How to Get into Y Combinator | Hacker News Reader

How to Get into Y Combinator

aptible.com

150 pointsmixonic37 comments

Before our interview, Frank and I: - Collected all of the known Y Combinator interview questions we could find - Wrote out 1-2 sentence answers - Agreed on which founder would lead on the answer, and - Practiced with flash cards until we could answer every question fluently

Sounds like YC has turned into something of a cram school.

Which isn't that big of an issue. I'm sure the YC folks are aware of the practice and look for other less-reproducible signals. Plus, the cramming, interview, 3-month sprint may lead to quite a bit of learning. Most doctors crammed in school.

Good answers to those questions aren't really that easily reproducible.

You mean figuring out answers to important business issues like "who are you users?", "how will you acquire them?", and "how will you make money?" and then having a plan how to clearly communicate them is cramming and nothing more?

It was the use of flashcards, specifically.

The thing that's strange is that it seems like they could write a one-two sentence to every of these questions without much trouble.

No, needing sessions with flash cards is cramming. Knowing those answers and communicating them should be something you can do on the fly.

So I guess people should stop preparing for Google interviews by looking at and practicing the myriad of coding puzzles they've previously asked. You'd be stupid not to.

Consider Management Consulting interviews, where the firm tells you exactly what to expect and even points you towards prep books.

They test for how prepared you are and how motivated you are in working to be given an offer.

Asking "what the interview tests for" is a pertinent one as any entrance process becomes increasingly formulaic.

It sounds like after studying with the flash cards they were able to do just that.

Should they ... not prepare? What are you even suggesting? Do you seriously think it's so easy to just communicate the complexities of a business without having practiced hundreds of times? Have you even tried? I get the feeling you're just an armchair philosopher who doesn't have any idea what the heck you're actually talking about. Either that or you're just being a dick. It's complete nonsense.

By doing flash cards, they were able to accomplish the exact goal you stated much quicker and more effectively than blundering their way through the YC interview and trying again in 6 months after they've had real pitches. Or should everyone just be as amazing as you are and be able to communicate these things without ample practice? Ridiculous.

Yep. I'm kind of disappointed that the article isn't "How to run a business and succeed", but instead is just more prep work for applying to this generations silicon ivy.

More people want to be in a startup than, you know, make a startup it seems.

This reminded me of a quote from The Way of the Gun (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Way_of_the_Gun)

  Longbaugh: These days, they want to be criminals more than they want to commit crime.
  Joe Sarno: Well that's... that's not just crime. That's the way of the world.

Yep. That's what I'm paraphrasing. :)

Excellent sheep! BTW, Lets hear their answer to #16, "Someone just showed us an idea like this right before you guys. I don't like it. What else do you have?" (Statements of the obvious not necessary, but this is the Internet, so...)

I would say it's more about speed and learning to be direct.

Interviews go crazy fast and the competition is insane. You don't want to spend 5 minutes answering a question that can be answered in 10 seconds.

Flashcards for YC interviews: http://hnacademy.com

Very helpful! It's good to answer those questions even if you are not aiming to apply YC very soon.

I converted all the questions to a google spreadsheet. Feel free to make a copy and answer them privately :) http://goo.gl/r3RXck

You are awesome.

All this advice looks excellent for running a startup, succeeding at it, and pitching to investors. However, Y-combinator's partners in particular have a habit of advertising "we don't care as much about your idea as about your team because the idea usually gets overhauled drastically anyway". This advice seems a bit contrary to that; at best, it's proof that you can go through the thought exercise of imagining what all of this looks like. But being able to do plan out a killer business with one idea doesn't necessarily translate to being able to do it with another.

Has YC changed its standards about people vs. ideas now that they can afford to be so selective? Or is planning a business a skill that's generic enough that proof of doing it in one instance is good enough to prove that a person can do it generally?

> However, Y-combinator's partners in particular have a habit of advertising "we don't care as much about your idea as about your team because the idea usually gets overhauled drastically anyway".

This is not true for any ycombinator startup I have worked at. The idea has always been key, but the team is also very important.

That certainly used to be an attitude Y Combinator had (http://old.ycombinator.com/noidea.html), although it sounds like that didn't work out. Paul Graham's essays also perennially mention that the people are far more important than the ideas ("Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route.", "What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people"), but it might be that I've been projecting too much of PG's views onto YC as a whole.

It makes a lot of sense to me that the idea would absolutely be key, which is why I've always been a bit suspect of the "people >> ideas" attitude. Not to say that the team isn't the more important piece, but I'm suspicious of the idea that a great team will usually gravitate towards a good business, left to their own devices.

I think it's more about having an idea that makes sense and how you've been executing on it. Basically, when they say "the team matters the most", it's less about "Tell me how good you are" but more about "Tell me what you've been working on and how you tackled various problems, and then we'll decide how good you are".

I.e. If the idea makes no sense at all and you aren't talking to users or building a prototype to test it, it doesn't really matter how smart or amazing you say you are.

Most blogs that describe tips and best practices when applying to YC have one advice in common - "Get customers", "Prove that someone needs your product", "Get signups, email addresses" etc. And while that is a *very8 valid and important point, for some of us though its harder than that. Even if one has a prototype, the companies they work for have strict policies that prevent doing business on the side, let alone the fact that the H1 visa also explicitly prevents you from having any other source of income or starting a corp. The only options would be to go all in and go to their home country to develop the product further, at which point they've abandoned everything they've worked hard for all this while, - or - wait for a green card, which is elusive if you are from one of the populous Asian countries. What other options does one have? Have any H1s successfully made it to YC? Could they describe their experience?

Also, please correct me if I'm wrong here, but despite assurances from YC folk and Sam himself that you can and should apply even if you have just an idea or prototype, blog after blog suggest you need to be much further than that to get through the tough competition.

YC is just three months, you don't need a visa. (Although most experts say you'd put the chance on your side to get one and move to the bay.)

>> [...] should apply even if you have just an idea or prototype, [...]

Yeah.. this one I'm not sure. I would say it really depends of how formidable the team is and what's the idea. Most YC companies joined with some tractions and market validation. If you really don't have a prototype, then you need to somehow convey that it has product market fit and how you can execute it. Just speculating here, but it could be that you have had previous startup experience, or maybe some unfair advantage, or you have an exceptional team that have been working together for 10 years, whatever.

The question is not about the visa after you get into YC and moving to the Bay area, its about starting a business while on a visa that prevents that.

For After, you could move from an H1 to a B1, or apply for a H1 using the newly formed company with the money YC gives you. But what about before? Looks like no one has done this yet.

If this is really what is stopping you from starting your business or applying to YC, feel free to send me an email and I could walk you through what process we used (Same situation here: different country, applied to YC, establishing ourselves in the bay).

I have used Aptible and can confirm that Chas & Frank follow through with "Step 0: Make something people want." Deployment on their platform is based on git and a Dockerfile in your project directory. For me, it's definitely an improvement over Ansible and its hacked-on AWS support.

I wish them the best!

> How to Get into Y Combinator

Luck. Competence, execution and a decent enough idea are requisite, but mostly luck.

For being a disruptor, YC should do away with the interview as the gate. Focusing on the interview is similar to focusing on a resume. People are engineers, scientists, artists, makers, doctors, and certainly not resume writers.

I have a cousin who is a barrister. She studied Ancient Greek at Oxford. She was hired out of school on the grounds that anyone who can do well at ancient greek can learn to practice law. From a hiring perspective, this makes a large amount of sense.

Most questions seem to be geared for tech base companies, but with the request for startups some other type of businesses are going to apply. Which questions our Food based company should focus on?

The questions provided cover everything in a business plan so it's interesting to see the overlap with a plain old business plan and an agile question-answer based template.

Batchmate of Aptible here (Zen99) - this information is spot on! Great guide by Chas and team.

lol @ the clinkle joke

I enjoyed that one as well :)

s/make something people want/make something people want to pay money for/

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