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My Y Combinator experience

marcobambini.com

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Re: My Y Combinator experience

#91

Post by giarc »

>As I already said and as I clearly written in our apply, we are currently in pre-beta so we just developed apps for internal usage, nothing is on the market yet.

I hope this isn't a verbatim quote from the interview. Your interviewees were obviously very smart people, if they keep asking the same question (or what seems to be the same questions) it means you have not answered it properly. Therefore saying things like "As I already said" leaves an impression that you don't understand what they are asking.

Thanks for writing this up though. All too often we hear about the successful candidates. It's good to hear the other side of things.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#93

Post by ryanSrich »

Great article and it points out an issue I've seen with a few startups.

It's no one else's job to understand what you're building. Even if you hand me an application saying what you built I still want to hear you explain it. I shouldn't have to work to understand your product. The fact that YC was trying very hard to get you to explain what you were building and you continued to repeat yourself tells me you still don't know entirely what you're building, and to an investor that's a huge red flag.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#94

Post by Alex3917 »

sama wrote: post #87

first of all, we do care about great products. a lot. though we still try not to fund great products that we don't believe will become great businesses (there are many, many reasons why this might not be the case). it's critical to us you have some specific ideas about who your first customers will be. second, we often ask questions that are already covered in your application. the way you explain what you do is incr…

> i don't know where this meme that we will only fund companies with traction came from, but it's not true.

Regardless of the selection criteria, would you say that as the batches have gotten larger, there is more of an advantage to having traction going into demo day? I can't help but feel like, at least for a consumer web startup, if you're just launching your product 4 - 6 weeks before demo day then you're probably not going to get as much value out of YC as you might otherwise.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#95

Post by corry »

simonw wrote: post #77

From reading both the article and the comments here, one common theme seems to be surprise that the YC partners didn't appear to know all of the information that was included in the application. Here's a tip for anyone who lands a YC interview: go in with the assumption that no one who is interviewing you has read your application form, and you'll have a much higher chance of success! Think about this from the POV of…

Good advice, and to expand on that: Even when they do read your application closely, I'd STILL expect them ask you questions that you answered in the app.

There is a BIG difference between painstakingly writing an answer on your application (refined over days? weeks? months?) and being able to quickly and concisely express that.

I don't think it's controversial to say that being able to concisely and persuasively talk about your idea is extremely important and likely highly correlated with success as a founder.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#96

Post by soneca »

Udik wrote: post #56

Despite all the good points made by other commenters here, I see that nobody has yet quoted the other somehow related story that appeared on these pages not long ago: How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867335 It seems interesting because the author of that post basically described how he came to YC without a developed product but only a vague and confused idea, and how his…

The factor is that they invest in people. They went as far as to accept applications of people with no idea at all a few years ago (they went back on that).

But I agree with you that a alfa stage built product tell more about a person capacity for execution than a good performance on a 10 minute interview. But maybe, both should be rejected.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#97

Post by sama »

unreal37 wrote: post #90
sama wrote: post #87

first of all, we do care about great products. a lot. though we still try not to fund great products that we don't believe will become great businesses (there are many, many reasons why this might not be the case). it's critical to us you have some specific ideas about who your first customers will be. second, we often ask questions that are already covered in your application. the way you explain what you do is incr…

I didn't take the article as anything negative against YC. The founders were thrown off their confidence early in the interview, and the interview is only 10 minutes, so it was impossible to recover. They left the room feeling like they bombed the interview, which was a fair assessment I guess. That said, you might be missing a lot of interesting people and ideas with only 10 minutes to evaluate both.

definitely--it would be great if we could spend more time on interviews.

the tradeoff we make for very quick evaluations is that we are able to look at every company that wants to be part of YC with no introduction or connection to us whatsoever.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#98

Post by pcunite »

coffeemug wrote: post #15

Negative feedback incoming. Sorry. Your landing page ( http://creolabs.com/ ) doesn't care about me (the user) at all. There is a big difference between being proud of your product and being self-aggrandizing, and you're on the latter end of that scale. To quote Henry Ford, you can't build a reputation on what you're going to do. Apple can get away with saying "something big is going to happen" because they've alread…

CreoLabs, your work is amazing "and" coffeemug is right on target. Heed this wisdom.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#99

Post by cryowaffle »

sama wrote: post #87

first of all, we do care about great products. a lot. though we still try not to fund great products that we don't believe will become great businesses (there are many, many reasons why this might not be the case). it's critical to us you have some specific ideas about who your first customers will be. second, we often ask questions that are already covered in your application. the way you explain what you do is incr…

Is your shift key broken? This is funny because it's clearly intentional. I know you have one because you made the parentheses. Ohh, and you made the YC uppercase, no way we can lowercase that.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#100

Post by dlu »

sama wrote: post #87

first of all, we do care about great products. a lot. though we still try not to fund great products that we don't believe will become great businesses (there are many, many reasons why this might not be the case). it's critical to us you have some specific ideas about who your first customers will be. second, we often ask questions that are already covered in your application. the way you explain what you do is incr…

I think it is interesting to see it from their point of view, especially their expectations, assumptions and details they remembered.
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