Get ready for the YC interviews: make sure you know the partners | Hacker News Reader

Get ready for the YC interviews: make sure you know the partners

yc-partners.s3.amazonaws.com

47 pointsway6625 comments

TL;DR: Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Stanford, Oxford, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford, Harvard. It is difficult to tell if this is an indication that YC overwhelmingly prefers people from extremely prestigious name-brand universities, or only people from said universities have any chance of being "connected" enough to get into YC.

I think it's more that several of the founders of YC were part of the MIT/Harvard community, so it grew from there. The participants in YC are much more diverse than the YC partnership.

If you look at the credentials of all the YC founders, it is undeniable that there is a bias towards folks with prestigious degrees, but the question is, is that bias causal? There are plenty of successful founders without the degrees too, so at best I would say it is correlative.

"It is difficult to tell if this is an indication that YC overwhelmingly prefers people from extremely prestigious name-brand universities, or only people from said universities have any chance of being "connected" enough to get into YC."

Neither. In our class (S12), there were founders from every background imaginable. I also know founders from other classes, and the same is true amongst that sample. If anything, YC founders seem a bit less "credentialed" than the Valley in general.

To the extent that "name-brand" universities tend to graduate extremely smart, capable people, you'll find that they're over-represented in any sample of smart, capable people. But YC has no incentive to select for factors that don't correlate with outcome.

There's a Case Western graduate in there too.

Heh. Are people from these universities so smart or do other people think that they are smart because they graduated from these universities? Are YC startups good or does YC make them good? Who knows. Here's more university statistics though: http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/29/study-startups-led-by-stanf...

Very cute.

Two thoughts-

1- I might suggest that if you're encouraging people to study/memorize the names for YC interviews, you provide a downloadable/clippable version, that they can paste into standard flashcard tools.

2- You're loading Zepto externally through cloudflare, but calling it as an inline script. This is causing an issue where Zepto can't initialize, as the external JS hasn't loaded yet. There are a number of ways to fix this, but it renders the site unusable in chrome for me (Although it works in other browsers)

2. Thanks Colin, I've fixed that!

Robert Morris is a very very very serious guy in his field. I wish I could interview with him to chat a little bit about exokernels!

There are also YC alumni walking around in the waiting area before the interviews, usually -- probably identifiable by YC clothing items (sweatshirts, t-shirts) or by generally looking less nervous than applicants...

And there are a couple more YC employees usually present, handling scheduling and logistics.

Some extra notes: Justin Kan is currently one of the founders of another YC company, Exec. RTM is the eponym of the "Morris worm" believed to be the first Internet worm (you note this a bit with the discovery of buffer overflow).

Good luck everyone for the interviews! We've made that for us to prepare but we thought other people will be interested too, so we've quickly made this website (works well on your phone as a full screen app!)

Is it fun to come before your interview and hang out with another applicants or everyone is so stressed (fixing the demo!) ?

I know that you shouldn't mix Jessica Livingston with secretary - many people do, they say.

i put together my own little version:

http://vicapow.clickb.in/investor/partner/person/yc

Pretty smart page :) Whoever did that deserves their YC spot!

Do all these partners give interviews?

Good question. I don't know. (intuition = yes).

AFAIK, only PG, Harj, Jessica, Garry, PB, Geoff, Sam, and maybe RTM and/or Trevor?

There are 3 tracks (fyi).

pg needs a better press photo than the one where he looks surprised at being asked a stupid question.

we like this face!

Well that's a nice panel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com