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How does Y Combinator scale Y Combinator?
- yabbadabbadoo 15y agoLast October, Graham said that the firm was seeing about one submission per minute for the most recent class. Is this right? It sounds wrong. Or was it just on the last day of submissions or something?
- timerickson 15y agoAs I recall, yes, it was right near the last day of submissions that they started getting 1 per minute. Most applications are on the last day.
- evincarofautumn 15y agoI’d be interested to see a graph of submissions/day from announcement till deadline. Is there such a thing?
- pg 15y agoYes, that was during the last day.
- dmvaldman 15y agoI've wondered if this is a skewed statistic due to the "resubmit" feature. How many of these submissions were resubmissions, versus "first-time" submissions? It seems more reasonable to do a last minute check, and update the app with any most recent progress (as I did) on the last day.
- pg 15y agoThey were first-time submissions. It's still a rather meaningless statistic though.
- brianbreslin 15y agoIs there a total published anywhere on yc with total applicant teams vs accepted during last two batches? I remember someone saying yc was more exclusive than HBS now. Is that true? (harvard accepts roughly 7% of applicants)
- sskates 15y agoIt's about 3%- http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/y-combinator-demo-day-the-ultimate-roundup/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/y-combinator-demo-day-the-u...
- brianbreslin 15y agothanks
- dustin 15y agoI've seen the 3% number mentioned a few times, and seem to remember hearing that this has stayed consistent for some time (so more applications but still 3% -> bigger batch size) but I can't find the original source just now.
- nchuhoai 15y agoAs a current applicant, I'm glad to see that YC is thinking hard about scaling. With rising application numbers, I'm sure the noise to signal ratio gets worse and considering that funding a bad startup is probably better than missing a good one, I can only applaud any measures that help in that direction. Actually, the cost of funding a bad startup are relatively low, aren't they? It's more the time of the partners and the resources of the alumni network, I'd personally be concerned about.
- kenrikm 15y agoAs another current applicant patiently awaiting the yay/nay email I wish you luck! I know it's got to be difficult for them to sort through all of the applications with so many great teams/companies. I tried to condense mine to make it easier on them but if you do the math (Number of questions * 180 Words) they still come out 3-4k words each! Now I know not all of the questions will fill 180 limit however it's still a lot of reading.
- ph0rque 15y agoThey once used the program to generate a top 10 list of factors predicting the probability of acceptance. ”I don’t want to share it, but it was fascinating,” Graham said. This is understandable, but a pity nonetheless. I'm sure HNers would love to read about the factors. PG, can you tell how well these factors sync with the characteristic of a good founder you've written about in your essays?
- pg 15y agoIt's at the level of spam filtering: individual words in application fields. So the insights were the sort I noticed when I first tried statistical spam filtering-- e.g. that ff0000 was highly correlated with spamminess (because it's html red). Incidentally, the past tense in the article is misleading. We're using that software now. It's the product of a company in the w2012 batch. I don't think I can mention the name because they're not launched yet, but we're very impressed by its performance. SV Angel is using it too.
- rdl 15y agoSo a wise yc-spammer will take the published YC applications of accepted teams (Dropbox, etc.) as a starting point.
- philwelch 15y agoNot enough of a corpus, and not very helpful because the applications are manually reviewed anyway.
- groby_b 15y agoI'm wondering if it says more about the companies or the people judging them :) Kidding aside, I'de be surprised if specific words correlated with the probability of success. So there's a good chance this is measuring only if there are key-words that please the reviewers. I'm sure you've looked at prediction models for individual partners and compared them (or at least considered it, what with days only having 24 hours :) It'd be fantastic to see you write about the results of that - maybe once the company has launched. The reason this has me so curious? If the predictive models are not partner-specific, this could indicate that there are very specific things that successful companies/founders say and/or do. Sharing that might or might not mess with the models, but it has a good chance to increase the likelihood of success.
- vaksel 15y agowhy should they want to scale? the point of YC is quality over quantity...if they go after quantity, they are just diluting what they have to offer. If they have 1000 startups, how much support can they really offer?
- robryan 15y agoWhat if the number of quantity startups has grown though? If last batch they had 66 startups that were judged as good enough to be in the program and this time they see 100 that make that grade, they can take 100 and quality shouldn't drop off.
- webwright 15y agoIf they can scale, they can create more value (for themselves, for the alumni network, for founders in general). If they successfully can scale it, there'd be minimal dilution (and, as they mention in the article, some additional network benefits to the companies/founders).
- paulsutter 15y agoI don't think there is any shortage of problems to solve / companies to start, so I say, keep scaling. Higher education is in need of reinvention. YC may be the most successful experiment to date towards that goal. I would really love to see a quantified ranking of top business schools by the total value of companies created per student-month in the last five years.
- philwelch 15y agoBusiness schools aren't designed for entrepreneurs. The hint is in the title--Master of Business Administration. Business schools train you to be an officer aboard a battleship. YC trains you to build yourself a dive bomber and pilot it.
- paulsutter 15y agoBut don't you think that YC is a business school, by any definition of the word? And wouldn't it be interesting to do a comparative ranking alongside traditional business schools? There was a time I wished I had gone to HBS or Stanford GSB. While those remain fine institutions, wouldn't any young nerd today prefer YC?
- ubi 15y agoI find it interesting that articles always point to AirBnB and DropBox but rarely mention Heroku... YC's largest exit to-date.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mark_up 15y agoHeroku is a B2B startup, unlike AirBnB and Dropbox. B2C startups will always be more sexy and interesting to the wider Techcrunch audience.
- rdl 15y agoThe valuations of both AirBnB and Dropbox are >5x that of the exit value of Heroku, and are still in play. It's entirely possible either (or both) could be $10b companies (yes, this seems crazy to me at some level too, but it's consistent with economic reality as it currently exists). If AirBnB totally disrupts the hotel industry, it could be bigger still. If Dropbox totally takes over as how documents are stored, edited, and managed, of course it would be bigger.
- robryan 15y agoThese valuations can go just as fast as they come though. I know for me, and a lot of people, the concrete value that was determined because someone actually paid it holds a higher weight than the valuations speculative investors have given the lastest hot startups.
- rdl 15y agoThere is some value to that, certainly. Pro: I think selling the whole company for $x is harder than selling 10% for $x/10. Con: Big companies can also destroy value effectively (doesn't appear to be the case at all with Salesforce/Heroku, but...look at anything Yahoo has bought, and a bunch of things Google, Microsoft, etc. have bought. Skype, etc. There's also some bias in the press here -- people reading mass-market publications actually might use (or at least understand) dropbox and airbnb; they have no idea what Heroku does. And, in tech/venture press, independent companies are more interesting because they might get bought; it's unlikely anyone will buy Heroku from Salesforce, or buy Salesforce, so it's less interesting to the press.
- motti_s 15y agoWhen it comes to the applications and the fear of missing good startups, I think the biggest bottleneck is how many groups they can interview. If I'm not mistaken, for W2012 they interviewed 180 groups and accepted 65. That's 36% acceptance rate, but it shouldn't distribute evenly. If the applications were properly graded and the acceptance rate didn't get very low for the lowest graded applicants who were interviewed, then they need to increase the number of groups they interview. I guess that's the case, since pg previously commented that for S2012 they'd probably interview 270 groups. The "problem" is that for every new batch they probably get more applications (and most likely of higher quality), so this might be just playing catch up. Maybe one day an Anybot robot will perform a preliminary interview so they can scale :)
- pg 15y agoAlas we are in fact going to be playing catch up. We got about 50% more applications than last time, so interviewing 50% more startups will put us exactly where we were before. Maybe this time we'll do a perfect job at the reading stage. Not likely, but we can always hope.
- dmvaldman 15y agoHave you considered Skype interviews outsourced to the YC network as another parallel process?
- solnyshok 15y ago3000 applications this time?! do you remember by name every founder from last batch? ' cause that's the line that I would draw in the sand re:scaling. Of course it is just me, as 500 startups prove that this criteria is arbitrary.
- amirmc 15y ago3000 applications this time?! If acceptance still hovers around 3% that implies next class should have around 90 startups. Wow.
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- staunch 15y agoI'm waiting for "StartupAdvisor", a program written in Arc and trained on paulgraham.com/articles.html Office Hours will consist of chatting with the program and (if necessary) pushing the "Request a Bag of Mostly Water" button if it reaches its (temporary) limits.
- azarias 15y agoIt seems like the academic publishing model would be useful here (and in fact that might be what they are doing with alums reading applications.) Each paper gets a few reviewers, which quickly determines the definite accepts and rejects, and the whole committee need only discuss the ones in the middle. The way partners and alums are structured in YC, it would probably be ideal to weigh reviews accordingly. There will definitely be some noise, but one would hope things will shake out as they should most of the time. At least that's what I am hoping.
- dude_abides 15y agoThe academic research community has certainly solved this problem to a large extent, eg. reviewing and program committee meetings at elite conferences such as SigComm and SOSP, or to demonstrate scalability, conferences such as Infocom which get thousands of submissions and still maintain high quality in their accepted papers. One big difference is in the incentives for a PC member at a top conference vs for a YC partner. The former needs to maintain his and the conference's status/reputation by ensuring the papers are of top quality. He doesn't care that much if some great paper is left out. Whereas in the case of a YC partner, the biggest concern is to ensure not missing out on spotting the next Facebook. This is why in the former case, past reputation and being part of the clique is very important, and in the latter case (YC) it is not so.
- eli_gottlieb 15y agoUgh, completely disagreed. Do we really want startup funding run by Statler and Waldorf? Academic reviewers tend to be looking for ways to reject your paper, not even trying to give an honest evaluation.
- azarias 15y agoA surprising amount of peer review is actually done by lowly graduate students who are assigned papers by advisors. I really try to give an honest evaluation :) [and my experience is most people generally do]. However, like it was mentioned above, the penalty for rejecting a good paper is really low.
- crcastle 15y agoWhy isn't the title of this post How Y Combinator Scales Itself? or just How Does Y Combinator Scale? Is it supposed to be copying this post title? http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-github http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-g...