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Comment by dpeterson | Hacker News Reader

Do these people not see how easy they have it? I am pretty sure no one would hire me at Mozilla with just php experience then get an interview with y-combinator without a product. I'm guessing he went to Stanford or some other Ivy League.

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He went to http://www.rit.edu/ but I'm not sure where that fits on your exclusivity scale

Random side story: when I toured there when I was 18, my tour guide was severely depressed and told me not to go there. Before showing up we got pulled into a gas station and quickly left when we realized it was being robbed.

I never attended so I can't say if this is indicative or not of the school in general, but it's funny how much these first impressions completely changed my decision to apply!

I loved RIT, although a lot of people there really succumb to Seasonal Affective Disorder thanks to all the snow and cold.

The RIT I know is a bit more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHcIQgQnkU

Quite a few RIT grads have come through my employer's engineering teams. There seems to be, or have been, a program there in "network engineering" or something, which places a big emphasis on practical systems architecture and debugging. Its grads emerge full of stories about how hard it is to assemble and debug all the physical interconnects between the network switches in the server racks that you have to assemble before you graduate.

You want these people on your team.

Some people complain about privilege while others are out there putting in the hours. One gets to pick which group they belong to. He picked wisely.

Ha, talk to me when you are 34, have a CS undergrad, a Master in Software Engineering, spent every second of your life programming since 19 and have been working on your startup for over 7 years, then get rejected flat out from y-combinator.

So what have you learned from that? (genuinely asking, and besides the privilege bit)

Okay.

Time does not equate to quality. Credentials do not equate to mastery. If shit's not working out for you, you're either ahead of your time or it's a shitty idea. Either way, the only person in control of your life is yourself.

Here is what I just heard from you.

I've done a lot of stuff that I think should give me what I want, and I don't have it yet. The world must be biased against me.

You just said that to a guy who managed to succeed in startups despite living in Japan, having an insane day job, AND whose CS credentials don't match yours. In short on every measure that you think matters, you're ahead of him. Except that he succeeded.

Now you have a choice. One choice is to continue moaning. The other is to start with articles he wrote like http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin... and see if you can figure out what actually matters instead of what you think should matter.

What's your startup? How many users do you have? I you don't have any after 7 years, it's a bad sign - speaking as someone who has been working on his own startup for 8 months, without any user yet.

Your response gave the impression that you think you should get into YC because of your programming ability. Startups aren't about your code skill. It helps, but there are several things that matter more:

    - your personality & attitude
    - the idea
    - the size of the market
    - the skillsets of your cofounder(s), and your ability to communicate/work together

Why haven't you posted about your startup on hacker news before?

It is really OK that you didn't get into YC. People with absurdly successful companies today had to apply repeatedly to get in. And, of course, getting into YC is just one way to do it.

Gatekeepers bother me a lot too. You can bootstrap instead of appealing for financing, and sublimate your anger at the gatekeepers as motivation. Lots of successful bootstrappers do exactly that. Being pissed off at financiers worked really well for me for a bunch of years.

Ultimately, though: you're responsible for your own success.

Also: next time you bring up your startup in an eye-catching retort to someone lots of people follow on HN religiously, you should seize the opportunity to tell us about your startup. It's 7 years of your work! That's the most interesting thing you have to talk to us about; not "not getting into YC".

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