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How to Apply to Y Combinator

ycombinator.com

131–136 of 136 posts

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#131
post #115
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that YCombinator, which values hackers so highly, included one pure business person (Jessica) among its four partners. Could you explain the reasoning behind that decision? What expertise did Jessica bring that Paul, Robert, and Trevor lack? More generally, when should founders consider bringing on a non-hacker as a co-founder?

Jessica came from an investment bank. She deals with all the legal documents, gets startups incorporated, and so on. She also organizes all the events; we have a lot of those. At least, that's what we thought we were getting. She also turns out to be an extremely good judge of character, better than any of us. One of her nicknames is "the social radar."

Some folks don't know how lucky they are at meeting the right people at the right time, but you don't sound like one of them Paul. It's hard finding folks to cover all the needs of an early business. I've written about coupling social media with relevant ads for months, so far I've only discovered one business type interested. I gave up and started coding it myself (very limited web programming, desktop c++ for a little under 14 years).

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#132
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.?

This is my preferred model as well. Is it too conservative to to build a product that users will like first before seeking outside investment?

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#133
post #91
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we're much influenced by how memorable usernames are Well, by definition, biases aren't intuitively obvious. But I'd love to hear explicit introspection about this in the essay: what are your biases, and how do you eliminate their affecting your decisions?

That's a question we think about a lot, because bias basically equals things we judge wrong. I like energetic founders, for example, but one wouldn't call that a "bias," because energetic founders are good. So what you're really asking is what makes us pick wrong, which is something we're constantly thinking about. When I pick wrong, it's often because the founders seem really nice. That's probably my biggest weaknes…

The more eyes you have on it, the more varied the views, the weaker the bias becomes but also the more watered down the perspective. You have a solid "review board" size at 4-5. You guys & gal will minimize cognitive biases. I'm only commenting because I spent a few hours recently reading and writing about the topic, it's all new to me though (blog links are in HN).

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#134
post #55

So let me get this straight--if you make it through the gauntlet of rather arbitrary, hype-driven judgements, you get a whopping $10k and you have to move to the Bay, which has among the highest real estate and cost of living in the country? How is this not a complete waste of time since it's so exploitive of developers? Oh, that's right, being part of the startup-hype bubble machine entitles you to a magic wand that…

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…

This is a great sales pitch for YC, wish it was on their application sheet Jamie :).

I've been wanting to move out to San Jose anyway...

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#135
post #128

Maybe because I'm a little older I'm confused on this one Paul. Why so much competition for 20k? Why are young founders racing to give away up to 10% of their business for such a small amount of capital? I can see the value of the YC network and that's worth a lot to me right now. But rent and fast food money for 3 months seems a little low of a reward on "winning" applications. Is the success rate of YC founders low…

I found a good answer on this nest of a comment page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=715530

Re: How to Apply to Y Combinator

#136
post #77
post #55

So let me get this straight--if you make it through the gauntlet of rather arbitrary, hype-driven judgements, you get a whopping $10k and you have to move to the Bay, which has among the highest real estate and cost of living in the country? How is this not a complete waste of time since it's so exploitive of developers? Oh, that's right, being part of the startup-hype bubble machine entitles you to a magic wand that…

http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html

Huh, somehow missed this one previously. Thanks rms
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