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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

"Ultimately, the point of these videos is not for you to sell them on your idea. It's another opportunity for YC to get to know you and your team as people, in a way that words on an application form can't convey."

Yes! We're not looking at the video as a way to understand your idea. That's what the written application is for. And yet so many people sit there in the video reading some prepared text in a monotone, which is not something that makes anyone look smart. Far better not to script the video. I'm not saying you should talk about random personal stuff like your favorite bands. You can talk about the startup. Just don't read a prepared statement. The best thing to talk about might be the background for the startup: how you met and how you got interested in this idea.

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That's really difficult for applicants. How can they possibly resist the urge to prepare for it, and to do retakes till it's 'perfect'?

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.

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."

Yes; preparing and doing retakes is orthogonal to reading a prewritten script.

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.

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 understand the video is important - but what if we can't get round to making it in time?

My cofounder currently lives the other side of the country (we're currently studying in different colleges) and so a video together would be kinda hard at the moment, not to mention expensive to meet up.

Do you have any suggestions - we've looked into recording Skype video calls but it's hard to make it feel natural.

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.

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.

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.

hi pg, I'm curious about applying for yc (in the summer), but we're not completely sure if our idea is the kind of thing yc is looking to fund. I know you don't advise startups, but would it be possible to get some quick feedback on our demo by e-mail?

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