We Make Mistakes
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
It's the same as how no student should ever PLAN to get into Harvard, and Harvard even has SATs and GPAs to rely on (fairly objective stats around which you can make a guess about your odds) while YC has only heuristics based on experience and founder reputation. Never judge yourself based on something that has an open application process - it doesn't define you, it defines them. No reason not to apply, but take it as a bonus if you get in, don't take it personally if you get rejected.
This this kind of thing always feels like a bit of a victory. I never came close to being admitted to Stanford, but years ago found myself on the campus, hiring a professor as a consultant to a startup I co-founded. As we walked around the campus and then sat in his office, this far-off universe of people that the Stanford admissions committee had long-ago decided were smarter and more capable than I was suddenly seemed far less so. I was already doing what many of the students, and even many professors, aspired to do.
A rejection from YC, Stanford, or any other exclusive club with limited space isn't necessarily an indictment of your abilities. In the case of a startup, launch your product and let the market tell you how valuable you are. Remarkable products will quickly spread, and investors will line up to write you checks. You can have VC partners worth hundreds of millions of dollars literally walking the streets [1] to find you, too.
And btw they seem to do well - all the "misses" are middling wins - for example Buffer (a poster boy for a YC miss) is an amazing company, but it's not a miss YC will ever rue. The misses for YC should actually validate so many founders - if you're looking to be a Buffer (which, if you want to live a good life, you should consider) you should bear in mind that I think even looking back on Buffer, YC would take them knowing about them what they know, but they wouldn't change their criteria for accepting founders to make sure they don't miss Buffer and they shouldn't. There are lots of great businesses and even big-win startups that YC isn't set up to catch, and that could be you.
From 1997.
I have several applications on the go right now, so I do not have time to go historical for them. They miss a candidate.
this request is very unreasonable if he got another certificate after this.
Right, it's pure insanity. Documentation of how you behaved as a minor when you already have multiple college degrees is completely irrelevant.
I did have all the information about my AA and BS, but apparently that wasn't enough.
Brilliant observation.
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Let me know when this is fixed and I'll delete this comment.
For those with less experience, the disappointment will pass. Take a day if you need to reflect on what you're doing, why you're doing it and how you could do it better.
Rejection is fuel for the fire, use it to burn brighter going forward.
Next time, be so good they can't ignore you, simple as that.
Exactly right!
Redirect that energy to building your business. Build your product and get customers/users, which is the real endgame, not getting into YC or getting a check from a fancy Sandhill VC.
I'm not OP but your comment makes it sound like he or she is spending significant time on applications and neglecting business. Granted the application isn't a really quick thing to fill out but it's also not something that takes so long that it can impact your business negatively.
1. YC would definitely be helpful and worth the equity.
2. The application process is a helpful reality check for the status of my startup regardless of outcome.
3. I still believe we have crazy amounts of untapped potential.
I focus just fine on my startup the rest of the time.
10/30 marks my 4 year anniversary for coming up with the core ideas behind Tinj. We're building dramatically better ways for people to share information starting with video ratings.
More than anything, I've grown enormously as an entrepreneur, as a developer and as a person.
reaction: cool!
"...starting with video ratings"
reaction: meh
One of these days I'll figure out the right way to explain things in writing...
Haven't looked at your site yet, but this is what I would relate to. Good luck!
Holy damn that site is all over the place if you try to scroll a bit too fast
as someone working on a video-based site I am interested in this concept but I just cannot use this website without irritation. Also there's barely any "Now you've seen that it's pretty, this is what it does" information.
Document! document! document!
You've spent 4 years working on a product that lets you draw a line on a time graph?
I mean, I see that it's synced to a video, and that's a small bit of interesting functionality, but...this is not a product. This is a feature of a product, maybe. It's a less-useful imitation of those "+/-" knobs that you see the results of during political debates on CNN.
I'm sorry, I really do like to see people succeed, but I think you need to move on from this idea.
It absolutely looks like a "bad idea", but all its deficiencies can be compensated and its strengths are unmatched.
clicking on 'contact' scrolls down and when it reaches the bottom it just snaps back to the top.
So, likely, net, if they are making money, then they are happy about the money they are making, smile all the way to the bank, and just f'get about the rest.
I believe Bessemer's last fund was $1.6 billion, so assuming a typical 2 and 20 structure, that would be $32 million/year, or $320 million over a 10 year fund's life, guaranteed.
But as in
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.html...
on average the VC returns to the limited partners have not been very good.
I think YC used to accept awesome teams with (seemingly) bad ideas. Which is only partially like your example. But I don't believe they are doing it now with so many applications (40% more than S14).
Anyone has any examples pointing the other?
I'd be super interested to know more about this, since LightSail seems like exactly the type of company (and founder) that YC says it wants to fund: Working in a RFS domain (energy), massive potential upside, and founder with considerable domain expertise.
Still food for thought that YC would reject a founder so obviously good (although perhaps not obviously then) as DaniFong..
I wonder if getting rejected was one of the reasons for her to start working on something more "zero to one", and closer to her area of expertise?
During the application process I started to realize, YC asks all the right questions. Just trying to find proper answers is a huge step forward for the first timers, like us. We learned a lot.
I think, the only thing that missing is the feedback loop. I'm aware of the fact that there are more applicants than YC could accept, or provide a feedback. But after all, we still need a feedback.
After I saw the rejection email, first I planned to share our application in HN to get feedback from the community. But now I see this is a need for all the rejected applicants. I'm not sure what could be a better way for closing the feedback loop. Maybe, there's a start-up idea in here somewhere :)
Great things can happen when you're low on budget and there are numerous entrepreneurial stories about those early days. Sometimes it is much needed to go through the early struggles to come out even stronger in the end.
Yikes! That's a major increase in applications. Has that number always grown that fast?
I wonder what the saturation point will be...
A couple of my biggest regrets are not applying to Google in 2000 when I was graduating from CPSC: "Search engine? Well that sounds boring. And they don't even have a business model!".. Opps....
The other was not applying to YC in November 2009. "Oh the next class is too far away." I had a killer prototype, and since then the whatifs always haunted me.
Better to try, and be overlooked, than to never try at all.
YC is a for-profit, private enterprise that can do whatever it wants, and it is in the business of maximizing income, so it would be foolish for the organization not to act in a self-interested way, but just calling it like I see it (and again, it'd be great if there were any stats the organization could release to disprove any of the points above, but I understand that it has no obligation to do so).
- You get a lot more 'no's than 'yes'es
- They don't give you a lot of feedback when they pass
- Having a previous relationship with them is helpful
- The more successful you are, the more they want to give you money
Unless you are starting a non-profit, this is just how it works. These people are investing, not donating to charity or your team's self-development. Get some traction and/or revenue and the game will flip around very quickly.
I think we both agree that: YC is becoming more like everyone else in the investing game. they want to make a lot of money.
Just to clarify, it felt like YC used to be more different from others in the investing game, like they cared more, or they were willing to invest in earlier-stage startups, or they had a higher purpose, or followed the hacker ethos. but now it just feels like they're more like every other investor out there -- please note the use of the word "more". they still do great things (watsi case in point), and all of their blog posts are very respectful towards applicants. to reiterate, it just feels like they're becoming "more" like traditional VC and less like what I thought YC was or used to stand for.
1. Anybody can apply, from anywhere, and you apply online. Good luck finding an online application for a normal VC, and cold-emailing partners isn't going to get you anywhere. Oh, and if you don't live in the bay area your chances just went way down of getting a meeting or investment.
2. They give you a nice chunk of money in exchange for a really tiny amount of common stock (I think it's common stock), have really nice terms, and don't take a board seat. I'm sure for many of the companies that apply, YC could take much more equity but they don't (and it would still be worth it for the companies anyway). They are paranoid about and lose a ton of money by restricting partners investing or taking their pro-rata rights to protect the companies they don't follow on with (this is my understanding of their policies).
3. They keep increasing their class sizes in attempts to get more people going through it. They created an online class that they offered for free to everybody to encourage more people to do startups and spread the knowledge.
4. They have a means of preventing and responding to investor misbehavior by threatening to blacklist them from YC companies. This is hugely valuable for your average entrepreneur as its helps to shift the culture in a way that is better for entrepreneurs (which has happened a lot in the past few years).
They aren't perfect. They don't claim to be perfect (case in point: the title of this blog post). But believe me, they are miles away from a traditional VC.
For example if they think you need to prove out certain assumptions then they'll tell you those assumptions, because it's in their interest. If they think you personally as a founder are uninvestable then they're unlikely to tell you that because there's no advantage in that for anyone.
We definitely fund people who have no connection to folks we already know, or Silicon Valley for that matter. And we also fund startups who are at the idea stage and have no traction (though traction does help).
I'm very sorry we rejected you, but we are honestly often wrong.
I'm just wondering if there's a way for people to understand what their chances are. For example, if 0.01% of people that have lower than a 650 GMAT get into Stanford, then that would be useful information to know (for hopeful applicants).
Similarly, if the "has revenue" cohort has a 15% interview rate, and the "pre-revenue" cohort has a 0.5% interview rate, that would also be really great to know. (same thing for solo vs. multiple founders, recommended vs. non-recommended, etc).
I understand that YC has no obligation to provide this information, and perhaps there are very good reasons why it wouldn't provide it even if it was available. It would just be useful to know if possible.
There are going to be a few companies which are obvious superstars (great team, market, execution, traction, etc.) which will be obvious yeses. You're either in this group or your not.
There are many many companies which are obviously bad: weak team, bad market, poorly thought through idea, pre-product, etc. These companies would get rejected regardless of how many companies applied.
Then you have the companies in the middle. That's where the competition is. It doesn't really matter how many companies are in the previous groups, what matters is how you rank compared to the "maybes".
Assuming this is true, this must be one of the easiest things in the world to hack. I would be very worried about any aspiring tech entrepreneur who couldn't manage to connect with a group of people who are as open and as generous with their time as many of the YC alums are.
> tendency to fund those who need it the least
First, I wonder if this is really true. It may look that way, but I imagine that many of the companies are in the product/market fit stage. Some may find themselves actually in the problem/solution fit stage. I imagine few are in the straight-up scaling stage.
Second, from YC's perspective, I think that they should definitely have some companies in each class for which they will simply act as a multiplier -- that is, get the company to where it is going, just faster and (maybe) better.
Lastly, if traction and/or revenue really are the key to acceptance, aspiring YC companies could simply use this as a parameter to consider when developing their company. IMHO, this is a case of the tail wagging the dog, but it's something to consider.
Does anyone know if they still allow this, in principle? Or are batches now so saturated (with good ideas) that they dropped the option?
Haha - honestly though , is this acceptable?
"You are listed as a founder on another application. Please do not create a new application unless you're applying with a different startup."
Was worth a look... :-)
You have to optimize for what they want and considering how transparent the application process is, it's actually quite easy. PG's essays are step-by-step guides on how to "tick" all the right boxes. They even give you the list of ideas they wish to fund. How nice of them... No wonder YC has announced that quality of applications is increasing. It's not increasing because startups are getting better. It's increasing because more startups are optimizing.
Remember Nikki Durkin from 99dresses? She didn't just apply. She spent huge amount of time researching partners, their history, what they liked, what they wanted to hear... and she has delivered just that like a rockstar. How many promising founders are rejected because they just didn't bother to optimize like Durkin?
To me, if you get rejected, it just means you didn't put enough time into the application. If your goal is to get into YC, then keep trying, you will figure it out.
But in the end, if you are real entrepreneur, figure out what you are doing with your business. Don't optimize for YC, just do what you've got to do and if YC wants to join you for a ride, then fine. If not, too bad for them.
isn't this logically absurd?
Just doing what you do is the only thing that matters and will get you in, assuming you're doing the right thing. (Asking alums for feedback on the application is a very good way to make sure you're doing the right thing and your presentation doesn't suck)
Really the challenge here is common, nearly standard, and a very old story that goes back to nothing less than the Mother Goose children's story "The Little Red Hen": What the hen was doing was unusual and, therefore, not in the experience of others. Thus, no one would help her. But when she had hot, fragrant loaves of bread freshly out of her oven and eager, hungry, paying customers lined up to buy, lots of people were ready to help. But in the interim she had to work alone with just her own evaluation, creativity, and determination. No doubt that story is in Mother Goose because the situation was both common and ancient.
What is needed are better means of evaluating projects. For a special, relatively small, collection of projects, there are such means, highly polished, e.g., for grant applications to NSF, NIH, and DARPA, similarly for Ph.D. dissertation proposals, and also for a huge range of US DoD projects, e.g., the SR-71, the F-117, GPS. Generally these projects and their evaluations have much better batting average than Silicon Valley equity funded information technology start-up projects.
Maybe what Silicon Valley is doing is making money, and the YC $30+ billion is astoundingly impressive, but one major success can be worth $300 billion, 10 times as much, so that we have to suspect that better evaluations could lead to better returns.
Anyone who was rejected want to share any of their application info, like team or product demo videos, or their website and a one line pitch? I know you might not want to for competitive reasons, and I understand.
But there's always things we can learn from each other, so if you want to share I'm sure I'm not the only one who would appreciate seeing what didn't work. :-)
It's not just the quality of the idea, team and product, but the quality of the presentation -- and that's always a challenge when you're in the early stages and not necessarily fully certain about, say, the product's nature.
And by presentation I don't mean how slick it is, but how effective it is at conveying what you're trying to convey (which can be undermined by slickness.)
Anyway I was asking for the ones that failed, not the ones that were successful (as I assume they would want to keep things under wraps until demo day.)
I expected that, given that my prototype was pretty bad, and I have a lot going against me. It definitely lit a fire under me just to apply though - and the questions that the application asks, are things you really need to think about. I definitely don't regret applying. And the fact that my demo & video were viewed - makes me think that perhaps my idea is somewhat promising.
I plan on improving my product a lot and re-applying next batch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12DAjoONx9E&t=35s
But that's okay, she's going to help out immensely, and it'll only strengthen our application in the Spring.
My suggestion, after working on and for startups for a couple decades is that you should be the CEO, find business people to be co-founders, and hire a VP of engineering, or CTO.
It's almost a cliche that there are business guys "starting companies" who "just need an engineer"... but I think the best chances for success - on a high tech startup - are for the engineer to be the CEO, and eventually bring on a CTO.
One advantage of this- the CEO is focused on product while the business guys (COO, CMO, whatever) are out doing the legwork for raising money. I've seen too many companies flounder because the CEO was focused on raising money.
You can learn business, they can't learn engineering. (well, they can, but not to your level in the time available.)
We are building a decentralized bank/crowdlending network on the blockchain.
My startup is movie industry related, so maybe Los Angeles would be a better place to be. I'll post the startup site here when we launch.
I have a small web app for low budget filmmakers that a hesitate to call a startup (I think rocket growth might be particularly hard to achieve in the production side of the industry). More of a business in its infancy.
Best of luck to you.
It would be interesting to see a chart plotting over time the number of applicants in each batch who have applied to YC multiple times. Based on the number of folks here on HN who have apparently applied multiple times, and for different concepts no less, it seems plausible that a not insignificant percentage of the applicant pool now consists of folks who, contrary to YC's own advice, are more focused on getting accepted into YC than building a real business.
pg wrote about this pretty convincingly here: http://paulgraham.com/equity.html
Unless you are comparing YC against an actual term sheet in your hand with at least 2X better terms, that YC is overwhelmingly likely a good deal. There might be good reasons not to enter YC for some companies, but the 6% equity is rarely the determining one, even for companies with revenue and sustainable Ramen profits.
It sounds like everybody that participates says they make more progress in the program than they would have otherwise in that amount of time.
But if you have a successful business then you probably don't NEED them. But they can still help.
Your application/video/product could be flawless and literally solve world hunger but the process isn't objective as all that. In the end they just pick a handful of people out of all the applications that they want to invest in.
I'm sure that most applications there was no reason at all that they chose not to accept them. They just didn't.
Also, how many teams make it to the interview stage?
In terms of the companies that make it, previous years the amount that make it in range up to 80 but they reduced it to 50 last year. 500 or so total YC companies since inception (2005).
Best of luck to everyone who has an interview and those who don't.
I've just received rejection email from Ycombinator... :( Though I realize, how competitive it gets to get in, its not the start one expect for their product or idea...
while, I am working on to make my product, I would appreciate if fellow community members can help point out ares of improvement in my product,
Thanks for your time! I really appreciate it!
Nish Founder, Joday.com
Our application was rejected, but you can sign up for a beta invite here: https://userium.com/ Soon 400 sign ups and counting. :)
It's very easy to believe "if only we just got in... we'd have the money to do X".
Any thoughts on how much a prototype and full-time commitment from all founders matter?
Also, you need to have a full-time commitment, otherwise they won't give you $120,000 if that makes sense.
- Over 35
- Female
- African American
Edit: My post here is to gauge if the needle of progress in our industry is moving forward in the terms of race, age and sex.
Not sure about ageism .. if your over 40 should you even bother?
Note also that hiring biases don't require anything so unsubtle as making something like that grounds for rejection.
To make a fair assessment you also need to look at the distribution of applicants. If 15% of applicants are female, then your null hypothesis is that 15% of founders will be female.
I do wonder if you...
- Are already generating revenue
- Have lots of traction/traffic
- Sold previous start-ups and or companies before
- Worked at and or working at Apple, Facebook, Google or similar companies
- Ran a successful KickStarter
- Went to an ivy league school
As for us.. I am 39 and this is my second start-up. My co-founder is 21. Our first start-up idea (was a novel idea at the time) has since gone onto being worked on/copied by dozens, including one now with millions of users. We were not technical when we started our first start-up, but did receive a fair amount of attention for the concept.
Overall, I don't think that matters due to the competition you face in applying for YC. I would assume many who are interviewed & accepted can check off a few of those questions I asked above. Though maybe not?
Not sure we will apply again since we applied in April of 2013. Though when we applied in 2013 & got rejected we soon were invited to demo our technology to an entity in the valley. That is an interesting story in itself. Maybe that will happen again :-)
Well we were not lucky this time, I wish you better luck!
Traffic/Traction. Wow, Two different things. We're an investment marketplace for agriculture and agtech (http://agfunder.com). Listed companies have raised $10.5M since Feb2014, we have another $2M in live deals, and about $12M in deal flow coming on in the next 4 weeks. So in that respect traction is huge, this is not being funded by thousands of investors but by VCs in Silicon Valley family or in Russia, offices, strategics. In our case the LTV of a customer is in the hundreds of thousands so we don't need traffic in the millions. We average about 5,000 uniques per month, and we have about a 1% conversion rate, of which 0.25% are investors.
Sold previous startups: No. I wish. I wouldn't be living off my credit card right now.
Apple/Facebook/Google: No.
KickStarter: No, family then advisories, and then friends of friends got us this far but it has been very very painful and it seemed like just when we were on deaths door (Maxed credit cards, zero sleep for 2 weeks) that we had a stay of execution.
Ivy: Yes. I have a PhD from Yale and have published in Nature, Harvard Business Review, and most recently TechCrunch so I had a lot of social proof to work with (That said I have ADD and dyslexia and I didn't graduate from high school so don't let a poor start hold you back). I'm sure this played in, but it is possible to build up your CV. I think YC (and frankly everyone else) wants to know that you are someone who is capable of doing something extraordinary. You need to give them data points. Start with some baby steps and leverage your way into something bigger. I submitted several articles to TC before one was accepted.
btw, it just might be sour grapes, but i get the feeling yc app process is highly gamed right now and being rejected by it is not useful enough information to act on for the founders - which is the hallmark of a good investor.
What's potentially dangerous about this situation is that quite a few glossy low-risk companies will outdo the more riskier ones - even though YC staff is one of the best in the world and thoroughly equipped to do what it does - and thus lowering the chances of fishing real gems off the coast.
I do not have the numbers, but how have the batches of later years done as compared to the early ones which had Dropbox, Airbnb in them?
Aid groups are choking on sheltering and feeding millions of refugees streaming out of Syria and Iraq but who gives a fuck?
1) your solution might not seem viable
2) your solution might seem viable but you don't seem like you can pull it off
3) your solution might be great and you might have a great team, but there were stronger teams in the round
I would also be angry if they wouldn't give me five minutes, but that's not how their process works (imagine how hard that would be to personally say no to hundreds or thousands of people).
I hope you will continue to pursue other avenues for funding.
While I found the rejection a good and sincere email, I'm trying to figure out the role of this article