12 ms·

The Worst Part of YC

354 points by dmnd 12y ago

zbruhnke 12y ago
It's nice to see the side of investors that still have a passion for startups so much so that they feel sad when they reject people. It often feels like noone in that world has empathy. For the ones getting rejection emails tonight don't sweat it. I got into YC on my Third try and it was worth every rejection. We're building a company now and spent months getting rejected about raising a seed round before suddenly becoming one of the "hot" companies with investors and being in a position to turn the same people who were turning us away down for a change. All this to say Sam is right. If you're working on something, there is traction and/or you truly believe in it don't give up. The only validation to worry about at this stage of the game is user validation. Talk to Users. Write Code. Best of luck with whatever you're building and if I can ever be of help feel free to email me (email in profile)
- cynic2 12y ago
  "It leaves me feeling down for many days after our application process." Nothing about this statement suggests he feels empathy for the people he rejects; much more, he feels bad for himself because he had to make a decision that makes him feel bad. Play the world's smallest violin.
pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
yes... sam altman is the worst part of YC. #AGREED
datamingle 12y ago
15 minutes old, with 1 comment: #1 post on Hacker News.
- Killswitch 12y ago
  As of this comment 66 upvotes in 27 minutes. Popularity will do that.
  - djt 12y ago
    YC employees have boosted stats, it makes sense to me as this is their business
    - tptacek 12y ago
      By all means, just make stuff up. :)
      - brymaster 12y ago
        Huh? By your own admission this was once happening. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008829 So when did this change and stop happening?
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        argonaut 12y ago
        Read those threads more carefully. The first only claims there are ways to boost OR identify YC alum posts (pg clarifies). The second implies you get a "boost" but does not say that HN itself gives that boost. As someone who tangentially interacted with YC founders, I can confirm that HN does not inherently boost posts, but HN does identify YC alum posts to other YC alums, which is probably the source of the "boost". In fact, HN on several occasions has penalized YC alum posts (upvote ring detection).
        djt 12y ago
        this is exactly what I was referring to
        argonaut 12y ago
        Saying YC employees have boosted stats implies that HN boosts those stats inherently. But that's not true. What happens is the same as what happens when people post their HN submissions on twitter/Facebook and tell all their friends about their HN post.
sbuccini 12y ago
Will we be notified regardless of our application's status?
- adamzerner 12y ago
  > We are going to send out YC summer 2014 interview decisions (both yes and no) before 10 pm PDT tonight.
  - jasondrowley 12y ago
    How will they let applicants know? Via email?
    - sbuccini 12y ago
      Yep!
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
rafeed 12y ago
Rejection is inevitable. If you're not rejected now, somewhere down the road you will be. If you haven't been rejected, get practice in getting rejected. If you have been rejected, feel the frustration and use it as motivation to prove whoever rejected you wrong. The best analogy I can find for this is that applying to YC is like trying to pick up a girl or asking her out on a date. (I know many of us have yet to try, too). Get over the fear of rejection, and put yourself out there. Will your way to success. YC is like the smartest, most beautiful woman with the amazing personality everyone falls in love with (well, there's always the haters). Don't give up. Exercise, eat right, sleep, and strive to be better. You never know, one day that beautiful woman might actually say yes. (To all the women on HN, replace girl/woman with guy/man and beautiful with handsome.)
- dougabug 12y ago
  Feynman describes being rejected by Bell Labs several years in a row for an internship, and each year coming back and cheerfully taking the tour. He finally got the job, but the war intervened. His attitude towards rejection seemed pretty constructive.
  - zodiac 12y ago
    Hey where was this from? I probably just forgot but I don't recall reading this in any of his books...
    - hboon 12y ago
      “Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman” mentions this.
hotpockets 12y ago
I always think about the bubble groups. Darn it would suck to right on the bubble. Maybe they could create a separate, remotely managed cohort of bubble groups, that are adopted by HN.
zt 12y ago
While I was in college, I was put on a committee to choose a new Director of Admissions. One of the internal candidates said during his interview: "There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a good reason why people are rejected." It many ways that seems obvious. To get in you have to have something going for you. To not get in you don't have to do anything wrong, you just have to not have a thing that does get you in. It would be just as hard for my college to write high school seniors a letter saying, well, you were 2nd in your class and had a 1500 but noting stood out as would be for YC to write people direct feedback at scale. What would it really mean? How do you action that? No special sauce isn't really feedback. You can't point to anything wrong other than you can't point to anything great. This has proven true for me in the admissions processes I've gone through on the other side: whether at a consulting firm, or Stripe, or Standard Treasury, or Echoing Green (I read semi-finalist apps). Most people self-select to apply for good and just reasons but some people really excite you and some people don't. Some people just have that something special, and the people who don't don't really have anything wrong with them. So to me this commentary rings true and is honestly put.
- adamzerner 12y ago
  > "There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a good reasons why people are rejected." Yes there is - because they aren't the best of the best. I don't see a reason to sugar-coat it. Being rejected means that YC doesn't think that you're one of the 50 or so best startups who applied. Nothing more, and nothing less.
  - zt 12y ago
    Sure. I'd agree with that I guess. The counterfactual theory is that YC has something to tell you -- but that suggests there is something to improve per se. But that's not quite right. It's not that you did something wrong it's that you didn't have quite the elements to be right.
  - ewoodrich 12y ago
    > I don't see a reason to sugar-coat it. Being rejected means that YC doesn't think that you're one of the 50 or so best startups who applied. Nothing more, and nothing less. True, but that's sort of ex post facto justification. Theoretically, ten startups could apply and objectively be equally qualified, but YC may still pick only one. The key is that without completely exhaustive criteria for admission (which would not be practical), it's impossible to determine what defines "best" and how to become one of the "best".
650REDHAIR 12y ago
How many companies that reapply get accepted during the next batch?
notastartup 12y ago
What is the benefit of joining YC? If you are just making a profit and reinvesting some of that into the business, do you have an advantage of joining YC? Why should you give up a piece of your action?
- hrrsn 12y ago
  YC gives a usually quite small amount of money for a small %age, however the value is really in the networking and mentorship.
  - notastartup 12y ago
    I guess that is pretty good deal. what are the % like? What are the criteria and what are they looking for?
    - namenotrequired 12y ago
      http://ycombinator.com/faq.html http://ycombinator.com/faq.html
rvivek 12y ago
We got into YC only the 3rd time in summer 2011; applied for the two earlier batches. Both of our earlier applications had bad ideas and very little traction. So, don't give up.
- mrchess 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, the 3rd time you applied (and got accepted), did you have traction?
  - jlteran 12y ago
    I'm also curious to hear the answer to this question. Last time I applied, it was only with an idea that had not yet been implemented. Now, I am waiting to see if my current idea has traction before applying to YC. I think they see traction as a very important factor in accepting you into YC. I might be wrong though.
    - namenotrequired 12y ago
      I have no experience with HN personally but I remember pg saying they tried to ignore early signs of traction, as there's no correlation between how far a company is when it's accepted, and how well it ends up doing. I can't find the comment now, but here's at least half of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6897904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6897904
tpae 12y ago
This. This is one of the biggest reasons why I want to get in so bad. Never give up. Thank you for this!
VaedaStrike 12y ago
As I go through the rest of my life I'll likely be applying just about every cycle simply for the way applying focuses my mind and energies. And the funniest thing...I get more excited each time. Rejection after rejection, I get more and more certain that I'm getting closer and closer. Totally counter-intuitive from what I thought, both the excitement side of it and the applying for the 4th or 5th time... :) "Y" I ask you...
- nomadcam 12y ago
  This could be the beginning of a great graphic novel...Zen and the Art of Y Combinator Rejection
ipince 12y ago
It's hard (or impossible) to give detailed feedback to every applicant. But maybe telling them roughly in which bucket they fell ("shortlist", "pretty good", "okay", "stopped reading after 30s") would be useful.
- _sentient 12y ago
  YC is in a difficult position here. Aside from being terribly labor intensive, specifying the reasons for rejection may serve to discourage teams from reapplying in the future. Seeing how often founders get accepted on their nth attempt, it's really in YC's interest to let you down softly.
  - ipince 12y ago
    I'm saying skip the reasons--that's too labor intensive. Just give a general idea of how the application was. Why? mostly calibration, I guess. I would find it useful to know how I'm doing within the pool. Even if the answer is "bottom 20%", that lets me know how much more effort I have to put into it to improve.
- dctoedt 12y ago
  > But maybe telling them roughly in which bucket they fell ("shortlist", "pretty good", "okay", "stopped reading after 30s") would be useful. Yes, it would be useful, but YC's lawyers probably advised against it. Doing this could open the door for a rejected applicant to allege some flavor of unlawful discrimination (pick one: race / ethnicity / gender / age / etc.). I'm not sure the anti-discrimination laws would even apply to a situation like YC, but at a minimum the allegation could turn into a bandwidth-sucking distraction and PR headache.
  - afarrell 12y ago
    Everyone that reviews applications to MassChallenge rates them along a few dimensions and then gives them at least 30 words of feedback, so it is possible to do. Then again, we pitch, "you get feedback even if you don't get in" as part of the value of our program. (disclosure: I work for MC)
exo_duz 12y ago
Whilst not everyone can get in. Best of luck to all that were accepted. We'll try again in 6 months.
tdullien 12y ago
Perhaps as a "cheer up" story: We applied to YC in their very first batch and got rejected. It is unclear what the reasons were -- but there were many reasons why it was understandable for YC to reject us. Among other things, the company had already been incorporated in Germany, we already had a few customers, we had decidedly nonexistent mass-market potential, the entire company was a bad idea from a purely business perspective, and just in almost every imaginable way did not fit the mold. This did not deter us from continuing; our company was profitable already, and we worked our butts off for the next few years (without any reasonable perspective of ever getting acquired, or even growing the company to be big). The work was interesting, and for a company that size, we had a surprisingly large impact (indirectly) on the wider world, but it was heavy toil with little reward. Either way - history then shifted under our feet, and it turned out in 2010/2011 that we had the combination of technology and team that out of a sudden had become pretty important to Google, and then after a long and painful negotiation process, we got acquired in 2011. Not a gangbusters acquisition by any stretch of the imagination, but one that worked out nicely for everyone involved. So perhaps the takeaway from this is: YC is great, but perhaps the great redeeming quality of modern capitalism is that you do not require gatekeepers in order to be successful. "You play shit that they like, and people will come, simple as that." - e.g. if you build a product that people like, people will give you money to build more of that product. Decentralized decision-making and the ability to bootstrap with nothing but a compelling product may be the one thing that led to our current economic system to out-compete the others. When we started the company, I wanted to build X. This was a huge endeavor, and I knew that on the way to X I'd need to build Y and Z; so I ended up building Z first, then used income from Z to bootstrap development on Y, then I got sidetracked a bit on B because we found a surprising application of our technology to a different field, and just when I was about to get back to X, we got acquired principally for B and Z. So up until today, we have made very little progress on X itself, but that doesn't matter :-) So if you're rejected from YC, don't despair. Use it to re-examine what you're doing, understand that investment is like dating (some people are just not made for each other, and it will end in horror if you pretend to be someone you are not), and then channel your disappointment into velocity :-P (PS: pg, if you folks have any notes whatsoever on reasons for rejection in the first YC batch, I would love to have more background info - but it is also pretty understandable if no memory at all exists ;)
davidw 12y ago
Just as the ever-increasing low cost accessibility of technology has made YC possible in that you can give someone just a little bit of money to build something, self-funded startups are also becoming possible for more and more things. Here are some resources: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/ http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/ https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23microconf https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23microconf - lots of information on the recently concluded MicroConf with patio11 and many others from HN. http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ And Rob's book, which is a great starting point: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/dp/0615373968?tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/... Granted, bootstrapping is not viable for some things, but for many others, it's a good path.
cynic2 12y ago
Pass me a bucket. Fund or don't fund. You didn't pick the companies you didn't pick for a reason. Don't be warm and fuzzy about it. Having a Kumbaya moment is just patronising -- and I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but that's how at least one person perceives it.
dctoedt 12y ago
FTA: [I]t was really striking how much higher the average quality of applications was for this batch compared to any previous batch. Most of the partners independently mentioned this to me. To me that was the most interesting part of the article.
jameshk 12y ago
For everyone who get rejected: don't give up. keep working on your startup and apply next batch, even Drew Houston got rejected the first time.
hyp0 12y ago
If you’re working on something that users love, you like working on it, and you have a plan for how to build a business around it Even with the mad hiring of new partners, there still aren't enough to take on all the applicants they'd like to (I assume that's the key resource bottleneck, not funding or space etc) - and the number and quality of applicants are increasing. It sounds like the YC we know so far may have just been the beginning. A great release, both in facts and vibe; Elon standard.
wildermuthn 12y ago
At West Point, I was one of ten cadets in my class of one thousand to make the parachute team. For some reason, the parachute team had become a symbol-status and a fast track to cadet success. What's interests me the most is that I had no idea, no clue, that the skydiving team was a fast-track to promotion. I just wanted to jump out of planes. That wasn't the case with many of my teammates. We had some great talent on the skydiving team — the most talented men and women at West Point. But some of them hated jumping out of planes, and they did poorly. Sama writes that the number and quality of YC applications has risen. That might not be a good thing. Talent and ambition aren't the greatest indicators of startup success. I don't think its a coincidence that Dropbox, Reddit, AirBnb, Justin.tv, Loopt, and Stripe all came within the first few years of YC's existence, and that YC's more recent companies haven't taken off in the same way. It might be because immensely talented people see YC as their avenue to success. If being immensely talented and ambitious was the prime requisite for startup-success, then YC would be in a great position. But as I understand it, having talent and ambition don't matter as much as having a determined, cohesive, and visionary team.
- jbooth 12y ago
  Someone mentioned in another thread that it seemed (allegedly, I don't know any of these people) like the type of people who apply for investment banking jobs are now applying for YC. I think the most salient fact about this stereotypical type of person is that they don't know why they're doing it. They wouldn't be doing it if it weren't prestigious. You lose something there, even if the person is theoretically better on paper.
  - zxcvvcxz 12y ago
    If so (about the IB-types), that sounds a little worrisome. These are the type of people that one could imagine being good at faking early progress on paper / online, and not following through because building a startup and being poor for multiple years doesn't feel very prestigious.
  - hindsightbias 12y ago
    Michael Lewis said somewhere (I think the intro to The Big Short) that he never expected to write another Wall Street book after Liar's Poker. He thought it was the be-all, end-all warning to IB wanna-bees. But he kept getting letters from college students to the effect of "I read your book, where is that kind of opportunity now?" It wasn't just the money, or the power, it's just being more whatever than anybody else...
mempko 12y ago
The worst part of YC is that they make groups of people compete with each other, instead of cooperate. The results are startups that have mediocre ideas that fill the needs of people who have money. If the phrase "vote with your dollar" is true, then it becomes obvious that the services and products society creates will cater to those with the most money.
pincubator 12y ago
We all know that it's almost impossible to provide custom feedback to those who are not selected. But is it also impossible to point out what portion of our application went wrong? E.g. there might be 4-5 checkboxes for reviewers: - Ideas are not clear - Ideas are not profound/original - Not profitable - No demo ... So at least we could know what went wrong. As most of the applicants, I think my idea was pretty cool and I am not sure what part I screwed up.
- _sentient 12y ago
  Check out http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html
eggbrain 12y ago
Back about 5 years ago, a prominent VC behind TechStars came to my college and talked about entrepreneurship. I was so enamored that I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur and apply to their incubator program. I applied about 5 times with various ideas to various programs (Boulder, Seattle, New York). I got close once -- I was a "finalist" for the Seattle program (Top 30), but didn't get chosen as the top 10. Each time left me pretty crushed. But I decided early on that I could sit around and feel bad about myself, or I could use it to become better. After each time I was rejected, I contacted the head of the incubator and thanked them for their time, and if they could give me any tips towards success. And more often than not, I got responses that helped me become a better entrepreneur. The first rejection is always the hardest. And so is the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth. But Edison is widely quoted as saying: "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb." Despite what you may think of Edison, I try to take the same mentality. To those who got rejected -- think of it not as the end, but as the beginning. You'll enjoy the ride if you do.
fayyazkl 12y ago
The best I think that can be done is to tell objectively why you didn't fund a company so either they focus on resolving those issues or at worst quit asap or move to a new idea. I dont know how much feedback is provided currently but it is immensely important even to those who got selected so they can focus on their strengths and fix their issues
mfrank 12y ago
Interesting that this is pretty different than what other VCs say is the worst part of their job: http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-is-the-worst-part-of-being-a-VC http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-is-the-worst-part-...
maximgsaini 12y ago
That is the Best Part of YC!!! If Albert Einstein had not been 'rejected' for 2 years, we might not have had that revolutionary glimpse into our own world (just saying). He might've accepted those stale old ideas by joining the academia of the time. Rejections force you to improve, rejections liberate you from previously held ideas, rejections force you to jump higher. Inside YC, you help 50 companies. Outside YC, you help 2950 companies by giving your opinion on their performance. Some of these 2950 companies will someday blow everyone away!! They will give everyone a glimpse into a new world, just like the greats of the past did. And the likes of YC will be thanked, because every rejection will have some contribution in shaping them.

354 points by dmnd 12y ago

It's nice to see the side of investors that still have a passion for startups so much so that they feel sad when they reject people. It often feels like noone in that world has empathy. For the ones getting rejection emails tonight don't sweat it. I got into YC on my Third try and it was worth every rejection. We're building a company now and spent months getting rejected about raising a seed round before suddenly becoming one of the "hot" companies with investors and being in a position to turn the same people who were turning us away down for a change. All this to say Sam is right. If you're working on something, there is traction and/or you truly believe in it don't give up. The only validation to worry about at this stage of the game is user validation. Talk to Users. Write Code. Best of luck with whatever you're building and if I can ever be of help feel free to email me (email in profile)

cynic2 12y ago
"It leaves me feeling down for many days after our application process." Nothing about this statement suggests he feels empathy for the people he rejects; much more, he feels bad for himself because he had to make a decision that makes him feel bad. Play the world's smallest violin.

pg_is_a_butt 12y ago

yes... sam altman is the worst part of YC. #AGREED

datamingle 12y ago

15 minutes old, with 1 comment: #1 post on Hacker News.

Killswitch 12y ago
As of this comment 66 upvotes in 27 minutes. Popularity will do that.
- djt 12y ago
  YC employees have boosted stats, it makes sense to me as this is their business
  - tptacek 12y ago
    By all means, just make stuff up. :)
    - brymaster 12y ago
      Huh? By your own admission this was once happening. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5008829 So when did this change and stop happening?
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - argonaut 12y ago
        Read those threads more carefully. The first only claims there are ways to boost OR identify YC alum posts (pg clarifies). The second implies you get a "boost" but does not say that HN itself gives that boost. As someone who tangentially interacted with YC founders, I can confirm that HN does not inherently boost posts, but HN does identify YC alum posts to other YC alums, which is probably the source of the "boost". In fact, HN on several occasions has penalized YC alum posts (upvote ring detection).
        djt 12y ago
        this is exactly what I was referring to
        argonaut 12y ago
        Saying YC employees have boosted stats implies that HN boosts those stats inherently. But that's not true. What happens is the same as what happens when people post their HN submissions on twitter/Facebook and tell all their friends about their HN post.

sbuccini 12y ago

Will we be notified regardless of our application's status?

adamzerner 12y ago
> We are going to send out YC summer 2014 interview decisions (both yes and no) before 10 pm PDT tonight.
- jasondrowley 12y ago
  How will they let applicants know? Via email?
  - sbuccini 12y ago
    Yep!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

rafeed 12y ago

Rejection is inevitable. If you're not rejected now, somewhere down the road you will be. If you haven't been rejected, get practice in getting rejected. If you have been rejected, feel the frustration and use it as motivation to prove whoever rejected you wrong. The best analogy I can find for this is that applying to YC is like trying to pick up a girl or asking her out on a date. (I know many of us have yet to try, too). Get over the fear of rejection, and put yourself out there. Will your way to success. YC is like the smartest, most beautiful woman with the amazing personality everyone falls in love with (well, there's always the haters). Don't give up. Exercise, eat right, sleep, and strive to be better. You never know, one day that beautiful woman might actually say yes. (To all the women on HN, replace girl/woman with guy/man and beautiful with handsome.)

dougabug 12y ago
Feynman describes being rejected by Bell Labs several years in a row for an internship, and each year coming back and cheerfully taking the tour. He finally got the job, but the war intervened. His attitude towards rejection seemed pretty constructive.
- zodiac 12y ago
  Hey where was this from? I probably just forgot but I don't recall reading this in any of his books...
  - hboon 12y ago
    “Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman” mentions this.

hotpockets 12y ago

I always think about the bubble groups. Darn it would suck to right on the bubble. Maybe they could create a separate, remotely managed cohort of bubble groups, that are adopted by HN.

zt 12y ago

While I was in college, I was put on a committee to choose a new Director of Admissions. One of the internal candidates said during his interview: "There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a good reason why people are rejected." It many ways that seems obvious. To get in you have to have something going for you. To not get in you don't have to do anything wrong, you just have to not have a thing that does get you in. It would be just as hard for my college to write high school seniors a letter saying, well, you were 2nd in your class and had a 1500 but noting stood out as would be for YC to write people direct feedback at scale. What would it really mean? How do you action that? No special sauce isn't really feedback. You can't point to anything wrong other than you can't point to anything great. This has proven true for me in the admissions processes I've gone through on the other side: whether at a consulting firm, or Stripe, or Standard Treasury, or Echoing Green (I read semi-finalist apps). Most people self-select to apply for good and just reasons but some people really excite you and some people don't. Some people just have that something special, and the people who don't don't really have anything wrong with them. So to me this commentary rings true and is honestly put.

adamzerner 12y ago
> "There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a good reasons why people are rejected." Yes there is - because they aren't the best of the best. I don't see a reason to sugar-coat it. Being rejected means that YC doesn't think that you're one of the 50 or so best startups who applied. Nothing more, and nothing less.
- zt 12y ago
  Sure. I'd agree with that I guess. The counterfactual theory is that YC has something to tell you -- but that suggests there is something to improve per se. But that's not quite right. It's not that you did something wrong it's that you didn't have quite the elements to be right.
- ewoodrich 12y ago
  > I don't see a reason to sugar-coat it. Being rejected means that YC doesn't think that you're one of the 50 or so best startups who applied. Nothing more, and nothing less. True, but that's sort of ex post facto justification. Theoretically, ten startups could apply and objectively be equally qualified, but YC may still pick only one. The key is that without completely exhaustive criteria for admission (which would not be practical), it's impossible to determine what defines "best" and how to become one of the "best".

650REDHAIR 12y ago

How many companies that reapply get accepted during the next batch?

notastartup 12y ago

What is the benefit of joining YC? If you are just making a profit and reinvesting some of that into the business, do you have an advantage of joining YC? Why should you give up a piece of your action?

hrrsn 12y ago
YC gives a usually quite small amount of money for a small %age, however the value is really in the networking and mentorship.
- notastartup 12y ago
  I guess that is pretty good deal. what are the % like? What are the criteria and what are they looking for?
  - namenotrequired 12y ago
    http://ycombinator.com/faq.html http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

rvivek 12y ago

We got into YC only the 3rd time in summer 2011; applied for the two earlier batches. Both of our earlier applications had bad ideas and very little traction. So, don't give up.

mrchess 12y ago
Out of curiosity, the 3rd time you applied (and got accepted), did you have traction?
- jlteran 12y ago
  I'm also curious to hear the answer to this question. Last time I applied, it was only with an idea that had not yet been implemented. Now, I am waiting to see if my current idea has traction before applying to YC. I think they see traction as a very important factor in accepting you into YC. I might be wrong though.
  - namenotrequired 12y ago
    I have no experience with HN personally but I remember pg saying they tried to ignore early signs of traction, as there's no correlation between how far a company is when it's accepted, and how well it ends up doing. I can't find the comment now, but here's at least half of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6897904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6897904

tpae 12y ago

This. This is one of the biggest reasons why I want to get in so bad. Never give up. Thank you for this!

VaedaStrike 12y ago

As I go through the rest of my life I'll likely be applying just about every cycle simply for the way applying focuses my mind and energies. And the funniest thing...I get more excited each time. Rejection after rejection, I get more and more certain that I'm getting closer and closer. Totally counter-intuitive from what I thought, both the excitement side of it and the applying for the 4th or 5th time... :) "Y" I ask you...

nomadcam 12y ago
This could be the beginning of a great graphic novel...Zen and the Art of Y Combinator Rejection

ipince 12y ago

It's hard (or impossible) to give detailed feedback to every applicant. But maybe telling them roughly in which bucket they fell ("shortlist", "pretty good", "okay", "stopped reading after 30s") would be useful.

_sentient 12y ago
YC is in a difficult position here. Aside from being terribly labor intensive, specifying the reasons for rejection may serve to discourage teams from reapplying in the future. Seeing how often founders get accepted on their nth attempt, it's really in YC's interest to let you down softly.
- ipince 12y ago
  I'm saying skip the reasons--that's too labor intensive. Just give a general idea of how the application was. Why? mostly calibration, I guess. I would find it useful to know how I'm doing within the pool. Even if the answer is "bottom 20%", that lets me know how much more effort I have to put into it to improve.
dctoedt 12y ago
> But maybe telling them roughly in which bucket they fell ("shortlist", "pretty good", "okay", "stopped reading after 30s") would be useful. Yes, it would be useful, but YC's lawyers probably advised against it. Doing this could open the door for a rejected applicant to allege some flavor of unlawful discrimination (pick one: race / ethnicity / gender / age / etc.). I'm not sure the anti-discrimination laws would even apply to a situation like YC, but at a minimum the allegation could turn into a bandwidth-sucking distraction and PR headache.
- afarrell 12y ago
  Everyone that reviews applications to MassChallenge rates them along a few dimensions and then gives them at least 30 words of feedback, so it is possible to do. Then again, we pitch, "you get feedback even if you don't get in" as part of the value of our program. (disclosure: I work for MC)

exo_duz 12y ago

Whilst not everyone can get in. Best of luck to all that were accepted. We'll try again in 6 months.

tdullien 12y ago

Perhaps as a "cheer up" story: We applied to YC in their very first batch and got rejected. It is unclear what the reasons were -- but there were many reasons why it was understandable for YC to reject us. Among other things, the company had already been incorporated in Germany, we already had a few customers, we had decidedly nonexistent mass-market potential, the entire company was a bad idea from a purely business perspective, and just in almost every imaginable way did not fit the mold. This did not deter us from continuing; our company was profitable already, and we worked our butts off for the next few years (without any reasonable perspective of ever getting acquired, or even growing the company to be big). The work was interesting, and for a company that size, we had a surprisingly large impact (indirectly) on the wider world, but it was heavy toil with little reward. Either way - history then shifted under our feet, and it turned out in 2010/2011 that we had the combination of technology and team that out of a sudden had become pretty important to Google, and then after a long and painful negotiation process, we got acquired in 2011. Not a gangbusters acquisition by any stretch of the imagination, but one that worked out nicely for everyone involved. So perhaps the takeaway from this is: YC is great, but perhaps the great redeeming quality of modern capitalism is that you do not require gatekeepers in order to be successful. "You play shit that they like, and people will come, simple as that." - e.g. if you build a product that people like, people will give you money to build more of that product. Decentralized decision-making and the ability to bootstrap with nothing but a compelling product may be the one thing that led to our current economic system to out-compete the others. When we started the company, I wanted to build X. This was a huge endeavor, and I knew that on the way to X I'd need to build Y and Z; so I ended up building Z first, then used income from Z to bootstrap development on Y, then I got sidetracked a bit on B because we found a surprising application of our technology to a different field, and just when I was about to get back to X, we got acquired principally for B and Z. So up until today, we have made very little progress on X itself, but that doesn't matter :-) So if you're rejected from YC, don't despair. Use it to re-examine what you're doing, understand that investment is like dating (some people are just not made for each other, and it will end in horror if you pretend to be someone you are not), and then channel your disappointment into velocity :-P (PS: pg, if you folks have any notes whatsoever on reasons for rejection in the first YC batch, I would love to have more background info - but it is also pretty understandable if no memory at all exists ;)

davidw 12y ago

Just as the ever-increasing low cost accessibility of technology has made YC possible in that you can give someone just a little bit of money to build something, self-funded startups are also becoming possible for more and more things. Here are some resources: http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/ http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/ https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23microconf https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23microconf - lots of information on the recently concluded MicroConf with patio11 and many others from HN. http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ And Rob's book, which is a great starting point: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/dp/0615373968?tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/... Granted, bootstrapping is not viable for some things, but for many others, it's a good path.

cynic2 12y ago

Pass me a bucket. Fund or don't fund. You didn't pick the companies you didn't pick for a reason. Don't be warm and fuzzy about it. Having a Kumbaya moment is just patronising -- and I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but that's how at least one person perceives it.

dctoedt 12y ago

FTA: [I]t was really striking how much higher the average quality of applications was for this batch compared to any previous batch. Most of the partners independently mentioned this to me. To me that was the most interesting part of the article.

jameshk 12y ago

For everyone who get rejected: don't give up. keep working on your startup and apply next batch, even Drew Houston got rejected the first time.

hyp0 12y ago

If you’re working on something that users love, you like working on it, and you have a plan for how to build a business around it Even with the mad hiring of new partners, there still aren't enough to take on all the applicants they'd like to (I assume that's the key resource bottleneck, not funding or space etc) - and the number and quality of applicants are increasing. It sounds like the YC we know so far may have just been the beginning. A great release, both in facts and vibe; Elon standard.

wildermuthn 12y ago

At West Point, I was one of ten cadets in my class of one thousand to make the parachute team. For some reason, the parachute team had become a symbol-status and a fast track to cadet success. What's interests me the most is that I had no idea, no clue, that the skydiving team was a fast-track to promotion. I just wanted to jump out of planes. That wasn't the case with many of my teammates. We had some great talent on the skydiving team — the most talented men and women at West Point. But some of them hated jumping out of planes, and they did poorly. Sama writes that the number and quality of YC applications has risen. That might not be a good thing. Talent and ambition aren't the greatest indicators of startup success. I don't think its a coincidence that Dropbox, Reddit, AirBnb, Justin.tv, Loopt, and Stripe all came within the first few years of YC's existence, and that YC's more recent companies haven't taken off in the same way. It might be because immensely talented people see YC as their avenue to success. If being immensely talented and ambitious was the prime requisite for startup-success, then YC would be in a great position. But as I understand it, having talent and ambition don't matter as much as having a determined, cohesive, and visionary team.

jbooth 12y ago
Someone mentioned in another thread that it seemed (allegedly, I don't know any of these people) like the type of people who apply for investment banking jobs are now applying for YC. I think the most salient fact about this stereotypical type of person is that they don't know why they're doing it. They wouldn't be doing it if it weren't prestigious. You lose something there, even if the person is theoretically better on paper.
- zxcvvcxz 12y ago
  If so (about the IB-types), that sounds a little worrisome. These are the type of people that one could imagine being good at faking early progress on paper / online, and not following through because building a startup and being poor for multiple years doesn't feel very prestigious.
- hindsightbias 12y ago
  Michael Lewis said somewhere (I think the intro to The Big Short) that he never expected to write another Wall Street book after Liar's Poker. He thought it was the be-all, end-all warning to IB wanna-bees. But he kept getting letters from college students to the effect of "I read your book, where is that kind of opportunity now?" It wasn't just the money, or the power, it's just being more whatever than anybody else...

mempko 12y ago

The worst part of YC is that they make groups of people compete with each other, instead of cooperate. The results are startups that have mediocre ideas that fill the needs of people who have money. If the phrase "vote with your dollar" is true, then it becomes obvious that the services and products society creates will cater to those with the most money.

pincubator 12y ago

We all know that it's almost impossible to provide custom feedback to those who are not selected. But is it also impossible to point out what portion of our application went wrong? E.g. there might be 4-5 checkboxes for reviewers: - Ideas are not clear - Ideas are not profound/original - Not profitable - No demo ... So at least we could know what went wrong. As most of the applicants, I think my idea was pretty cool and I am not sure what part I screwed up.

_sentient 12y ago
Check out http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

eggbrain 12y ago

Back about 5 years ago, a prominent VC behind TechStars came to my college and talked about entrepreneurship. I was so enamored that I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur and apply to their incubator program. I applied about 5 times with various ideas to various programs (Boulder, Seattle, New York). I got close once -- I was a "finalist" for the Seattle program (Top 30), but didn't get chosen as the top 10. Each time left me pretty crushed. But I decided early on that I could sit around and feel bad about myself, or I could use it to become better. After each time I was rejected, I contacted the head of the incubator and thanked them for their time, and if they could give me any tips towards success. And more often than not, I got responses that helped me become a better entrepreneur. The first rejection is always the hardest. And so is the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth. But Edison is widely quoted as saying: "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb." Despite what you may think of Edison, I try to take the same mentality. To those who got rejected -- think of it not as the end, but as the beginning. You'll enjoy the ride if you do.

fayyazkl 12y ago

The best I think that can be done is to tell objectively why you didn't fund a company so either they focus on resolving those issues or at worst quit asap or move to a new idea. I dont know how much feedback is provided currently but it is immensely important even to those who got selected so they can focus on their strengths and fix their issues

mfrank 12y ago

Interesting that this is pretty different than what other VCs say is the worst part of their job: http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-is-the-worst-part-of-being-a-VC http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-is-the-worst-part-...

maximgsaini 12y ago

That is the Best Part of YC!!! If Albert Einstein had not been 'rejected' for 2 years, we might not have had that revolutionary glimpse into our own world (just saying). He might've accepted those stale old ideas by joining the academia of the time. Rejections force you to improve, rejections liberate you from previously held ideas, rejections force you to jump higher. Inside YC, you help 50 companies. Outside YC, you help 2950 companies by giving your opinion on their performance. Some of these 2950 companies will someday blow everyone away!! They will give everyone a glimpse into a new world, just like the greats of the past did. And the likes of YC will be thanked, because every rejection will have some contribution in shaping them.