Guys, remember, Ycombinator is a great resource but you'll see that some of the ventures they've backed are either completely stupid, already invented by google or simply not existing today because even they failed. Ycombinator seems to be seeking a very specific set of ideas and type of team. My personal opinion is that this lack of diversity in type of ideas and teams doesn't contribute much to the growth of their endeavor. Why just programmers? The real value is in the vision and outsourcing is easier than ever today. Overall, keep at it! I guarantee that many of the ventures Ycombinator didn't accept are going to do well. Good luck.
Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
#32What's the rejection email look like? Just a one liner or an explanation about how "it's not you, its me"? :-)
--- We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally. Despite the stock market crash we got a record number of applications this time, and the average quality was high. And since there's a limit on the number of interviews we can do, we had to turn away a lot of genuinely promising groups. Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know we make lots of…
That's probably one of the nicest and most humble rejection emails.
Re: Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
#33Guys, remember, Ycombinator is a great resource but you'll see that some of the ventures they've backed are either completely stupid, already invented by google or simply not existing today because even they failed. Ycombinator seems to be seeking a very specific set of ideas and type of team. My personal opinion is that this lack of diversity in type of ideas and teams doesn't contribute much to the growth of their…
This is silly. And by silly I mean moronic. You can't outsource an entire start-up, especially without more than $15,000. Hell, we couldn't manage to successfully get a Wordpress template created when we supplied a full PSD and offered $300 for it. Talk about epic goddamn fail.
You realize the whole "Clone Amazon for me, $100-500" thing doesn't actually work, right? And look at the last batch of YC companies, will you? There's a lot of diversity there.
Maybe the only thing you got right here is that some of the start-ups YC doesn't fund will likely go on to succeed. Since YC themselves admit that, it wasn't much of a point though, was it?
Re: Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
#34Re: Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
#35Guys, remember, Ycombinator is a great resource but you'll see that some of the ventures they've backed are either completely stupid, already invented by google or simply not existing today because even they failed. Ycombinator seems to be seeking a very specific set of ideas and type of team. My personal opinion is that this lack of diversity in type of ideas and teams doesn't contribute much to the growth of their…
Welcome to the world of startups and investing. Enjoy your stay.
For those that just got rejected: Welcome. If you're seriously getting into the startup world that will be your first of dozens of rejections. Learn to take it in stride.
Investors invest in stuff they get, stuff that's presented well, and stuff that they relate to. That's triply true for early phase where they're going more on a hunch than anything even bothering to be hand-wavey with projections.
Just one kind of cute story, both from successful founders cum angels: We've had meetings with two angels now. One of them thought my co-founder was a turd. The other thought he was the swellest guy on the planet and has been telling all his buddies about us. Are either of them idiots? No. In one case things clicked, and in the other they didn't. All of the business plans and prototypes in the world wouldn't have changed that.
All early phase investors make some dumb investments. In fact, most early stage investments are dumb. YC is a bit ahead of the curve there, but they don't have a crystal ball.
Re: Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
#36We applied during the last cycle and didn't get accepted. We forged ahead (Were doing this regardless if we are a part of YC or not), started prototyping, networking, and solidified our business vision and plan.
We applied again this cycle and got accepted for an interview. Our YC application has changed a bit since we now have a much more focused direction, but our technology stack has been pretty much the same from day one.
I hope that this can be an encouragement to those of you who didn't get it this time, but I'm sure that if you try again you can only increase your chances. BTW, last time we applied we did it fairly last minute and I missed an email from pg asking us some questions. This time, we applied a month in advance and I checked my YC mail daily so I wouldn't make that mistake again. And yes, he did email us some questions again but this time I replied on time. =).
Re: Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
#37In IRC: lol, didn't pg invent that spam filter? (Didn't quite invent it, but http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html )
According to a conversation I had with Paul Buchheit (paul here at HN) in the past, GMail spam filters are heavily reputation based, which leads me to believe that Bayesian filtering is not a first line of defense, and likely would be specific to each mailbox rather than universally applied. So, if it's happening to everyone, then it's a universal rule at GMail that's doing the filtering, and thus I would guess not h…
"But pg did invent the most powerful recent spam fighting technique. "
While it may be the case that PGs essay was many peoples first exposure to baysian spam filters, he didn't invent the technique.
The first time I heard of it was in a paper published in 1998 at Microsoft research. This predates 'A plan for spam' by 4 years. http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/junkfilter.htm
Re: Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
#38Re: Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
#39REJECTED! KILLS SELF Naw it's coo-. I was kind of hoping I would get rejected since I've had second thoughts about someone owning 5% of my idea since I applied a few months back. Hope the lucky winners blow apart the interwebz 2.5 with some crazy new productive ideas.
If your application read anything like this comment I think I know why you got rejected.
What is so bad about his comment? Writing "interwebz"?
Re: Tell HN: If you haven't got your YC email, check your Spam folder
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to a conversation I had with Paul Buchheit (paul here at HN) in the past, GMail spam filters are heavily reputation based, which leads me to believe that Bayesian filtering is not a first line of defense, and likely would be specific to each mailbox rather than universally applied. So, if it's happening to everyone, then it's a universal rule at GMail that's doing the filtering, and thus I would guess not h…
"But pg did invent the most powerful recent spam fighting technique. " While it may be the case that PGs essay was many peoples first exposure to baysian spam filters, he didn't invent the technique. The first time I heard of it was in a paper published in 1998 at Microsoft research. This predates 'A plan for spam' by 4 years. http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/junkfilter.htm
I think I knew about that and completely forgot about it.
I just don't pay as much attention to the spam problem as I once did a few years ago--it seems to be reasonably solved for me. I got over 600 spam messages to my primary address yesterday, and only 3 made it to my mailbox...and all I do is run SpamAssassin with almost entirely default settings and auto-white/black listing (which is Bayesian). Now, the primary things that motivate me are making the system more efficient with regard to resource usage, rather than more effective (though being more effective is also good). Some of our customers still seem to have problems, but I've not really figured out why SpamAssassin works so poorly for them and so well for me.