Considering Applying to Y Combinator? | Hacker News Reader

Considering Applying to Y Combinator?

tonywright.com

83 pointswebwright24 comments

"It may seem like selling for millions to Google is a foregone conclusion given how brilliant you are, but it’s not. ...If you can trade a little bit of equity to nudge up your shot at success by a few percentage points, you should do so."

I love this point. Many people I've talked to dislike going the YC route because it's "so little money for the amount of equity they take" as if their idea (which has been a PT thing for over a year and there's still no MVP) is pre-destined to be the next $750MM hit and the sacrificing of 6-8% is a dumb idea.

It's what I like to call a false statistic or misleading math. If your startup never goes anywhere then it's pretty much worth $0 even if it's $750MM in your head. PG has a great article about how YC is not about the money (except in the analogous sense that one is funding a poor grad student).

Yaw, I find that to me one of the most common misconceptions (or maybe mis-judgements!) about YC. 6-7% feels like a lot. But when you do the math with 3 founders and a $50m exit, that's basically each of you walking away with somewhere between 10-15m and YC walking away with 3-3.5m. So the YC experience is shedding your personal take by $1m or so before taxes... But very well could make the difference in you succeeding or failing.

It could also make the difference in the price tag. The YC brand and the early boost you get from it almost certainly would up the price tag by $3m in that scenario.

(NB: it's a bit more complex than that if/when you take a Series A round, offer employee stock options, etc-- but bottom line is that the YC stock isn't going to make big difference. If you exit, you'll likely be freakin' rich)

The “demo” will be less like Steve Jobs and more like Guantanamo Bay

Heh-- I hope that didn't offend. I remember being pretty shellshocked during the interview process and, from what I've heard, I think we had it easier than most folks did. Coming in expecting to fill the time with an uninterrupted demo probably isn't the best bet. :-)

That's actually rather reassuring, since I really hate giving demos/presentations and am much better with interaction and questions.

Also, since my primary interests lie in infrastructure and performance, if a demo takes 10 minutes, then I've already failed.

That was alarming. We try to make the interview as low stress as possible, believe it or not. But unfortunately we end up having a lot of questions and only 10 minutes to ask them.

I find the 10 minute limit quite odd. I assume you've thought it through, but it seems to me that the cost of spending a little more time interviewing would likely pay for itself many times over in better decision making. Especially after watching your Mixergy interview, where you emphasize how poor you consider yourselves at choosing who to invest in.

Thin slicing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_%28book%29

I'm reading Blink right now (highly recommend it -- very interesting so far), so perhaps there's more said on this later, but I'm not sure thin slicing will help here. pg says they're not very good at choosing people yet, so it's possible that they're thin slicing successfully without knowing about it (as is talked about in Blink), or that the format just isn't successful. Without a whole lot more information (which is tough to get in such a situation), I don't think you can really make a call one way or another. Regardless, it's an interesting idea.

Ah, bless Gladwell. You say thin slicing, I say gut instinct or intuition. I'd say Gladwell is not worth reading. He takes an obvious, folksy thing, adds a bit of a twist to it, presents several anecdotes as dramatic stories illustrating his point, then slaps on some "science" to make it seem like its true. It's not. He's just making stuff up that sounds plausible but surprising.

As an example, in Blink he refers to the mostly excellent work of John Gottman [1]. Gladwell's thesis is in Blink is that by "thinking without thinking", i.e. intuition, experts make better decisions. Now Gottman has developed a technique that can predict if a couple will stay together with frightening accuracy, simply by watching them argue. However, the longer he watches, the more accurate his prediction are. And it's not an instinctive thing; it's measuring expressions using a system [2].

Gladwell writes well, and seems believable. That doesn't make him right.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_Action_Coding_System

YC did long interviews at first and they've evolved to the shorter form. Presumably this is because they're interviewing so many teams and don't want to change the interview-weekend format drastically to, say, span several weekends.

Plus, honestly, there are only so many hours of pitches the brain can endure before shutting down and wanting them to be over more than for them to be exciting.

If we spent more time on each interview, we couldn't interview as many startups in the same period. 10 minutes seems the optimal tradeoff in that respect.

We are trying to engage more with people in the application phase now. That should improve things.

That sounds shockingly low to me too, but I keep hearing in my interviews with YC-backed entrepreneurs that they got some of their most productive insights from these meetings.

I used to think they were making it up because pg is such a hero in this community and they wanted to make YC look good. But after wasting time disbelieving the process, I now accept that it works, and I spend more time in my interviews trying to understand out WHY it works.

Do you think that this is because, up to the point of the YC interview, most founders haven't left the safety zone of "friendly feedback", and therefore haven't encountered a serious vetting of their business idea?

It may also be (may not, dunno) that a lot of YC applicants are first time entrepreneurs. Many may come from a technical background where they're used to being the topical expert in most of their meetings with "business types". So, they become business types and suddenly that's no longer the case.

So maybe it's not that they've never had constructively critical feedback before, but rather just that they haven't yet had much of it outside their area of expertise?

Our questions might be slightly different than people are used to, but I suspect the main problem is simply that there are so many of them, approaching the matter from many directions at once.

No matter how friendly you try to make it, there will always be people who are nervous in interviews. It's amplified by the fact you're asking questions they probably haven't thought about before. There's not much you can really do to stop the feeling of dread that some people are bound to feel.

i had fun with our interview. i think the author is referring to the interview as being more of a dialogue and less of a monologue (steve jobs just talks at you).

Heh-- well, I figured it would be better to over-prepare them for stress. We just did a YC panel at a local startup group in Seattle (with a bunch of YC founders) and to a man they all agreed that the interview was a meat grinder. Of course, much of that isn't your fault-- there's a lot of preparation and a lot riding on that 7-10 minutes :-)

I would expect nothing less and would still give up almost anything just for the chance to present our startup... If only the program was a bit more 'accessible' for those married with kids and a mortgage :)

No kids, but I'm married with a mortgage and I did it. Several people in my batch had kids. You can make it work.

Founders at Work seems like a great book. I'll check that out.

Overall these tips are great. Thanks.

I'll vouch for it. Picked it up a few weeks ago and was sucked right in by these stories. Great mix of drama, comedy, and wisdom. Read a chapter or two over on Google Books: http://bit.ly/dAFbnw

I've been writing down some notes for advice for applicants but Tony's article covers everything I would have said and then some. Great job!

If you're applying or thinking of applying, take what he says to heart.

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