6 ms·
PG charts acceleration of YC applications since noon
- pg 13y agoI knew a lot of people applied on the last day but I've always been curious about the shape of the curve, so I finally wrote something to track it. The current rate is about 1.3 applications per minute. I'm guessing that will increase smoothly till the deadline, since the curve looks so smooth so far, but we'll see.
- jsonne 13y agoSo you're looking at ~2000 for the last day? Do you expect this rate to be constant or to accelerate the closer it gets to 8pm?
- melvinmt 13y agoI always wonder what happens with a resubmit (I must have done it tens of times), does the original date still stand? Does it push it to the end of the queue again? Do you see all the revisions?
- shrig94 13y agoThat's the kind of graph you like to see on demo day.
- ldn_tech_exec1 13y agoso i guess it's passed the deadline now, was your assumption correct?
- sethbannon 13y agoIt would be really interesting to see a historical breakdown of acceptance rate by submission time until deadline.
- pg 13y agoI've always meant to check if that's a predictor, but anecdotal evidence suggests not. I.e. I know some of the most successful startups applied at the last minute, but not all did.
- aswath87 13y agoThat seems to contradict - "Early submissions have a significant advantage because we have more time to look at them and engage with the founders." :)
- kapitalx 13y agoBut then we saw a team get accepted on stage on Saturday, so there is definitely some anecdotal evidence for advantage of early submission :)
- jgoldsmith 13y agoIs this a graph of the rate of change (acceleration) of applications, or a graph of the raw number of applications submitted? Some labels might be helpful.
- pg 13y agoThis is total applications submitted (scaled to fit the graph).
- highCs 13y agoOh the server is down: http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=ls&chs=62x300&chd=t:70,70,70,70,70,70,70,71,71,71,71,71,71,71,72,72,72,72,72,72,72,73,73,73,73,73,74,74,74,74,74,74,74,75,75,75,75,75,76,76,76,76,77,77,77,78,78,78,78,78,79,79,79,79,80,80,80,81,81,81,82,82,82,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50 http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=ls&chs=62x300&chd=t:70...
- kyro 13y agoNot entirely related, but do you think your assessment of a particular application (team, idea or any other component therein) is influenced at all by the quality of applications that precede and succeed it, especially considering the sheer volume and the rate at which you go through the apps?
- TennisID 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_resident#Matching_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_resident#Matching_algo... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem offer clues.
- kyro 13y agoYes, I'm familiar with both, intimately so with the first. I know it occurs, and was wondering to what degree he thinks it does and if there any controls in place.
- GFischer 13y agoThanks for the links, I ended up enjoying reading about them :) I ended up on: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SultansDowryProblem.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SultansDowryProblem.html
- pg 13y agoI doubt it, precisely because of the volume.
- 5vforest 13y agoOn the software side, how are you managing to sort through the sheer number of applicants?
- gibybo 13y agoHow is this being updated? The data is encoded in the url, so the link url must be changing periodically. Doesn't this mean 'nthnclrk' is doing the charting?
- fbnt 13y agoWhat's the record amount of applicants per batch so far?
- Link- 13y agoWould like to see this curve if it was a real-time updating chart publicly available on HN :P (P.S Don't forget the username when reading my application!)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- 6thSigma 13y agoAn interesting (albeit impossible to track) metric would be how much time the average YC application took - and if the time spent correlates with acceptance at all. I wonder if that graph would look closer to a bell curve or exponential decay.
- trey_swann 13y agoAn increase in time spent would not increase the success rate. Probably the opposite. More time spent -- less likely that an applicant is on the right track. Applicants that submit at the last minute have likely been thinking about/living with the problem for a while, and they are able to quickly articulate the problem, their solution, and the reason that they will be successful.
- 6thSigma 13y agoWe agree. Both the bell curve and the exponential delay curve would mean the more time spent on the application, the less likely that team is to be accepted.
- DjangoReinhardt 13y agoTL;DR: I may or may not have contributed to a point on that curve and I am not sure how to feel about it. I began filling out the form on the day the application window was announced. Halfway through, I realized the answers I had to some of the questions on the form, were either unconvincing or simply non-existent. As I progressed, I realized that me and my idea both sounded increasingly half-assed, so I promptly stopped, saved the form, quietly went back to the drawing board and started attempting to figure out the answers. It has been roughly two months since that day, I guess. I still don't have all the answers but I can at least tell myself now that the idea is worth a shot...
- zabramow 13y agoCurious if you've speculated about the reason for the high volume of late applications, especially since you're pretty clear that early apps have a better chance to get accepted.
- hakcermani 13y agoIt is like the lottery rush hours before the draw.
- VaedaStrike 13y agoConsidering the creative nature of the whole enterprise it is kind of nice to know I made a very very small part of that curve. May it be one of the first of many such convex curves. Reminds me of Nasim Taleb's smile and frown demonstrations vis a vis fragility and anti-fragility.
- rdmcfee 13y agoAny guess on correlation between location of applicant and proximity of application time to deadline? Is the 8pm PST deadline keeping the European applicants up late?
- bujatt 13y agoyes.
- jermaink 13y agoIt would be interesting to know more about the (historical) distribution of the overall applications, especially how many are settled within the last one percent quantile of time. Assuming a distribution and working with a simple e-function, around 3.500 total applications with an acceptance rate around 1.25% (batch<50) might be a ballpark estimate.
- anish_t 13y agonthnclrk just curious where you got the updated chart in your link. the chart link in PG's tweet has much less data...