4 ms·
Applications now open for summer 2008 YC funding cycle
- danielha 19y agoI liked the Cambridge YC HQ quite a bit. It's much homier than the one in MV.
- ivankirigin 19y agoMuch smaller too, right? I wonder how they'll fit all the groups if next year they have even more.
- curi 19y agousually when you're so popular you run out of space, it's not a problem to get more
- ivankirigin 19y agoI get your point, but it is a huge hassle to expand. Have you ever been part of a company in the process of a move? It takes eons. Luckily for YC, it seems all they need to do to get setup is buy a place and get their architect to make it perdy.
- pg 19y agoI'm wondering too. We were pretty much at the limit last summer. When we had investors there for demo day, we literally had to put the founders outside in a tent. Fortunately we can expand in time if constrained in space: just have multiple dinners per week. That would get us 7x without needing to find a new building. I've had my eye out for places in Cambridge, but it would be really hard to beat the current one.
- gibsonf1 19y agoIf you need a good architect to build something remarkable for YC, let me know :)
- Tichy 19y agoPlug: word count Greasemonkey script for yc application form http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13291 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13291
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- Tichy 19y agoMine has colors, too ;-)
- ivankirigin 19y agoEditing in something accessible online -- like Google Docs -- is just so much easier than dealing with the form. You should write to clearly emphasize your point, and only when you're done ask yourself if you've violated the spirit of the 120 word limit.
- Tichy 19y agoWell it seemed like a good opportunity to try out Greasemonkey at the time (wrote it for the last application cycle). Just thought the one or other applicant might appreciate it. The bookmarklet somebody else posted might be more elegant, though. Also I had been looking for word count scripts like that and didn't find any, so maybe it can be useful for other web sites, too (it works for the news.yc comment form, for example).
- ivankirigin 19y agoI would love a more powerful right-click menu. I'd like to highlight a bunch of text, and have the word count told to me. A script for a single site isn't as useful.
- tlrobinson 19y ago
- Tichy 19y ago"Are any of the following true? ..." You forgot "are you a terrorist" ;-) That question seems to indicate that there will be automated screening out of applications?
- cperciva 19y agoI don't think the YC crew is silly enough to automatically discard applications. Most likely they'll use this question to pull out applications for a preliminary "can we see anything amazing here" filtering stage. PG has said before that traits listed in that question aren't absolutely disqualifying -- I think his exact words were "we'll bend any rule if you're a genius" -- but from a perspective of streamlining the application-handling process, I'm sure they'd like to eliminate the applications from non-genius rule-benders as quickly as possible.
- pg 19y agoNo, there's no automated screening. We added this question because people's answers are sometimes so unclear that we can't be sure of the answers to these. It serves the same purpose as a check digit in a credit card number. We certainly wouldn't automatically reject a group that answered this question yes. Loopt would have, among others.
- Tichy 19y agoThank you for the clarification!
- mcxx 19y agoIs there any chance of YC expanding to Europe in the future?
- sharpshoot 19y agoWhat do you mean expand to Europe? European founders can apply.
- mcxx 19y agoYes, I know that but we would have to move to US for the summer and thus get visas, which could be difficult.
- pmjordan 19y agoI'm hoping that getting a visa is easy compared to getting a successful startup off the ground. :) pg's views on this have been widely documented.
- DaniFong 19y agoFrom http://www.paulgraham.com/america http://www.paulgraham.com/america : "US immigration policy is particularly ill-suited to startups, because it reflects a model of work from the 1970s. It assumes good technical people have college degrees, and that work means working for a big company. If you don't have a college degree you can't get an H1B visa, the type usually issued to programmers. But a test that excludes Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell can't be a good one. Plus you can't get a visa for working on your own company, only for working as an employee of someone else's. And if you want to apply for citizenship you daren't work for a startup at all, because if your sponsor goes out of business, you have to start over." Getting a visa isn't always something you have control over. My best friend, having found a job at a YC startup, is currently held up at the boarder. The guards didn't seem to believe it was a real company. I was rejected for my TN visa once, and had to prove that the company I was to be working for was incorporated, along with a plethora of other documentation. I'm still not sure how I'm supposed to get a visa to work at my startup. The rules for the TN-1 visa (for Canadians, I presume the TN-2 for Mexicans work similarly) say you can't be a controlling owner of the business you'd work for. Could you then get a whole bunch of Canadians together, no one of whom would have a controlling share, and found a company in the US? I've tried to hunt down an answer to this, but to no avail. By the letter of the law, yes, one should be able to: this means that many college educated Canadians could bypass immigration entirely. But in practice it's up to the whim of the immigration guard, and people are kept out of the US, not allowed to work for completely legit companies.
- rms 19y agoooo, new question: Please tell us about the time you, username, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
- pg 19y agoThere are a bunch of new questions. That one was suggested by Sam Altman.
- Alex3917 19y agoThat's a really awesome question. If you don't already have a copy, you might enjoy Rod Beckstrom's book Brainticklers. It's basically just a book of questions about the year 3,000. The questions range from "When we can match or exceed many or all human physical and mental skills with computers or appliances, how will we define our reason for being?" to "What will be the most popular baby shower gift in the year 3,000?" It would probably be a fun toy for the YC dinners.
- ajkirwin 19y agoI didn't quite understand that, yet I still applied. I just asked for further clarification.
- ajkirwin 19y agoI applied, because, well.. he who never tries, never succeeds? One should never be afraid of failure or rejection!
- secgeek 19y agosuppoes someone in india then will u consider them?i mean cost of relocating there is high so is it ok?
- wumi 19y agoNot to throw a racial stick into the wheel, but are there any black or latino founders out there applying to Y C? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104919 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104919 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104728 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104728
- Tichy 19y agoI know that I don't know the skin color of the creators of web sites I visit. Also, I just remember MC Hammer being in a promo video of a YC startup, I think weebly. And I've heard he is starting his own social network thing, something music related.
- xirium 19y agoI wasn't able to login using elinks. The error to the POST submission was "Post request without Content-Length." You might want to have a look at that.
- DaniFong 19y agoSuspend your disbelief, and irrationally accept what quantcast tells you: (http://www.quantcast.com/paulgraham.com http://www.quantcast.com/paulgraham.com) African americans, latinos, and asians all outrank caucasians in pageviews on paulgraham.com. It also shares with ycombinator.com a slightly female audience, and members who visit also enjoy shopping for horses. ;-)