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Comment by creolabs | Hacker News Reader

Guys, I just wanted to describe my experience, I really didn't want to criticize YC or the interview process. YC was our first pitch and we were surely not prepared enough. As I clearly wrote in my post I started with the wrong assumption that our product and our technology could make the difference. I was wrong.

Website is more a landing page that a real site. Product is not yet released to the general public. We plan to launch a public beta and a brand new website with more useful information in about a month.

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People love to carp and criticise here, don't take it to heart. The good news is your product is impressive, the bad news is you're not great at selling it as yet, and your target market is not clearly defined.

I found the article really interesting, because it highlights what is clearly a huge gulf between what you expected of YC, and how they behave. You were looking for validation of what you think is a great idea, and to discuss an idea with people who have spent a long time thinking about it and perusing your carefully prepared documents. They don't really care about your idea, they care about you, how well you can sell any idea to them, how well you can sell yourself to them (and by extension customers) in limited time, how you deal with pressure, how much contact you have had with customers, and how you plan to make money. You didn't have convincing answers to those questions, because you were expecting entirely different questions and an impressed audience. YC are not even really interested in your idea, they're interested in whether you can execute. That's probably because most ideas do not survive contact with the harsh reality of customers and the market, but companies do if they can adapt.

In this sense YC is behaving far more like a potential customer of yours than you might imagine - most customers spend about 30 seconds evaluating your product, and if you can't sell them in that time, you have a problem. Most customers will never read your sales docs or understand your product at first, they might read the home page if you're lucky. From a customer point of view, there is a fundamental problem with your idea which I think you're going to have a lot of trouble with:

Who could have developed a new multiplatform programming language with a blazing fast virtual machine?

You're asking people to build a business on top of your platform and a new language. There are a lot of reasons why that's a terrible idea for customers (even if it is a great thing for you), but foremost among them is lock-in. This is not really a technical problem, it's an issue of trust, and these decisions are not even often made on a technical basis. IMO you need to open-source your platform (get rid of trust issues), show customers everything, and make money on support/bespoke development if the platform is good enough to actually attract users (that'll be a very tough sell, and not one based mostly on technical concerns).

Thanks for posting and I hope any criticism you find here will be useful to you.

I think the post above by <grey-area> is on target. I suspect there is a large market for very easy-to-use app building environments (though, because I know how to code and like doing it, I don't know what the competitive landscape is like).

I remember seeing Steve Jobs giving demos of Interface Builder at NeXT -- hey, drag and drop connections between objects! -- and, years later, nobody has solved it yet.

But as <grey-area> says, there may be many reasons why people could be reluctant to switch to your environment. You created a new programming language? I don't care about programming languages as much as having a good collection of libraries -- will I be able to find or convert the ones I need? How about the equivalent of ones like Beautiful Soup, or PIL, or even massaging UTF-8 strings? For reference, CPAN has over 144,000 Perl modules available.

Do I need your build servers to create an app, meaning if your company goes out of business, I'm out of luck? If Apple changes APIs, how long until you support them? Etc. Open sourcing will help.

I understand you're pre-release, and that the site is a placeholder. But you may want to address some of these questions in a FAQ. In any case, I applaud your effort. You're trying to create something new and powerful. Very few people have the courage and fortitude even to try.

UPDATE: I watched part of the video and it seems very GUI-based, so my question about programming languages and libraries doesn't seem relevant.

Italy hasn't caught up with the "fail fast, fail often" culture, so the comments sound harsher then intended. Don't beat up yourself, You're getting high-quality feedback from users who most likely failed (and learned) many, many times. :)

Your language is highly critical. There's some wiggle room for English not being your first language but you did not have kind words to say about pretty much anyone from YC, and you look really bad because of it.

It's strange you should say that, because I didn't get that at all. He was being honest. Why would that be a problem?

Things like "(Eclipse Holy God, you really just said Eclipse??)" really come across as pretty negative to me and I'm no big fan of Eclipse.

All the questions asked seemed pretty reasonable to me - after all the person asking the questions is looking at it from a business rather than a technical perspective. If someone who is running a company can't adapt to the type of person asking the question then I would see that as a pretty major weakness in the team.

I read that statement less as arrogance and more as one's internal thought process when an interview starts to go in the wrong direction. Before any interview or presentation, I have an idea in my mind of how the conversation is going to go (some canned answers here and there for info that requires a concise explanation, some general ideas to touch on, etc.).

I'd guess that never in these dev's rehearsals did they imagine they'd be defending their validity as a product over a product like Eclipse.

That's not to say that the question was wrong to ask; in fact, I think it was one of the most important questions asked at that interview because it gives the Creo team great insight into how people are trying to "fit" their product into the current market. I do think, however, that the question threw the Creo team for a loop because it doesn't allow them to highlight the benefits of Creo in a meaningful way.

And so you address that and then you move on. Use that to shape the direction the interview takes you in rather than as a way to get irritated. Having eclipse as an anchorpoint helps because you can now show how you're different from something the interviewer already knows. That's much easier than talking in a vacuum.

These questions quite unambiguously pointed at YC never giving their application proper attention. Perhaps they skimmed it, but even then they should've picked up that the product was for non-developers. So to people who spent days writing the application and planning their life around the interview it would look like a half-ass effort on the YC part. It's only natural that they are pissed about the whole experience. One can hardly blame them.

Asking you to compare your product to Eclipse is not saying its similar to Eclipse. It's a conversation catalyst.

Yeah but then you could claim asking "why you wouldn't use a banana instead" is a useful conversation catalyst.

Clearly eclipse has nothing to do with their technology or product - it just showed ignorance. He even said prior to the remark, it was a application builder for people who don't code - yet they persisted.

YC do admit they make mistakes, and I think this is one of them. It was a terrible interview on both sides.

...it was a application builder for people who don't code...

People have been trying to build application builders for beginners who don't (yet) code at least since Kemeny and Kurtz invented BASIC in 1964. Successful intentional examples of this include BASIC, Logo, Hypercard, and PHP.

History shows that people are willing to use these until they realize that programming is hard, and then they hire someone to do it for them. History also shows that developers are completely oblivious to the actual challenges that end users will face until they put it in front of them. For a random example, most developers will hapilly expose the file system to users without realizing that in usability studies, most computer using college graduates do not understand the idea of a file system with directories inside of directories, files at every level, and two files named the same thing in two different directories actually being different files.

You can't develop something for people who don't code without putting it in front of people who don't code and accepting harsh feedback. By their own admission, they failed to do this basic thing. Without even looking, I can guarantee that their half-million lines of code and whiz bang technology is entirely unusable by their target audience. And anyone in their target audience who decides to stick with the technology will quickly want to hire a programmer. Whose first question will be whether they can rewrite the application in a more familiar environment. Which they will as soon as they dare. Therefore no matter how much you don't think you're in competition with mainstream programming environments, you really, really are.

Don't believe me? Excel has proven to be an insanely successful technology for getting non-programmers to write useful applications. Ever talked to a programmer who inherited a complex application written in Excel by a non-programmer? My point is made.

I am sure the YC person is as aware of this as I am. What do we have? We have a team that devoted an insane amount of time in creating a piece of cool technology which certainly is useless for its target purpose. This team clearly has no idea how to make something that customers want. Furthermore they don't show any sign of caring about how to make a successful business. They may be fun to talk to about technology, but is this a group you want to invest in?

YC made the obviously right choice here. And asked the right questions.

> ... without realizing that in usability studies, most computer using college graduates do not understand the idea of a file system with directories inside of directories, files at every level, and two files named the same thing in two different directories actually being different files.

That claim seems hard to believe. Would you have a link to one of these usability studies?

But it's completely redundant because they had already talked about XCode.

Perhaps the interviewer noticed that they missed the point and tried again.

I actually would of reacted the exact same way. It's clear that this is a completely new dev environment and an intentional divorce from xcode/eclipse etc. The people interviewing couldn't get that. They showed zero understanding of the problem space. They were clearly stupid.

>The people interviewing couldn't get that. They showed zero understanding of the problem space. They were clearly stupid.

It's always possible that they wanted to see how the team would react to those types of questions. We had a very similar experience during our interview (asked questions that we thought were clearly explained in the application).

There was a bit of discussion on this topic yesterday here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9147252

The people interviewing want to be educated on why the current solutions aren't good enough. Being snarky or dogmatic isn't a good way to educate someone who wants to learn. The founders could have done a better job.

If you are trying to convince someone of something (customer to buy your product, YC to invest, etc), I think you have to offer a conciliatory approach. Keep the gripes to yourself. If you have to push back, do it incredibly politely.

Every question that YC asked (Eclipse after Xcode, for example) will be representative of what a potential customer thinks when they read the creator's web site.

All of the explanatory stuff was technical and waffly; the description is way too long. If it's "drag and drop app building", then say that and show examples of why this is the foray that will succeed where others failed.

A lot of the language in the write-up was heavily laced with attitude. Noting ages of the interviewees for example implies inexperience in my reading of it. "They must be wrong, not me."

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