My Y Combinator experience • Hacker News Board

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#121

Post by simonster » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

dingodoo wrote: post #89

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.

Plus, people like Elon Musk and Richard Branson have built up enough credibility in their own names, that when they say "we're going to make commercial space travel possible" you tend to believe them, because they don't make those kinds of announcements without having done significant research ahead of the announcement. I'll agree you need bold commitment, but the last thing you want is to commit to a concept that do…

I can't comment on whether or not you're correct, but if the only way you can take on a large, world-changing project is if you're already famous, that seems kind of sad, doesn't it?

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#122

Post by ZeroFries » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #117

yuncun wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there such things as incubators for innovation? Example?

Yeah. In Europe there are incubators that are based, not on market demand but on technical innovation, and offer public money; no equity is taken.

Canada has a similar program as well.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#123

Post by CrackpotGonzo » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 7:16 PM UTC

sama wrote: post #97

unreal37 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You guys are interested in funding great products and companies but of course you're interested in making money. That's the only way you can sustain a great thing like YC that has the ability to fund great things. Your post yesterday about how you haven't yet passed on a unicorn speaks shows that you have succeeded (so far) on your purpose which is to fund companies that will be hugely successful.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#124

Post by CrackpotGonzo » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 7:18 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…

And the most important point is that they are trying to build an environment for non-developers to program in. By definition their target audience won't have any idea what they are talking about. Agreed that they need to retarget their messaging to their audience.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#125

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 7:37 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #116

justin wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

YC is not really for technical innovation, it's for product development: it's for taking X and doing something new with it, not for creating a revolutionary new X. For example, you certainly might have funded Facebook but I don't think you would have funded Google with Page Rank. There were a lot of search engines at the time and there was no clear market for it. And that's not pejorative -- there's nothing wrong wit…

They did fund DropBox, which is also in the category of "There is a lot of X, there is no clear market for X, but here's a new way of doing things that may or may not work technically." Granted, I've heard that they almost turned him down (twice!), but they were at least open to the possibility of it working.

I suspect that a lot of that is because Drew actually went to the trouble of building a video and getting a few thousand signups before applying. Similarly, Google had significant traction at Stanford well before it became a company. While it takes years for world-changing ideas to become world-changing, it usually takes about 4 months for them to get an initial prototype out that can at least excite some users.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#126

Post by yitchelle » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 8:19 PM UTC

dlubarov wrote: post #119

yitchelle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if they don't validate their product, are the Creo folks building the product for the love of it?

It's a calculated risk. If no one risked building such products we wouldn't have innovative operating systems, languages, storage engines, etc.

A calculated risk means that they have though about the market for their product. From what I read, it seems that they have adopted the "build it and they will come" strategy.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#127

Post by david927 » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 8:19 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #125

david927 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC is not really for technical innovation, it's for product development: it's for taking X and doing something new with it, not for creating a revolutionary new X. For example, you certainly might have funded Facebook but I don't think you would have funded Google with Page Rank. There were a lot of search engines at the time and there was no clear market for it. And that's not pejorative -- there's nothing wrong wit…

They did fund DropBox, which is also in the category of "There is a lot of X, there is no clear market for X, but here's a new way of doing things that may or may not work technically." Granted, I've heard that they almost turned him down (twice!), but they were at least open to the possibility of it working. I suspect that a lot of that is because Drew actually went to the trouble of building a video and getting a f…

I used to think of Silicon Valley as the birthplace of the future in revolutionary terms -- what Peter Thiel refers to as going from 0 to 1. Doug Englebart, Alan Kay and Xerox PARC, etc.

Now when Silicon Valley talks about innovation, it's about making it so much easier to store files on a server and metrics to gauge product/market fit. There is nothing about DropBox that changed the world. Simply and sadly nothing. But there is everything in that it's what is cited as "innovation" in 2015.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#128

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 8:41 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.

You can talk about the form or the substance, I'd prefer you did the latter.

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#129

Post by bobbles » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 8:42 PM UTC

benbou09 wrote: post #25

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…

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.

"I want to expand my lemonade business"

"Great, how much lemonade have you sold?"

"We have 50,000 lemons on backorder!"

Re: My Y Combinator experience

#130

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 8:44 PM UTC

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #74

arethuza wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 read that statement less as arrogance and more as one's internal thought process when an interview starts to go in the wrong direction. Before any interview or presentation, I have an idea in my mind of how the conversation is going to go (some canned answers here and there for info that requires a concise explanation, some general ideas to touch on, etc.). I'd guess that never in these dev's rehearsals did they im…

And so you address that and then you move on. Use that to shape the direction the interview takes you in rather than as a way to get irritated. Having eclipse as an anchorpoint helps because you can now show how you're different from something the interviewer already knows. That's much easier than talking in a vacuum.