Remember seeing you introduce Twillio at Tomorrow's Web a while back and was hugely impressed.
I have a feeling we will be seeing a lot of very cool stuff from Zap in the future ;-)
How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle
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Re: How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle
#12Anyone got a TLDR on this? It looks interesting, but I don't have the minutes to read it to get the juice.
Re: How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle
#13Great post, but your choice of colors make reading it incredibly hard on my eyes (it's the end of the day here).
What's the easiest to read Tumblr theme? I'll happily change it. Sorry it makes it difficult to read.
http://www.tumblr.com/theme/36037
Just anything that isn't light on dark.
Re: How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle
#14After the story of you flying over to doorstep a hedge fund manager, navigating the many layers to get there and ultimately solving the problem, I don't see YC saying no to be a problem. Learning experiences and such, grind it out and keep going.
Yes, though the problem they likely saw was he virtually has no product, business plan, nor seems interested in selling it as much as himself. Its a trope you see here in the post mortem after every YC season selection. "I hacked the process and all I got was this stinking blog post." Edit: This front-paging HN will more than likely land him a job somewhere, for better of for worse, and was likely his real goal in wr…
He did say that he had a product ready to demo but they didn't want to see it.
Selling yourself is almost as important as the idea, if you have the best idea in the world but you seem a bit wishy washy then no one is going to be interested, but if you can sell yourself and get them to believe almost anything is possible in your hands then you're in with a better chance.
Re: How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle
#15Anyone got a TLDR on this? It looks interesting, but I don't have the minutes to read it to get the juice.
tl;dr: guy wanted domain zap.com, owned by a hedge fund. he tried emailing and calling people there with no luck. he decided to spend many thousands of dollars flying from london to NYC to meet with CEO. got shot down again, ended up getting email to CEO by blindly bccing different formats, CEO asked for business plan. domain is still owned by hedge fund.
Re: How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle
#16Anyone got a TLDR on this? It looks interesting, but I don't have the minutes to read it to get the juice.
Spent lots of time and money stalking a big time hedge fund manager in an attempt to acquire Zap.com domain. Failed to acquire domain, but still considers this a "life hack" because the manager downloaded his business plan.
Later, messed up one question in YC interview and got rejected.
Baffling...
Re: How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle
#17Honestly I don't get it. While the story is cool, it really just seems like you're comfortable blowing several thousand dollars on what, lets be honest, is a very, very unlikely chance at securing a domain name. I know this story speaks of SV culture in some way; huge risk, huge rewards and the idea that no one can stop you. If the venture pays off, it makes you a hero. If it doesn't, well you get a cool story. But y…
Just because he was not successful (yet) does not mean it was a foolish effort. It's attitudes like yours that make hustling work, simply because so few people are willing to even send an email to somebody because they think it's unlikely they'll get an affirmative response. Getting rejected is like ketchup on french fries.
Re: How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle
#18Honestly I don't get it. While the story is cool, it really just seems like you're comfortable blowing several thousand dollars on what, lets be honest, is a very, very unlikely chance at securing a domain name. I know this story speaks of SV culture in some way; huge risk, huge rewards and the idea that no one can stop you. If the venture pays off, it makes you a hero. If it doesn't, well you get a cool story. But y…
Spot on. Seem to have forgotten to address the 'to your advantage' bit in the question. It's a bit rash jumping on the first plane out before even sending out a speculative email to find out if they'll disclose a price tag for it, which can be budgeted for at a later date.
Re: How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle
#19First, thank you very much for detailing your Y Combinator experience with the rest of us; you will no doubt help out many other startups planning to apply to Y Combinator.
During the entire interview, I imagine PG and his partners were likely analyzing and processing your idea, your capacity to execute your idea, and your potential to succeed compared with the potential for other top-tiered candidates to succeed. Also, they were likely looking for signs, any sign (based on prior failures), that were predictor of failure.
In my opinion, you were likely turned down because either they weren't convinced that you (along with your idea) have the potential to succeed more than the candidates they were considering, or your case showed signs of potential failure. Note that the signs of potential failure is not necessarily reflective of you or your idea, it is simply based on actual factors that Y Combinators have seen in startups that had eventually failed. I have read about this from PG himself right here on HN.
If Y Combinator turned down a potentially primed-to-succeed applicant because the applicant did not convincingly answer one question (while being very convincing on all the other questions), then I am definitely mistaken about all I have read about PG and Y Combinator. These chaps are well-reasoned and thoroughly experienced investors, I don't think they will turn down a potential DropBox for missing one question—well, I hope not.
Re: How I got a YC interview as a single founder and blew it at the final hurdle
#20"but when I finished I filled the BCC with as many permutations of what his email address could be and then hit send."
I've figured out a great way around this. Install rapportive in gmail, compose a new message and start guessing emails. If the email is correct, rapportive will pull up all the information for that person. Bingo! There's the correct address!