4 ms·
Why don't you move the dates up for everybody?
by medianama 18y ago
Why don't you move the dates up for everybody?
- pg 18y agoMainly because we're not finished yet reading all the applications. When someone gets an exploding termsheet, we can all read their application immediately, but we can't do that for everyone. Also, Robert flies in for the real interviews. When we interview people early, we have to do it without him.
- unalone 18y agoHe's located in Boston?
- pg 18y agoYes; he's a professor at MIT.
- unalone 18y agoGotcha. Also, purely curious question: when you're looking through applications, is there a bar of "this is how many people we'll interview"? Or do you set a bar for quality-of-app, then take as many people as place above that bar?
- pg 18y agoThere's a numeric bar for how many people we'll interview, based on how many groups we can physically talk to in 3 days. We usually interview 50 to 60 groups; it's hard to talk to more than 20 per day. At interviews, though, we care more about quality than numbers. We wouldn't reject a good group because we were over some number.
- prakash 18y agoAre there any stats on if more people get accepted on Day 1 or Day 2 or Day 3, in the mornings, afternoon's or in the evenings? For startups that were accepted, if the startups that interviewed prior and/or after were accepted?
- davidw 18y agoWell, people who interview when there's a full moon tend to get in, but of course it all depends on what pg had for breakfast that particular day. Joking aside, it's probably best not to publish that kind of thing so that people inadvertently worry about something they can't control. The only reason to do those sorts of stats might be for pg & co. to check and make sure they don't have some sort of biases, but it doesn't seem likely.
- prakash 18y agosome context. The first part regd. time of the day was asked since PG mentioned (not sure if it was an essay or a comment on HN) that he used to get mundane stuff done during the day, and then code from 9 pm to 3 am. This is not to say, PG ignores the early interviews and kicks it into high gear for the evening ones; just that if you look at the results, are there any insights or patterns. Re. the 2nd one, look at #9, Cialdini cites the case of the real estate broker.....: http://www.vinvesting.com/docs/munger/human_misjudgement.html http://www.vinvesting.com/docs/munger/human_misjudgement.htm... I agree that YC should not publish these stats, but if they did learn anything interesting that could be shared with everyone, it would make a good read.
- harpastum 18y agoHopefully there's little to no bias based on scheduling, but even if there was, publishing the statistics would only exacerbate the problem. Not only would PG et al be thinking about this while the interviewed people ("This doesn't really seem interesting, but is that just because they're the 18th pitch today?"), but it would also distract the startups, when all they should be focusing on showing YC how awesome they are. As far as I can tell, the people at YCombinator are extremely qualified to pick the best companies out of the group, and they generally do a pretty great job of it.
- medianama 18y agoI was talking about the future rounds. Why don't you be the first one to offer term-sheets?
- pg 18y agoIt probably wouldn't cure the problem. The others would just move their dates even earlier.
- arjunnarayan 18y agoYou should test that hypothesis. There's only so far they can push ahead.