Y Combinator interview advice (by Robby from Zenter) | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator interview advice (by Robby from Zenter)

robbywalker.name

27 pointssharpshoot14 comments

There's a danger in some of this interview advice: everyone writing about it is writing based on their one interview. So it seems to the Zenters that one should be passionate about one's idea. But the Zenters had a good idea. We'd been waiting for someone to propose a web-based Powerpoint killer. So all we needed to know was that they were smart and psyched to work on it.

Reddit was at the other extreme. We didn't like their initial idea. But we liked Steve and Alexis, so we brainstormed with them about other possibilities, and the result was Reddit. If they'd spent the time before the interview pumping up their "passion" about their idea, it would have just made things harder.

Maybe I'd better write something myself about what happens at interviews....

One thing I seem to notice from people doing startups---really, from anyone doing something that isn't codified---is the urge to take a personal experience and distill it into generalized wisdom, even if what they learned isn't useful in general. If you have a scatterplot, you can draw a pretty nice linear approximation through it. I sort of think of this type of advice as the experienced person throwing a line through their one point and then trying to orient that line as best they can. Personal stories make great content for a blog, and it's true, when taken in the context of other people's experiences they can be of great help, but the urge to generalize and present them as a method is something that's usually better off avoided.

Everyone does this. There's nothing wrong it. Generalizing from experience is part of intelligence.

Maybe the reason you seem to notice it more with startups is that there's a lot of variation in startups, so generalizations more often miss.

No. Avoiding baseless generalizations and making rational decisions is a mark of an important intellect. Anything contrariwise is exactly that.

But one is always guessing. Or always should be. You can't wait till you have complete information. You have to act on hunches.

Case in point: most of what Robby wrote was correct, even though it's based on a small amount of data. He's a smart guy, so he was able to extrapolate.

I think you have it exactly wrong. The mark of a great mind is not how few mistakes it makes, but the magnitude of the new things it discovers. Newton probably spent more time on pointless theological controversies than on physics. But we still consider him smart.

You're both right. You need the balls to trust your hunches, to put yourself out there, even when there's limited data. But you also need the balls to throw your previous assumptions out the window, in the face of new data.

In the case of startups, it's true that everyone's advice is extrapolated from one or two data points. The key is to look at a lot of those data points -- read Founders at Work or listen to VentureVoice.com, for instance -- and try to find recurring themes and patterns.

This is part of the idea behind YC, right? I get that impression from your essays. These days there's less "At Viaweb, we..." and more "Out of the N startups we've funded, X have..."

I have found that most disagreements are artificial; these are the result of a poorly framed discussion. I bet we agree, but are talking about two diffrent things.

I chose my words carefully. I did not say "the" mark of a "great" mind, but "a" mark of an "important" mind. I think we can all agree that Newton was a great mind, but I think the questions of what makes a great mind and an important mind are different.

I think there are many important minds in the myriad fields of human enterprise. These are people, like yourself Mr. Graham, who are able to understand their corner of the world and shape it.

I have observed that a lot of the people I see who are leading their fields have the quality I mentioned above. (These people have other qualities as well, but that exceeds the scope of the conversation.) They are in a position to lead, in part, because they have made a great many good decisions. As far as I can tell, the people who make good decisions are those who are not wrapped up in superstition and who are disciplined enough to make rational decisions whenever practical. Rigorously rational decisions require boundary conditions. It is important to know what degree of certainty is important. It is important to make a separate equally rational decision about how much time to spend thinking about the first decision (but be careful with this recursion.)

I can identity this pattern of decision making in your writing. You say that start-ups shouldn't spend a great deal of time worrying about their idea: "[if it seems good enough, then build it and find out.]" But, you rationalized that idea at length with the idea that implementing a project is less costly than researching the market. So, in this case, you are carefully making a rational decision to recklessly make other decisions. I think this suits my model (which is, of course, not certain).

It's also very unlikely that one person can do enough startups in reasonably similar circumstances to get a decent sample size.

You seem to be attentive in gathering data from YC participants, but there's some bias built in to that, as those that don't fit the mold don't even get accepted. Nothing wrong with that, just that it influences your observations.

This reminds me of Paul Buchheit's "Advice on advice" at this year's Startup School: "Advice = Limited Life Experiences + Over-generalization."

That's probably an accurate description of the median item of advice. But there are people who are good at advice just as there are who are good at math or writing. The recipe of the best advice = limited life experience + great perceptiveness.

Why limited life experience? Wouldn't more experience make for better advice?

[Edit: I suppose you mean that advice with less experience is more valuable by coming earlier.]

Life experience is always limited (almost by definition). You've only lived your one life. Broadening your experience is generally a good thing, but it's still extremely limited. In general, people can't even comprehend how limited their perspective is.

Ah, I see. I thought the word there had a restricting meaning, that you both said 'limited' as opposed to something else.

"Taylor Hicks won American Idol. QED"

Oh cool, is someone going to set up a "vote for the worst YC app" website like there is for American Idol? :)

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