Dear Y Combinator, we bet you we can solve a problem of yours in 72 hours.

Perhaps in reaction to what's perceived as southern-European corruption, in Scandinavia there is substantial pressure on funders to make their decisions based on the official application process. There's a worry that "contacts" means your old grad-school buddy, someone you know from a sports club or weekly board-game get-together, etc., as opposed to scientific merit. There's also (what seems to me, as a foreigner) a strong worry that the process shouldn't be perceived as a sham, which means that at least some proportion of the funds have to be doled out according to the official application route, to prove to everyone that the system works like it says it does. In practice that ethos is upheld at some places more than others, of course, but in some circumstances you really can just apply and get money.

However, in my country at least, I do know they give more weight to applications from people they know (I don't know how, the others might get processed later or whatever, or they skew in their favor).

So, you might get funded without contacts, but it's less likely (I guess you have to be outstanding in some sense, either killer business plan or credentials).

Northern Ireland for example is a startup paradise. InvestNI, the government body in charge of giving away free money, recently had to give back a whooping £39m (that's $62m!) because it couldn't find enough businesses to give the money to quickly enough.

Sadly, many entrepreneurs in these places have never experienced what doing a startup in the "real-world" is like and they don't realise what an incredibly competitive advantage these grants give them. So instead of leveraging this opportunity, many spend most of their time whining and complaining about the paperwork and bureaucracy involved.

If you look at business as if it was dating, this just makes you seem needy; while getting an introduction through a mutual contact is always a better way to go...

The problem is what you are trying to do lacks creativity and originality. And without that I would question whether you could in fact build the next "dropbox".

What you're saying here is that you want someone to believe you can maintain such a series of problems and solutions, _without_ the ability to spot or select problems.

Of course, you should be mindful of the pressures from YCombinator. If they accept your challenge, they will have to either (1) do it in such a way that there aren't a lot of copycats; or (2) if it is wildly successful (they discover you, the group that builds, not the next dropbox, and not the next facebook, but the first dropface), they'll try to find a way to incorporate it into their business waters.

YCombinator is breaking new ground and trying different things. I think this was worth a shot. Maybe a "team challenge" will become part of the interview process eventually.

Patrick is right: networking your way in can be better. But it can also fail. Having a network connection can sometimes get you a courtesy audience, but it may do so in a way that is done as a favor to someone rather than someone who is actually excited about meeting you. It also can take a lot of time to build that network, at least if you do it organically. Indeed, most of us are on the lookout for the sniveling idiots whose only function in life seems to be to network. In the early part of the century a lot of folks thought that was a good idea. However, we quickly learned that most of the good people were working, not networking.

Besides, if this doesn't work you can always try networking.

How many of these cold emails have you sent? To what extent have you varied the copy in those emails? Are you just asking for something, or are you offering something as well? Have you gotten advice from other successful hustlers (concretely, talk to some seed stage founders for hustle ideation; abstractly, read How to Win Friends & Influence People at least once per year) on what you might want to put in the email?

What about non-email channels? Have you gone through Twitter (This is how I've met multiple investors and advisors, totally cold, with no friendly introduction.)? How about crawling toward them meticulously through LinkedIn? How about networking via HN? Have you tried hanging out on relevant IRC channels? Have you contributed to their questions & answers on Quora?

I don't mean to be overly critical here. The OP is a great example of inbound marketing hustle, and I commend you guys for it. Two of the key ingredients in startup success are determination and resourcefulness. Clearly you're resourceful, now crank up the determination a notch. Right now it sounds a bit like you've found good excuses not to keep trying. If you can't land a Skype call with someone who might be able to help you get noticed by YC, what evidence do we have that you're going to land a Skype call with a key distribution partner in six months?

Keep trying. Keep swinging and striking out. You'll see patterns. You'll improve. Eventually, you'll start making contact.

You know what takes savvy and elbow grease? Creating a customer acquisition channel! There are just so many amazing technologies these days for finding people and getting their attention. You could pick a YC company and find a way to generate credible leads or affiliate customers. You could do this with a completely automated, partially automated, or manual solution (like a series of great blog posts). There are all these YC companies who are making new products that replace existing ones. Take a special look at the B2B products. They have limited ability to directly target more than the few most lucrative verticals, but you and your friends are probably intimately familiar with at least one industry that could benefit from a new technology.

Here is where the most critical attribute of a YC-worthy person come in: hustle. It's all out there waiting for you: pick a technology that can help an industry that you understand, and sell that technology to them. Increase their bottom line demonstrably. After you've done this, you'll probably find you're a lot less interested in getting into YC, but they'll be more interested in you.

I'm confident there is at least one YC alum who would respond to your cold email. Stop assuming you can't solve this problem, and solve it.

But many people can't ship a quality photo viewer even in months.

What heavily distinguished Facebook from Myspace in 2006 when it became open to public was the product culture and quality. It took 3 years to build.

Although I completely understand the point of being able to make quick decisions and execute, the problem is far from solved after spending 72 hours on it. It takes at least weeks to deliver a good solution.

I'm 100% sure you've spent a lot of time with that viewer afterwards until you were confident users will have no problems using it.

While engineering the front-end can be done on a 2-3 day turn-around, I'm fairly certain that the engineering problems of storing and retrieving the petabytes of photos that Facebook users upload took far more than 2-3 days. If it used existing infrastructure then you need to count that engineering time in too.

I'm currently 2 months into developing the core technology for my project, working 1-3 hours in the evening after a 10 hour day at my client. Much of this work is with new technologies and mathematics/algorithms I'm unfamiliar with. In this situation, being unable to iterate on a front-end UI design in 2-3 days has nothing to do with skill.

If I were in your shoes I would spend 72 hours getting a full profiling system up and online with the vision, get THAT on hackernews, and start building a user base. By the time you actually finish the integration of backends to allow for micropayments, tracking users, and equity allotments, you already have users and are that much further ahead of anyone else working on something similar when you turn those features on.

YC is awesome, but they only are one of many options available to you. From where I sit, there is nothing about this project that _needs_ a lot of funding to get a prototype built, an a prototype will be what you need to prove you guys have the chops to take this all the way. The prototype just needs a few weekends of time, infrastructure knowledge and programming skill. The only thing I really see you needing some cash for early, is legal counsel to build solid terms of service and investment agreements carefully written to make sure you are fully protected and acting within the JOBS act.

Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss this further.