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We Make Mistakes

blog.ycombinator.com

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131–140 of 206 posts

Re: We Make Mistakes

#131

Post by bobbles »

flipside wrote: post #71
aliakhtar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 times is a lot. Has it always been with the same product, or different ideas?

Team has changed, name has changed, product has changed, vision has been refined. 10/30 marks my 4 year anniversary for coming up with the core ideas behind Tinj. We're building dramatically better ways for people to share information starting with video ratings. More than anything, I've grown enormously as an entrepreneur, as a developer and as a person.

"We're building dramatically better ways for people to share information..."

reaction: cool!

"...starting with video ratings"

reaction: meh

Re: We Make Mistakes

#132

Post by coffeemug »

lubos wrote: post #121

If you want to get into YC, it's quite simple. You have to optimize for what they want and considering how transparent the application process is, it's actually quite easy. PG's essays are step-by-step guides on how to "tick" all the right boxes. They even give you the list of ideas they wish to fund. How nice of them... No wonder YC has announced that quality of applications is increasing. It's not increasing becaus…

Optimizing for what you think YC partners want is a sure way to not get into YC. You're not a mind reader; what you think they want is almost certainly different from what they actually want. More importantly, they read thousands of applications, and you're only working on one. They can smell people who are trying to game them from a thousand miles away.

Just doing what you do is the only thing that matters and will get you in, assuming you're doing the right thing. (Asking alums for feedback on the application is a very good way to make sure you're doing the right thing and your presentation doesn't suck)

Re: We Make Mistakes

#133

Post by yarou »

dropit_sphere wrote: post #30
sfeng wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're trying to be kind to the people they just refused, I'm not sure why that's pretentious. If you applied, presumably you wanted to get in and reminding them that it's not necessarily them or their company which is wrong is a kind thing to do.

Actually, I think this is the most important part of the process. When you're small you have the luxury of making mistakes and no one cares. When you wield some power/prestige and your actions affect other peoples' lives, people start coming to you with grievances. The worst part is that often those grievances are "deserved" --- I guarantee that some startup w/o an interview request will make it big, and one that get…

The problem itself isn't very hard, at least not in the mathematical sense of the word. It's just that it's a human process, and is thus prone to the failings of human beings, including the various biases that human beings are known to have.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#134

Post by viksit »

kevin wrote: post #39
viksit wrote: post #16

Does this include late apps? Curious about the decisions on apps that came in hours or days after the 8p deadline.

You can pretty much late apply all the way until the next batch starts. There's not really a formal process with late applications, though. We do read through them all eventually and we'll respond to all of you. Right now, the rough deadline for us is by the end of the year.

Ah got it. So this means late apps still haven't been reviewed?

Re: We Make Mistakes

#135

Post by kevin »

Fando wrote: post #114
hillis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website you're describing already exists. In fact, you just posted on it.

You're obviously right to think that hillis. What are your thoughts on the potential that could be achieved if YCombinator would build on the idea?

If? We are!

Re: We Make Mistakes

#136

Post by flipside »

bobbles wrote: post #131
flipside wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Team has changed, name has changed, product has changed, vision has been refined. 10/30 marks my 4 year anniversary for coming up with the core ideas behind Tinj. We're building dramatically better ways for people to share information starting with video ratings. More than anything, I've grown enormously as an entrepreneur, as a developer and as a person.

"We're building dramatically better ways for people to share information..." reaction: cool! "...starting with video ratings" reaction: meh

I know, right?

One of these days I'll figure out the right way to explain things in writing...

Re: We Make Mistakes

#137

Post by jordanbrown »

kevin wrote: post #9
Udo wrote: post #7

Damn, I was thinking about trying for a "late" application, but apply.ycombinator.com seems to be down. Does anyone know if they still allow this, in principle? Or are batches now so saturated (with good ideas) that they dropped the option?

We do still allow late apps. We're working on the problem and hope to have it back up soon. Sorry guys!

How about a rejected application but one that now has traction? ie live in the App Store and growing.

Re: We Make Mistakes

#138

Post by doddavenkatappa »

We too got the rejection letter. But it is perfectly understandable in our case as we are really in the early stages, without a prototype.

Any thoughts on how much a prototype and full-time commitment from all founders matter?

Re: We Make Mistakes

#139

Post by tsenkov »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #100
vishnupr wrote: post #8

A relevant question I asked PG a year ago: [Do you review rejected YC apps to find startups who then made it big?] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7122774

I've mentioned this in another post. I'm a CPSC University of Calgary alum. James Gosling (Founder of Java) is also an alum. A bunch of my profs went to school with him back in the 70s and the stories they told about him. Well he was a legend. One day he came to do a talk when I was in undergrad. He told us that he applied to every major CPSC school for his PhD and was rejected EVERYWHERE except for Carnegie Mellon.…

This is a very interesting case, indeed.

I think YC used to accept awesome teams with (seemingly) bad ideas. Which is only partially like your example. But I don't believe they are doing it now with so many applications (40% more than S14).

Anyone has any examples pointing the other?

Re: We Make Mistakes

#140

Post by BillionaireBear »

jl wrote: post #104
AustinPythonFTW wrote: post #77

I'm definitely speaking at least a little bit out of bitterness (our team just got rejected), so with that caveat it feels like YC is becoming more like traditional VC (venture capital): - extremely low probability of success just due to volume of applications - no feedback (again, due to volume of applications, and they posted a nice blog post about this, but just stating a fact) - it seems (I don't have any factual…

We've been doing pretty much the same things since we started in 2005: we've never given specific feedback about rejections at the application stage (it wasn't going to scale even when we only got a few hundred applications). We funded 8 startups in our first batch, which was roughly 2-3% of the total applications. We definitely fund people who have no connection to folks we already know, or Silicon Valley for that m…

Are you expecting another +40% increase for the next batch? I have the impression that companies that would've been (just about) invited for interview last batch , may not have made the cut had they applied this batch (with there being a few actual data points to support this). Would you agree with this assessment? Do you expect the difficulty to get into YC to only increase going forward?
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