rachellaw

I think they're all pretty bad tbh. They aren't very good at guessing age, and guessing gender is harder especially if you're young or have rounded features.

thanks! We were wondering if it was worth applying.

We went from zero revenue to generating revenue after our old accelerator and was looking into YC to grow now that we had a solid, validated product-market fit.

How much is the bias against startups that have been to other accelerators? What are the benchmarks for progress in those cases?

One the reasons why it took so long (2 months to approval) is there isn't a clear set of rules for success.

When you submit to Play store or Apple store, there's a list of guidelines and checkbox reasons why you get rejected.

With Slack, it's more like having a conversation about making it better, not necessary a fixed set of rules.

It probably didn't help that we submitted in mid-December when most people were already on holiday.

I like the penguin it's cute, but I can't help but think of Microsoft clippy

Yes, that's what we thought as well when we got rejected. With such a large group of applicants, the core reason is probably "you're on the wrong side of bell curve"

At the same time I wish they were more transparent. Dropping bits and pieces in no particular order like "don't do a previous accelerator" or "get a recommendation from another alum" makes their process seem irrational.

one of the things that really struck me when fundraising:

"...that 25k he just gave you, could've gone to his kids' college fund or investing in blue chip stocks instead. It's amazing that you can raise money at all."

Angels give less money than VCs, some angels give low amounts (15-25k) especially in an early seed round. They're doing it for you. Screwing them over for more equity or YC makes you a shitty irresponsible human being and imho, should be considered a type of fraud.

Honestly I'm surprised at Sam's stance. Unless it's really justifiable, this seems like bad advice.

one of the key reasons why people join accelerators is for network and connections though, not just advice.

Without that conversations, that sounding board, all that written advice just makes another investopedia/venturehacks guidebook. Most startup founders already do the google legwork and required readings. It's great, but not the main reason why people would apply for YC.

It's more of a natural evolution. We had one idea on how to use the technology, but the user feedback preferred a smaller aspect that we overlooked. So we narrowed down and turned that one small aspect into the company focus instead. The technology that powers it all, is still the same

I guess you can call it baggage, but nothing works right out of the box. Youtube was a dating site before it became a video site, but they didn't start fresh/reincorporate. They just grew from what their users wanted.

We've already taken investment pre-pivot from angels, screwing investors over to be a 'fresh startup' seems to be a type of fraud.

It's different pitch, but a natural and logical progression. Most of the time ideas need refining, especially with user feedback. It doesn't make sense to start with a new company since the technology that powers is still the same.

It seems to unfairly penalize startups who've pivoted since after the accelerator.

We've been to one. It was early stage, and within our geography. When we spoke to YC/500startups in 2013, it was all about having traction or earning revenue and breaking even. We didn't have that. We were academia dropouts with some patents and an idea.

Going through the 1st accelerator helped us because we didn't even know how to put together a pitch deck. We've since pivoted because ideas change, become more focused and polished. Our idea, business model and pitch is completely different.

YC would not have accepted us in 2013, someone else did. Now if we want to apply to YC post-pivot, we get penalized? That seems incredibly unfair.

I think it's in-combo with the whole AI/automated personalization as well. It used to be very difficult to do intelligent bots, but now you have tensorflow/caffe/word2vec frameworks that come built-in with NLP

The walled garden thing has always been an issue though. I mean Facebook threw a fit when India turned down their "facebook-only" internet: http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21685292-...

What's fascinating is the bot-bandwagon is mirroring the early app market.

With apps, you downloaded things to do things. With bots, you integrate them into things, so they'll do it for you. (Save extra step laziness)

I think you have to be a successful founder i.e. huge revenue or huge user growth or a VC in order to give expert advice and feedback.

For user testing, the most important metric is not how many people give us feedback but whether it's coming from a credible and relevant source.

We were rejected, despite being in the YC RFS' category (A.I.)

Kip is a deep learning search for fashion in IRL stores around you: https://kipsearch.com

I don't think there was a particular reason why they rejected us, most likely that in a bell curve we just weren't as good compared to other applicants.

It was great fun doing the application, and we learned a lot! More importantly, we closed a lead investor/partnership the day before, so even though we were rejected it wasn't a big disappointment.

Thanks! I'm curious to know how Lyst would handle outlier datapoints. ANN seems to be a variation of regression techniques (achieving nearest result) instead of creating a new mutual exclusion (unsupervised learning)

I have an O-1 visa, it's not impossible and it's a great visa to have since you can reuse the same documents for your initial application for subsequent renewal. The key is to get as many peer references you can get in your industry.

While getting letters from your advisers and investors is great, it's a common mistake to ONLY do people in your startup. You want to get recommendations from your previous employers and also academics who write about the industry you're in to justify your extraordinary ability. You don't want to put "founder" in your application (unless you're IPO'ed), you want to put "founder + professional skill".

The reason is that an O-1 is really meant for talent or skilled professionals. Being a founder is not necessarily a skill, it's just an indication that you've started a company. By applying as a founder, you miss the main purpose of the visa and that gets your application rejected.

edit: not a YC founder, just a founder.

Sam A. said that they received around +6500~ applications, so being in the top 300 would make you in the 5%

https://twitter.com/sama/status/626523690533027840

I'm assuming that the founders they're looking for are already on a Series A or have a nice cushion of savings or positive cashflow? I'm making 5x lower than I previously did (thanks for reminding me!) after bootstrapping through all my savings and such.

TBH it seems like they're doing a survey to confirm a story they've already written on founder successes. That's a good, rags-to-riches story but the hard numbers is that 80% of startups will fail within 3 years and those founders will be financially burned.

not the OP, but I met mine in grad school. We were working on different projects in a similar area. We really only decided to become cofounders after a year of graduating, because finishing one thesis and immediately hopping to another seemed like the fastest way to a burnout.

agree, and I'll extend it to finding cofounders through hackathons too. It's a huge ask for both parties, especially since you'll be financially and mentally be in each other's pockets the whole time.

You don't do that to someone you've just met. That's akin to proposing after a one night hookup on Tinder.

I think otherwise though, it seems like the fellowship was to try for remote program. See this article by SamA: http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/20/y-combinator-just-introduce...

I'm just concerned if they're going to cut out later stage startups who have fundraising but re-launched or pivoted.

Hey Kat,

Would YC Fellowship be open to later stage startups?

We've already gone through a previous accelerator, done some fundraising (below series A) and have employees. Moving would be difficult for us since our key business is in fashion (we're in NYC) and also employees. As founders we're happy to go down to SF once in a while, but the remote option would suit us perfectly.

thanks!

it's still bloody damn hard i get nightmares about cashflow

Note if you don't get a response from hello@interfacefoundry you can email me directly at rachel AT milkred DOT net (personal)

Interface Foundry – New York City – (Full time, Interns and H1B; developers and designers)

We let users browse and build their own data bubbles -- data pinned to a specific location or time, consolidating apps and other widgets into a single context-aware interface.

Our mission is to index the physical world, allowing people to move seamlessly from one area or timeframe to another, interacting with their environment where information (apps, widgets, connected devices, data cards, localized maps) is absorbed into personal devices securely.

We just closed our first round of seed/angel financing, raised over 100K and looking to grow and scale quickly. We have over 20,000 users, deployed worldwide everywhere from Berlin to Barcelona, Detroit to Oakland and of course, NYC. Our system is open source, open API and open hardware. We believe strongly in transparency and accountability, and have benefit-corporation status.

Our culture embraces diversity, we value a collaborative environment with lots of challenges that require creative solutions. We like walking-breaks, snacks and cats. We’re flexible about time as long as you get work done. We prefer direct communication, if there are any issues or things in your mind, let us know. You’ll be joining us in our office in downtown SoHo, and there’s a lot of great food places nearby Chinatown too. All early employees get both stock options and vesting interest when they join full time, along with other possible benefits such as health insurance.

More information: http://interfacefoundry.com

Positions:

== Front-End Developer ==

Build out widgets and interactive themes for our mobile front-end for events around NYC, the data bubble builder interface for anyone to build new bubbles and a searchable map of active bubbles.

- Knowledge of: Angular.js, CSS3, HTML5, PhoneGap, Git

- Nice to have: Leaflet.js, OpenStreetMap / automated geo-tile creation

== Back-End Engineer ==

Perfect our database architecture, automated systems for API consolidation and communication with 3rd party connected devices, authentication / security.

- Knowledge of: Node.js, MongoDB, Express, Git

- Nice to have: Hadoop, Elasticsearch

If you’re interested, send us a note: hello@interfacefoundry.com and we will definitely get back to you!

Some things just require a lot of time to grow, either because it's a new problem or a new technology. We were lucky because both of us (founders) had a headstart in academia, which funded our research for 2 years. We could chart prototype pools of 20,000+ people and test out things like scalable mesh wifi networks and user-persona switching because of that academia safety net.

Maybe it's more truthful to say - "having a growth vertical and being able to articulate it concisely is the most important." Things will change. Your strategy will change, your product will adjust itself based on testing, listening, more testing, listening. Getting that market fit, and knowing your market ensures that you're growing in the direction that you actually want to grow in.

I'm a current applicant though, so maybe I'm wrong. Regardless, we did our best in the application and that's all we can do. Now -- back to working on the company! (it takes them a while to get back to you anyway, no point waiting anxiously)

PS. good luck to everyone else who applied

I'm an international student on OPT doing startup, but the proposal still makes me uneasy. There's already too much of business interests lobbying in politics and I've seen that happen in my home country -- what starts off as a seemingly good idea, becomes legalized corruption.

I remember O-1 visas had several types, it's the O-1B visa

http://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-workers...

seconded - btw do you have a STEM related degree though? there's now an additional provision for OPT extension if you graduated from a STEM related field.