Vote up if you're rejected but will still proceed | Hacker News Reader

Vote up if you're rejected but will still proceed

50 pointsvlad62 comments

Hi guys. Sorry about the news.

I suggest joining my YC alum startup, Xobni, instead. Sometimes great hackers joinup instead of startup. That is what Paul Buchheit did : http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/looking-for-co-founder-try-attending.html

send resumes: http://www.xobni.com/jobs.php

People here have voted to continue to work on their startup and there's nothing to be sorry about.

That is probably a great job opportunity, but not the same as starting up your own business. A lot of companies (like Xobni) take years to get up and running, and that's doing it full-time. How can somebody expect to do a startup while working 40 hours a week for somebody else without putting in the full-time hours?

Finally, I don't know if you want to hire people who have entrepreneurship in the back of their mind, 24/7. What do you think? Or, do you think it would be good to have entrepreneurial minded employees? Thanks!

I don't think you'd join something like Xobni and also do a startup on the side; Matt didn't mean that. The point of joining a startup this early is that it becomes your startup. Same concept as finding someone who's already tackling the same problem you were planning to, and joining up.

"Job opportunities" usually give Benefits and Work-life Balance. Xobni would give you (hopefully) lucrative equity and the sprint-or-die startup pace that most people here are looking for (along with the rewards that come with it).

Oh. The "send resumes" part made me think they were posting a job ad, in a thread where 30 members voted to "proceed with their startup anyway."

they are looking for employees :P but it would be a much better learning experience than a typical job; you'd be joining early enough that you'd be with the company basically from the beginning and would have much more of an opportunity to take on serious responsibility and make a significant impact (that, and much more equity than later employees :P)

Definitely! It's a great job opportunity and you guys are great! I was just wondering why a job ad was posted here. :P

We definitely want entrepreneurial hackers on our team. I often say entire aspects of our company are tableau rosa. There is fertile ground for innovation and creativity not found in big companies. I guess we are hiring employees, but I've not once used that word.

Ask Craig Silverstein if he has regretted being Google's third guy.

You mean 'tabula rasa', or is that some sort of pun?

Sorry I couldn't resist to reply. I just checked xobni job page and was surprised that they're looking for someone with C# knowledge. I assume they're building something based on ASP.NET ? (or at least .NET technology)

So right now the list of startup companies that use .NET has grown to 2 in YCombinator? Xobni and Loopt (arguably one of the most successful YCombinator investment).

PG, any thought on that?

And consider that they their products thus far are outlook-based. MS does a lot of the work for you if you use their tools and language.

As far a languages go, there's no silver bullet, go with whatever your team is comfortable with.

let me +1 this post.. adam and matt are not only damn smart but awesome guys (i worked out of their living room last summer and we had a great time.) xobni's on a fantastic trajectory and this is a rare opportunity for a smart hacker to get in early -- definitely check them out.

Just curious. Why did you apply to YC, then? And, would you've abandoned DropBox and started at Xobni, had YC rejected you? Thanks!

a fair question -- i would have loved to work with adam and matt, but at the time my stock hadn't yet vested in another startup where i had been working for a while, and i was also running another company i had started in 2004, so the timing wasn't quite right.

i don't want to drag this thread offtopic so shoot me any other questions by email -- thanks :)

np, good luck with DP!

I did send my resume some time back. The least you guys could have done was to send me a regret letter.

My business partner and I applied back in the spring of 2005 and were passed over. It wasn't all that surprising to me, based on the number of applicants that the SFP had received.

In retrospect I'm a little relieved. At the time, our company was not really in the state to make a run for a M&A or IPO exit, nor did it need to. It was only after doing more research that I realized that our company mostly needed customers, not investors.

We've spent the last two years setting up the necessary infrastructure for us to support our customers. It looks like 2007 may be our year. It's been two years and we are still proceeding.

Yes, but we're taking a break on the original idea for about a week or so. The yCombinator rejection gave us another product idea; we want to push a minimal version of that out and see how it goes before returning to our original idea.

Reddit has made me wary of vote polls, so I won't vote up. But we are still going to do our thing. I'm looking at the silver lining of not getting in. Moving really sucks ;)

Well, I voted you up even though I disagree with your belief about not voting up.

today was an odd day ...

it started out with my site (neurokinetikz.com) winning a webby award

http://webbyawards.com/webbys/current_honorees.php?category_id=48

and then ended with a rejection email from YC

odd indeed ...

c'est la vie ;)

I spent a couple dozen seconds on your site and had no clue what it was about. You need to focus your pitch and make it more obvious for "old" folks like myself. You lost me as a viewer very quickly.

PS: Lose the obnoxious, animated, poorly incorporated wrt background color GIFs... they gave me a headache.

PPS: Also, lose the first page: you'll get better SEO results & it won't look like it's 1997. ;)

I knew I was a long shot. I had two strikes against me in that I'm a single founder and I'm more interested in building a company I want to work for than in becoming rich at it -- so my interests and investors' interests don't line up.

Of course I'm still proceeding -- Y Combinator money was a means to an end, and not an end in itself.

we didn't get in but will keep going; the only frustrating part of our rejection is that ycomb didn't even look at our demo (they would have had to login to do so).

Our team had a similar experience. It seems they didnt even look at the parts which didnt require logging in.

This is an easy problem to correct. Have a link that POSTs the demo login (or whatever) and tosses the user in directly instead of requiring the user to type in demo twice.

Or is that what you did?

The rejection from Y did hurt for a few minutes but then it is actually a blessing. It helped our team to re-evaluate ourselves. Our background is in medicine. We lack the technology part yet understand the 'gaps' in medicine that technology is needed. It's like Steve Case and his dive into medicine with revolutionhealth.

Anyways, going to give it a go for another program but this time using our strength - medicine. Any hacker out there want to give it a shot with us in the other program application, we have some great ideas that combines the internet, medicine, health insurance etc. Tired of hiring programmers, we need a real partner who can program since my programming ability is still newbish.

Give me an e-mail ;)

ping me - theoutlander at gmail ... i dont have urs

Of course, my thing is already started, the YC thing was just a last minute deal, I only found out about it a couple of weeks before the deadline. People are interested in what I'm doing, interest is building, and I have a lot of ideas to continue improving it.

I'll still be looking for some cash, though, because development would go a lot faster if I didn't have to work to pay the bills, and it would help me compete against anybody who might be out there to compete against me.

I would hope that you would continue working! yCombinator isn't the end all be all, it's not really even what matters. Just make something that you feel has value and hopefully other people will too. I think Paul is a very intelligent guy and I love reading his views on stuff but if you stop working on a startup just because you didn't get his blessing into yComb then you're giving him WAY too much credit.

We have been telling this from first, YC or not, we will go for it. We are still in the race to make it happen and go live

I think it's important to be flexible though. If an idea does not seem to be getting much traction, you might consider moving on to your next idea.

Not really dude, we believe that wasnt the criteria for rejection. We believe in our idea and we will implement that and will go live. Then we will do a soul search depending on how the world reacts

Yep, we got rejected too but we'll take it live. If it doesn't attract users we'll quit and move onto another project.

Well, yes, you would probably want to see how the world reacts before giving up.

If you honestly think PG rejected people based on their idea, I think you're wrong. That's probably the last criteria he used. So, work on the idea. I would reject 90% of submissions, too, if I was running something like this.

For example, with Google, Google AdSense was the glue that made everything work (profitability, great product, many users, good reputation, ability to have free food.) You might say their demo and pagerank was actually important, but they couldn't even sell that for $1 million dollars. Heck, even right now, nobody would buy their original technology as Yahoo! and MSN must have already surpassed the original PageRank in quality.

yep vlad. As i told you, we know why we were rejected. so its not the idea

I think what's important is to do some preliminary user testing to see if people can even understand what the application is all about.

Of course, if you are trying to keep your idea secret, then this could be difficult to do.

Well its ok. We would dare to go ahead and see how users take our model

mukund, why don't u ping me: theoutlander at gmail....

The problem isn't when you have an idea and get rejected it's when you have a really good idea and still get rejected.

That's when it hurts.

We submitted way late - literally last minute - but we'll still be proceeding. It's okay, since we thought up of a few more interesting ideas, and a few that would be easier to start first before working on our really big ambitious one. It's amazing how many ideas you can come up when you really sit down and think about it.

Will definitely proceed because I believe in my idea. I just need to make enough time to work on it, which means finding funding so I can do it full-time...

It was a very nice rejection letter, though. And, I'm consoled by the fact that they at least looked at the website - at least there was access from a Bay Area IP...

I just want to say that there are as many comments as there are votes. This is great! I think we have likely exceeded the number of teams which will have been selected at the end. Those just starting now have months of time to get going. Let's have tons of demos up by June 1st, when YC probably starts!

We should have a section to list demos that are up or going to be up so that we can support one another.

Maybe someone can put up something that the audience on here can go on and evaluate what everyone is doing. Perhaps make it 'invite' only to avoid trolls.

Just to share a little story. I am "stuck" in a foreign country for some strange reasons; one of them is to avoid folks squaking at me for this crazy endeavour. YC would be a good excuse to fly back; it passes off as a job interview of sorts.

I am destined to piss off the older people. Shrug.

Where? I am currently in Thailand.

How is it over there? I'd email you, but you have no email address in your profile.

japan. on traveler's visa. very, very random story.

Really? Philippines here, I got rejected too but it's cool, After much evaluation on my part. My start up needs customers more than investors at this point. And yeah living in the Philippines I have the advantage of lower expenses all across the board. :-)

I dunno about the Philippines, but I do know that user preferences in the Eastern hemisphere are very different from those in the West. And if you are developing for a Western audience, you may very well be in the wrong place.

Cause the only way to know anything about your customers is to look out the door?

I assume they are american expats...

... or maybe they are developing a product for the 5/6th of the world that isn't America.

or they share a similar very very random story.

I presented to a bunch of devs 2 months ago, and despite being senior IT developers, they never heard of digg or delicious. It's not a big deal, but it's hard to get your point across.

True but the Philippines is the 2nd largest outsourcing country to India(Correct me if I'm wrong) Although I agree that going out there and getting to know your customers is the most important thing.

For us, this was just a small step towards seeking out more funding. While it would have been faster and easier to develop and launch with some money coming in (read, one less contract job necessary to get through the summer) that's no reason not to do it anymore.

I'm not sure. Without someone to pay my living expenses, I can't work on it full time. So I'm deciding between moonlighting it, or taking a job with another startup.

Yes, you can! Save enough for six months to a year in basic living expenses -- that's your seed fund. While you save, keep moonlighting on your project. Your seed-fund will empower you to make the right decision when the time comes (i. e.: When your project gets traction). And you can always do consulting gigs if you need more money.

Well, I just finished working out the terms of the job offer from said other startup and I'm insufferably pleased with my negotiating :-). I probably won't have time for side-projects while I'm there, but even if I don't get rich with them I'll probably walk away with enough savings to set out on my own afterwards.

I'm starting a startup hub in the SF bay area: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=11808

Did y combinator even take much of a look at the demo's?

No, I think they have been very busy ... besides, the idea has to sound promising to waste time looking at a demo...

They looked at my demo. I still got rejected thought. A better question is how many demos they looked at that still got rejected.

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