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How to Apply to Y Combinator

ycombinator.com

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Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#81

Post by pg »

ajju wrote: post #47
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.

A question that is not directly related: 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…

Not really. It matters much more how good the people are than what type of group they are.

The reason I want to know the type of group is that it helps me to interpret the answers to the other questions. E.g. if the founders are undergrads, I shouldn't have as high standards for what they've achieved; if they're colleagues who worked together, I'm curious about whether the idea grew out of some need they had at work; etc.

If you want to know who to pick as cofounders, pick people who are smart and energetic and that you can work well with. Also try to pick people you've known for a while. You need more holding you together than the startup, because there will probably be some point when you dip below the x axis and the startup seems worthless.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#82

Post by araneae »

_cbsz wrote: post #67
araneae wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the analogy that's flawed at all. You admit that this might make that choice of who to interview less obvious, which is exactly my point. 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 inte…

OT: was this that crazy dorm at Cornell?

Yes :). Ah, college. I miss it.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#84

Post by dbul »

dhouston wrote: post #73
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.)

Hopefully I won't feel stupid posting this, but I wished someone had done the same thing when I applied. (pg -- if you'd rather I not share this, feel free to delete) Original Dropbox YC app: http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2/app.html Had to remove some names and one sensitive thing but otherwise unedited

Even though I don't intend on reapplying, this was thought provoking; thanks.

Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate? I think this is a critical question.

Several weeks ago I was at a coffee shop and some girl was complaining to her friend about saving her data as they were leaving. Her friend said, "I just use DropBox." Had to smile as it was the first time I saw a (presumably) lay person mention a YC-funded company. It was nice to see an indication of such a breadth of success.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#85

Post by rms »

yumraj wrote: post #58

How about someone who needs guidance more than money. Like, someone who is currently employed and wants to do something on the side till it makes sense to go solo and maybe would need funding at that point. Would YC be interested/willing to consider this model and engage with such founder(s) to help review ideas, business models etc.?

Check out the program run by The Funded. I think they are probably the only program out there for very early stage companies that really lets you keep your day job. http://www.founderinstitute.com/

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#87

Post by cperciva »

pg wrote: post #80
cperciva wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be worth discussing the "are any of these the case" (sole founder, keeping an existing job, can't move, etc.) question a bit -- the form says that these are not automatically disqualifying, but if you can give an example in each case of when they would or would not be disqualifying (and thus give people some idea of where the grey area is) it would probably help some people.

The point of this question is just to alert us to go back and check the application for problems. Before we added it, we often used to miss these things. Here's how the question is used in practice. We vote on applications without necessarily checking it. Then at the end when we have a ranked list, we go back and check to see whether any of the top ranked ones have any signs of breakage. (That's when we check the ans…

Here's how the question is used in practice...

Well, yes. I more or less understood all of that based on comments you've made in the past and what happened last time I submitted a "I can't move to the bay area" application -- my point was that it might be a useful thing to explain in your essay.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#88

Post by jacoblyles »

You get what you measure. The application selects for the ability to communicate in pithy statements. Fortunately, this is likely to be somewhat correlated with intelligence. Unfortunately, there are no obviously better methodologies.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#89

Post by siong1987 »

Mz wrote: post #76
jamiequint wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC for us was much more about the connections than the money. It makes getting in the door a lot of places much easier, VCs/Angels are big on referrals and YC is kind of an insta-referral to anyone you want to talk to. The value of YC also depends largely on what kind of company you want to start. If you're looking to start a small shop making $500k-$2M (max) a year in revenue with 2-3 people than YC probably isn't f…

How would one determine which category they likely fall in ($2M max or $10M+ potential)?

You can ask yourself: Can your startup make 500M in 10 years time?

If the answer is YES, then, you're in that group.

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#90

Post by skywalker »

rms wrote: post #86
skywalker wrote: post #83

PG, please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

http://ycombinator.com ?

YC is pretty recent and he did it in his forties.

I was thinking about what he did when he was younger, just like the situation of someone that would apply to YC.

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