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Comment by throwaway1979 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway1979

Now that YC has gotten bigger (=more competitive), does an application without a prototype still have a shot? I'm incredibly paranoid about getting exposed to IP-related problems (working for a large corp and not in California). I suspect a few other people are in the same situation.

The sad thing is that when I think about it, I wouldn't fund someone without a prototype (if the roles were reversed). It is only when you build something do you realize if the materialized idea has any wings. Quite the mess I'm in :(

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Yes, of course. We care more about the founders (both individually and their relationship) than the idea.

Incidentally, YC hasn't gotten as much more competitive as you might think, because we've grown as the number of applications has. We consistently end up funding about 3% of applications. Not as a conscious strategy; it just always works out to about that. Applying to YC has grown somewhat more competitive though, because the top 3% keep getting better as we get better known.

Related to that, I have a question that's been bugging me:

If the application is assessed primarily on the founders, is it really worth failed applicants applying again? Speaking as someone who has applied (and failed, with cause!) twice relatively recently, and as an experienced 14 year 'veteran' of web technology, I can't say that my experience, skills or business-savvy have drastically changed since the application from 6 months ago.

As there's (understandably) no feedback for previous rejections (e.g. "Your idea sucks" vs "Your founders suck"), it's difficult to tell whether it's a waste of time to apply again. (Having said all that, we will of course be applying again anyway!)

Yes, we often fund groups' later applications. Dropbox was Drew Houston's second application. I believe PagerDuty was those guys' fourth.

Were they rejected at the application or interview stage?

Have you had many groups accepted after being rejected at interview stage?

We've funded people we previously rejected at both stages. I don't think we interviewed Drew the first time. I believe we interviewed the PagerDuties 3 times out of the 4 they applied.

I was under the impression that for YC the the idea was less important than the team.

How did the teams change between rejection and acceptance?

Was a different idea enough to consider them in a different light or is the interview process just sufficiently noisy that they were false negatives earlier?

I applied and was turned down two other times before being accepted on the third ... idea did change for the one we got accepted with though

A bigger problem is team, if you can show you're a solid team which has built stuff together then it matters less that you don't have a prototype.

PG might be more concerned that you still work for a large corporation than not having a prototype.

There will be a ton of startups applying where the founders left their jobs/schooling ahead of time.

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