Would Twitter have made it as a YC applicant? | Hacker News Reader

Would Twitter have made it as a YC applicant?

6 pointsjeremyawon10 comments

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I wondered the same thing about Delicious, back in my day. I'm pretty sure the idea sounded less interesting than the execution.

You certainly would have. Whether we got the idea or not, we'd have at least interviewed you based on your resume, and once we talked to you in person we'd have been convinced you'd do something good.

Yes. The most important thing to us (or to me at least) is what the founders have built previously.

That begs the question, what about Google? A couple of first-time student founders taking on the hardest hitters in the industry with little more than a some ideas about how web search could work to show. (Presuming this was before they had a working prototype and even perhaps afterwards.)

Perhaps a better question: At what point in their development would Page and Brin have been interesting? Or would a couple of Stanford PhD students have gotten them an interview on that alone?

Being students in the CS PhD program at Stanford would have been enough to get them an interview. We don't put that much weight on where people went to college, but grad school admissions are a fairly meaningful test.

We wouldn't have counted it against them that they wanted to take on big companies. That kind of courage is exactly what we look for. When combined with rationality.

I think it probably would have. Twitter was originally started as a side incubator project within Odeo.com (it became obvious corp). Three guys, @noah, @jack, and @csshsh (florian) were working on it day and night. They basically lived at the office, focused on getting something working quickly, had a good set of ideas and some examples of how it could work. From initial idea to working prototype was just a few days. They even had a business model, which was thrown out, to make money via sms from the carriers. Later as it grew, not having a business model and focusing on the platform, tools, scaling, and community made more sense.

On the one hand, the idea is an intriguing one (especially if the demo was already up and running), and the founder of Twitter had a stellar background considering Blogger. On the other hand: revenue plan?

But the guys who made Twitter weren't planning to make it into a business. It was just a cool idea that they had and expanded on.

They've stated publicly that they have a business plan, just not what it is. Speculation abounds (as I'm sure you know), and many potential plans that have been dropped online could work pretty well.

ttrp, time to ramen profitable = ;)

depends on who else applied.

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