Applications open for winter 2010 YC funding | Hacker News Reader

Applications open for winter 2010 YC funding

ycombinator.com

110 pointspg52 comments

We haven't decided for sure, but we have to change something, because reading all the applications is becoming overwhelming.

Why not have someone create a simple, private site which makes salient application information: a screenshot which may lead to the site's demo, video of founders, answers to questions. Then certain trusted people, partners or alumni, can rate the applicants over time. Instead of going days without shaving and being exhausted, you could spend a few minutes each day flipping through applications. Surely over time those you are interested in for an interview will be apparent. I'm pretty sure there was a reason not to use this approach, but it may be worth it to bring it up again.

Maybe the site could run news.yc. YC alumni get accounts and vote up good applications. The cream rises to the top.

I don't think voting would be a good way to do this. Now, YC applications are different from scholarship applications or honourary degree nominations (which are the areas where I have the most experience judging); but if they're not too different, there are going to be some very good applications which most people don't immediately recognize as good. I often find that out of a large committee, some of the best applications are only noticed by one person -- but when he/she says "seriously, I think this one is really worth looking at", everybody else will look closely enough to recognize the application's merits. Simply having everybody vote yea/nay will result in obscure applications being lost when people default to nay.

It sounds like a classic case of groupthink, something I would think YC founders would be highly susceptible to.

I think groupthink is far more of a problem when people see "hey, this has been voted up to 10" than when people hear a reasoned argument for why they should read an application which they previously ignored.

To fight against that -- maybe you could make the total number of votes an application has gotten (it's score) invisible to the people doing the voting?

I wasn't talking about doing polls only. Each application would get a discussion thread, so there is room for someone to write a passionate essay or whatever.

I agree that there are issues with exposing voting. Maybe it would be interesting to shuffle the number of votes at first, see what happens when an application that was below the fold shoots to the top. (Maybe news.yc should do this too?)

The advantage of voting is that you can quickly flag wastes of time. In, e.g., fiction publishing, the ratio of acceptable to crap is 1 to 100 or worse, because any idiot can and does write a novel. You don't need to know everything as a reader to be able to eliminate the crap.

I think what you are really worried about is a situation where you have so many winners that there's no time to find the diamond in the rough. I don't think that's different from these startups' current situation though. They need to stand head and shoulders above the competition in some manner. They might as well start now.

quickly flag wastes of time

Exactly. The startup would have to opt to be publicly vetted, but it would make a lot of sense. The worries of group-think are overrated. I think most would happily allow it and be grateful for the feedback and to see how they rate.

It takes some of the stress off of YC and lets a very smart community get involved. It's a win-win, really.

You can deal with that using some scarcity. Give each team 10 apps to rate. You could allow them to vote "good" or "bad" for all apps, but give them one "Drop everything and fund this" star that they can dole out. Ideally, distribute enough that each app gets rated by 2 or 3 teams and you could sort the list by star count first, and yes-to-no ratio second.

I don't think that this system necessarily would require a strict yes / no vote. I would imagine interesting commentary and feedback springing up around each idea. This system would give the entrepreneur a chance to defend his/her idea or iterate on some of the shortcomings others address. PG et al are betting on this iterative process occurring during YC anyway, why not accelerate it by making it part of the application process?

Pg and team can use online web-app tool such as "Decide Already" - it makes easy for organizations and groups to come to a decision about anything.

http://www.decidealready.com/

Maybe they can use http://alpha.crowdmind.com to facilitate the application review process. Going to release private group collaboration functionality soon, this could help when comparing the applications.

Half the groups who apply only do it in the last day or two before the deadline.

Eliminate an explicit deadline. It may affect the applicant pool at first, but subsequent iterations should be normalized.

Removing the deadline removes the likelihood of groups applying.

PG, just outsource the entire selection process to Mechanical Turk. It could be an experiment similar to that proposed in the finance classic "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" in which a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a stock page out-invests stock-picking experts. If Mechanical Turk picks a more successful crop of startups than the YCombinator average, you will have succeeded in making yourself completely redundant -- a worthy goal of any enlightened manager.

That only works until enough people start doing it. If you think that blind faith in quantitative factors beats a qualitative analysis of the effects of such faith, I can probably rustle up a few CDOs to sell you.

If the applicants have a demo-ready B2C product, MTs [1] might even be consistently better at picking winners than YC, as the ultimate success depends on what MTs think, since MTs[2] approx= common people approx= customers.

[1] Given enough MTs

[2] Provided you restrict allowed MT demographic to match your target market

Except that I believe (from YC terms) founders(and thier ability to persevere) are more important than thier ideas.

Yes, which is why I said "If [they] have a demo-ready B2C product". YC is more early stage than what you can meaningfully show MT.

Also: If users love your product (not just the idea) and pay, you have already demonstrated that you are a good team, and it is pretty easy to persevere when you have an increasing number of paying customers.

The Application Form link (http://news.ycombinator.com/apply) still results in:

"Sorry, but applications for summer 2009 are now closed. Check back in a few months for the application form for winter 2010."

Perhaps that how they're going to reduce the number of applications to read.

we may ask some YC alumni to help us review applications

Why limit this to YC alumni? Obviously you don't want to fully "crowdsource" the process (both for reasons of quality and for reasons of confidentiality); and YC alumni presumably have an advantage of knowing what being in YC is like -- but conversely, using YC alumni has the disadvantages that (a) they're liable to be busy running startups, and (b) there's a good chance that they would fall into the people-like-us trap.

Can't you think of any smart and trustworthy non-YC-alumni?

Shouldn't big name VCs like Sequoia do the same? I think confidentiality is probably the biggest reason. Who else would YC trust better than their previously funded startups?

not 1 alumni review 5 applications, but 5 alumni review 1 application. There gonna be much opinions, which is better.

The amount is more solo-founder friendly than before. Has YC become more solo-founder friendly than before?

I wonder how many solo founders are there in YC. Anybody know any of them?

I don't know any examples, people have asked on several occasions how many single-founder companies YC funds, and IIRC pg said it was roughly 5% of the companies.

I think PG's advice against solo-founder companies would remain true, hence not rendering YC any more solo-friendly. I'm surprised that number is even 5%, considering the number of high-quality YC applicants that could potentially be paired together.

I think they just don't want to financially incentivize bringing on unnecessary people as founders.

Nothing has changed in that respect. We rarely accept single founders and when we do we usually encourage them to get a cofounder before YC starts. So the $14k for a single founder is more of theoretical possibility.

Any tips for the application? (Other than the obligatory, don't ask on HN)

We have a solid business plan, plenty of lines of code and are looking forward to applying.

I'm going to write something about how to apply. I've been meaning to for years.

Make the questions look easy.

You made my question look easy!

I had to think about it but I do get what you mean. Let me see if I can summarize. If one can make difficult questions seem trivial, then it shows potential.

Thanks.

Is it me or is this application coming out much sooner than it has in the past? Not complaining though- this is always a welcome YC submission.

We've been getting lots of people asking about it. Maybe it was the Inc article.

are startups allowed to reapply? we didn't get in last time, but we're still making awesome progress ...

4 founders should get $23k, right?

No: "we're going to invest $11k + $3k per founder, for up to 3 founders"

Whoops! Thanks. I think I was distracted because at first I thought "k" was the variable representing # of founders, and then when I figured that out... ah, forget it. I'm an idiot.

"Starting in winter 2010, we're going to invest $11k + $3k per founder, for up to 3 founders. So now 1 founder will get $14k, 2 $17k, 3 $20k, and 4 $20k."

If I understood well, 4 = 3 because the costs of 4 persons are near to the costs of 3 (in YC point of view)

why not just hire someone to help out? Pay them by charging a small($10) application fee to filter out the bs applications.

Because the sort of people that would work for $10 aren't the ones you want reviewing funding applications.

I'm not saying that the person would review all the apps at $10/pop. Just the extra that pg can't manage.

+ its not like it'd be peanuts. Let's say YC gets 1,000 applications this summer. That'd be $10-20-$100K(depending on how much they'd charge) to go towards the extra person to review the app.

I dunno about you, but 10-20-100K for a month's worth of work is hardly peanuts. If you use the $100 price point, that's $200K/yr just to review funding apps for 2 months. Plenty of cash to "hire" some angel investor as a "consultant", who'd be able to do this and still have the time to do his regular "job", the other 10 months out of the year.

+ talk about synergy, the angel investor would be able to get in on the ground floor, to fund the program graduates at show and tell, and if pg passes on some project that the angel thinks has merit, he can fund them outside of YC.

Angel investors are already rich, by definition. We're talking about the sort of people that can write a check for $50k and not really sweat it. They're not looking for contract work that will pull them $10k. They'd probably be more interested in becoming a YC partner, as in a sense Paul Buchheit and Ron Conway have become.

The people qualified to do this sort of thing are either rich or insanely busy, which is why they'll probably do it if Paul's calling in a favor, but not to make a buck.

I would rather have 6 or 7 more companies funded than drop 100k having someone sort through applications.

Under this proposal, the applications pay a small fee, so the total operation is neutral.

Will you read every application all the way through?

I have been on this site for like a long time, but could someone explain thoroughly what is it that they are funding, how it really works, do they get any percentage of the company in return and why would anyone want to be funded by Mr. Graham?

http://ycombinator.com/about.html

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