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Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

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Re: Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

#31

Post by pitchups »

lazyjones wrote: post #5

> Graham said that, after thousands of founder presentations and pitches, he and the YC partners are now able to tell “within minutes” whether a startup will pass muster or not. This I find slightly worrying. It's amazing if it still works (and I've been wondering how YC was still able to scale), but is the minimum amount of information that needs to be exchanged between startup and YC in order to get a good assessme…

This may well be an example of our ability to find patterns based only on "thin slices," or narrow windows, of experience. [0]

Called "thin-slicing", first read about it in "Blink" by Gladwell, which is based entirely on this concept, and has plenty of great examples of this phenomenon (The Wikipedia link below has some of them).

I think the human brain is the ultimate pattern-matching and learning machine, and when trained long enough develops an ability to discern patterns from the faintest and narrowest of signals.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-slicing

Re: Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

#32

Post by oskarth »

GuiA wrote: post #27
oskarth wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are the Richard Feynman of your field, don't you think you could pick up if someone is a good physicist or not in 10 minutes of talking about physics? Not just physics per say, but the mental models you have, the experiments you are going to perform, what kind of theories you have, what you've worked on before, etc. I certainly do, especially if you get to ask the questions.

There are Richard Feynmans in math, biology, physics, computer science, etc. I'm not sure there are Richard Feynmans in startups or similarly "soft" fields.

That's true. What about people like da Vinci or Michelangelo?

I am not comparing pg to either of these three people, at least not directly. I'm just claiming that it's not unlikely there's some kind of taste, knowledge or whatever have you which he (and the other partners) possesses to a much higher degree than Random Joe Investor.

Re: Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

#33

Post by btilly »

PakG1 wrote: post #22
rjzzleep wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except you completely disregard cultural backgrounds, but meh. to each their own. interviewing just like any other skill can be practiced. edit: not saying i disagree per se. I can tell really quickly if someone knows their shit by working with them for a day... or so i'd like to think. the truth is i've been completely misjudged based on interviews before. i've seen people on top of their fields do the same mistakes…

You know, I know that PG has been beaten to death over the speaking English with an accent thing, which is unfortunate, because it got away from what he was trying to say. But this is an interesting point. Culture, language, and other similar factors that could lead to poor interview performance is something that I hope we can somehow figure a way around. Now given that, let me say that I completely understand what P…

Let's not leave the "speaking with an accent thing" alone for a second.

PG's point was that if your accent is sufficiently strong that people have trouble understanding you, then you have a big problem. And that's something that is obvious in a sentence. So person opens their mouth, and you know it is a no.

If the person merely has an accent, that's OK.

And so we have confirmation of what he's saying now. There are times when it is obvious within the first 10 minutes, in fact in the first 2, that you need to say no.

Re: Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

#34

Post by nostrademons »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #6

Err, Sam Altman is the only beta tester of a YC-company trying to develop a better email client? Anyone got any more details on this? Is this just an inside joke that I don't get? (Yes I remember the build-better-email-client thing, but actually trying, and using one beta-tester?) To be honest I no longer think an email client is the problem. Its the lack of contact book, integration with all my devices and just gene…

Was that ReMail? If it was, they were acquired by Google, so in some sense it seems to have worked.

Re: Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

#35

Post by Arnor »

sridharvembu wrote: post #30
Ologn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having interviewed many people over the years (not for an accelerator though), you can easily tell within ten minutes if someone can not pass muster. I have never had anyone who stumbled over the first three questions I asked them, recover on subsequent questions. Nowadays, the only reason I keep interviewing people who stumble over the first three questions is out of politeness. As I am usually interviewing people f…

I have to disagree with the "can easily tell within ten minutes if someone cannot pass muster" part. Interviewing is hard. We tend to make such snap judgments but those judgments reflect our own biases. I have come to believe over the years that interviewing measures interviewing skills. Test scores measure test taking skills. Success on the job requires success-on-the-job (to coin a phrase) skills. All those things…

Aren't "interviewing skills" essential to founders? Isn't a YC interview basically a chance to pitch your company and answer probing questions about your plan? Seems like a pretty fair qualification to me...

Re: Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

#36

Post by emmett »

smrtinsert wrote: post #4

> Principally, he said, just because someone is intelligent, doesn’t mean they can actually run a business and go out and execute. > “You can be surprisingly stupid if you’re sufficiently determined,” he concluded. Oh that's nice. Reminds me of the Simpsons episode when some kid accepts homecoming king with "Thank you for not choosing the popular jock and electing me, your intellectual superior, as homecoming king".

Do you believe the opposite (that you must be very smart to be successful), or are you saying it's not nice to point out the (true) fact that it's not all that important to be very smart?

I think "surprisingly" is the key word here. Someone could be quite smart and still surprisingly stupid if you were expecting them to be a genius.

Re: Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

#37

Post by yogo »

oskarth wrote: post #14
lazyjones wrote: post #5

> Graham said that, after thousands of founder presentations and pitches, he and the YC partners are now able to tell “within minutes” whether a startup will pass muster or not. This I find slightly worrying. It's amazing if it still works (and I've been wondering how YC was still able to scale), but is the minimum amount of information that needs to be exchanged between startup and YC in order to get a good assessme…

If you are the Richard Feynman of your field, don't you think you could pick up if someone is a good physicist or not in 10 minutes of talking about physics? Not just physics per say, but the mental models you have, the experiments you are going to perform, what kind of theories you have, what you've worked on before, etc. I certainly do, especially if you get to ask the questions.

I can sort of see this for physics but what if it's programming or software in general. I wouldn't be able to tell if someone is good if they were describing something to me in F#, as an example. They could be going about it the wrong way.

What if someone was really onto something and they were describing it to you. They might be trying to explain it as simply as they possibly can and you might think you understand, but a lot could be lost and your impression might be that, that person is not good at what they are doing or that it's a toy.

It all comes down to good communication but I think overall, we learn more over more time. I get that there is a time constraint with the current approach so maybe to scale things there should be some sort of engine that processes people/teams from a watch list over a period of time. For example, mine data from a private YC journal that applicants can start writing in a year or six months in advance. I don't think that should be a problem since a lot is submitted in the applications (my basic understanding of the process).

Re: Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

#38

Post by yohanatan »

awwstn wrote: post #12
lazyjones wrote: post #5

> Graham said that, after thousands of founder presentations and pitches, he and the YC partners are now able to tell “within minutes” whether a startup will pass muster or not. This I find slightly worrying. It's amazing if it still works (and I've been wondering how YC was still able to scale), but is the minimum amount of information that needs to be exchanged between startup and YC in order to get a good assessme…

PG points out regularly that there is no way of predicting whether a startup will succeed. So, I'd guess that much of what they do is try to filter out companies that are likely to not succeed. If YC has nailed down the process, then only formidable teams would make it to the interview, and then the interview would serve to simply make sure the dynamic and attitude of the team is not such that they'd be likely to not…

You could say 'fail' instead of 'not succeed'.

Re: Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

#39

Post by iqster »

Arnor wrote: post #35
sridharvembu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree with the "can easily tell within ten minutes if someone cannot pass muster" part. Interviewing is hard. We tend to make such snap judgments but those judgments reflect our own biases. I have come to believe over the years that interviewing measures interviewing skills. Test scores measure test taking skills. Success on the job requires success-on-the-job (to coin a phrase) skills. All those things…

Aren't "interviewing skills" essential to founders? Isn't a YC interview basically a chance to pitch your company and answer probing questions about your plan? Seems like a pretty fair qualification to me...

In deep tech, no.

Re: Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups

#40

Post by WalterSear »

Arnor wrote: post #35
sridharvembu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree with the "can easily tell within ten minutes if someone cannot pass muster" part. Interviewing is hard. We tend to make such snap judgments but those judgments reflect our own biases. I have come to believe over the years that interviewing measures interviewing skills. Test scores measure test taking skills. Success on the job requires success-on-the-job (to coin a phrase) skills. All those things…

Aren't "interviewing skills" essential to founders? Isn't a YC interview basically a chance to pitch your company and answer probing questions about your plan? Seems like a pretty fair qualification to me...

I don't think that's the case.
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