Reddit Founders' YC Application | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Founders' YC Application

alexisohanian.com

178 pointsptn51 comments

So I have to wonder if this application would have gotten anywhere if pg hadn't personally met these guys previously?

ie. is this really a sample of a "winning" YC application?

I imagine the quality of applicants to YC has gone up considerably in the last five years, and many of the applicants who were selected then may well have struggled to get through the current rounds.

> We are going to build an infrastructure that will allow consumers to order food from their cell phones (via a text-interface, rather than voice), drive to the restaurant and pick up their order.

That sounds like a much more promising business than "a site where users submit news and sites, vote them up and write comments about them". I don't mean this is in a snarky way, I'm a reddit user too. Am I missing something?

It certainly sounds like it would have made more profit, but less likely of getting bought.

Reddit was a fantastic idea to getting acquired.

Good point, I came here looking for the answer to this too. Hopefully kn0thing or pg can shed some light as to why this was such a horrible idea?

Here is what Alexis had to say answering this question in the comments section of his site:

alexis ohanian said... I believe the biggest thing was the dangers of dealing with both cellphone carriers (this is pre "AppStore," remember) who are notoriously closed and slow-moving as well as restaurants, which aren't typically very tech-curious (all the ones I spoke with were taking online orders via fax).

Edit: Never mind. Someone posted the samething below.

Technical challenges integrating with existing restaraunt ordering systems; probable need for active field salespeople. They acknowledge possibly even needing hardware...

It might stand a chance of being a more profitable business than Reddit, but it's a tough and expensive route to market without experience or a large chain desperate to try the system. Probably pg had good reason to be more risk-averse about the types of business he invested in back in 2005.

But it seems like more of a risk to think a social news site (of all things) will be a successful business. Without Condé Nast to be the "greater fool" (in the sense of the "greater fool theory" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory) it's really questionable even today whether Reddit could have been profitable.

Something that actual businesses can use to sell things to people? Sure, there are risks, but at least it can make money.

But still, the sales challenge is immense, especially for 3 guys with no sales experience and no money (remember that back then it was nowhere near as easy to raise a bunch of money after YC). Individually talking to every restaurant you sell to doesn't scale at all, and signing on big chains would have been very hard, especially before they had proven that it works and makes restaurants money.

Plus, the problem he mentioned about integrating with other restaurants' systems is a major one. I'd guess that there are many different order-tracking systems. They'd probably have to customize that hardware solution to each restaurant that already had an electronic order-tracking system.

Now, they could have started out with restaurants that were just using paper (with the hardware appliance just printing stuff out), but that would pretty much exclusively mean small non-chain restaurants, which, again, doesn't scale.

This was like five years ago, before mobile internet was available to most consumers. Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe.

It was a good idea, just ahead of its time.

J2ME apps involved no carrier participation (though often you had to target all of the profiles), and most devices, including standard Nokia feature phones, could run it. Windows Mobile apps...well that was always completely open and with little carrier control.

And of course...WAP. Largely forgotten now, but the Gopher-like WAP was usable on pretty much every feature phone, optimized for limited displays and input technologies. It was a giant dud for a variety of reasons, but it was always an option back to the turn of the century. And you didn't need a data plan, which remains the #1 impediment to the mobile revolution, though you did get charged usurious rates for the packets you did use.

But how many people really used these things? I consider myself pretty techy and I can count on one hand the number of J2ME apps I've used (heck, I can use my other hand to count the number of times I used them).

> Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe.

While an app would have been nice, I guess that you could do something like this with just SMS.

This is essentially Just-eat.com, minus the mobile txt messaging. Depending on the geography here in Europe it's wildly successful.

One requires significantly more overhead. Also, the whole thing about submitting, voting, and commenting came much later. Reddit didn't even have comments for the first 5 months or so.

I like Steve's answer: "Steve: Ten years from now I hope that we would have either sold the company for gazillions of dollars, or realized we could not do so and tried to come up with something new."

The application content seems remarkably normal. Even the Restaurant idea. Nothing stands out other than the 'Animal' question. Like, within the realm of most of us at HN (even if the quantity of YC applications has raised the bar since Summer 2005). Thanks for posting this.

PG, when you read this did you remember them as the guys who met you after your talk in Cambridge?

I just realized that Alexis = Reddit founder = kn0thing = the author of this -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isk88nT0sRY

That is one of my favourite youtubes. Big kudos! I couldn't stop laughing the first time I watched it. It's amazing how most of it still applies after ~5 years

The jig is up!

It's interesting to see how the application form has evolved.

I was telling team YC during interview week that I miss the "animal" question, partially because I really love our answer (the "we're a freaking zoo" line is pure Huffman).

They used to ask for your Slashdot username!

And in Steve's defense, his number should be lower, but I think he lurked for years...

Well, Reddit didn't exist yet (on account of Reddit being a YC startup) and HN didn't exist because Reddit hadn't gotten to a state that HN needed to be created. So the evolution seems natural, assuming they wanted to know whether you made any intelligent comments on tech news sites.

Now what do they ask for?

From http://news.ycombinator.com/w2011form :

>For each founder, please list: YC username; ... personal url, github url, facebook id, twitter id;...

"Sorry, the application deadline has passed."

Edit: Anyone have a copy of it?

You should be able to get it at http://news.ycombinator.com/apply . If not, go to http://ycombinator.com/late.html

You can still get to the application form to apply late, but they seem to do some session stuff making the direct link not work (which means you have to acknowledge that you're applying late).

Anyway, go here: http://news.ycombinator.com/apply

Click "apply late". Click "Edit your application online" (number 3).

So how on earth did it get from that to what is currently reddit?

> We were rejected after our interview, but Paul called us the next morning as we rode back to Charlottesville to say we could join YC if we came up with a new idea. That idea was reddit.