5 ms·

there is still valuable feedback to be had, no? why are some companies "particularly good" where others don't get accepted? "no reason" is paradoxical and i'm n

there is still valuable feedback to be had, no? why are some companies "particularly good" where others don't get accepted? "no reason" is paradoxical and i'm not really convinced it's a reason...

emmett 13y ago
YC chooses applicants by rank-ordering the list and interviewing the top N candidates. Thought experiment: What's the difference between candidate N and candidate N+1? Likely, they are nearly identically good. What could you possibly tell candidate N+1 about why they weren't selected? There are almost certainly no red flags, or any specific thing you can point to that caused them to fall under the line. Any feedback you gave candidate N+1 you'd also want to give to candidate N who did get the interview. If you're saying that YC should give generalized "how to be a better startup" advice to everyone who applies, I'm afraid the time requirements for that are unrealistic. There aren't obvious reasons why most applications are rejected, and giving more nuanced advice is really hard.
- natch 13y ago
  Forget candidate N and the difficulty of discerning nuances. That's just pretending no information is available, so it's a made-up argument. Let's not pretend. Just tell them what the very top candidates had. And if they are a middle candidate and not a bottom one, also tell them what kept them out of the bottom. If they're in the bottom, tell them about the top and the middle. Clues for what is promising and what is not. We're talking about spending a few minutes sharing words that could positively alter the course of decades of people's lives, if they hear the right thing. Seems like a decent courtesy to pay the applicants, if there's no real reason not to.
  - rdl 13y ago
    I wonder how much benefit the good-but-not-accepted groups would receive from a few minutes even up to an hour of time over the next few weeks (maybe after the main interviews are done). The benefit for YC would be if these groups then chose not to do something like TechStars, but continued to work on their idea and came back in +6 months. Realistically, if someone is rejected by YC, gets into TechStars and does it, they're unlikely to do YC. Assuming there are ~300 "on the bubble" groups on top of 200 interviewed groups (out of 2-3k total), it would cost YC basically a month of someone's time to follow up with them reasonably, and then maybe 5-10% of a person over the next 6 months.
    - sbisker 13y ago
      Wow, that's a really good idea. What I really like about it is that with so many rejected applicants per cycle, you can actually determine statistically the impact of giving feedback on later performance. One can make a small investment of time to try it on a small batch, and if it improves the quality of the whole group, a financial case can be made to spend more time on it. One group of 500 rejected applicants is sent a sentence or two of feedback by a random YC alum (ideally whoever read the application initially, to account for each reader's biases) 1 month after their interview. Another group of 500 is set aside as the control, and is treated as normal. Is the group of 500 applicants with feedback more likely to reapply? Are they more likely to get an interview or get in the second time around?
    - tvo 13y ago
      I like this idea. This task can also be made simplier by just focusing feedback on the company-related sections of the app. This is where having an experienced perspective (feedback from YC) can really help smart but inexperienced founders. If you fall into the good-but-not-accepted group, chances are good that you can treat all feedback as an opinion to be considered, not a directive to be obeyed.
      - rdl 13y ago
        The class of things I hate the most (having applied to YC, etc.) is when a bad application masks what is otherwise a good or potentially great team. That's something you can learn not to do, and which can be corrected with some coaching. 1) People fuck up videos frequiently. I've personally been studying "how to do good kickstarter videos" a lot, but "how to do a 2-3 minute Demo Day pitch" and "how to do a 1 minute YC app video" are pretty specific, and while a lot of it should be obvious, it isn't all obvious. The problem is, doing a good "how to do a YC video" is itself best communicated as video, with good/bad examples, so it's a fair bit of work -- it would probably take a couple people a week to do very well. 2) Sometimes, people "bury the lede" and hide the most salient parts of their project deep inside an application in a non-clear way. Sometimes it isn't even listed. I've talked to friends who want to apply to YC who intentionally couched their whole application in "corporate speak", focused entirely on top-down analysis, etc., rather than actually explaining why the product is good, why they're interested in it, etc. 3) There are a lot of items which are hard to verify, and which lose their predictive value as soon as they're widely known. Similar to the well-known interview questions ("what is your greatest weakness?" being a pathological example), where once they become common knowledge, the only value is knowing who prepared ahead of time vs. who didn't, or who is willing to recite something which sounds convincing vs. actually thinking about it. I'm afraid the Thiel question "what is something you believe to be true which isn't widely held" is becoming that question today. X) My personal belief is that something like a YC app should be fractal -- good on the surface if you skim it for 10-30 seconds, but then just as good when you read it closely in any area without greater context. That's a specific style, and not universal, and I don't know if the YC Partnership agrees with me. The applications get reviewed many times (with some rejected at each step), and ultimately if you're on the bubble and the application gets debated internally, you want it to help you just as much as it did when it was initially screened. (Obviously, it's better to just be so amazing that you're well in the "yes" range and not seriously debated...)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ritchiea 13y ago
The YC partners have written extensively on what they are looking for in startups and what impresses them. As have many of the companies that have been accepted. pg has even participated in the comments here on those sorts of articles and blog posts. Barring their entire public persona being an elaborate conspiracy I don't think they could possibly be more transparent about what impresses them and what they think are red flags.
- shrikrishna 13y ago
  The thing is, the applicants would have read them too. I don't think most applicants would have the obvious red flags. Many that don't get in would be the corner case, ie, pushed down by those with a slight edge.
  - ritchiea 13y ago
    Reading those pieces and taking the advice seriously are entirely different things. For instance I knew two non-technical founders with a company who were outsourcing their app and had no users and were shocked they didn't get an interview. On paper and in person they are both very bright, had attended elite schools and done a lot of interesting things in their lives. But I think that was actually their downfall, they suspected they had enough good things going for them in general that they ignored a lot of very specific advice from YC. My bet is the companies that don't get interviews are a lot more like my friends who just didn't pay attention than a sea of corner cases. It's actually really hard to meet the criteria that YC asks for. If you follow their advice you need the following things: - At least 2 founders who know each other well, preferably have worked together before or known each other for years - Have found your domain problem through personal experience - Are good hackers - Have already put together a decent product/have some semblance of a reasonable start It can almost sound simple but that's really really hard. And I say that as someone who has spent the last couple years talking with my friends about whether they would be interested in being co-founders for startup ideas and searching for problems in my own experience that would make for scalable ideas. I go out and talk to companies and I don't see much of what YC explicitly asks for. It's not far fetched to imagine they interview nearly 100% of the teams that fit the profile above.

there is still valuable feedback to be had, no? why are some companies "particularly good" where others don't get accepted? "no reason" is paradoxical and i'm not really convinced it's a reason...

emmett 13y ago

YC chooses applicants by rank-ordering the list and interviewing the top N candidates. Thought experiment: What's the difference between candidate N and candidate N+1? Likely, they are nearly identically good. What could you possibly tell candidate N+1 about why they weren't selected? There are almost certainly no red flags, or any specific thing you can point to that caused them to fall under the line. Any feedback you gave candidate N+1 you'd also want to give to candidate N who did get the interview. If you're saying that YC should give generalized "how to be a better startup" advice to everyone who applies, I'm afraid the time requirements for that are unrealistic. There aren't obvious reasons why most applications are rejected, and giving more nuanced advice is really hard.

natch 13y ago
Forget candidate N and the difficulty of discerning nuances. That's just pretending no information is available, so it's a made-up argument. Let's not pretend. Just tell them what the very top candidates had. And if they are a middle candidate and not a bottom one, also tell them what kept them out of the bottom. If they're in the bottom, tell them about the top and the middle. Clues for what is promising and what is not. We're talking about spending a few minutes sharing words that could positively alter the course of decades of people's lives, if they hear the right thing. Seems like a decent courtesy to pay the applicants, if there's no real reason not to.
- rdl 13y ago
  I wonder how much benefit the good-but-not-accepted groups would receive from a few minutes even up to an hour of time over the next few weeks (maybe after the main interviews are done). The benefit for YC would be if these groups then chose not to do something like TechStars, but continued to work on their idea and came back in +6 months. Realistically, if someone is rejected by YC, gets into TechStars and does it, they're unlikely to do YC. Assuming there are ~300 "on the bubble" groups on top of 200 interviewed groups (out of 2-3k total), it would cost YC basically a month of someone's time to follow up with them reasonably, and then maybe 5-10% of a person over the next 6 months.
  - sbisker 13y ago
    Wow, that's a really good idea. What I really like about it is that with so many rejected applicants per cycle, you can actually determine statistically the impact of giving feedback on later performance. One can make a small investment of time to try it on a small batch, and if it improves the quality of the whole group, a financial case can be made to spend more time on it. One group of 500 rejected applicants is sent a sentence or two of feedback by a random YC alum (ideally whoever read the application initially, to account for each reader's biases) 1 month after their interview. Another group of 500 is set aside as the control, and is treated as normal. Is the group of 500 applicants with feedback more likely to reapply? Are they more likely to get an interview or get in the second time around?
  - tvo 13y ago
    I like this idea. This task can also be made simplier by just focusing feedback on the company-related sections of the app. This is where having an experienced perspective (feedback from YC) can really help smart but inexperienced founders. If you fall into the good-but-not-accepted group, chances are good that you can treat all feedback as an opinion to be considered, not a directive to be obeyed.
    - rdl 13y ago
      The class of things I hate the most (having applied to YC, etc.) is when a bad application masks what is otherwise a good or potentially great team. That's something you can learn not to do, and which can be corrected with some coaching. 1) People fuck up videos frequiently. I've personally been studying "how to do good kickstarter videos" a lot, but "how to do a 2-3 minute Demo Day pitch" and "how to do a 1 minute YC app video" are pretty specific, and while a lot of it should be obvious, it isn't all obvious. The problem is, doing a good "how to do a YC video" is itself best communicated as video, with good/bad examples, so it's a fair bit of work -- it would probably take a couple people a week to do very well. 2) Sometimes, people "bury the lede" and hide the most salient parts of their project deep inside an application in a non-clear way. Sometimes it isn't even listed. I've talked to friends who want to apply to YC who intentionally couched their whole application in "corporate speak", focused entirely on top-down analysis, etc., rather than actually explaining why the product is good, why they're interested in it, etc. 3) There are a lot of items which are hard to verify, and which lose their predictive value as soon as they're widely known. Similar to the well-known interview questions ("what is your greatest weakness?" being a pathological example), where once they become common knowledge, the only value is knowing who prepared ahead of time vs. who didn't, or who is willing to recite something which sounds convincing vs. actually thinking about it. I'm afraid the Thiel question "what is something you believe to be true which isn't widely held" is becoming that question today. X) My personal belief is that something like a YC app should be fractal -- good on the surface if you skim it for 10-30 seconds, but then just as good when you read it closely in any area without greater context. That's a specific style, and not universal, and I don't know if the YC Partnership agrees with me. The applications get reviewed many times (with some rejected at each step), and ultimately if you're on the bubble and the application gets debated internally, you want it to help you just as much as it did when it was initially screened. (Obviously, it's better to just be so amazing that you're well in the "yes" range and not seriously debated...)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ritchiea 13y ago

The YC partners have written extensively on what they are looking for in startups and what impresses them. As have many of the companies that have been accepted. pg has even participated in the comments here on those sorts of articles and blog posts. Barring their entire public persona being an elaborate conspiracy I don't think they could possibly be more transparent about what impresses them and what they think are red flags.

shrikrishna 13y ago
The thing is, the applicants would have read them too. I don't think most applicants would have the obvious red flags. Many that don't get in would be the corner case, ie, pushed down by those with a slight edge.
- ritchiea 13y ago
  Reading those pieces and taking the advice seriously are entirely different things. For instance I knew two non-technical founders with a company who were outsourcing their app and had no users and were shocked they didn't get an interview. On paper and in person they are both very bright, had attended elite schools and done a lot of interesting things in their lives. But I think that was actually their downfall, they suspected they had enough good things going for them in general that they ignored a lot of very specific advice from YC. My bet is the companies that don't get interviews are a lot more like my friends who just didn't pay attention than a sea of corner cases. It's actually really hard to meet the criteria that YC asks for. If you follow their advice you need the following things: - At least 2 founders who know each other well, preferably have worked together before or known each other for years - Have found your domain problem through personal experience - Are good hackers - Have already put together a decent product/have some semblance of a reasonable start It can almost sound simple but that's really really hard. And I say that as someone who has spent the last couple years talking with my friends about whether they would be interested in being co-founders for startup ideas and searching for problems in my own experience that would make for scalable ideas. I go out and talk to companies and I don't see much of what YC explicitly asks for. It's not far fetched to imagine they interview nearly 100% of the teams that fit the profile above.