YC Interviews only 10 minutes long? | Hacker News Reader

YC Interviews only 10 minutes long?

10 pointsspie20059 comments

It seems YC interviews have a super high degree of randomness.

Woke up with an allergy/headache and saw its not possible to reschedule the interview. Additionally my field is a bit niche and requires some explaining.

A 10 min interview (in the midst of like 30 interviews daily) seems totally insufficient to have a proper discussion about my idea. Feels like interviewers themselves don't have a good idea of what startups will work or not and just pick which personalities they vibe with in 10 mins.

tldr; How can YC be a good signal on founders if they only speak with them for 10 mins?

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I think you all might have it wrong as to why it’s ten minutes. Here is how I see it:

YC is playing a numbers game. Their whole play is to give money to those N founders who they think have the highest probability that their idea could become a very big business and very quickly. They also know that they will have may be handful of “winners” and that even the most promising founders and their ideas are most likely to fail. So to ensure that they really only pick the most promising ones based on what they can see/tell today, they are ruthless about anything less than ones that look extremely promising. In a way they are looking for extreme and obvious standouts. To borrow an analogy they are looking at the waveform and identifying the spikes. As that’s the best they can do(regardless of if they admit to it or not). That why it’s a numbers game. And 10 minutes is plenty for that.

If anything, if they spend more than ten minutes they not only lose on the numbers game as their “pool” size becomes smaller but also diving into more details will add more noise to the signal and will work against them. they just want extreme standouts from the get go and not the standouts they rationalize after a big deep dive. The deeper the dive the more they risk their biases affecting them.

Finally this is not their first rodeo - imagine if you have interviewed hundreds or thousands of founders to evaluate their ideas. You’d have a decent understanding of what a “spike” looks like on a waveform.

Would (genuinely) love to hear a counterpoint

Counterpoint is they're not investing into the top 10 or even 50 per year, they're investing in literally 3 batches per year at 250 - 500 candidates per batch that too at an 8 mil cap (even the best vcs in the world aren't allowed to invest at that cap).

At that dilution and a 10 minute interview slot, I essentially focused on other more important VC / client / employee meetings I had and wrote off the YC meeting as essentially random.

The amount of time they spend on each interview leads to questions on how much time they will actually spend with each team.

From personal experience, know several teams that are struggling to close a seed round post YC. I highly doubt that would be the case if the partners were heavily involved in their projects.

I posit that being accepted to YC means you're likely above average but not a strong signal by any means and not a guarantee that the YC partners will give you attention.

This is going to sound like a sarcastic joke, but I’m totally serious.

A proper founder that is YC caliber would take an elephantine dose of Zyrtec and Tylenol to ensure that a one-time opportunity doesn’t slip away, because you can’t always reschedule “in the real world”

And that’s why 10 minutes is enough.

Zyrtec and most of its peers have a dose tuned at the edge of what can be called 'non-drowsy'. Taking more is likely to induce sleepiness, which isn't going to help. Also, Tylenol (acetaminophen) is toxic at doses not too much more than the listed dose; it's not a good idea to take an elephantine dose unless you don't enjoy having a liver.

thx, til.

s/Zyrtec/"Your favorite anti-allergy medication combination that remains non-drowsy in large doses"

s/Tylenol/"Your favorite pain medication combination that doesn't kill your liver in large doses"

When I have a severe cold I pop 1000 mg of Tylenol (i.e. paracetamol) and then two hours later 500 mg of Advil (ibuprofen).

The interview can be 0 minutes long if you decide not to do it.

If the interview was 30 minutes you’d be trying to reschedule it and complaining that the interviews aren’t an hour long.

YC isn’t trying to understand your niche. They’re trying to see if you’re a founder worth backing. They can do that in 10 minutes.

I believe they get at why it's 10 minutes in this video but there are also some practical tips for how to think about the interview.

Good luck!

https://youtu.be/tVnglV-HcJU

I'd have something to say to them regardless of how I felt.

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