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The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

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Re: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

#41

Post by dannyr »

sailormoon wrote: post #39
gruseom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted because people think the answer to your question is so obvious that you must be trolling. However, I'll assume you're being sincere. The money is the least important aspect of getting in to YC. What matters is the advice they provide and the community/network aspects. These things are so valuable that they are a huge state change for most startups.

This is not obvious to me at all. I admit I have difficulty conceiving of advice so compelling I'd travel to America to receive it. Fair enough I guess. People pay what they think it is worth. That's capitalism; no argument from me. I am not trolling. Carry on.

The travel expenses is reimbursed by YC up to a certain amount. It's no expense for the founders except time.

I'm curious what led you to Hacker News if you don't see the value of YC more than the money.

Re: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

#42

Post by dannyr »

mahmud wrote: post #14

Anyone know if YC is doing traditional companies? i.e. advertising and real-estate. Don't need the money but could really use the "blessing". They have some of the most enviable media contacts in the industry right now.

How about just hire a PR firm?

Yeah you get good media contacts with YC but that only takes you so far. What's good is the community of founders who have gone thru YC.

Re: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

#43

Post by indranil »

sailormoon wrote: post #25
davidw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request." suggests that something is amiss. I'm not a big fan of overboard, fancy graphics (just look at my sites), but just a little bit of looking nice goes a long way.

It's a standard Apache error. No big deal. Really, if the user hits a 404 then something has gone badly wrong and I think it's appropriate for them to get an ugly message.

If it is a 404 page, do not assume that it's something the user has done intentionally. Links change, sites link wrongly. Link-shit happens.

If you really want your users to be helped by your site, even when they've ended up somewhere they probably shouldn't have gone, you need to have a basic 404 error page which gently describes that the page doesn't exist and contains a link back to the home. Not everyone using a website will see "404" and understand what it is, and without a link back to the main site, a user (potential customer) is lost.

Re: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

#44

Post by pg »

sailormoon wrote: post #39
gruseom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted because people think the answer to your question is so obvious that you must be trolling. However, I'll assume you're being sincere. The money is the least important aspect of getting in to YC. What matters is the advice they provide and the community/network aspects. These things are so valuable that they are a huge state change for most startups.

This is not obvious to me at all. I admit I have difficulty conceiving of advice so compelling I'd travel to America to receive it. Fair enough I guess. People pay what they think it is worth. That's capitalism; no argument from me. I am not trolling. Carry on.

It shouldn't be that difficult to imagine. It's a very old tradition to travel long distances in search of specialized knowledge. Practically every famous medieval scholar did. But of course the tradition is way older than that. In the mid 6th century BC Pythagoras went to study in Egypt, and his biographer Porphyry said "It was from his stay among these foreigners that Pythagoras acquired the greater part of his wisdom."

Re: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

#45

Post by pyre »

dannyr wrote: post #41
sailormoon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not obvious to me at all. I admit I have difficulty conceiving of advice so compelling I'd travel to America to receive it. Fair enough I guess. People pay what they think it is worth. That's capitalism; no argument from me. I am not trolling. Carry on.

The travel expenses is reimbursed by YC up to a certain amount. It's no expense for the founders except time. I'm curious what led you to Hacker News if you don't see the value of YC more than the money.

Lots of people (me included) are on Hacker News because of the community and the quality of articles (as compared to Digg, Slashdot, Programming.Reddit, etc).

Re: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

#46

Post by rantfoil »

chrischen wrote: post #35
madmotive wrote: post #2

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. :)

Is a demo required?

I think its incredibly foolish to try to get funding for something that has no basis in reality yet. That's what a demo really is -- a toe-hold. But that toehold is usually enough to know whether a team can make it a reality, and whether they have a chance in the real world.

There's so much competition from great teams that it may well be a waste of time without showing your best.

Re: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

#47

Post by chrischen »

rantfoil wrote: post #46
chrischen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a demo required?

I think its incredibly foolish to try to get funding for something that has no basis in reality yet. That's what a demo really is -- a toe-hold. But that toehold is usually enough to know whether a team can make it a reality, and whether they have a chance in the real world. There's so much competition from great teams that it may well be a waste of time without showing your best.

I understand but Paul Graham really makes an emphasis on the team, and that a demo is not required. I mean there has to be a way to prove that that the team can produce what they claim: past work, past startups, etc right?

Re: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

#48

Post by joez »

chrischen wrote: post #47
rantfoil wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its incredibly foolish to try to get funding for something that has no basis in reality yet. That's what a demo really is -- a toe-hold. But that toehold is usually enough to know whether a team can make it a reality, and whether they have a chance in the real world. There's so much competition from great teams that it may well be a waste of time without showing your best.

I understand but Paul Graham really makes an emphasis on the team , and that a demo is not required. I mean there has to be a way to prove that that the team can produce what they claim: past work, past startups, etc right?

I think YC is sufficiently competitive that teams without a demo (on the application) will not even get an interview. Also (I believe it has been said), the two weeks from when you're notified to the weekend of the interview should be sufficient to produce some kind of early stage demo. Your startup idea might be unfit for YC if you can't at least have something to show in two weeks of fervent work.

Re: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

#49

Post by eru »

aberman wrote: post #38
mahmud wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we got into these businesses from meeting industry insiders and specialists. You sit down with people, chat, and find out business opportunities. Just today we evaluated festival, trade show and expo opportunities; took me about 10 hours to study the industry and see potential, I am still evaluating it, but there is no reason for YC not to understand it fully. Seems like the whole startup scene is focused on we…

What you describe sounds more like a small business than a startup. YC only funds startups (i.e. scalable and disruptive). The two are not synonymous. YC primarily funds software and web-based companies because you can create a scalable and disruptive web-based company on $20k.

I wonder where all those recent down-voters come from. It used to be more friendly around here. When only trolls got voted down to 0 or less.

Re: The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

#50

Post by chrischen »

joez wrote: post #48
chrischen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand but Paul Graham really makes an emphasis on the team , and that a demo is not required. I mean there has to be a way to prove that that the team can produce what they claim: past work, past startups, etc right?

I think YC is sufficiently competitive that teams without a demo (on the application) will not even get an interview. Also (I believe it has been said), the two weeks from when you're notified to the weekend of the interview should be sufficient to produce some kind of early stage demo. Your startup idea might be unfit for YC if you can't at least have something to show in two weeks of fervent work.

Thanks for the advice. I was under the impression that the demo would be unimportant, and since I'm in school right now, I thought I'd go slow at it unless I am accepted.

I can whip up something in two weeks easy (even with school), but I didn't submit a demo in the application because I didn't think it would be necessary, so I focused on developing the idea instead.

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