Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymoose7191 | Hacker News Reader

I expect to be downvoted but my YC interview with Michael a couple summers back left a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm not really sure he asked more than "how is this a billion dollar company?" multiple times during the 10 minutes. I'm not sure why YC would pay $1k to fly us to Mountain View if that question was that important and wasn't already answered by our application.

Hope that was just a fluke though... Good luck YC!

View on HN

It's very difficult to truly evaluate a business without talking to the founders. Sometimes a bad sounding business (such as air mattress rentals) will turn out to be a really great business (such as AirBnb).

That said, I'm sorry you had a bad experience. We're working on better ways to pre-screen startups before interviews so we can hopefully avoid as much unnecessary travel as possible.

Thanks paul. I should elaborate: the other partners were asking other and varied questions.

The experience was really not bad except that the persistence and insistence of that question made it feel like an episode of Shark Tank.

Maybe we were just bitter realists but the only answer to that question is "get really lucky."

Maybe other factors lead them to believe you had a billion dollar idea, but needed to tweeze it out of you. A VC trying to understand how you'll make a billion dollars is as a legit of a question as you can get.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com