My Y Combinator experience • Hacker News Board

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#101

Post by asadlionpk » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

cryowaffle wrote: post #99

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.

is that the only thing you learnt from his comment? :)

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#102

Post by charlesnw » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #49

david927 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strange you should say that, because I didn't get that at all. He was being honest. Why would that be a problem?

Things like "(Eclipse Holy God, you really just said Eclipse??)" really come across as pretty negative to me and I'm no big fan of Eclipse. All the questions asked seemed pretty reasonable to me - after all the person asking the questions is looking at it from a business rather than a technical perspective. If someone who is running a company can't adapt to the type of person asking the question then I would see that…

I actually would of reacted the exact same way. It's clear that this is a completely new dev environment and an intentional divorce from xcode/eclipse etc. The people interviewing couldn't get that. They showed zero understanding of the problem space. They were clearly stupid.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#103

Post by beambot » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

nickbauman wrote: post #85

peteforde wrote: post #9

Sorry 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 ma…

Yes. YC will not fund the company that will invent something new. They will fund a company that looks like it might be a good business and make money. These two things aren't inherently incompatible in theory. But we've seen time and time again in practice that they are. To invent new things you need Xerox Parc (the PC) or a big government program (the Internet). To make a lot of money off the inventions, you need Ap…

I don't think that's true... YC funds plenty of inventive companies (sometimes based on idea alone). Still, the onus is on the founders to articulate why they're the ones to pull it off and how their inventions could plausibly become billion dollar companies.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#104

Post by nattofriends » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:12 PM UTC

By the way, Creo was the name of a Vancouver-based digital imaging software company that was acquired by Kodak in 2005. So there might be some people you are confusing with that name.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creo

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#105

Post by justin » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:13 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #33

benbou09 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think that fast product iteration and testing with customers is the only way to go. It isn’t. The most ambitious projects sometimes need bold commitment. For instance if you want to create a space travel company, you will need funding way before you've finished your proof of concept. Now, maybe Y Combinator is simply not their market.

Exactly. Applying to YC was a mistake: it's an accelerator for making money, not an incubator for innovation.

If you don't think consumer software like Dropbox or marketplaces like Airbnb are innovations, consider that we have funded companies like Gingko Bioworks (synthetic biology) and Helion Energy (nuclear fusion).

One thing you're right about: we're not an incubator.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/16/why-the-first-yc-backed-bio...

http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-in...

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#106

Post by arihant » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:25 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #94

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 probabl…

I don't think that's true. I think even on-the-napkin stage ideas also can use a lot of YC input to drive development in right direction. I believe it is important to at least have a prototype at least a few weeks before demo day in these programs, but that depends, of course.

I think you're looking at companies that would fail without sucking in every last bit of YC juice. Those kind of companies will fail anyway.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#107

Post by mhomde » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

peteforde wrote: post #9

Sorry 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 ma…

The thing is the most ludicrous ideas might also be the most brilliant ones, and the only way to know is in hindsight. I mean hell Google was a ridiculous idea in its day. Tesla was too in the beginning, and numerous other companies.

Some ideas do require a lot of risk in form of up-front development for a shaky idea, but that's the only way to find out if that particular idea works.

There are some ideas where you can simply throw shit on the wall until something sticks and iterate from there but there are also ideas that you have to go all in on.

If someone says they're going to develop a "revolutionary new programming language" that will obsolete java/c# (or something) I'd roll my eyes and call bullshit, and in 99.9% cases it will be true, except for the one that isn't.

Its up to every entrepreneur and venture capitalist to choose what kind of idea to bet on. I'd only hope that the entrepreneur picks something they're passionate about.

You could say that you should at least be aware of the risk and scope of the idea your pursuing, but is that even true? Some might be better of not knowing or they'd never attempt it.

As George Bernard Shaw famously said: "People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it."

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#108

Post by gmarx » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:42 PM UTC

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…

Excellent advice. I've had this problem myself. When you think (rightly or wrongly) that you have amazing, near unique, technology which has multiple amazing aspects, you struggle to tell a concise story about why any specific user should care. It's much easier with simple tech that only does a couple of things

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#109

Post by cryowaffle » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

asadlionpk wrote: post #101

cryowaffle wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

is that the only thing you learnt from his comment? :)

Well no, but it was the most obvious. ;) Ok, ok, I kid.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#110

Post by jim_greco » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

It's good to have a little ego, but I don't know anyone in the batch who talks like this:

> I realized that Creo is an extraordinary technological challenge and we achieved unbelievable results so far. Who could have developed a new multiplatform programming language with a blazing fast virtual machine? Who could have rewritten from scratch a mobile operating system fully UIKit compatible? Who could have a product like ours? Nobody, probably nobody in the world… and if YC’s choice was driven by the product than we would had no rivals.