How to Prepare for the Y Combinator Interview | Hacker News Reader

How to Prepare for the Y Combinator Interview

tryzen99.com

69 pointstzier18 comments

Great post Tristan. Solid advice. I'd also add http://ipaulgraham.herokuapp.com/ in the list of resources on the bottom. It forces conciseness.

We're alums (YC W12 and S09). We do mock interviews every batch. If you're interested, reach me at jason at 42floors.

Also happy to help here (S12). seth at amicushq

Good article.

I'd suggest that your strongest points are:

1. "Traction trumps all." Demonstrable opportunity is the primary currency.

2. "Be a nice person." Successful people don't like to work with assholes.

3. "Prepare, and be brief." Anything that doesn't add significant value needs to come out of your pitch.

4. "Don’t be deterred by interruptions." These are opportunities. Think of these as buying questions. If they're asking you questions, they're telling you what you need to do to convince them to believe in you.

Good luck all in the next round or other endeavors!

Nice, I think this is actually by far the best thing I've seen written on YC interviews.

Appreciate the kind words!

> It’s relatively easy to pick up on someone’s personality in their application.

From the written application that's supposed to be as terse as possible? I think I could get a feel for someone in person since I could dig into particular questions on the spot, but seems I'd have a real hard time judging meanness if I could only see the 1-way communication of the written YC application.

Good point, I could have made that clearer. Wasn't meant to be specific to "meanness", more so just personality. This can obviously be complicated by things like language barriers/etc, so isn't a catch-all.

In general, the point was that humans usually make subconscious judgments before they even start talking to you; at the least, you should be aware of this.

Y Combinator sounds like such a great experience. Now if only I had a startup.

I used to think so too. But then again, is it advisable to start a startup just for Y Combinator?

I'm having trouble understanding how one would demonstrate traction at the idea stage.

Would it be a combination of 1) demonstrating past successes gaining traction and 2) having a catchy prototype? Or are there other things?

See Philosophical #1 - at idea stage, you should focus on these things instead since you likely don't have a product/traction. (You may if you've hacked/MVP'd something.)

If you have a track record of building products with traction, definitely discuss that as well (falls into the 'why you're the right team to execute').

Have a list of 400,000 users waiting to buy your product [1].

1. https://getfinal.com/

+1...just make sure you ship before everyone forgets about you :). I've heard 10% conversion from signup list isn't unrealistic when products finally ship.

10% is optimistic

It's great to have a blog with some traffic where you can find interested future users. If you have enough traffic, you can keep the signup-to-invite time short so your conversion will be better.

Keep in mind that if the idea is novel and something people want, you'll get most of them converted no matter what if you initially promised that novel thing during the signup.

The effort that you put into quantifying potential traction would also count.

As somebody pointed out above, a "soon to launch" Web site, a large-scale survey with potential customers, a successful Kickstarter campaign, etc. provide some validation before traction.

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