How to make your YC application stand out

Yeah, that bugged me about the video portion of the application too. It was weird; everything else about the application was fairly straightforward, and then there was this video part which was really vague with this really arbitrary 1 minute requirement.

We ended up wasting a couple of hours of one night on it, and by the end of it I was totally fed up with the whole idea of putting in a video (and, by extension, YC). We ended up submitting something really lame and shrugging our shoulders about it.

A "one minute unrehearsed video" is an oxymoron IMO.

There's a difference between preparing for and scripting a video. My cofounder and I prepared for our video in that we talked about what we wanted to convey and (roughly) who'd say what parts, but we didn't have any sort of a script.

Our video was about 90 seconds, and we did it in four or five takes, which means we spent way more time agonizing over how to cut down any one of our written answers than we did recording our video. Think of it as talking to a friend rather than "making a movie."

When people ask about your startup you should have the confidence of a Noble Prize-winning economist being interviewed by an 11th-grade economics student.

I think we had 3 or 4 retakes, almost all because we end up laughing. (We have almost an half hour bloopers besides that with random rambling though :p). We did prepare some general subjects, mainly cause my friend had a hard time getting out of his words. He really didn't like doing it but realized it was a necessary evil to being even remotely considered for YC. In hindsight it's far from perfect and our idea has somewhat progressed, but I'm not really going to make him suffer through a re-take so our video stands. It's not perfect but hey, it puts a face on the words, and hopefully it conveys some of our passion, which is the most important about it anyway.

I think resisting the urge to perfect the video is part of the same mindset as not using marketing lingo and buzzwords in the application. The entire YC application is about cutting the bullshit and being genuine. PG and the others don't want to see perfection, in the app or the video, they want to see who we really are.

Me and my cofounder did our video Tuesday night. We didn't do any preparing, messed up the first take, took maybe five minutes to get an outline set up, and were happy with what we got in the second take (51 seconds). It certainly wasn't perfect, but life goes on.

Spend 20 minutes talking to each other once or twice a week on Skype. By the time you have to make the video, you'll be pretty comfortable with it.

Also, close AIM/GTalk/Twitter/whatever while you do this. Don't let yourselves fall back to another way of talking to each other.

Skype works. Sometimes the sound is hard to deal with. However, consider that there are probably 20 other people in your same situation who will hack out a quick skype video.

Keep it simple don't overthink the stuff.

Do what you can. You won't be the only one using a skype call.

My Co founder and I had the same problems. The solution? Skype+Screenr :). It worked out fine.

Good luck in your application.

On this video (http://ycombinator.posterous.com/dropbox-interview-now-onlin...), Jessica Livingston interviews Drew. Besides being an interesting interview, it reveals that he was rejected the first time he tried out YC.

Thanks, that means a lot to me. I won't be applying this time because I don't think that I could promise YC a decent shot at getting as much value from me as I got from y'all, but who knows what the future holds.

I don't think a community has ever had a man-crush on a member, like we all do on Patrick. They should teach him as an example in future "Personal Branding" courses.

Has this ever hurt anyone? (I.e. recognized a name you Did Not Like).

well I was not really looking for one in the post because I did not want to hijack, but a good idea nonetheless

http://www.zachbruhnke.com