Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

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...you're comfortable blowing several thousand dollars on what, lets be honest, is a very, very unlikely chance at securing a domain name.

Considering the context I have to vehemently disagree.

Steve's really well known in the UK tech scene. He's a regular attendee & speaker at the Hacker News London meet-ups. Acceptance into the YC program would have vindicated his ambitions.

YC is seen as almost mythical in this part of the world as it's a huge ask to move to the opposite side of the world to go through a program to gain funding when there are an insane number of VC's & angel investors in the UK. YC is essentially 'Tech Hollywood' as far as most UK hackers are concerned. You can make yourself a household name as an Actor based in the UK but most Actors would jump at the chance to make it in Hollywood. The appeal of YC is a microcosm of that analogy.

EDIT: I appreciate CaveTech is referring to the zap.com situation but the entire trip was a guy doing everything humanly possible to make his dream a reality. I stand by my point.

I do not understand your comment at all.

To what do you vehemently disagree? That it is a slim chance of securing the domain name? If so, why does the rest of your comment discuss how important YC is to UK programmers?

I disagree with CaveTech's summation that the process was all about securing a domain. It was about the author doing everything he could to bring his intentions for his product to fruition and the original article was about the significant effort the author made to get accepted into YC only to blow it on a single question. I believe a lot of folk aren't quite grasping how or why one guy would go to such extremes with such ridiculously low odds of succeeding.

I guess the post can be seen as a cautionary tale about the dangers of spending too much time on your domain name and not enough on your product.

Not at all. As I state in the post, I think I spent too much time on preparing the product and not enough time on interview prep.

I'm not persuaded that the interview flub was the problem.

Your hypothesis seems to be that if only you had answered the one question right, then PG would have seen the beauty in your plan and let you in. But you followed up immediately with the answer. And then you sent them a link to an implemented feature, which they didn't bother to click on. Why would they ignore both followups if that was the one thing that kept out someone they otherwise saw as a promising candidate?

It would seem to me that the more plausible hypothesis is that PG still believes exactly what he told you: you haven't figured enough of the idea yet. And therefore, that it really wasn't about that particular question. I suspect you're fixating on that because it was the problem that you could see, and because it was a strong emotional experience.

When I've rejected job-seekers after interviews, it was never about them failing a particular question. It was about a pattern in the interview, generally a Dunning-Kruger failure in some key area. I think it speaks well of people when they follow up with, "Oh, I totally blanked on X, here's the correct answer." But that never makes a difference, because never blanking out for a moment is not one of the characteristics I'm hiring for, and the conscientiousness displayed in the followup was also visible in the interview.

But prior to that you say:

Inspired, I hacked out the feature that was the answer to the flunked question and used it on the partners.

If it was such an easy feature to add and so important that you had several strong answers to the issue that required the feature, why wasn't it already part of your product?

edit: If the feature was already present in your product, it would have been almost impossible to have gone blank.

...when there are an insane number of VC's & angel investors in the UK.

The constant gripe of U.K. based talent is that nothing ever gets funded there. At least not at the rate or the fluidity with which it does in the valley. Besides this maverick ex-con of an angel, Xavier Niel, who claims to have invested in some 700 startups to the tune of almost $150,000 a pop, who are these angels and VCs you talk about?

It's certainly harder to get funding but by no means impossible. The likes of Stefan Glaeznar in London is a good example of someone with the capital, experience and willingness to invest in early stage start-ups.

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