How to plan for Y Combinator interview | Hacker News Reader

How to plan for Y Combinator interview

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65 pointstoomasr11 comments

We got rejected as well after travelling all the way from Denmark. We landed saturday afternoon and got to the interview sunday morning and took the plane home sunday afternoon. We didn't even reach a point where we had jetlag.

I think one of the reasons we got rejected was our response to some of Paul Graham's suggestions. One of them was to expand the concept to include game characters (Iconfinder is currently an icon search engine). We didn't respond to his idea in a positive way but instead defended icons as a large enough niche to build a initial service people would pay for.

So do you wish you had accepted his suggestion?

I still don't like that specific idea, but I regret trying to defend our idea during the interview. I think they test the teams by suggesting different ideas to see how we react to new things. The more open you are to new ideas, the better. Just like Reddit, the team came to Y-combinator with totally different idea. So I think it's very important to be open and positive to th ideas bring up during the interview - because if they like you (but not your idea), you can very well be working on theirs instead.

I wonder if they ever flip out "bad" ideas to see if they're dealing with a "yes man". Doesn't seem to be their style, but it's not like I really know them well.

Not intentionally, but we get the same effect unintentionally because a lot of the ideas we suggest are bad and we later realize it.

Be careful. A non-yesman might still say "yes" in the room to shut the guy up, and then just not do it.

I'm interested to know more about why PG thinks that people typically don't pay for software tools? Do others feel this way? In my own experience, if a software tool saves me time, I have no problem paying for it. I've seen this in others. I realize that my observational sample is quite limited, but what do you think?

PG was right. People don't pay for software tools. But companies do. The number of freelancers who pay is small so focus could be on getting the sales funnel working for the developers inside the companies.

I'm afraid that memleaks alone would be too small benefit to keep a dedicated overhead running in production. Leaks are something that you worry only after it already happened. What could work is a system monitoring dashboard that includes memory leak detection. Definitely something corp clients and developers could love at the same time. But the competition is already there, just none of them has the memleaks detection.

Zeroturnaround has been very successful with the java class reloading business thanks to the massive pain that java developers face daily with the bloated frameworks that make you develop inside the running application instead of writing small batches of test-driven code. Perfect fit for corporate environments. I'm not sarcasatic here. On the contrary, I'm very happy to see a very serious problem being solved. It's a huge dedication to work with all the containers and frameworks to get the live class reloading right.

Regaring VC funding and tools: VC's are surfing the latest waves to reap the profits and capture the market. Tooling is enabler, not a wave.

What is the largest and most successful software tool? How much money does it make? [1]

You can sell dev tools, but the market is small and fairly stingy. There are also lots of good free opensource alternatives, because your users are perfectly capable of building and maintaining their own tools.

[1] I believe the answer is probably Visual Studio, which as far as I know is run as a loss leader to promote Windows. Given the amount of development effort going into it, I doubt they sell enough copies to cover the cost.

Generally ill-advised to mention meetings with specific VCs and angels ("Facebook was truly interesting and led to three new meetings. Next four days went like a breeze - in total we had 15 meetings - with blue chip VCs ([...]) who have presumably passed (otherwise I assume you'd have announced them as investors).

Saying "met with top-tier VCs and angels" is usually good enough, without the downside.

Ouch, thanks for pointing that out. Rephrased it now.

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