear immigration hurdles till sometime in 2010. Does it make sense to apply?
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.
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.
You said
My initial goal is to figure out what kind of group I'm dealing with. Three friends about to graduate from college? Two colleagues who work together at a big company and want to jump ship? Are they all programmers? A mix of programmers and business people? There are maybe 20 or 30 different configurations of founders, most of which I've probably seen by this point.
Is there a subset of these group types that work(s) better than others in your experience? If so, founders might be able to choose cofounders that increase their chance of succeeding.
Also, having worked as a member of a couple of types of groups (startup with room mate / recruiting talented programmers with a similar outlook and goals), I have found that there seem to be problems common to each type.
Since you have a much larger dataset, you might be able to outline the common pitfalls each type of group runs into. Could you do that, at least for the common types of groups?
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.)
What pg's doing here seemed mostly to tell applicants what not to do. He's trying to make his application process scale better, and to increase the signal to noise ratio on the good, but not obviously great teams.
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.
However, if the goal of teaching is to teach students, then obviously one should try to improve their writing! Similarly, as you point out, if the goal of YC is to find useful information, then of course they should provide this additional help.
tl;dr:
Of course, most intelligent people I know would have found everything in this link perfectly obvious. In this case, you'll fail to separate people with good projects and reading comprehension from people with good projects AND good business sense.
It reminds me of applicants to our dorm (residents reviewed applications and rated them, which decided admission). It was easy to get into the dorm if you had any idea what the dorm was about. But some people just "didn't get it" and they were easy to pick out and rate poorly. (Bad application: I want to live here because I'm an architect and the architecture building) (Good application: I want to live here because I like getting naked in a kiddie pool in the middle of winter.)
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.
The reason for "(non-computer)" is that we wanted to distinguish between hacking in the sense of programming, and hacking in the sense of beating the system.
I guess with your comments above paul, it is something along those lines that you are looking for.
Thanks for clarification, oh and the initial question for that matter :)