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YC S11 Rejection Letter
We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.
Please don't take it personally. The applications we receive get
better every funding cycle, and since there's a limit on the number
of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot
of genuinely promising groups.
Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know
we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group
to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that
we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall
just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.
http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html
We're trying to get better at this, but the hard limit on the number
of interviews means it's practically certain that groups we rejected
will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate
it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn
from our mistakes.
Y Combinator Team
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- citizenkeys 16y agoThis is new. Got it just now. If there's any angel investors out there, send me an email. I already live in the Valley. I'm willing to make my pitch in person.
- ABrandt 16y agoYour confidence continues to impress me. That being said, I believe its misguided here. The only time a serious investor is going to reach out to you is when you don't actually need their money (as the old adage goes). ...and I'm willing to make my pitch in person. This comes off as, "you should be throwing money at me, but I'm a nice guy so I'll come and talk to you." I know that's not your intention, just trying to help. Good luck!
- rabble 16y agoIt's this year's letter, presumably it's the same as they've used in the past.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tiabasnk 16y agoAint taking it personally. After all, just coz YC is not funding does not mean you have a bad idea. If you're smart and determined, you can still pull through :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- daeken 16y agoI'm going to ignore the content of this post and just say: the tone here makes you sound very bitter and "I'm taking my ball and going home". You may well be right, but this isn't a good way of getting people to take your side, and would look really bad if future potential investors were to see it. Something to keep in mind.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- iamwil 16y agoget feedback from yc alum. They'll be able to tell you.
- jdunck 16y agoIt would cost them time. There's no reason to suspect that just because they've dialed in the application that they aren't tuning the process. Try to remember that sour grapes make good wine. Prove them wrong.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- suhail 16y agoIf you were rejected from Y Combinator. Mixpanel is offering free startup plans to you to help bootstrap your startup. Just forward your rejection letter (as proof) to free@mixpanel.com, sign up, and let us know.
- ABrandt 16y agoYour guys' support of the startup community and overall awesomeness continues to impress me! This is a great example of paying it forward with potential for future returns (some of those free accounts you give out will undoubtedly go on to succeed). Thanks for your contributions.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- matthewhardnack 16y agoWe received a rejection letter as well, we aren't disappointed, the whole process has been a great learning experience for us, filling out the application and recording the video got us thinking about things we hadn't. I've also learned to get more feedback and to go to great new places, like wompt and convore to get that feedback. When we submitted our application we thought that our service was the only service like it out there and we had a hard time explaining our service. But we were wrong just yesterday (1 day before the rejection letter), I found out that there is a similar service and that it was even funded by YC. That service being Songkick. Our lack of research is our own mistake, a mistake we'll learn and grow from. Today our description is: Subscriby is like Songkick but for any interest you decide on and like Topspin, it allows brands to connect directly to it's fans to promote and sell. Yesterday it was: A service that is like twitter/facebook but provides filtered updates for relative interests. And on our website it's: Subscriby is a User-submitted Micro-news Aggregator. Users subscribe to interests and receive filtered updates of user's selected types. So I'm not surprised, that out of the very talented people that applied, we got rejected. Thanks and we'll see you next batch!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- matthewhardnack 16y agoThanks, we certainly will.
- jerrya 16y agoI received my reject letter, which is fine, just filling it out helped me sort out a lot of ideas. I shall place it next to my NASA Astronaut reject letter. I was surprised to find out how obesi-phobic they are!
- ricaurte 16y agoIf you are a business or other non-technical person, a friend and I are building a product to help you get your software idea built and launched, so that you can start making money off of it. My email is in my profile if you're interested.
- mariust 16y agoWe also got rejected, but that's fine. We did not had any demo or a pitch video, so our odds got down the road. However we would like to learn more about how a startup really works (we mean the documents, funding, etc). I will make a post here on hacker news in order for us to get off the ground, I am sure we will have a great product by demo day. We made a deadline for us (demo day).