Why We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews | Hacker News Reader

Why We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews

ycombinator.com

80 pointsdanielsiders45 comments

The title can be parsed ambiguously. At first, I was surprised as I read it as: "We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews. Here's Why." and expected an article focusing on interviewing one team member at a time. It's perhaps better stated as "Why Some Groups Aren't Invited To Interviews".

The title is confusing. I thought I accidentally clicked the wrong link.

Back many years ago when I used to interview people for restaurant work we had a stock phrase that we would write on rejected applications: "others more qualified." It's as simple as that. Nothing especially wrong with the candidate, but we had better choices.

Interesting to see the same dynamic in place in the gamut between mundane restaurant work and YC applications.

"others more qualified" is more re-assuring than 'there was something wrong' or 'we don't like you' so i'd take that boilerplate response over silence/nothing.

And you would take that boilerplate response even if there actually was something wrong or they didn't like you. So there is every reason for them to put it on essentially every application which didn't involve felonies

Sorry to pick on you here: but why is being a felon considered a negative, as opposed to being convicted of something that isn't a felony?

Does the IRS tax your business differently if you employ a felon?

I mean, I get it: someone did something shitty at one point and got caught and convicted. In an absolute sense they're 'less reliable' than someone that hasn't been convicted.

I only ask because I've worked some blue jobs with ex-cons and felons (some of which were exceptionally bright) who were stuck where they were because of some dumb choice they made 10, 15, 20 years ago.

> Does the IRS tax your business differently if you employ a felon?

Actually, yes. The IRS often gives you breaks if you employ ex-convicts.

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tax-breaks-employers-hire-fel...

I have done this before and applied for the tax credit. The employee passed all his screens wonderfully and his ex-conviction history did not faze me at all.

I have no problem with felons, but they aren't exactly a protected class for employment purposes.

Sure, but in that case they would be blatantly dishonest as opposed to lying by omission.

That's just how it is, if someone wants to discard your application they will usually say you were underqualified or someone else was more qualified regardless of the actual reason

Yes, but how will potential candidates improve if they don't get feedback? Be a good person.

> gamut between mundane restaurant work and YC applications.

Talk about splitting hairs...

It's all service industry work.

It's fine if you don't want to tell people since there are legitimate reasons not to. But this is mostly a cop out.

We know that YC application reviewers make notes and obviously do some sort of internal ranking. There may be cases where better startups just push slightly "worse" ones down, but there's obviously some startups that are passed over for specific reasons that YC knows about. I guarantee most of these reasons/notes would be very useful for an early startup.

Too bad they'll never know.

If YC states a specific reason, then what?

Does YC now have the responsibility to engage in a dialogue outlining the details for the reason.

It wouldn't be fair to write a single paragraph and say, "oh, we think your team dynamics suck, so we are rejecting you." What does that mean? Team dynamics compared to what? Do you write a more detailed response? Multiply that response by the number of rejections and all of a sudden you are left with a lot of new work that needs to get done. The reasons for rejection may make real sense for the reviewers but may have layers of context that can't easily be dictated in a simple email.

I'm sure this is some of the thinking that is involved with why it's easier to not give specific reasons.

If a team takes the YC rejection as confirmation that their startup isn't going to go anywhere then they never believed in the startup.

It's like Dating. You're looking for the right person, not for the wrong person with the right answers.

If you reveal too much of "why a team didn't get chosen" they can use that info to game the system. If you give away everything you're looking for in a partner on your dating profile you're going to get a lot of creepers attempting to match themselves up to you. YC already gave away too much info with the video interviews they've done in the past.

Here's a free idea for a future YC application:

"We've made the easiest way for reviewers of web submitted applicants to write notes on those applications and share them with their colleagues and applicants. Our customers include the most exclusive universities, accelerators and employers who were once mysterious and opaque about their consuming application processes. They've found that once they start using our service their applicants, team and other stakeholders learn more and make better decisions faster. They get more high quality applications as both parties get more value out of the application process."

I don't think proper for YC to release there notes.

For one, as soon as you release notes, it opens you up to all sorts of criticism and public outing of frustrations by people that didn't make the cut. Same reason you don't get notes from job interviews, college applications, when you get laid off...

Second, while the notes may be helpful. It's not like a little bit of magic YC advice is suddenly going to make you a successful entrepreneur. Not anymore than the thousands of other bits of advice that people publish and founders get.

The vast majority of successful startups do not go through YC, and most YC companies fail anyway(albeit they often fail more gracefully as aquihires). People that actually care if they get in need to take a step back and make sure they are founding a company for reasons other than validation.

I think the issue of feedback is a bit different from that of reasons why a group isn't selected. What YC seems to be saying here is more like, even if the group had done everything "right" for their project, that project/idea just doesn't seem to have the potential of another group's. (In the opinion YC).

So you could ask for feedback separately from asking why you weren't selected. The potential issue there is that groups will still interpret it that way and say things like "YC said they rejected us because of this, but that's a ridiculous reason to reject...."

I haven't even applied to YC and find this article insulting to the applicants. Sort of like telling a losing team in a sports match that there is nothing wrong with them and just that the winning team was slightly better. Well how does that help them at all and obviously everyone has room to improve. I usually enjoy articles from YC but personality type As who apply to YC don't care for sugarcoating...

Telling people why they are rejected does not serve the interviewers and creates unnecessary risk for them (see sexism debates). Preventing these risks is understandably more important than giving applicants feedback.

Somewhere YC is doing ranking of applications. When ranking gets done some function does get applied to each group. It might be beneficial for YC to know how this function works so they can debug it. For instance the YC's ranking function can generate set of components that contributes to final rank.

If YC wants to scale it is imperative to understand their own ranking ranking function. If we say that I have no idea why group A was considered better than group b then its not very scientific and there can be not much hope to improve something that we don't understand. Of course, it's different matter if this information is passed back to group because I suspect that would make ranking function more vulnerable to gaming.

I would be surprised if they're ranking every applicant. When I've been on hiring or admissions committees, I use a threshold. There's no point in ranking candidates clearly below the bar relative to each other, and there's no point in ranking candidates clearly above the bar either. For applicants on the bubble, it's often easier to decide for each individual whether you should interview him or her or not, and let the final number of interviews be somewhat fluid, than to rank them against each other.

Obviously, one could conduct an ex post ranking based on the decisions, but I wouldn't put a lot of weight on it.

I do agree that one should try to go back and check how the decisions worked out in a systematic way, but it's not obvious that there's an easy way to do it (and by "easy" I mean "a way that anyone will adopt for long enough for it to be worthwhile.")

I think most people would appreciate some feedback on something they work hard for, even if it's just an "atta boy, looks good, keep on going--sorry it didn't work out", or even better some productive feedback ("you need to narrow your focus" or "market already saturated").

I have never applied for YC, but I have applied to other things in life that seem like a black hole from the outside. Just an acknowledgement of something that surely took a lot of time would be a nice gesture. I mean, I'm sure you're nice folks, right? Would you ignore applicants if you met them on the street?

"You need to narrow your focus" seems like something that would not be the main reason for rejection, and instead something that the mentors advise to fix after getting in. If there really was a serious reason for rejection (instead of being close but barely not good enough), then I think it's most likely related to the team:

* "Your fourth co-founder is dragging you down. You need to fire him."

* "You seem to have different life priorities and dedication. I predict an angry team breakup in 6 months."

* "You gave away 50% of the company for an investment from your uncle. No VC will be interested to follow up."

* "None of you have good enough technical skills to get to the point where you can fundraise and hire engineers instead."

... and so on. This kind of honest feedback would not go down well with most the founders, even if they say that they want honest and harsh feedback. It's one thing to suggest improvements to the business plan, but nobody wants to hear that they personally might not be good enough.

And the feedback would open YC to all sorts of criticism. Remember the brouhaha about the comment on founders' accents? The message was "There should be at least one founder who speaks English well to interact with the media, investors and public." But it was immediately taken out of context to accuse YC of discriminating against foreigners.

I imagine that the types of feedback you're suggesting, such as "market already saturated", would only be half of the story. A founder who is making such a mistake is automatically making a second mistake: not being good enough to realize the mistake in the first place.

A founder who fixes the one mistake pointed out by YC would be missing the big picture, likely making numerous other mistakes. I don't think that most applicants want to hear the truth, which is effectively, "Based on problems X, Y, and Z that we can see after a cursory analysis, we can only assume that you're not smart enough for other program, else you would have realized those problems yourself."

My entrepreneurial experience so far has been about making a lot of mistakes and learning from them.

I think for a lot (but not all) of issues in startups and in life, "not being good enough" or "not smart enough" really just means "not having enough exposure or practice". Based on this view, constructive, specific feedback goes a long way in helping dedicated founders improve so that they too, can add value to society via their startup.

I realize it is unfair to expect this from YC, considering they also have finite bandwidth. I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable fee for this type of feedback from YC and I suspect a lot of founders wouldn't either.

I agree that entrepreneurship is a great opportunity to make and learn from mistakes in execution. It's also an opportunity to try completely new things that may or may not work.

Other sorts of mistakes, though--like being ignorant of existing players, failing to explain why someone would use your product, or having no remote plan to profitability--are more troublesome. They indicate a lack of business acumen or even common sense that will make success incredibly unlikely.

As with execution mistakes, you can learn these things through experience, too. However, I would not want to invest my time and money teaching them to someone unwilling or unable to learn those lessons on their own.

Which gets back to my original point... Who wants to hear, "You seem to lack common sense"?

This is just one of those things you learn in life. You'll never find out the real reason someone rejected you. It doesn't matter if it's a girl or an interviewer. That's just how it is. The only thing to do is to take your best guess and improve on that next time.

Oftentimes, the people doing the rejecting may not even know the real reason. Sure, everyone can come up with something that sounds rational but how do you know it's not because you looked at them weird the first time you met because you were nervous?

I think there are better analogies than girl/interview rejection scenarios. More like TV gameshow where there are lots of applicants and only a few get chosen to make it onto the show. The producers have reasons of their own that have no bearing on how good you are. So rejection is not to be taken personally in a soul destroying way.

Just a lesson to learn, no feedback needed.

there is still valuable feedback to be had, no? why are some companies "particularly good" where others don't get accepted? "no reason" is paradoxical and i'm not really convinced it's a reason...

YC chooses applicants by rank-ordering the list and interviewing the top N candidates.

Thought experiment: What's the difference between candidate N and candidate N+1? Likely, they are nearly identically good. What could you possibly tell candidate N+1 about why they weren't selected?

There are almost certainly no red flags, or any specific thing you can point to that caused them to fall under the line. Any feedback you gave candidate N+1 you'd also want to give to candidate N who did get the interview.

If you're saying that YC should give generalized "how to be a better startup" advice to everyone who applies, I'm afraid the time requirements for that are unrealistic. There aren't obvious reasons why most applications are rejected, and giving more nuanced advice is really hard.

Forget candidate N and the difficulty of discerning nuances. That's just pretending no information is available, so it's a made-up argument. Let's not pretend. Just tell them what the very top candidates had. And if they are a middle candidate and not a bottom one, also tell them what kept them out of the bottom. If they're in the bottom, tell them about the top and the middle. Clues for what is promising and what is not.

We're talking about spending a few minutes sharing words that could positively alter the course of decades of people's lives, if they hear the right thing. Seems like a decent courtesy to pay the applicants, if there's no real reason not to.

I wonder how much benefit the good-but-not-accepted groups would receive from a few minutes even up to an hour of time over the next few weeks (maybe after the main interviews are done).

The benefit for YC would be if these groups then chose not to do something like TechStars, but continued to work on their idea and came back in +6 months. Realistically, if someone is rejected by YC, gets into TechStars and does it, they're unlikely to do YC.

Assuming there are ~300 "on the bubble" groups on top of 200 interviewed groups (out of 2-3k total), it would cost YC basically a month of someone's time to follow up with them reasonably, and then maybe 5-10% of a person over the next 6 months.

Wow, that's a really good idea. What I really like about it is that with so many rejected applicants per cycle, you can actually determine statistically the impact of giving feedback on later performance. One can make a small investment of time to try it on a small batch, and if it improves the quality of the whole group, a financial case can be made to spend more time on it.

One group of 500 rejected applicants is sent a sentence or two of feedback by a random YC alum (ideally whoever read the application initially, to account for each reader's biases) 1 month after their interview. Another group of 500 is set aside as the control, and is treated as normal. Is the group of 500 applicants with feedback more likely to reapply? Are they more likely to get an interview or get in the second time around?

I like this idea. This task can also be made simplier by just focusing feedback on the company-related sections of the app. This is where having an experienced perspective (feedback from YC) can really help smart but inexperienced founders.

If you fall into the good-but-not-accepted group, chances are good that you can treat all feedback as an opinion to be considered, not a directive to be obeyed.

The class of things I hate the most (having applied to YC, etc.) is when a bad application masks what is otherwise a good or potentially great team. That's something you can learn not to do, and which can be corrected with some coaching.

1) People fuck up videos frequiently. I've personally been studying "how to do good kickstarter videos" a lot, but "how to do a 2-3 minute Demo Day pitch" and "how to do a 1 minute YC app video" are pretty specific, and while a lot of it should be obvious, it isn't all obvious.

The problem is, doing a good "how to do a YC video" is itself best communicated as video, with good/bad examples, so it's a fair bit of work -- it would probably take a couple people a week to do very well.

2) Sometimes, people "bury the lede" and hide the most salient parts of their project deep inside an application in a non-clear way. Sometimes it isn't even listed. I've talked to friends who want to apply to YC who intentionally couched their whole application in "corporate speak", focused entirely on top-down analysis, etc., rather than actually explaining why the product is good, why they're interested in it, etc.

3) There are a lot of items which are hard to verify, and which lose their predictive value as soon as they're widely known. Similar to the well-known interview questions ("what is your greatest weakness?" being a pathological example), where once they become common knowledge, the only value is knowing who prepared ahead of time vs. who didn't, or who is willing to recite something which sounds convincing vs. actually thinking about it.

I'm afraid the Thiel question "what is something you believe to be true which isn't widely held" is becoming that question today.

X) My personal belief is that something like a YC app should be fractal -- good on the surface if you skim it for 10-30 seconds, but then just as good when you read it closely in any area without greater context. That's a specific style, and not universal, and I don't know if the YC Partnership agrees with me. The applications get reviewed many times (with some rejected at each step), and ultimately if you're on the bubble and the application gets debated internally, you want it to help you just as much as it did when it was initially screened. (Obviously, it's better to just be so amazing that you're well in the "yes" range and not seriously debated...)

The YC partners have written extensively on what they are looking for in startups and what impresses them. As have many of the companies that have been accepted. pg has even participated in the comments here on those sorts of articles and blog posts. Barring their entire public persona being an elaborate conspiracy I don't think they could possibly be more transparent about what impresses them and what they think are red flags.

The thing is, the applicants would have read them too. I don't think most applicants would have the obvious red flags. Many that don't get in would be the corner case, ie, pushed down by those with a slight edge.

Reading those pieces and taking the advice seriously are entirely different things. For instance I knew two non-technical founders with a company who were outsourcing their app and had no users and were shocked they didn't get an interview. On paper and in person they are both very bright, had attended elite schools and done a lot of interesting things in their lives. But I think that was actually their downfall, they suspected they had enough good things going for them in general that they ignored a lot of very specific advice from YC.

My bet is the companies that don't get interviews are a lot more like my friends who just didn't pay attention than a sea of corner cases. It's actually really hard to meet the criteria that YC asks for. If you follow their advice you need the following things:

- At least 2 founders who know each other well, preferably have worked together before or known each other for years

- Have found your domain problem through personal experience

- Are good hackers

- Have already put together a decent product/have some semblance of a reasonable start

It can almost sound simple but that's really really hard. And I say that as someone who has spent the last couple years talking with my friends about whether they would be interested in being co-founders for startup ideas and searching for problems in my own experience that would make for scalable ideas. I go out and talk to companies and I don't see much of what YC explicitly asks for. It's not far fetched to imagine they interview nearly 100% of the teams that fit the profile above.

> It can almost sound simple but that's really really hard.

It really _is_ hard. No way is it easy

> I say that as someone who has spent the last couple years talking with my friends about whether they would be interested in being co-founders for startup ideas and searching for problems in my own experience that would make for scalable ideas.

That is the biggest problem in getting it going. You have to be able to convince others to share your vision. But isn't it easier to do with long-time friends than that guy you met last summer? When you know someone for long enough, you will have the confidence that you'll stick together through the friendly breezes and the wild storms

> Are good hackers

That is a requirement for a good reason. The founders are the only guys initially who give a sh*t about the product. Say a customer makes a support call, being able to quickly respond and fix the bug can mean life or death. You need at least one hacker who can do this. Better if every founder is one.

> I go out and talk to companies and I don't see much of what YC explicitly asks for.

YC in no way has the magic portion. They just have a set of things they believe are positive indicators, which are mostly right, but not fulfulling one/all of these no way means you can't build a successful startup

> It's not far fetched to imagine they interview nearly 100% of the teams that fit the profile above.

That's not surprising, is it? If 70% of the slots were filled with applicants that fulfilled 100% criteria, then they might loosen some of the criteria (like single founder teams, idea stage etc), but with the momentum that YC's gotten, I bet 100% of the slots get filled with startups that fulfill 100% of their criteria (and more, those corner cases). So obviously, they'll stick to their criteria (which has been working for them)

Hopefully the one who wrote this article is not a moderator on https://news.ycombinator.com/. Very misleading title.

I think the only useful case for an explanation is if your application was defective per the outline, but I doubt that's the main reject reason anyway.

I know this is nitpicking... but that box needs padding.

So just to confirm, if we didn't receive an email or any notification on Hacker News, we were not selected, correct? Not sure if we were supposed to receive a 'Sorry' email.

They haven't sent out the mail yet. You will get a mail (be sure to have your mail id in the profile with which you applied) even if you are rejected

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