The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

This is exactly how our "interview" went.

Despite being given the same advice by others that had been through the process we still foolishly wasted time preparing a short 1 minute pitch.

We might have had a better result if we'd invested more time in getting the user experience in our demo right and answering the one critical question - "Why would people want this?"

Don't make the same mistake we did. :)

Heh, waiting for the post-interview phone call was a real nail-biter, we basically spent the entire evening waiting for the phone to ring. But it didn't.

It didn't even occur to us that they might call our land line back home until we got the email the next morning. Remotely checking the answering machine was fun too, hadn't used that feature in ages and the code didn't work (turns out you can't send DTMF tones when calling via Skype).

At the time we weren't sure if they give everyone a call or just the ones they accept, so we didn't take the absence of a call as a 'no', but kept wondering. In the end, we got the answer about 26 (pretty exciting) hours after we left the interview room.

So, unless you're a thrill seeker, put your cell number in the application :-)

Interesting read and nice success story...

On DirectedEdge home, can I enter any search term, or does this need to be a well formatted Wikipedia entry url ?

If you type the beginning of an article name it should autocomplete after a sec (it's a little slower than it should be...) There's also an easter-egg you can use:

http://www.directededge.com/?Y%20Combinator

Another tiny UI thing- for me the search bar overlays one of the results. For the easter egg I thought they had left pg out of the results until I realized it was underneath the search bar.