6 ms·

Reddit Founders' YC Application

178 points by ptn 16y ago

nandemo 16y ago
> We are going to build an infrastructure that will allow consumers to order food from their cell phones (via a text-interface, rather than voice), drive to the restaurant and pick up their order. That sounds like a much more promising business than "a site where users submit news and sites, vote them up and write comments about them". I don't mean this is in a snarky way, I'm a reddit user too. Am I missing something?
- axod 16y ago
  It certainly sounds like it would have made more profit, but less likely of getting bought. Reddit was a fantastic idea to getting acquired.
- jroes 16y ago
  Good point, I came here looking for the answer to this too. Hopefully kn0thing or pg can shed some light as to why this was such a horrible idea?
  - tsbaron 16y ago
    Here is what Alexis had to say answering this question in the comments section of his site: alexis ohanian said... I believe the biggest thing was the dangers of dealing with both cellphone carriers (this is pre "AppStore," remember) who are notoriously closed and slow-moving as well as restaurants, which aren't typically very tech-curious (all the ones I spoke with were taking online orders via fax).
  - Indyan 16y ago
    Edit: Never mind. Someone posted the samething below.
- notahacker 16y ago
  Technical challenges integrating with existing restaraunt ordering systems; probable need for active field salespeople. They acknowledge possibly even needing hardware... It might stand a chance of being a more profitable business than Reddit, but it's a tough and expensive route to market without experience or a large chain desperate to try the system. Probably pg had good reason to be more risk-averse about the types of business he invested in back in 2005.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    But it seems like more of a risk to think a social news site (of all things) will be a successful business. Without Condé Nast to be the "greater fool" (in the sense of the "greater fool theory" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory) it's really questionable even today whether Reddit could have been profitable. Something that actual businesses can use to sell things to people? Sure, there are risks, but at least it can make money.
    - jackowayed 16y ago
      But still, the sales challenge is immense, especially for 3 guys with no sales experience and no money (remember that back then it was nowhere near as easy to raise a bunch of money after YC). Individually talking to every restaurant you sell to doesn't scale at all, and signing on big chains would have been very hard, especially before they had proven that it works and makes restaurants money. Plus, the problem he mentioned about integrating with other restaurants' systems is a major one. I'd guess that there are many different order-tracking systems. They'd probably have to customize that hardware solution to each restaurant that already had an electronic order-tracking system. Now, they could have started out with restaurants that were just using paper (with the hardware appliance just printing stuff out), but that would pretty much exclusively mean small non-chain restaurants, which, again, doesn't scale.
- psawaya 16y ago
  This was like five years ago, before mobile internet was available to most consumers. Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe. It was a good idea, just ahead of its time.
  - ergo98 16y ago
    This was like five years ago, before mobile internet was available to most consumers. Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe. J2ME apps involved no carrier participation (though often you had to target all of the profiles), and most devices, including standard Nokia feature phones, could run it. Windows Mobile apps...well that was always completely open and with little carrier control. And of course...WAP. Largely forgotten now, but the Gopher-like WAP was usable on pretty much every feature phone, optimized for limited displays and input technologies. It was a giant dud for a variety of reasons, but it was always an option back to the turn of the century. And you didn't need a data plan, which remains the #1 impediment to the mobile revolution, though you did get charged usurious rates for the packets you did use.
    - city41 16y ago
      But how many people really used these things? I consider myself pretty techy and I can count on one hand the number of J2ME apps I've used (heck, I can use my other hand to count the number of times I used them).
  - eru 16y ago
    > Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe. While an app would have been nice, I guess that you could do something like this with just SMS.
- ojilles 16y ago
  This is essentially Just-eat.com, minus the mobile txt messaging. Depending on the geography here in Europe it's wildly successful.
- spez 16y ago
  One requires significantly more overhead. Also, the whole thing about submitting, voting, and commenting came much later. Reddit didn't even have comments for the first 5 months or so.
tomjen3 16y ago
this is actually pretty close to an already existing service in Denmark called just-eat.dk, except it focuses mostly on fast-food, and you order over the internet. So pg missed the boat on this one. Fortunately I haven't seen this anywhere in the us and it will take some times before these guys will branch out of the country, if at all.
- nhangen 16y ago
  Many restaurants have implemented it on their own via iPhone app or web app. Chipotle is an example.
- mseebach 16y ago
  Just Eat is expanding pretty aggressively, currently in eight countries, UK is the largest. http://www.just-eat.com/ http://www.just-eat.com/
  - ojilles 16y ago
    From personal experience (lived in 3 Just-eat.com "countries") I would say Denmark is the biggest. In the cities, there's a really high coverage of restaurants -- and not just fast-food either. The problem for restaurants is pretty interesting, and reminds me of the disintermediation RoundTable is doing in the US.
  - eru 16y ago
    I thought it was a UK-only thing earlier. I was surprised when I saw them in Belgium.
- ig1 16y ago
  Just-Eat is the largest player in the market (revenue of around 700 million dollars/year), SeamlessWeb in the US are the next closest competitor but they're a long way behind.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    Compared to reddit, pgs advice must have cost them a fortune. Damm.
wallflower 16y ago
I like Steve's answer: "Steve: Ten years from now I hope that we would have either sold the company for gazillions of dollars, or realized we could not do so and tried to come up with something new." The application content seems remarkably normal. Even the Restaurant idea. Nothing stands out other than the 'Animal' question. Like, within the realm of most of us at HN (even if the quantity of YC applications has raised the bar since Summer 2005). Thanks for posting this.
meterplech 16y ago
I find the number of poeople who end up not working on the startup interesting. We also saw that on a few of the other yc posted apps recently. As a college senior I try to put myself in their shoes. I think a good barometer for startup success could be how good the offers they are willing to turn down to start it. If nothing else, the need to validate their decision could add extra motivation
piers 16y ago
So how on earth did it get from that to what is currently reddit?
- user24 16y ago
  > We were rejected after our interview, but Paul called us the next morning as we rode back to Charlottesville to say we could join YC if we came up with a new idea. That idea was reddit. top of the article ;)
- kn0thing 16y ago
  When PG offered us a chance to be in YC, we agreed to hop off the train in CT and grab the next one back to Boston to brainstorm with him about a new idea. From that ~1hr conversation came the idea for reddit. PG summed it up well: we were building a "front page of the web."
  - alexophile 16y ago
    Sounds like a great scene for the Social Network 2: The Upvoting.
    - ilovecomputers 16y ago
      Way ahead of you. I wrote the script after spending 30 min reading blog posts that interview reddit founders. Than I realized the movie wasn't Hollywood enough, so I added frat parties, cocaine, and made PG 30 years younger and more eccentric and more of a ladies man. I think I'm on to a blockbuster here. Does YCombinator invest in film productions?
      - kn0thing 16y ago
        Please let me be played by Christopher Walken.
        eru 16y ago
        If you add a dance routine, he may even do it for free. At least he did so for Weapon of Choice.
pclark 16y ago
It's interesting to see how the application form has evolved.
- kn0thing 16y ago
  I was telling team YC during interview week that I miss the "animal" question, partially because I really love our answer (the "we're a freaking zoo" line is pure Huffman).
- ciscoriordan 16y ago
  They used to ask for your Slashdot username!
  - kn0thing 16y ago
    And in Steve's defense, his number should be lower, but I think he lurked for years...
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Well, Reddit didn't exist yet (on account of Reddit being a YC startup) and HN didn't exist because Reddit hadn't gotten to a state that HN needed to be created. So the evolution seems natural, assuming they wanted to know whether you made any intelligent comments on tech news sites.
  - ilovecomputers 16y ago
    Now what do they ask for?
    - zck 16y ago
      From http://news.ycombinator.com/w2011form http://news.ycombinator.com/w2011form : >For each founder, please list: YC username; ... personal url, github url, facebook id, twitter id;...
      - younata 16y ago
        "Sorry, the application deadline has passed." Edit: Anyone have a copy of it?
jmtame 16y ago
Made me laugh: "animals? were a freaking zoo!"
karzeem 16y ago
PG, when you read this did you remember them as the guys who met you after your talk in Cambridge?
mikeryan 16y ago
So I have to wonder if this application would have gotten anywhere if pg hadn't personally met these guys previously? ie. is this really a sample of a "winning" YC application?
- ig1 16y ago
  I imagine the quality of applicants to YC has gone up considerably in the last five years, and many of the applicants who were selected then may well have struggled to get through the current rounds.
fbnt 16y ago
I just realized that Alexis = Reddit founder = kn0thing = the author of this -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isk88nT0sRY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isk88nT0sRY That is one of my favourite youtubes. Big kudos! I couldn't stop laughing the first time I watched it. It's amazing how most of it still applies after ~5 years
- kn0thing 16y ago
  The jig is up!
JoeBracken 16y ago
This supports that investors invest in the founders and not the idea. This isn't the most compelling application/idea however the founders made an impression and that got them a slot.
callmeed 16y ago
This is totally a service I've discussed building recently. With 3rd party payment aggregation, you could totally take payment and dispurse funds to restaurants fairly easily. Could do native iOS/droid apps or even SMS ordering with twilio
wcarss 16y ago
I actually have been planning to send an application in with this exact idea. I came to the site today to check in case the next application round is open, and to conceivably fill an application out with this information in it. I'm not sure what to do, at this point. We still think this would be a success but, good god. Edit: In the opinion of anyone reading this; do you think it's a better idea to put our application in as planned (using this exact idea...), or to try to differentiate ourselves somehow?
nutjob123 16y ago
Interesting idea for the time. God aweful business plan though. I hope that they had a thorough document with much more market reaserch before courting investors.

178 points by ptn 16y ago

> We are going to build an infrastructure that will allow consumers to order food from their cell phones (via a text-interface, rather than voice), drive to the restaurant and pick up their order. That sounds like a much more promising business than "a site where users submit news and sites, vote them up and write comments about them". I don't mean this is in a snarky way, I'm a reddit user too. Am I missing something?

axod 16y ago
It certainly sounds like it would have made more profit, but less likely of getting bought. Reddit was a fantastic idea to getting acquired.
jroes 16y ago
Good point, I came here looking for the answer to this too. Hopefully kn0thing or pg can shed some light as to why this was such a horrible idea?
- tsbaron 16y ago
  Here is what Alexis had to say answering this question in the comments section of his site: alexis ohanian said... I believe the biggest thing was the dangers of dealing with both cellphone carriers (this is pre "AppStore," remember) who are notoriously closed and slow-moving as well as restaurants, which aren't typically very tech-curious (all the ones I spoke with were taking online orders via fax).
- Indyan 16y ago
  Edit: Never mind. Someone posted the samething below.
notahacker 16y ago
Technical challenges integrating with existing restaraunt ordering systems; probable need for active field salespeople. They acknowledge possibly even needing hardware... It might stand a chance of being a more profitable business than Reddit, but it's a tough and expensive route to market without experience or a large chain desperate to try the system. Probably pg had good reason to be more risk-averse about the types of business he invested in back in 2005.
- philwelch 16y ago
  But it seems like more of a risk to think a social news site (of all things) will be a successful business. Without Condé Nast to be the "greater fool" (in the sense of the "greater fool theory" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory) it's really questionable even today whether Reddit could have been profitable. Something that actual businesses can use to sell things to people? Sure, there are risks, but at least it can make money.
  - jackowayed 16y ago
    But still, the sales challenge is immense, especially for 3 guys with no sales experience and no money (remember that back then it was nowhere near as easy to raise a bunch of money after YC). Individually talking to every restaurant you sell to doesn't scale at all, and signing on big chains would have been very hard, especially before they had proven that it works and makes restaurants money. Plus, the problem he mentioned about integrating with other restaurants' systems is a major one. I'd guess that there are many different order-tracking systems. They'd probably have to customize that hardware solution to each restaurant that already had an electronic order-tracking system. Now, they could have started out with restaurants that were just using paper (with the hardware appliance just printing stuff out), but that would pretty much exclusively mean small non-chain restaurants, which, again, doesn't scale.
psawaya 16y ago
This was like five years ago, before mobile internet was available to most consumers. Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe. It was a good idea, just ahead of its time.
- ergo98 16y ago
  This was like five years ago, before mobile internet was available to most consumers. Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe. J2ME apps involved no carrier participation (though often you had to target all of the profiles), and most devices, including standard Nokia feature phones, could run it. Windows Mobile apps...well that was always completely open and with little carrier control. And of course...WAP. Largely forgotten now, but the Gopher-like WAP was usable on pretty much every feature phone, optimized for limited displays and input technologies. It was a giant dud for a variety of reasons, but it was always an option back to the turn of the century. And you didn't need a data plan, which remains the #1 impediment to the mobile revolution, though you did get charged usurious rates for the packets you did use.
  - city41 16y ago
    But how many people really used these things? I consider myself pretty techy and I can count on one hand the number of J2ME apps I've used (heck, I can use my other hand to count the number of times I used them).
- eru 16y ago
  > Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe. While an app would have been nice, I guess that you could do something like this with just SMS.
ojilles 16y ago
This is essentially Just-eat.com, minus the mobile txt messaging. Depending on the geography here in Europe it's wildly successful.
spez 16y ago
One requires significantly more overhead. Also, the whole thing about submitting, voting, and commenting came much later. Reddit didn't even have comments for the first 5 months or so.

tomjen3 16y ago

this is actually pretty close to an already existing service in Denmark called just-eat.dk, except it focuses mostly on fast-food, and you order over the internet. So pg missed the boat on this one. Fortunately I haven't seen this anywhere in the us and it will take some times before these guys will branch out of the country, if at all.

nhangen 16y ago
Many restaurants have implemented it on their own via iPhone app or web app. Chipotle is an example.
mseebach 16y ago
Just Eat is expanding pretty aggressively, currently in eight countries, UK is the largest. http://www.just-eat.com/ http://www.just-eat.com/
- ojilles 16y ago
  From personal experience (lived in 3 Just-eat.com "countries") I would say Denmark is the biggest. In the cities, there's a really high coverage of restaurants -- and not just fast-food either. The problem for restaurants is pretty interesting, and reminds me of the disintermediation RoundTable is doing in the US.
- eru 16y ago
  I thought it was a UK-only thing earlier. I was surprised when I saw them in Belgium.
ig1 16y ago
Just-Eat is the largest player in the market (revenue of around 700 million dollars/year), SeamlessWeb in the US are the next closest competitor but they're a long way behind.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Compared to reddit, pgs advice must have cost them a fortune. Damm.

wallflower 16y ago

I like Steve's answer: "Steve: Ten years from now I hope that we would have either sold the company for gazillions of dollars, or realized we could not do so and tried to come up with something new." The application content seems remarkably normal. Even the Restaurant idea. Nothing stands out other than the 'Animal' question. Like, within the realm of most of us at HN (even if the quantity of YC applications has raised the bar since Summer 2005). Thanks for posting this.

meterplech 16y ago

I find the number of poeople who end up not working on the startup interesting. We also saw that on a few of the other yc posted apps recently. As a college senior I try to put myself in their shoes. I think a good barometer for startup success could be how good the offers they are willing to turn down to start it. If nothing else, the need to validate their decision could add extra motivation

piers 16y ago

So how on earth did it get from that to what is currently reddit?

user24 16y ago
> We were rejected after our interview, but Paul called us the next morning as we rode back to Charlottesville to say we could join YC if we came up with a new idea. That idea was reddit. top of the article ;)
kn0thing 16y ago
When PG offered us a chance to be in YC, we agreed to hop off the train in CT and grab the next one back to Boston to brainstorm with him about a new idea. From that ~1hr conversation came the idea for reddit. PG summed it up well: we were building a "front page of the web."
- alexophile 16y ago
  Sounds like a great scene for the Social Network 2: The Upvoting.
  - ilovecomputers 16y ago
    Way ahead of you. I wrote the script after spending 30 min reading blog posts that interview reddit founders. Than I realized the movie wasn't Hollywood enough, so I added frat parties, cocaine, and made PG 30 years younger and more eccentric and more of a ladies man. I think I'm on to a blockbuster here. Does YCombinator invest in film productions?
    - kn0thing 16y ago
      Please let me be played by Christopher Walken.
      - eru 16y ago
        If you add a dance routine, he may even do it for free. At least he did so for Weapon of Choice.

pclark 16y ago

It's interesting to see how the application form has evolved.

kn0thing 16y ago
I was telling team YC during interview week that I miss the "animal" question, partially because I really love our answer (the "we're a freaking zoo" line is pure Huffman).
ciscoriordan 16y ago
They used to ask for your Slashdot username!
- kn0thing 16y ago
  And in Steve's defense, his number should be lower, but I think he lurked for years...
- philwelch 16y ago
  Well, Reddit didn't exist yet (on account of Reddit being a YC startup) and HN didn't exist because Reddit hadn't gotten to a state that HN needed to be created. So the evolution seems natural, assuming they wanted to know whether you made any intelligent comments on tech news sites.
- ilovecomputers 16y ago
  Now what do they ask for?
  - zck 16y ago
    From http://news.ycombinator.com/w2011form http://news.ycombinator.com/w2011form : >For each founder, please list: YC username; ... personal url, github url, facebook id, twitter id;...
    - younata 16y ago
      "Sorry, the application deadline has passed." Edit: Anyone have a copy of it?

jmtame 16y ago

Made me laugh: "animals? were a freaking zoo!"

karzeem 16y ago

PG, when you read this did you remember them as the guys who met you after your talk in Cambridge?

mikeryan 16y ago

So I have to wonder if this application would have gotten anywhere if pg hadn't personally met these guys previously? ie. is this really a sample of a "winning" YC application?

ig1 16y ago
I imagine the quality of applicants to YC has gone up considerably in the last five years, and many of the applicants who were selected then may well have struggled to get through the current rounds.

fbnt 16y ago

I just realized that Alexis = Reddit founder = kn0thing = the author of this -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isk88nT0sRY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isk88nT0sRY That is one of my favourite youtubes. Big kudos! I couldn't stop laughing the first time I watched it. It's amazing how most of it still applies after ~5 years

kn0thing 16y ago
The jig is up!

JoeBracken 16y ago

This supports that investors invest in the founders and not the idea. This isn't the most compelling application/idea however the founders made an impression and that got them a slot.

callmeed 16y ago

This is totally a service I've discussed building recently. With 3rd party payment aggregation, you could totally take payment and dispurse funds to restaurants fairly easily. Could do native iOS/droid apps or even SMS ordering with twilio

wcarss 16y ago

I actually have been planning to send an application in with this exact idea. I came to the site today to check in case the next application round is open, and to conceivably fill an application out with this information in it. I'm not sure what to do, at this point. We still think this would be a success but, good god. Edit: In the opinion of anyone reading this; do you think it's a better idea to put our application in as planned (using this exact idea...), or to try to differentiate ourselves somehow?

nutjob123 16y ago

Interesting idea for the time. God aweful business plan though. I hope that they had a thorough document with much more market reaserch before courting investors.