Ask YC: what could be done better - next time | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: what could be done better - next time

Sorry for yet another summer 2008 thread here's a quote from my rejection email.

We realize this process is fraught with error. It's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

what do you think could be done better?

I'm not sure if this is too much to ask but to be able to review our applications, and perhaps have a spot for yc to have left comments. I'd like to know if it was something other than the obvious solo founder black mark.

Also and additional comments box in the application would be nice. I had a few things to say that didn't really fit in anywhere else.

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I wonder if it would be possible to get some basic quantitative feedback from YC to get a clearer idea about the strong and the weak points of an application, e.g. a rating from 1 to 5 for criteria like quality and potential of idea, fittingness of the founders, progress of the project, potential and risk of business model, etc. you name it. Risk for YC would be that people try to optimize their application against the criteria and distort somehow the competition.

I should also note that I'm looking for more review because as I said in the other thread. I believe in self improvement, I of course wonder if it was just the solo founder thing, or if there was maybe something else. If there were other things I'd like to know so I don't repeat my mistakes, I can only avoid mistakes in the future if I know what they were.

Hindsight is only 20/20 if you have enough data.

In this case I am guessing it is my late application, and the fact that I am a solo founder. Having a demo would help too.

Maybe they are getting too busy, too successful? Not a bad problem for them to have - but difficult for us vagabonds.

Previous rejection letters had a bit more detail; hope this helps:

    We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.
    Please don't take it personally, because most of the proposals we
    rejected, we rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the
    quality of the applicants.  For example, we were very reluctant to
    accept proposals with only one founder, because we think starting
    a startup is too much work for one person.  We also had a higher
    threshold for applicants who were still in school, groups where one
    or more members planned to keep their current jobs, and groups that
    couldn't all move to California.  We rejected a lot of proposals simply
    because we couldn't understand them, or didn't understand the problem
    domain well enough to judge them, or because the project seemed too
    big to start on only three months of funding.  Sometimes we even
    rejected good ideas, because another group proposed the same idea
    and seemed further along.

to be fair. this was the full letter

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally. The average quality of applications this cycle was significantly higher than in previous ones, and because there are physical limits on the number of groups we can interview, we were forced to turn away a lot of groups who would have made it to interviews in the past. We hate doing this, and we're thinking of schemes that might allow us to interview more groups in the future.

"because another group proposed the same idea and seemed further along."

That'd be nice to know. Especially since one might want to join that group ;).

I would be rather peeved if PG gave out that kind of information on what I was doing to someone else. I suppose he could ask, but... that's not really his job to play matchmaker is it?

This time around pg set up conversations between some of the prior founders and some of the applicants--to get a better feel for the teams, and to give them a chance to ask any questions about YC they had (including what to expect in the interview and how to best present their case--and maybe even who to pitch to, since sometimes pg is not going to like your idea, but rtm or tlb might if you pitch it right, and pg takes their advice seriously).

I was amused to find that one of the groups (one of the best we talked to, actually) was planning to work on the same area as our new product from a slightly different angle--I don't think they were entirely aware of how closely the functionality of their proposed product matched what we're about to launch until I told them). It's not at all unlikely that we'll contact them in a few months when we begin hiring (because them having written no code, and us having functional code in private beta with real paying customers, we do seem further along--but they did seem like a smart team, and if YC doesn't accept them, we might have a good place for them on ours).

I thought it was interesting, anyway. And since I've frequently stated that the single best thing about Y Combinator is spending a lot of time with the other teams, anything that provides more connectivity between founders is a win for everyone.

> because them having written no code

I'm curious as to how it was determined they were one of the best when they hadn't written anything yet. It seems a lot of proposals with code and demos got declined (not even looked at in some cases) but in this case a proposal with no code, which has essentially already been funded and done by your group... gets an invite?

Prior work, though admittedly in unrelated fields.

I don't know if they got an invite--we talked to them before any decision was made. But if they don't have a demo before the interview, I strongly suspect they won't get in--our pitch was not well-received by pg, and only the strength of our demo brought rtm and tlb around to an appreciation of the difficulty of the problems we're solving. And, we have yet to prove that this is a lucrative market--we know it is, but YC can't be blamed for not knowing it yet, since we've had no exit and growth is steady rather than explosive.

But, YC will fund groups that are working on the same problem domain, but not usually in the same round. Since we're a year in the past, I'm sure they wouldn't turn a team down based on where we are.

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