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Much like the Google guidelines on SEO, I would imagine pg's response to this would be something like 'the best way to optimize your application is to ignore op
by wilfra 14y ago
Much like the Google guidelines on SEO, I would imagine pg's response to this would be something like 'the best way to optimize your application is to ignore optimizing your application' and instead focus on building something awesome.
- RKoutnik 14y agoHe's written quite a bit [0] on what they look for in founders. I'm not talking about pg writing a "How to optimize your app" essay, but literally "Indicators of Failure" [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
- wilfra 14y agoRight, you want him to give you more signals about what they are looking for so you can tell them what you think they want to hear - that's the wrong approach. You should instead focus on being awesome and hope that YC recognizes how awesome you are. The perfect application may look identical to the perfectly gamed application - but the intent is different. And it's a bit naive to think YC isn't really, really good at sniffing out that intent.
- stcredzero 14y ago> And it's a bit naive to think YC isn't really, really good at sniffing out that intent. At this point, YC probably has a useful amount of data. I wonder if he's thrown a Bayesian filter at it? One of the things PG noted in his "A Plan for Spam" essay, is that his Bayes filter flagged indicators that he never would have thought of. I wonder what kind of data someone could get from a corpus consisting of YC's data, plus web searches on the applicants?