How to not get rejected from YC's Early AI interview batch | Hacker News Reader

How to not get rejected from YC's Early AI interview batch

hermitian.substack.com

42 pointsjohntiger124 comments

Which is more likely?

A) A company that got rejected from YC's Early AI interview batch has figured out not to get rejected?

B) A company that got rejected formed a theory about why which absolves them of blame, and means that they do not have to ask how their application was weak?

I'm voting for B unless the rejected company has managed to put up a strong enough independent success signal that it is clear that they should have been accepted, and they don't just have sour grapes over not being accepted.

This goes doubly so given how much YC itself stresses personal qualities of the founders over the idea they started with. Trends in the ideas in companies formed therefore have more to do with what companies are pushed towards, by market forces or YC, than with the mix of starting ideas.

Could also be both

This post reminds me of a founder I worked for. We had a pitch meeting where one of the prospective investors laid out exactly why the founder’s idea was fundamentally flawed based on the investor’s personal experience as a past founder working on a variant of the same idea. The investor also explained what paths forward our founder could take with clear and actionable ideas before the rejection.

After the rejection the founder told us “the investor is biased because he failed so if we succeed it will hurt his ego” and proceeded to ignore all his advice. Well 6 months later when we tried to get users on the platform everything the investor had said turned out true and the startup limped along for another couple years on angel funds, thankfully without me.

I think there is a difference between ignoring someone’s advice because it would “hurt his ego,” and believing that a fail in the past doesn’t mean a fail in the future. (- false fail if you will)

I thought about saying that bit of it more explicitly. But chose not to.

That said, there is a fine line. You want someone who defends their opinion on how things should be done.. And also someone who takes feedback. Therefore it seems valuable in the interview process to try to give feedback, and observe how the person responds. With HOW they process feedback being more important than whether or not they changed their minds.

Processing feedback by telling the internets about it would seem to be...a negative signal.

Speaking of negative signals the startup website linked in the substack comes across as one.

A lot of medical buzz words in what is becoming a very crowded area for AI (this is the third opthalmology related AI startup I’ve heard about this month) without any real substance to their claims, details or publications. Opthalmology is the farthest thing from my specialty (radiology) so I can’t comment whether the problem being described is worthwhile but there is also little to no detail provided.

The only substance is the EMNLP paper which is vaguely described as award winning although unspecified and was an interesting read but in my opinion objectively isn’t sufficiently technically impressive to be the whole pitch and hyped on the startup homepage and doesn’t really lend much direct credibility for the problem tackled.

Some of the links are also broken on mobile Safari.

Finally, the author of this article and co-founder is described as “MD Candidate” on the startup page yet his CV states he finished his masters in 2023 and was at Lyft. If this means “admitted to medical school but hasn’t started” suggesting that status imparts any qualification or medical expertise is a huge red flag.

I fully appreciate that this may be a stealth startup but that website is being linked in the post so I interpret that as an advertisement and intended to be read.

Hope to be proven wrong when more comes out but I’d suggest refining that website a bit more.

I was a co-founder of a startup in 2014, and we applied to an incubator that had experience with hardware startups, and domain expertise.

Here's where it got interesting, my co-founder was friends with the founder of another much more established startup in a vaguely similar space. The leader of the incubator was under the impression we were focusing on a different idea (we considered as a secondary, later opportunity) and concerned about a conflict between the two startups. If we had listened to his suggestion, we probably could have come up with a successful product opportunity.

At the end of the day, It was my own stupid fault for not listening closer to what was said, and analyzing the option to pivot into a more successful path.

He says:

"For instance, if you are pitching a research lab without a specific plan to profitability (e.g. Mistral AI), then YC is not for you. "

So does YC fund similar companies [with "better" founders]?

The observation that YC companies tend to share a common shape is a pretty easy one to make. Who gets accepted or not is clearly a matter of fit and equally clearly has strong random chance effects.

Analyzing why the fit wasn't there is interesting. Your framing as "should have been accepted" (???) seems like you're thinking about this in a very different way from how it works.

Yep, glad you got the point. YC isn't some test where "passing" is the goal. As trite as it sounds, you are evaluating them as an accelerator as much as they are evaluating you as a startup - if the fit isn't there, either the startup changes itself or you move on. No big deal either way.

This is exactly right, not sure why you are getting downvoted. YC wouldn't work as an accelerator if there wasn't some pattern to their successes.

Yea a more realistic title would be - "We got rejected from YC, what I thought we did wrong"

I don't think the article claims A). The claim is that YC prefers companies that match a certain pattern and if yours does not then chances are not great. It mentions that other accelerators could be a fit though. It does not claim to have figured out how to not get rejected.

What would be valuable though is if they posted the feedback and rejection reason that they got from YC.

The article makes some salient observations and very good points, but yeah, I'm inclined to think this is another case of the sour grapes.

> While it may seem like YC invests in a diversity of companies across <healthcare, banking, travel>, it is an “Airbnb for X” type of diversity... if you are not building a product that is fundamentally like an Airbnb (or alternatively, a dev tools startup), then YC will not be interested in you.

I'm looking at the S23 batch and among them, I see a product for automating processes in healthcare, an AI voice assistant, a company tracking methane emissions with satellites, a company fixing GPS errors, building decarbonization, an AI for medical coding and others. None of these feel like AirBnB to me and certainly are not dev tools.

>As a result, most YC companies look the same. While I won’t name specific companies in any of the batches, YC companies will generally... have low capital and infrastructure costs, with low marginal variable costs

Yeah, that's the kind of company that wants $500k to get started. If you are building something capital intensive, then 500k probably doesn't move the needle for you. Either you are going to start small and build slowly (which makes for a bad VC investment) or you are going to need a lot more than 500k.

>For instance, if you are pitching a research lab without a specific plan to profitability (e.g. Mistral AI), then YC is not for you.

Yeah, Mistral AI raised $113M. If you can raise that as a seed round, then you don't really need YC. YC just isn't in the business of financing things that need 9 figures to get started.

> or alternatively, a dev tools startup

I have notice a lot of dev tools startups on YC. Since a dev tool startup is sort of a "busman's holiday" [1] for geeks, it sounds like a really attractive proposition. Get funded to do something that is pure programming, for other programmers.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/busman%27s_holiday

As someone who roughly fits that mold: I do love it, but I’d never describe it as a holiday :)

The phrase means that something isn't a holiday. Despite linking to an explanation of it, the grandparent does not seem to be using it correctly.

To take a break from a FANG or other corporate job, and do a low-key start-up thing with the gang, and greenfield some code instead of bug fixing maintenance work, while working remote from a beach in Hawaii or somewhere sounds like a holiday to me!

Exactly. Working from a beach isn't for me (too much sunlight and sand, and "i could be surfing :-(") but yes the rest of it. Especially the deep work of not working in a typical business.

I'd bet that YC would love to fund fewer dev tools, but there's a bias towards who applies to YC in the first place. It's not that YC isn't well known outside of tech circles, but they are especially well known in tech circles, and that affects who applies.

They can choose what they fund right? There might be some element of "Kelly criterion" to it though, so if all you have is tech tool ideas, it is still worth investing an a proportion of them.

This is advice you should get from people who have been accepted, not people who have been rejected.

Someone has an axe to grind

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