Our YC Interviews | Hacker News Reader

Our YC Interviews

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178 pointsgdi229073 comments

In general, when doing sales, sometimes it is easier to lead with the pain point and then introduce the solution. For example, "Setting up a dev environment takes a day. Sometimes you need one in a minute, like if you're interviewing somebody and need them to demonstrate coding ability on a company laptop. We turn any browser window into a fully-functional dev environment, and it's as ephemeral as the browser window is, so if you close it the company laptop is back in its original state without requiring a sysadmin to wipe it and start over. Next applicant gets a new browser window. Is everyone clear on why a dev environment which doesn't take 2 days to set up or tear down is a useful thing to have? Great! Would you like me to talk about who is willing to pay serious money for this, or do you want to hear what special sauce goes into making this Just Work for your favorite programming stack?"

My guess is that even technically inclined people connect to that more than "OK, so we have cloud-based virtualization technology which spins up ephemeral application containers then hooks them to a proprietary in-browser IDE and shell prompt. It's a Frankenstein monster of Docker, Github, Heroku, and a browser-based IDE. No, the IDE's not the primary value add. No, AWS/Heroku is not a direct competitor. No, no, you don't get it, let me try again..."

Edit: Incidentally if you just conceptualize the product as pain-first rather than solution-first then you'll phrase your strapline as "Dev environment for any stack on any machine in a minute" rather than "Virtualized insert words increasingly disconnected from anything you care about here."

They would cut you off less than half way through that pitch.

Care to explain why? I thought it was a pretty concise explaination.

Do you have personal experience with YC interviews and know that they would for a certain reason?

I think they'd interrupt almost exactly at "Is everyone clear..." with "who uses it now?" or "what stack?" or "have you built this already?"

Some other key questions you'd need an answer for, either in some kind of prepared way or in response to a question, are:

1) Why do you want to work on this (this is a great opportunity to talk about personal experience, showing the depth your technical skill and market knowledge indirectly

2) Who else does this today, how to do people do it now ("wipe laptop, spend a few hours setting it up" is one way; a lot of people have nice VMs already pre-populated for this and shared within a company, either local or VDI)

3) Any special risks, regulatory issues, etc. (e.g. if you're a medical startup you should know about HIPAA at least in sufficient detail to talk about it)

4) How do you get people to use it (namedropping current users is good, but your understanding of the market and how it's sold would be good to show)

5) (more key for non-YC investors) general market numbers. The top-down analysis is usually bullshit ('we need 1% of a 10b market..."), but being able to do bottom-up and based on comparables is good for a lot of things.

In a 10 minute interview with YC, or a meeting with a consulting client, you don't know what they're going to care the most about. You want to make sure you hit your key points, but also can address their likely concerns in depth -- if you hit your points in 5 minutes and they spend 5 minutes drilling into the sales model, it's good to be able to talk about the sales model for 5 minutes, even if your original plan was to only talk about the sales model for 2 minutes.

This pitch is already strong, but is actually improved by the suggestion (inspired by your comment) to cut it to half its previous length:

"Setting up a dev environment takes a day. Sometimes you need one in a minute, like if you're interviewing somebody and need them to demonstrate coding ability on a company laptop. We turn any browser window into a fully-functional dev environment, and it's as ephemeral as the browser window is, so if you close it the company laptop is back in its original state without requiring a sysadmin to wipe it..."

Well, the second part is just responding to an anticipated first question.

Agreed. You generally don't get off more than a couple sentences before they fire more questions off. They're looking for concise answers.

Provided you get this far, it's enough: Setting up a dev environment takes a day. Sometimes you need one in a minute, like if you're interviewing somebody and need them to demonstrate coding ability on a company laptop. We turn any browser window into a fully-functional dev environment.

Once you are that far you've framed your offering.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. When they cut you off, respond to their question. The goal of an interview isn't usually to talk interrupted for 10 minutes.

Or: "Instant development environments, anywhere, anytime...all in the browser"

That works well on a sign. Not as well in a conversation.

That's not as good. Note that you didn't tell me the problem. If I hear this pitch, I'll think "I set up an envirovnment once, then never touch it again. Plus, I don't develop in the browser. So why do I care about this again?"

Note that patio11 specifically gives an example use case within the first sentence, so that I now connect to what this is useful for. And that is a use case I come across. Not sure I'd pay for this, but that's something.

Good thoughts. Yeah, we led with a high-level description of the product (it went much better during the second interview). When they asked followup questions, we dug into the pain points that we both had as engineers.

I think it would be better still to give a one-sentence description of what the product does first:

interview starts: “So you’re building some automation for Github?” asked Paul

response: Sort of. Our product spins up new development environments in the browser really fast, about 10 seconds right now. (optional second sentence: our MVP is for projects hosted on GitHub, but it doesn't have to be and we'll probably want to let companies host their own code in the future.)

Then go into the pain points: "One reason why we're working on this is that sometimes you need a dev environment in a minute, not a day like it usually takes, like if you're interviewing somebody..."

You can probably make it more concise by switching the pain points from hypothetical to actual examples: "We're using the project for..." or "we'd like to use this project at work because..." or even better "We've talked to Parse, Firebase, Mongo, Stripe and Mixpanel about this, and they want to use it for..."

The interview sounds a lot like first-stage interviews for academic jobs (in econ, at least), and it's usually not that helpful to approach those interviews as sales pitches or boxing matches. They work like 10 minute presentations that can be derailed by the audience at any time, even midsentence. Even in the middle of the first sentence. So it might help to prepare for the interview by preparing to give an extemporaneous 10 minute presentation without any visual aids.

The logic (in academic interviews and probably for YC interviews too) is that you believe you have an exceptional product. You don't have to "sell" it and you don't have to convince anyone of anything that's not true. You only have to explain what you have so that the interviewers understand it and then they'll see how awesome it is. (I'm not saying that everyone's product is awesome, but you'd better believe that yours is.)

Incidentally, I don't think that the right answer is "Github/Docker/Digital Ocean is not a potential competitor." I prefer, "maybe they could take our business, but they won't because our approach relies on x/y/z that we are uniquely able to provide." x/y/z can be technical skills, domain knowledge, a specialized proprietary encryption algorithm, ruthless and bloodthirsty work ethic, etc. Again, not every founder can provide some unique value to their product, but you'd better provide one to yours.

* "You" in this comment refers to the reader, not patio11.

edit: formatting

I've helped a bunch of people prepare for YC interviews and the biggest problem by an order of magnitude is not being able to concisely explain what you actually do. That may sound crazy, but I've yet to review an application that clearly and simply states what the company is building, why it's important, and how they're going to get adoption. It seems these guys had the same issue, since Guy mentioned that they spent the first 5 minutes explaining what they do.

This is a symptom of a more general problem: people severely underestimate how difficult it is to convey an idea to another human being such that they actually understand it. Being able to do so is no small task, and I wish more people would recognize the value of this skill.

Thank you for adding this comment. I find it very valuable, and quite interesting, especially the idea of "not being able to concisely explain what you actually do."

I wonder if you could expand on that? I also wonder if you've observed whether or not people want to be "concise" with their goals. In my experience, success has been built around doing certain little things really well. For example, my business is successful because I'm really good at building a certain type of landing page. Yes, there is a lot that surrounds it, but it's basically just this one thing that makes it work.

The issue of scope is something that everybody confronts when running a business. Any additional insight you could add would be appreciated.

Thank you for your comment.

Warmly,

Jacob

> "especially the idea of "not being able to concisely explain what you actually do."

> I wonder if you could expand on that?"

This is really selling. And it's something that comes in handy in business in every situation. If you can't concisely explain what your product can do for someone (either in person or in print) through marketing or salesmanship you won't make the sale unless you have some overwhelming advantage in some other area that holds people's interest (or little competition or maybe a super low price).

Obviously in a HN comment there is no way to get into explaining how to be a good sales person in a few sentences. And while I could suggest books [1] the truth is you either have to have some experience and/or you have to be a "born" salesman. Or both.

Edit: [1] I don't mean "I" could suggest specific books. Because I've never read books on sales. But I have closed large and small deals, against formidable opponents (right out of college, an example is trained IBM sales people) and I never read a single book on sales. But I do know there are books that can be purchased on selling and sales obviously.

This is an excellent book http://www.amazon.com/Zig-Ziglars-Secrets-Closing-Sale/dp/04... . I buy used copies and give them to friends starting new businesses.

Used copies start at 1 cent, and I closed a lot of deals with the contents of this book. Very easy to read, with short humorous chapters.

You need to be "concise" if the target is pressed for time or likely to be.

This is always the case at YC like places.

It's not "skipping all the details", it's starting with the key parts first, then expanding. And every sentence should make the reader/listener want to continue to the next.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

I found your terrible formatting far more bothersome than the parent comments name.

This suggests an interesting alternative lay-out for presenting threaded forums: add the moniker of the user to the bottom of the comment rather than at the end. It is how we used to communicate anyway and it forces you to first digest the words before seeing who said them.

that doesn't surprise me. one of the hardest problems of any business is explaining what you actually do. on a sales call, you have about 90 seconds to present this concept to the client.

The ability to communicate is the first thing that I look for in a founder. It's difficult to get customers, raise funding, hire employees, and build a substantial company if you aren't able to communicate in a concise and effective manner.

That sounds right, but thinking of examples, off the top of my head, I wouldn't class Bill Gates, Larry and Sergey, and Mark Zuckerberg as great communicators. Steve Jobs being the antithesis of course. Am I missing something?

I think you're imagining "communication" to mean inspirational TED talks or something, which is really just one very specialized case. I've spent quite a bit of time talking to Larry, Sergey, and Zuck, and in my experience they are all very direct and effective in their communication.

It might be a completely different type of communicator you need, depending on the direction of the status hierarchy you're addressing.

Talking to employees, or even partners, where the other party is responsible for understanding the general mental framework and needs a precise answer to a precise question, is very different to talking up the status hierarchy.

When you speak to an investor who expects a "crisp" response to an arbitrary knee-jerk question they just thought up, which buries in it several wrong assumptions, the correct response is to reverse engineer that, and address the assumptions themselves, while conveying a whole host of other attributes at the same time. Essentially you need to decode the other person's mental framework and encode your message on their terms. If the inferential distance is significant, there is no way this can be done in real-time. But what I worry about here is that the more off-center the entrepreneur's mental model, (which is what you need for innovation), and the more complex the execution, the harder it is to cross the chasm to communicating with an up-the-status-chain interlocutor that expects everything to be in bite-sized insights they can digest.

An observation here is that, in one case a correct answer is a direct answer, and in the other case a correct answer is an indirect answer.

the YC interview is particularly error-prone in that regard, as you don't know who you are going to be speaking to in advance, so you have little means for preparing. That setup (plus the 10 minutes limit) is a recipe for randomness. Essentialy you get good interviews if the two parties happen to have similar mental contexts, but it doesn't seem that YC takes that into account at all. On the other hand, it also favours mainstream mental models and simple-to-explain ideas, which seems directly contradictory to what YC wants to achieve.

However I don't see how convincing a non-motivated arbitrary person of a fairly complicated idea in 10 minutes is highly correlated to all the other contexts a founder has to deal with. Sure it's a great attribute if you can have it, but it's one in a long list.

I find it has more to do with clarity of thought, and in my experience the top founders all have it.

I think the idea is that the founder's mental context should be a superset of the investor's mental context, so that he can quickly identify and address the particular issue the investor raises, having already thought about it.

Big ideas are usually really simple to explain to users. Google Search is basically "Type anything into a text box, and we'll give you answers." Ideas that are complicated rarely become big (as in widely adopted by many people).

Who's an example of someone you believe is a great communicator?

Thanks for the advice Paul. Overall it was a great experience interviewing with you guys and meeting amazing founders from all over the world. We'll be seeing you in 6-12 months =)

Absolutely and the interview at YC was a wake up call. We set the frame poorly and dove off into misc questions about implementation for 5 minutes. If we had described the pain point and the product better from the get go, it would've made the rest flow much smoother.

In this case they did a bunch of mock-interviews with people who had been through the YC process and got other developers to review it. I think at the end of every such interaction they could have asked those people how they will describe the product in 2 lines. Then they can take those responses and build a solid, concise response. That response, presenting views of people who are not the developers/not so close to the product, would probably appeal more/make more sense to the interviewers since they in a similar position of seeing a new product.

[pre-apologies for the CAPS, but they seemed warranted.]

I definitely appreciate the analysis, since analyses of any kind of stressful interaction are helpful. But I did want to comment on a small thing:

    YC is a very special kind of interview.

I assume that this is referencing the previous bits of TFA, so I'd suggest that possibly YC is a COMPLETELY TYPICAL INTERVIEW FOR THIS KIND OF SITUATION.

HN is a wonderful resource, but the idea that a YC interview is of "a special kind" is naive. [I'm sure the down-votes are heading my way...] YC is a type of VC-ish firm. Getting to pitch to any VC is rare and the kinds of questions mentioned in TFA are pretty standard. YC is going to invest their time in you and that is quite expensive for them to do, so it makes sense for them to push you in lots of directions to see how broadly you've thought about the problem.

Random: I was in a board meeting yesterday getting peppered with questions about AWS AMI setups, framework choices and API load resiliency... And I'm just an advisor. Investors care a lot about a lot of things.

10 minute time limit, scheduled into an entire day of interviews against other teams, sounds pretty untypical to me. Plus how often do you get interviewed by the likes of Paul Buccheit?

    10 minute time limit

As TFA said, it's not a 10 minute time limit... 10 minutes is the pressure relief valve. But let's say "10 minutes". That, plus some time for questions, is a fairly standard angel round setup.

    how often do you get interviewed by the likes of Paul Buccheit

Pretty much every time you do a serious VC pitch. There are certainly crappy firms, but my experience has been that good firms select an excellent set of folks and you will be grilled once you get through the initial screens.

The differentiator of YC is the stage of investment and the shepherding of the teams, not the "very special kind of interview". [And I don't want to discount that YC might do a superlative job with their interviews, but I've not heard anything to suggest that the concerns/questions are atypical.]

It's not a 'special' kind of interview in the type of questions or the general format. I'd say it's special in the little amount of time you have and how you get cut off mid-sentence. I've also never pitched to Paul Buchheit before which made it special.

I'm definitely with you on this. Last year my team interviewed with YC (with Paul Buchheit in the room) and it was crazy.

10 minutes feels like 7-8 because of the adrenaline/nervousness. You don't usually get to finish your answers because they cut you off. They're straight to the point and cut through all the fluff (my suggestion is to have a 15 second answer and a longer answer for all questions if you want to get your points across). They're usually in "control", but you have to be strategic to lead things back to your "good side"

I think the article is really accurate on the YC process. Thanks for sharing.

I've pitched 30+ VCs and angels (occasionally successfully!) as well as YC partners.

The YC interview is different. Extreme time pressure, absence of many social norms and a room of brutally smart people.

YC also has a way higher "full yes" rate -- 25-50%! -- than any VC or angel, at the interview stage. VCs seem to cull at the interview (assuming you're smart enough to have contacts, you should be able to get an interview; if you're really good, you should get a 1-2 partner interview vs. associates or principals); YC culls using the applications first, and a single round of interviews with full partners.

I'm also a Hack Reactor alum who interviewed at YC this round and our team also met with Justin and Gary. Their feedback was basically, "why haven't you guys quit your jobs and started building this?" To be totally honest, I wasn't expecting such direct feedback, but they were right. Not only that but we already have pretty much every thing we need from the Hack Reactor network in terms of hiring advantages and connections with investors.

I dearly love YC for everything they've shared with the world and PG essays are the only reason I left my profitable non-tech business and moved to the US, but we can build this without them. I've quit my job and taken the plunge. We've gotten a first customer and we're going for it. I hope Guy and Shu do, too. I know them and they're formidable both in technical terms and in drive.

The question isn't about who will "give" you a chance. It's who can stop you. Maybe Github or Docker will both care enough about and make the effort to take your business. That doesn't mean they can succeed or that you'll be helpless wallflowers when it happens. Based on what I know of you, Shao and Guy, you will still find a win.

Thanks for coming in and taking the time to talk with us. I hope you guys do continue on building and I wish you the best of luck doing so.

Thanks for the good wishes.

Going over to ask for investment and mentorship was a no-brainer. I'll try again with YC if I do another startup in the future.

Isn't this pitched idea basically exactly http://nitrous.io/ -- especially with their recently launched "Hack on Nitrous.io" button for GitHub?

that's what I thought also, can either of the founders talk about what makes it different?

We were interviewed by the same group (Jessica, Paul B., Trever, Michael), and the experience was very similar.

  “Here we’ll show you a demo,” Shao offered. “No, we want you to tell us what you’re building,” Paul fired back with a very skeptical look.

We, too, tried to show our demo and Paul gave us a skeptical look and said something along the lines of "I'm distracted by pictures."

The interviewing team is very skilled in the art of extracting the essence of your startup and the possible shortcomings. I was impressed in how each of their questions had an obvious and very precise purpose.

Additionally of interest, I can't remember Jessica asking a single question. I think she was observing the relational chemistry of our team during the interview.

Wow, that's a really detailed and thoughtful analysis of your interview experience. It also successful as a promotional piece for your project -- I'd be more likely to use the tool based on this.

In general, the advice is "listen to the no, but not the why", but I think that doesn't apply with YC -- the reason YC gave is probably an accurate reflection of what YC believes based on what you said in your interview (and application, and whatever other information they had).

What a great writeup!

I also interviewed at YC last week but didn't get in. Our product is fairly simple -- we make it easier for anyone to book a service and we're starting w/the massage industry vertical. Here's part of the rejection email we received:

"This wasn’t an easy decision because, as you pointed out, there’s clearly a lot wrong with the systems that people use to book massages. It’s a similar problem to the one in many other appointment based businesses, and solving it would be valuable. Given the nature of the market and competing products, though, we could not quite see how you’d build a defensible product. Additionally, based on the way you’re planning on structuring your fees and relationships, it isn’t clear how you’d be able to lock your customers in for long enough to recoup your expenses and profitably acquire new customers."

We also applied for and/or interviewed at other incubators. What sets YC apart from those other experiences is the great feedback we get from them.

While it's very nice of YC to send a detailed rejection email stating actual reasons, the reasons themselves don't seem very strong.

Isn't it true of any project at an early stage that it could, in theory, be wiped out by a well executed competing offer from an existing player?

Would Youtube exist if Google Video didn't suck? Github / Google Code? Whatsapp / Google Hangouts?

What prevented Github from inventing Docker? or any big tech company from inventing Dropbox? (etc.)

when they try pull that shit, open up and go down their portfolio list and basically every company was or is still in a similar situation

Thank you for the insanely detailed write up.

What I want to know is what kind of magic YC saw in the application that got the team the interview. Because even from the team's perspective "There was no business model to speak of, the market size was unclear, we didn’t have much of any secret sauce, we hadn’t been working on it that long and the list goes on."

Is this an instance where the team was so compelling it warranted an interview?

One possibly positive factor is that both founders have several years of previous startup experience (I believe starting their own non-tech businesses).

Even something as small as starting a delivery company, or a tutoring company, is I believe a huge signal of someone's determination/entrepreneurial spirit.

For those who have succeeded, is boxing the right mindset?

I find that boxing is the right mindset for low-thought sales. "I'm going to keep fighting until I hit my quota of 10 gym membership sales for the week."

For collaborative discussions, I find the Judo or Jiu Jitsu mindset more appropriate. If you push, I won't push back, I will pull you in the same direction. If you pull, I won't pull back, I will move my momentum in the same direction.

In more practical terms, it doesn't treat comments like objections, it treats them as suggestions. "Have I thought about market X? Oh yes, it's a very interesting market. Here is what we thought...."

I don't think you're going to get very far with a contentious approach. Really, I think the partners are just looking for thoughtful and considered answers to any objections they raise. If you wanted to use boxing as an analogy: They would be throwing the punches, and you would be standing strong and blocking the hits.

If you want to come work on this product at Docker: get in touch. nick@docker.com

>Shao and I had lots of experience in starting companies, product management, management consulting and developing

Maybe this is just me being nitpicky but "lots of experience" to me says that this person is an expert in their field. Guy obviously has done great things, but I wouldn't say he is an expert. Flawed as it may be, the 10,000 hour rule I think is a good rule of thumb to determine expert status and is roughly 10 years of full time intensive work, which he doesn't really have.

This is part of a wider issue with the tech community that seems hypocritical. In one breath many in the tech world say that "results are what matter" and that age and experience are nothing but numbers. Then in the next breath these same people will tout about all the experience they have and how they are experts and have this and that experience.

Can't have it both ways though. Either experience qua experience is worth something or it isn't. I would generally fall on the side of it isn't, so lets just not even mention it.

Lots is a relative statement and it doesn't mean expert. To put it in perspective collectively we have 6 years of running startups (both exited), 1 year of product, 2 years of management consulting, 16 years of coding. Definitely not expert, but well-rounded enough to start a company.

Definitely enough to start a company, though I don't think anyone would argue that is a very high bar.

Good luck.

It is interesting that they have misspelled 'jl's last name twice, especially since one instance of it is in an email they quote from her.

I think that ideas have nothing to do with people. There is a general human race intelligence eather where ideas boil and and when one particular human comes up with an idea, there are probably 10 others that at the same time have the same idea. If you investigate carefully you'll notice that there are no breakthroughs. All ideas are incremental. Einstein was genius, but even his work was incremental [1].

Why I am saying this - we applied to YC this year with exactly same idea. It looks like even details of the implementation are similar.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute

That concept is known as multiple discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery (or "simultaneous invention")

Agreed. That's also why implementation is king. We were building an app 2 years ago that was exactly like 4snaps (finally climbing the charts) but we didn't keep with it or ever do it full-time. Ideas are cheap.

Good job... your insights were great and description of the event was well written. As a developer I think there is a need but I do see point of YC, that your position is precarious.

Good luck!

In the terms of a venture backed startup, I’m not sure your company makes sense (only based on a shallow reading of what was posted). While you have traction, a talented team, solid tech, and a potential business model, there’s not a clear understanding of the next step whether broadly or even in the developer community. I would love to have a dev environment ready in a few min but I don’t know how that tech extends beyond my own pain point.

We interviewed twice and were rejected as well.

Overall the experience was awesome and we hope to get the opportunity to meet with them again.

One thing we didn't realize was how nerve-wracking waiting for the phone call / email would be. Our email came at 11pm. We figured that after 9ish it would be an email but weren't sure.

http://beta.howtox.com/ or someone else with a similar idea?

Hopefully everyone feels free to leave their comments about this one, I really enjoy reading it, thanks.

Good Luck for the future! Great to chat with you at the interviews. Keep working hard.

Why rent a hotel on YC's money if you live in SF? That seems wasteful~

I am trying to understand why I was downvoted for this.

Have nothing to do with your downvoting but the author explains why - 'No need to stress out more than we already were.'. Whether or not they expensed a hotel room could strike many as tangential to what is most interesting about being interviewed by YC.

Wasteful would be not giving the interview every ounce of effort that we had. I have a passionate hate for the Caltrain and didn't want any additional reason to stress on the morning of the YC interview. Showing up to the interview frustrated or stressed seemed more wasteful.

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