Insights on the Y Combinator interview | Hacker News Reader

Insights on the Y Combinator interview

rtabl.es

93 pointsnateberkopec14 comments

Anyone curious what interviews are like can get an idea from the office hours we've done at TC Disrupt and Startup School. Interviews are similar, but with more questions (partly because there are more of us asking them, and partly because we need to arrive at a decision, not just have a conversation).

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/25/absolute-must-watch-office-...

http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/tc-disrupt-office-hours-wit...

http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298808297

Almost everybody seems to miss the mark in the "What do you do?" type questions. What do you think it is about these interviews that prevents them from describing it in the way you want them to? Or do you try to make everybody be more specific than their first pitch?

It's a big problem. We sometimes spend half the interview trying to figure out what the startup is doing. A lot of people are bad at explaining this type of thing. In fact I'd say most are.

The solution is to practice beforehand, preferably on people who will tell you candidly when you haven't yet explained yourself clearly.

The test of how well you've explained a startup idea is how accurately the listener could reproduce it from your description.

You might be interested to know that the German guy you instructed to launch immediately back in September has not launched yet.

But I should not be too sarcastic. I really liked these. A lot of the interviewees were very promising even after your well meaning attempts to shoot holes in their business models. And your comments are very informative.

But it seems that your comments and questions also indicate how hard it is to build a successful start-up. It is not merely about making something useful or better than the competition, you have to make something that cures a significant pain point so that your customers are actually motivated to go out and get it. It really does make one take a pause and question things.

I originally tried to post this on the roundtable, but was discouraged by the requirement to "apply for membership". I'd love it if the roundtable just let anybody post, but allowed the moderator to filter/sort/organize the content.

By far the most useful thing we did to prepare for the interview was to build a FAQ. The FAQ had everything we thought the partners might ask. For example: * How will we get users? * How do we know users have the problem we're solving? * What's the rocket science? Why can't other people do the same thing? * What existing services exist, and what specifically will make our product better than each of them?

For each question, we tried to have as many concrete details as possible, e.g., statistics, research papers, specific advantages we had over each competitor.

The other really useful thing was to spend about $50 to run a small AdWords/Facebook campaign, and measure the click-through-rate we got with various keywords and ad texts. This let us figure out, 1) did users actually want what we were building?, 2) how many users total could we drive to our site per day?, 3) what is the average cost per user would be? If you're building something that requires getting lots of users, I'd recommend doing this. Just seeing the most popular keywords that are relevant to your product will give you a much clearer idea of what people want.

Ah, perhaps "Apply for membership" is a misnomer. It's just a way for people who want to host their own to reach out to us. Anyone can comment on the Roundtable itself. We'd love to see your comments up there.

I may just be really tired and missing something obvious, but I see how to comment on other people's posts, but not how to post to the main roundtable. There's a message at the bottom of the page saying "You are not a participant in this roundtable," is that expected?

Since it's only ten minutes, it's pretty hectic as the YC partners try to understand the company/team. Because of the time constraint, they interrupt you, and they even interrupt each other.

It's on the interviewee to get his or her key points across. Go in knowing the three or four main bullet points you want to convey, and make sure you get them out.

Great work on the site BTW.

thanks! we welcome any and all constructive criticism on UX/UI

Maybe this is just me, but it would be nice to have an indicator (perhaps changing the color of the text box) to show who's leading the conversation/asking the questions. I know not all of the roundtables will be in this format, but having it be an option when starting the roundtable may not be bad.

Seconded. First time I visit and I already love the concept.

if any past interviewees or YC founders want to contribute please do so in the comments section of each post!

I tried to comment as a fellow YC S11 alumnus but got a message saying "You are not a participant in this round table." It seems like an invite only thing. Anyways, so I'll put in my comments here.

Before we interviewed we had been pitching to a lot of people including other incubators etc. This was the only preparation we made. The questions that YC partners asked were similar albeit more pointed and direct. We showed them a demo that we had created and basically told them what we do. There were a lot of questions about the business. A lot of them we've heard and answered before. Some were new and we were honest with our answers (more or less). I think what we did well was the convey the passion we had for the business we were building and I distinctly remember our interview ending with my co-founder's 30 second monologue about how we really aspire to help people.

I think 10 mins is just enough for people to understand what you are doing and a little bit of how you are doing it. No one should waste time in actually trying to convince the partners that you bigger than you actually are. You might be able to pull it off but it requires a whole lot of BS-ing skills.

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