Pairwise and Y Combinator: Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

TBH, my feeling about this stuff is that it belongs in nazi research labs and Cosmopolitan magazines, rather than as a screening tool in business where you want the best people. If I was considering applying to anything (Y, a job at a company), being presented with this would disappoint me and set off Dilberty alarms.

Now, this is fun stuff to burn some minutes while procrastinating! Here are my results:

http://www.likebetter.com/quiz/results?quiz_id=1125255845&user_list_id=6

Some things that the test got backwards:

- I'm more a listener than a talker,

- I never smoked (I clicked on the hemp pic because I like intense green :),

- I think I'm more into books than my score there suggests,

- I like mild food rather than spicy,

- I do like and have pets,

- I'm not really that urban. I'm more comfortable in villages or small towns.

'You may have someone with a very high IQ but has low interpersonal skill .. cannot relate to other people very well. Cannot understand other people. This can be a real liability for organisations who are looking for leadership .. looking to promote people with high intelligence' [0]

Interesting. I posted a similar post this week on the characteristics found in entrepreneurs ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=7459

'... all we'll care about is one measure: how close one comes to the best founders. We don't care what atoms are in that molecule ...'

But testing for characteristics of 'high achievers' then correlating test scores against potential applicants is fraught with problems. Is the correlation against the best enough? [1]

I'm sure you might get some correlation but it's pretty unimaginative [2]. So what could be a better tool? What about direct testing of skill? Wouldn't a better technique be simulation? Why not build a 'startup simulator' where applicants are given tools to simulate tasks they actually will have to do? Then you have a controllable scenario where you really can measure results against successful founders.

You could test

- the conception of an idea

- the building of a (simple) prototype

- quickly find an audience

- find a way to make money off it

Wrapped up in a framework [3] where you test the execution of these tasks you could get a better grasp of the

- skills

- determination

- entrepreneurial audacity

- passion

- humour

- leadership skills needed to succeed.

- risk taking, emotional intelligence

There is a long history of simulators in testing & refining of skills, competency and execution are required. Even Captain Kirk at Starfleet Academy trained, passed (and cheated) on simulators.

Who knows it might even be fun.

Reference

[0] Professor Con Stough, Brain Sciences Institute, 'Director, Centre for Neuropsychology, Swinburne Institute of Technology'

http://www.swin.edu.au/bioscieleceng/neuropsych/stough.htm

[1] But I do like the simplicity of just looking at a simple set of parameters to make a Gladwellian decision.

[2] In a competitive environment the difference between getting the attention of the right candidates could be the tools used to measure how they stack up against the best .. but actually doing something, learning and getting some feedback.

[3] The framework could be a game, or simply a panel of dials. The key thing is you can have a back room with founders, past entrepreneurs twiddling the dials checking to see in RT how candidates handle things like a person leaving, stressing system etc (like the LEM tester in the Apollo missions). It also allows for candidates to learn from failure with less risk & pass on the best decision making skills to candidates that have passed.

Is this comparison with respect to all Y combinator founders or only with respect to those who have succeeded? Have you identified any personality differences between those who succeeded and those who did not?

I found it relatively inaccurate, but oddly, it was always very precise; i.e. when it got things wrong, it got them profoundly, diametrically wrong.

One thing I wonder is whether there is any logic to deal with confounding variables--for instance, if someone picks every photo that has a bike in it, maybe they just like bikes, and those data points should be excluded.

On the whole, though, the pairwise people have probably as good a shot at anyone at making a not-suck personality analyzer.

Absolutely ridiculous test. There weren't even any books in it, for example, yet they claim to be able to tell if I am into reading books or not? Sorry, but I don't believe their tests are scientifically sound. The sheer number of traits they claim to identify - almost as many traits as there were "questions", I don't think it can work.

Why don't you just use a classic IQ test if you are into that kind of stuff, or the Myer-Briggs test?

I didn't find this to be accurate at all in telling me what kind of a person I am. Anyone else take the quiz?

This doesn't seem to work at all for me. Its assessment of me seems to have pretty much zero correlation with my self-assessment.

http://www.likebetter.com/quiz/results?quiz_id=1449411178&user_list_id=6

ok, my observation is that, the GREEN of most attributes is somewhere in the middle (with some nearer to some side), which means that there is a diversity between to those who you are compared, with 3/4 of the samples to define that side. This means that someone can be in right opposite but it doesn't mean that personality is excluded.but be in the 1/4 of the samples. So, with all this diversity, how valid and helpful is this test?

I think the attributes of the test, should be more questions of type, what you do in specific situations, and be compared to what YC would prefer as answer.

update

or am I wrong, and GREEN is the range of answers of the samples?