How We Got into Y Combinator | Hacker News Reader

How We Got into Y Combinator

lloyd.tc

166 pointslloydarmbrust81 comments

There's a lot of great material in this post, but as a recent YC alum myself, I have a number of problems with it.

1) "If you’re writing your Y Comb application and it takes you less than a month of work, you’re not trying hard enough."

No. You should not be spending that much effort on your application to YC -- or any accelerator. Should you have a few people read it over? Yes. Should you spellcheck? Yes. But not much more than that. Focus on building your product and building your business.

2) "no one’s video is under a minute."

Ours was. 50 seconds, to be exact.

3) "But my point is, if your company and team is solid, than you will get in."

This is the most dangerous statement in the post. This is simply not the case. Every successful entrepreneur was told "no" and turned down time and time again on their path to greatness. Facebook got "no's" from VCs. Airbnb's founders were told they were crazy. Many people outright laughed at Elon Musk's dream to build rocket ships. SendGrid was rejected from YC. If you believe in your team, and you believe in your idea, trek on. The YC partners are some of the smartest people I've ever met, but they're not infallible.

YC has been absolutely amazing for my team and my company, and we're very grateful for having gone through the program. But we likely wouldn't have been accepted and wouldn't have benefitted so much from the program if we weren't focused intensely on what matters -- building our product, talking to our customers, and staying healthy. Apply, hope you get in, but if you don't, carry on.

Couldn't agree more on all counts. What works for one team will not always apply to another.

I started filling out our application 2 hours before the deadline, and I am a slow writer. It worked out for us, but I wouldn't recommend this approach. Correlation is not causation.

Best applications consistently keep the video under 1 minute. Given the culture of conciseness in YC I wouldn't recommend intentionally going longer.

A month is not 730.484 hours on your application, it's spending a lot of time thinking and musing about your application and your business.

Our application process helped hone and focus our business in ways that nothing else has. I would argue that working hard on your YC application is working hard on your company.

As you've pointed out twice (#2,#3), there are always exceptions to rules.

If a company does not make it past a YC interview, then there was something that YC didn't like... it can only help that company to try to extract that issue and deal with it early on.

"I would argue that working hard on your YC application is working hard on your company."

This is exactly wrong. There are two types of questions on the YC application:

1) the ones about you as founders, and 2) the ones about your business

Spending time thinking about the first type of question (e.g. "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.") does not help you build your business -- not in the least.

And if you spend time building your business (i.e. talking to customers and building your product), then you'll be well prepared to answer the second kind of question.

You have it backwards. Working on your YC app != working on your business. Working hard on your business, however, is the best thing you can do make your YC application successful.

I think we believe the same things here, and are talking around each other.

Spending time thinking about our business for us included talking to customers and asking hard questions. Only after understanding our customers could we build anything at all--for an enterprise product like ours, it's impossible to iterate in a vacuum.

Working on your company should always be the answer, but before we could ship code, we needed to know where we were going.

As PG points out, "The biggest mistake founders make when applying is to confuse us. Half the time when I'm reading an application I'm thinking 'I have no idea what this person is even talking about.' I suspect this often the writer's own confusion showing through."¹

Trying to explain our very-difficult model helped us to both understand it and define for ourselves.

Admittedly, it was a bit weird to just start making money without knowing where the future of the company was going. The YC app itself forced us to talk through these things; but maybe this problem is unique to our company.

¹ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4694322

lloyd, would it be to much to ask what you enterprise product is exactly? I'm thinking about one for quite some time now...

look at my profile.

That would have been to easy! :)

nice product, so!

EDIT: And site, just because I forgot...

Agree wholeheartedly.

One of the most valuable pieces of advice YC offers is that there are lots of things that are a waste of time, but feel like they're productive, and that these things are especially dangerous to spend time on.

As a data point, I was rejected by YC 3 times. Once after the interview, once at the application, and amusingly enough the first time we applied for the last batch. We got in after applying again late with LightTable.

There is certainly no guarantee that with a "solid" team you'll get in. At the end of the day, it's all a matter of serendipity.

You were rejected three times for the same company?

Nope, they were all different ideas/companies.

Typewire - disqus for liveblogging

Attend.me - conference management software

Prospector - medical chart review

and finally LightTable. Oddly enough we had/have domain expertise for all of them :D

If you switched projects four times, I can only assume that the last company, the one that YC accepted, has the most potential... otherwise, you would have continued working on the other projects.

I think it's way more than serendipity. I think the YC staff is extremely good at identifying where good teams and good products meet.

This was over a series of years. There are lots of reasons why we stopped working on the different projects, but I'm not sure I believe there was any less potential in them - especially Prospector.

While I agree that they've gotten very good at identifying potential good team/product pairings, that just means they have relatively few false positives. It makes no claim to how many people they pass over who may in fact have an amazing team and product. As the noise in the process increases, you're bound to end up with more and more people who for completely random reasons didn't end up being what they wanted that day. This isn't a purely objective process (thank goodness).

All other things being equal, anything that relies on the judgement of a few people has an element of serendipity to it.

I think Prospector sounds very interesting, even only from a three word description. I know three friends running startups in the healthcare market and it's a tough one (with a lot of entrenched interests).

"All other things being equal, anything that relies on the judgement of a few people has an element of serendipity to it."

Also recall that the judgement is made on the basis of a 10minute interview. Ask any of these startups if they'd ever hire a group of strangers into their company based on a 10 minute interview. (I'm aware that's not really a fair comparison, but it should still make people think).

"When we realized that multiple YC partners had already independently contributed to the Kickstarter project because they wanted to use Light Table themselves, it was not a hard decision." --thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992343

For #1, I know many YC founders who have gotten in just using half or day or so for the application (usually defying the deadline). We used only one Sunday afternoon for ours on the second run when we got in and I don't see the point of wasting time except getting few rounds of feedback and spellcheck.

Interestingly enough also many alumnus I know thought they failed the interview once walking out of the room. I sure did.

Edit: With the second comment I was referring to section "Once we got the Interview, we knew we were in"

"We used only one Sunday afternoon for ours on the second run when we got in and I don't see the point of wasting time except getting few rounds of feedback and spellcheck."

I think many of the posters who spent relatively little time on their second, third, fourth, etc. applications are underestimating how much time they spent preparing the application. Unless you could have written that application from scratch the first time, at least some of the time spent on your failed applications counts as "writing the application." I'm pretty sure the author didn't mean 1 month of 12 hour days sitting in front of a word processor (and I think has said as much).

Hi sethbannon, idbknox, gleb, and lloydarmbrust, would it be ok to ask you guys for feedback on my YC app? I wanted to check with you first before I start spamming your inboxes :)

I live in Silicon Valley so everyone here is either going YC crazy right now, or absolutely clueless. It would be awesome to get feedback from someone objective but experienced.

I apologize if this wasn't the right place to ask, but with 4 YC alums in the same thread I had to give it a shot!

Thank you in advance.

Surprisingly, I agree with my co-founder. "Hacking" the yc application process implies that the poster was able to put much less work into the application than others did through cleverness on the poster's part. The post sounds like he thoughtfully filled out the application in a way that highlighted his strengths and minimized his weaknesses, as everyone else does. He also put a lot more work and thought into it than we, and the other yc founders that I know, did.

Instead of building that application for a whole month, he should have been building his product and landing customers.

My co-founder agrees with me? It's a miracle.

I don't comment a lot here, but I did want to come on and make the same point, but you beat me to it Seth. The truth is that we had a quick write up. Our video actually took more than a couple takes because we didn't rehearse or script it and someone would say something silly and we would all laugh. The best way to get in is to have a strong team and understand your product and market. Building your company is the best way to understand your product and market. For the interview I would definitely recommend being rejected as much as possible before the interview so you can quickly and confidently answer any questions or concerns someone can come up with in a 10 minute span. You will find that getting rejected is pretty easy to do. It's just like with women (or men), if put yourself out there, you will get rejected. How you learn from the rejection and better yourself is important.

I went back and looked at their application to see what we liked about it. What we liked is that they really understood their domain. This was not random undergrads making up some idea about social shopping. These people clearly understood local newspapers.

Out of curiousity, do you find that a lot of people applying under RFS don't understand their domain? It seems to me that a lot of those things are things that are both clearly broken, and not yet fixed, which means you get a lot of people from the sidelines saying "Oh all you need to do to fix that is ..." not knowing that the exact thing has been tried and failed dozens of times.

A lot of people who apply don't understand their domain, but I've never looked at whether this is more or less true for applications that mention a specific RFS.

Looks like they put a lot of effort in here and are excited about what they're doing. Congrats.

But, as an aside, can we please kill the abusage of the word "hacked" because, as far as I can tell, it's being used as a synonym for "did a lot of research and spent a bunch of time on".

Having deep industry knowledge, a product with paying customers and spending a lot of time preparing the application and video is not "hacking" the application process.

I typically think of the term in the way it's used in the question "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." I.e. something like finding a loophole.

It's too bad, this diverts the discussion on that post around the use of the word, whereas there is some good stuff in there.

if you read the answer to that very question on their application it falls pretty much in line with your parent's characterization: "did a bunch of research and spent a bunch of time on [drafting some legal documents]"

I've noticed that too. Alas, everybody wants a shortcut -- and the word 'hacked' implies that someone found one (for stories like these).

I think it also makes the link that much more attractive to readers:

"How we Did A Very Good Job on the Y Combinator Application Process and Got in"

versus

"How we Hacked the Y Combinator Application Process and Got in"

There's a word for when you choose a snappier title that doesn't reflect reality to get more clicks.

It's called linkbait.

"How we got into YC: by storming the building with assault rifles and smoke grenades!"

Now that article I would read.

For once "Pics or it didn't happen," might actually be on-topic!

Yeah - except they didn't find a shortcut. They just worked really hard and prepared. That's a good thing - but it's not "a hack." That word is just being overused now to the point of hilarity.

I'm not sure if this is something good to admit or not, but I only spent about 2 hours writing my YC application, and we spent about 15 minutes planning and filming the video, no editing. The video got 2 views. We got asked to do an interview.

Seems like every "YC Application Advice" blog is about spending hundreds of hours doing an APPLICATION. To me this sounds absurd. If you're really using the time to figure out the direction you want to head, or where your product focus is, then fine. But then it's not really for your YC application, its for your company.

In the end we didn't get in. We didn't have a sound business strategy; our focus was on the product. Nieve, yes, but lesson learned. It was one hell of an experience.

Who knew, all this time you just had to add &accept=1 to the end of the URL.

Our company is called "DropTable".

Or maybe it should really be &accept=2 ... (inspired by [1])

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4695587

I'm curious, why did you apply to YC if you were already bootstrapped and bringing in revenue? For the connections?

Unrelated, I like your "Tweet this quote" sidebars...clever idea. :)

Because when you start a company, everything is against you. Being a YC company, for the knowledge base and the connections, removes a lot of barriers and opens a lot of doors.

Plus, being two guys from the Midwest, we really didn't know what we were doing. After YC, our path was much clearer.

Cool, thanks for the honest response. :)

"Y Combinator is the most exclusive thing in the world that you can openly apply to."

I hope you don't actually believe that... if you do, start-up groupthink is definitely getting to you.

What's more exclusive that you can openly apply to?

I guess one counterexample might be the Navy SEALS--anyone can openly apply to enlist in the Navy, and once enlisted, a sailor can openly apply for SEAL training.

NASA Astronaut.

There are admittedly a few ways to measure exclusivity and define openness.

If you account for applicant quality in how you measure exclusivity: NSF fellowships, top medical schools, top JD programs, top science PhD programs, many jobs, some country clubs,

The Rhodes and Marshall scholarships come to mind as "most exclusive." They're arguably not "open application" due to age requirements. I suspect YC has an age requirement too, but it is less restrictive (and less explicit.)

If you don't control for applicant quality, then even entry-level jobs are more exclusive than YC. I've been in charge of hiring for a jobs where we made job offers to less than 0.5% of applicants. Which is just to say that acceptance rate alone isn't the right metric.

I think I'm touching on a small sliver of the "most exclusive things" list. The fact that most of the world hasn't heard of YC would also suggest that there are also exclusive programs in other fields that we aren't familiar with.

There are literally no requirements to apply to YC, except wanting to be in YC (which implies you want to build something).

Rhodes and Marshall have specific requirements, even your job hire probably had requirements (high-school education, must be able to lift 30 lbs).

That's what makes YC so amazing... anyone, anywhere, can apply.

I agree that YC's requirements are more flexible than most jobs.

If you don't have the skills to do statistical modeling, we wouldn't hire you. We gave guidance in the job posting about who was a good candidate. But we didn't prevent anyone from applying.

YC is the same in all those dimensions. If you don't have the skills necessary to build a successful startup, they won't accept you. YC gives guidance on their web page about who was a good candidate. But they don't prevent anyone from applying.

I'm not sure how you define "open" so that one of those qualifies and the other does not. If "open" just means that they have more flexible requirements, that is a difference of degree, not kind.

YC is an unusual combination of selective and eclectic. But claims about "the most selective open application in the world" suggests a lack of perspective.

Is 27 really considered that old in the YC circle? Does it actually put you at a significant disadvantage in the application process?

IIRC the average founder age is about 27-29.

I'm 29. Since I finished my undergrad I've gone to grad school, done work for huge companies, small companies, universities, and worked at a startup. I think all of these first hand experiences will prove to be very valuable in my future entrepreneurial endeavors. As always, YMMV.

Yeah, I found the phrase "we were both pretty old (27)" to be equal parts amusing and depressing. Sort of like when an intern in the office (after a few beers) told us he was dreading the day that he turned 20. That got a lot of chuckles from those of us with a few grey hairs.

"Besides, getting in Y Combinator is easy: just be wicked smart, create a beautiful product, get millions of users, and build a revenue stream that grows 20% each month."

If your company's revenue stream is growing 20% each month on the backs of millions of users, why are you applying to Y-Combinator?

I think they were being flippant.

This is not 'hacking' the application process in the slightest. You prepared yourselves well; there's a difference.

But then again, the title got you on the frontpage of HN, which was almost certainly the goal.

Insightful article that would have benefited from a less sensationalist headline. "Hacking the Y Combinator Application Process" makes a promise that you fail to deliver on.

To be fair, I said "How We..." Did it. Also, I made sure to clarify the point of the post with the beginning disclaimer.

Apologies if you felt mislead. LMK a better title and ill change it. Also, I hope there's plenty of stuff in there that demonstrates how to write a good application.

No need to apologize. The meaning of "hacking" has changed over time, and of course you're free to contribute to that.

"How We Applied To YC, Got Accepted"

Re: Article Title Suggestion: "Why YC Made Sense for Our Business and How We Got In" or "How I Was Almost Eaten by a Shark (or something equally absurd), but Got into YC Combinator Anyway"

Humor may really help the article to gain acceptance and readership.

I know this is Hacker news, but hacking, bootstrapping or kickstarting are slowly becoming meaningless buzzwords.

Please please stop using them for anything.

YCombinator is just like college now. Its all about getting in and not about what you're supposed to do when you're there.

lame.

I can't imagine spending over a month writing your YC application is something PG would recommend, but I do love the idea of having a few random people explain your application back to you. That's great advice about being sure you're writing is clear in general.

I can't imagine "we're already making money" and the fact that you were doing it monetization journalism (an RFS and a tough one) didn't help you get in more than the clarity of your application though. That seems to be a proof point beyond anything you could have written, to me.

Congrats on the win, but:

"...we basically don’t have an accent..."

You do. It's called "American". :P

The word hacked gets thrown around way too much.

This is a good read. You really know what you want, and what to do. Concrete plan. Midwest is still in the US right. It's funny, I just read earlier here in YC an accepted application but failed in the interview.

This is a good example of a YC application but I'm more intrigue with applications outside America, or in Asia. And dealing with what you said as language barriers, culture differences, and also the visa problem.

Regarding spellcheck: I noticed the application contains the typo "bolierplate".

Ha.. nice!

403 lol jk but seriously.

caching error. apologies. up now.

I found this useful. Even if the terms are being abused, it always helps to have others perspectives on how they succeeded. Regardless if it doesn't apply to your system/experience, it is still a valid (and successful) method of getting in. Do you need to work for 1 month to submit the YC application? Nope. Did it work for them: Yep. So, as with anything, YMMV but getting as many different perspectives as possible can only help. Hack a bootstrap to get kickstarted.

It looks like you, guys, are embarassed by your age. "We're too old - we are already 27". Damn, I thought that you were at least 50 when I read it. As far as I remember, PG told about 26 to be average age for applicants. I'm 27 right now but I'm not going to retire tomorrow - hell, I'm still to young and will be even when I be 40. :)

The most interesting part of this, I think, is the tweet buttons with the quotes everywhere. Does that make an appreciable change in terms of people sharing? Or does it just take up a bunch of space?

Useful piece. I started breaking down our YC application and rewriting answers and I realised that I could write much of what I've put in a much shorter manor that is to the point.

>even if we don’t get in, this trip has convinced us that we’re moving out to the valley to do this full time.

Simply curious, why did you decide to build the company in Austin, TX?

Hi, I can't speak for Lloyd. But, as someone else who's building a funded startup here in Austin--and who sits about 10 feet away from Lloyd and OwnLocal every day!--I can answer it for me/my startup.

I ran my last company in the Valley and did really well--I exited for 7 figures. I am building my current company in Austin because I see here what the Valley was in 2002-2004. Growing fast, retooling itself as a startup hub, and building real businesses with real revenue.

Developers are (somewhat) easier to hire here. Salaries and cost of living are lower. No state income tax saves you some good money, too (matters more once you get acquired and/or start pulling down a larger salary.)

Weather is less great, but you do have seasons here, which I can appreciate, having lived in California most of my adult life.

Funding is available, though not quite as easy to get as in the Bay Area. However, I will say, once you figure out who the investors are in Austin, they love to invest in local companies with traction and revenue. And there are venture funds here, as well. In addition to local funds, 500 Startups makes several trips through Austin a year and funds the most promising startups here.

Plus, Austin is a fun city that has a lot of fresh, young energy. Thriving culture, bike- and scooter-friendly, and did I mention you can actually afford to buy a house here? I suppose that's more important for us "old fogies" who are already in our 30's. ;) Oh, yeah, and you can drink beer at the movies thanks to Alamo Drafthouse. Also, if you're a foodie, Austin is epic. I still can't believe the Bay Area doesn't have an equivalent to Central Market.

I wrote a more in-depth blog post before I left for Austin: http://www.erica.biz/2011/california-im-leaving-you/ And I can safely say that moving here to run a high-growth, B2B tech startup was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

Our not-so-well written post about this last year is here: http://ownlocal.com/newspaper-support-group/a-successful-sta...

The short version is that we work with small newspapers, and small newspapers sometimes like the idea of working with people from Austin instead of San Francisco. (Yes, I realize how crazy that sounds.)

It also suits me better personally, and it seems to be easier to raise a relatively large (and young) family.

I made a go of it in the valley for a year, and it was a lot of fun, but we're happy to be a part of the Austin Tech community now.

> just be wicked smart, create a beautiful product, get millions of users, and build a revenue stream that grows 20% each month.

If you did this, why would you need YC?

Children are useless until around the age of three. I never thought it would take them thatlong to become real people.

Love this answer.

Why does the YC app form ask you to not password protect the demo site?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com