Founder recommendation after working at a YC startup can help get you into YC
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
I not saying YC is elitist, because the since-the-beginning action of actually reading ALL applications, no matter from who, says a lot about the meaning to accept people with no connection at all to YC ecossystem.
But, said that, this announced action is a step on the opposite direction. I would appreciate another step in the direction of "we give a fair chance to not well connected people". Maybe some active recruiting actions on other places outside Silicon Valley.
As a double counter-example, 500startups do a lot of active recruiting outside USA. But, at least in Brazil, to have a real chance on getting in, you need the personal approval of a particular individual (Beddy Yang) to endorse your application. Having an application from Brazil, with no endorsement from this person, is as good as not applying at all. So solve one problem, but creating another to the openness of the selection process.
You have 5 applicants. They all look great/same. One of them has a reference you can trust. OF COURSE you weigh that. Why wouldn't you use a signal if you thought it might make a difference?
The fix from the applicants side isn't to try to put that in your resume (it's just a nice to have, hardly worth the X years it will take out of you life).
The fix is to differentiate yourself in terms of product and traction because that's the only way completely within your control.
ps: I agree with the general gist of your comment though :)
YC partners do dozens of events every year in the US and dozens more in the rest of the world to reach out to people we don't have any connection to.
A great idea, product, market, traction, etc. will always carry more weight than anything else. As much as there is any single secret to YC's success (other than not having a coworking space), being willing to talk to people with no connection to us is it.
That said, we definitely take note of recommendations from YC founders about great people they've worked with, and we should be upfront about that.
Also, we think announcing this will help YC companies recruit, and anything we can do to help YC companies we like to do.
Why should YC care about your perception problems?
But how does making a a formal policy and public announcement help YC or applicants? It looks and smells bad from the outside. I winced when I read it.
Imagine if beloved Stanford made that announcement. They would not be so daft.
"If you've worked with a Stanford professor and have a positive reference from them, we will take that into account on your application."
?
That sounds like a totally sensible (as well as totally ethical) thing do do!
But what exactly constitutes, "extra consideration"?
It's the mandate of YC to find companies worth investing in and founders who are worth having a relationship with. So it's in YC's best interest to give all extra consideration possible to every single candidate. No?
So it sounds to me like it's a matter of giving additional preference to such candidates.
I was invited to interview at YC a few years ago and they declined to get involved with my venture. Indeed, I was quite a bit less experienced at that time, and I didn't realize that YC's real mandate is to find at least one company in each batch that will be a billion dollar company. My business model wasn't geared for that kind of growth, so I must not have known what I was doing when I applied to YC. However, if they had decided to provide me "extra consideration", they might have informed me of their feedback /before/ rejecting me instead of /after/ rejecting me, and then instead judged me on the merit of how I treated their feedback. In other words, to have judged me based on my capacity to learn.
Well, I didn't get funded that day, but I did meet one of the founders of a company that graduated YC the year before. He very soon after offered me a job as their first engineering hire. I worked with that YC company for a while, and it was there that I found out that just having gone to YC doesn't make a company's founders into true leaders. I saw the same thing at a Tech Stars company where I worked thereafter.
After all, genuine leadership is a function of individual truthfulness. In my experience, such a thing is only won through hard training by learning from a truthful person, and/or hard trials while trying to live truthfully.
However, one of the problems is that only truthful people can recognize and understand other truthful people. Not being able to recognize others' capacity without truthfulness, we need to be very careful about trusting our own judgements.
In that case, is the so-called "extra consideration" really able to be "extra consideration" of the person themselves, or is it simply the application of favor by using the heuristic of the candidate having worked under a YC grad?
2) 'take into account' is not 'give your YC application extra consideration'. The former is neutral with regard to resource usage, the latter is not.
That's it.
But it also hurts YC. They are selling out the value of "we will look at your application regardless of your network" which will mean lots of founders without SV networks will self-select out of applying. It compounds the problem YC has with getting experienced people to apply.
Also, everything I've heard about sama indicates he networks amazingly well. So, it probably makes sense for him to give advice that promotes other people to do the same as a way to success.
But top startups make their hiring decisions almost entirely based on the skills of the candidates, because they can't afford to be at all self-indulgent. So this probably is a good thing and serves as a merit-based backdoor for some otherwise underestimated people.
References can't hurt. And, if you don't have a concrete next step then working with/for like-minded people is a blast.
But, if you really want to start something, start it. There are no gatekeepers. You don't need to build someone else's dream before you build yours.
As an aside, do we have some numbers on how many YC employees went on to start companies that are now in YC? Compared to say: ex-Google/facebook employees?
Doing a startup is the 21st century version of the 7th century practice of going on a religious pilgrimage. And YC is a wealthy kingdom somewhere along the way; it is neither your destination nor an absolutely necessary via-point (though it is refreshing to go there). Your startup is your journey, the roads you trailblazed is your business, and the journey itself starts with you and it ends with you. YC might help you on your way, but it won't and can't carry you (incidentally, the only thing that gets your through your worst moments is blind and obstinate faith, which is surprising because this hasn't changed despite all the centuries)
If you're reading this post and thinking 'well, that sucks', it's important to realize that pretty much everything everywhere works the same way.
The former talks about getting a stamp of approval on the team while the latter talks about a stamp of approval on the execution/product.
I would think the latter would be the one to carry a lot more weight by default.
If this were about a16z, I would guess the latter. Since it's about YC, I can't hazard a guess.
It would be a shame if YC missed out on good investments simply because their founders were too busy successfully running their own companies to have an opportunity to work at a YC-funded company.
There were other "surprising hacks" always mentioned here, have a solid product with good group, have a product which makes money, get a recommendation from other YC alumni etc.
This, this just sounds like, "hey, we want you to work for our companies. In case you ever want to start one, we will look at your app favorably then."
hack => trick
Happens a bit in sama's and pg's comments too. Kind of funny, I guess nobody's immune to writing buzzfeed posts.
Hopefully the mods will enforce the HN guidelines and rename this submission with a non-linkbaity title :)
"Working at a YC startup can help you get into YC" isn't right, since what the post says is that a recommendation from a founder of a YC-funded startup that you've worked at can help get you into YC. 80 chars, anyone?
Edit: ok, thought of one. We've changed the title from "One surprising hack to get into YC". If anyone can suggest a better title, we're happy to change it again.
We are mostly adults here, why so much equivocation?
When trying to come up with a better title, our rule of thumb is: stick to the language of the article as much as possible. Don't paraphrase. Best case is when you can find a sentence or phrase that expresses the article's actual point neutrally, in which case we can just use that. He didn't make this easy, did he. :)
Not following your bit about equivocation.
(I like your use of the word "vouch", though, for unrelated reasons that will become apparent in the next week or two...)
That's supposed to be a way to get around the system. Even "trick" implies some form of short-circuiting.
This, however, says "work a few years and we might look at your application a little more closely" so you can get into the system.
Lols.
If I have worked at a YC company, I get extra startup cred, but no worries, if you don't have that recommendation then we're still cool - right? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Announcing there's a way to getting special treatment, then completely backing off your original statement? Brilliant.