My Y Combinator experience
marcobambini.com
My Y Combinator experience
1–10 of 152 posts
Re: My Y Combinator experience
#2Too bad there isn't a Creo demo, screenshots, or walkthrough, where you could show off your platform. You must have many potential customers on your site with this influx of HN traffic -- hint hint.
Re: My Y Combinator experience
#3Too bad there isn't a Creo demo, screenshots, or walkthrough, where you could show off your platform. You must have many potential customers on your site with this influx of HN traffic -- hint hint.
Word. I just visited their site, looking for the same.
Re: My Y Combinator experience
#4Too bad there isn't a Creo demo, screenshots, or walkthrough, where you could show off your platform. You must have many potential customers on your site with this influx of HN traffic -- hint hint.
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Re: My Y Combinator experience
#5I haven't interviewed with YC, but I felt like I was missing something while reading their account of the interview. I would assume that the YC interviewers DO read applications, and they only ask questions they already know the answer to to see how the founders will respond. I read somewhere that they do this to make sure the founders have already considered every possible objection to their idea. I wonder if these guys were rejected because of their negative reaction to this type of questioning.
Re: My Y Combinator experience
#6> We entered the room and facing us there were 3 young boys in their early twenties.
I wonder if YC considers applicants' age when pairing them with the interviewers. Because if not, that's a very fertile soil for all sorts of interesting biases.
Re: My Y Combinator experience
#7Too bad there isn't a Creo demo, screenshots, or walkthrough, where you could show off your platform. You must have many potential customers on your site with this influx of HN traffic -- hint hint.
Here's a video walkthrough: https://vimeo.com/108812024
Not sure why it's hidden in the footer.
Re: My Y Combinator experience
#8Too bad there isn't a Creo demo, screenshots, or walkthrough, where you could show off your platform. You must have many potential customers on your site with this influx of HN traffic -- hint hint.
Word. I just visited their site, looking for the same.
Here is my tiny soapbox: Programming is about making better tools. Business is about programming people. If you go to a business incubator, you had better prove that you can program people, or they won't be interested in your business.
Re: My Y Combinator experience
#9Sorry guys - if I was interviewing you as a YC partner, I'd pass on you too.
You repeatedly express frustration that the interviewers were not intimately familiar with your application, but it doesn't seem if you put much into familiarizing yourself with YC and their flavour of logic.
YC: Why are you spending so much time developing this application? Creo: It is not only an application, it is a compiler, a virtual machine, a new language and even a mobile operating system.
YC was asking why you ignored customer development and just jumped into boiling the ocean before doing anything to verify that there was an existing market opportunity in the form of real customers willing to pay you real money to solve a problem. It's not that they didn't understand what you were trying to do, or questioning whether you could do it. They were right to push you for proof that you had more than a few friends who were desperate to use it.
The answer that you gave to the question is just a hairball of red flags. You wrote half a million lines of code before validating your business case? Do you truly believe that your ability to see the future is so strong that you just don't need to back up your vision with data? That is not reassuring to a savvy investor who hears "500klc" and feels fear and/or pity.
Listen, it sounds like the experience was positive and that you are taking answering some of the hard questions seriously. However, I urge you not to move forward without questioning that your entire position that YC blew it on an obviously incredible opportunity might be significantly flawed.
As to your idea itself: I am deeply skeptical that a drag-and-drop UI for building mobile apps is going to turn non-developers into developers. You're not considering that 10% of writing code is syntax and 90% following a strong intuition of what to do first.
Perhaps the reason it doesn't exist is because nobody has that problem.
"What does it do?"
"Anything you can imagine!"
Most people don't understand what they are allowed to imagine. Sorry.
Re: My Y Combinator experience
#10I haven't interviewed with YC, but I felt like I was missing something while reading their account of the interview. I would assume that the YC interviewers DO read applications, and they only ask questions they already know the answer to to see how the founders will respond. I read somewhere that they do this to make sure the founders have already considered every possible objection to their idea. I wonder if these…
That's my reading of it too. When pitching your product, these types of seemingly ignorant questions should be exactly what you're prepared for. Responding with incredulity is a terrible way to win people over.