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Our YC Interviews

178 points by gdi2290 12y ago

zaroth 12y ago
Hopefully everyone feels free to leave their comments about this one, I really enjoy reading it, thanks.
mbleigh 12y ago
Isn't this pitched idea basically exactly http://nitrous.io/ http://nitrous.io/ -- especially with their recently launched "Hack on Nitrous.io" button for GitHub?
- flylib 12y ago
  that's what I thought also, can either of the founders talk about what makes it different?
rdl 12y ago
Wow, that's a really detailed and thoughtful analysis of your interview experience. It also successful as a promotional piece for your project -- I'd be more likely to use the tool based on this. In general, the advice is "listen to the no, but not the why", but I think that doesn't apply with YC -- the reason YC gave is probably an accurate reflection of what YC believes based on what you said in your interview (and application, and whatever other information they had).
vecter 12y ago
I've helped a bunch of people prepare for YC interviews and the biggest problem by an order of magnitude is not being able to concisely explain what you actually do. That may sound crazy, but I've yet to review an application that clearly and simply states what the company is building, why it's important, and how they're going to get adoption. It seems these guys had the same issue, since Guy mentioned that they spent the first 5 minutes explaining what they do. This is a symptom of a more general problem: people severely underestimate how difficult it is to convey an idea to another human being such that they actually understand it. Being able to do so is no small task, and I wish more people would recognize the value of this skill.
- noisy_boy 12y ago
  In this case they did a bunch of mock-interviews with people who had been through the YC process and got other developers to review it. I think at the end of every such interaction they could have asked those people how they will describe the product in 2 lines. Then they can take those responses and build a solid, concise response. That response, presenting views of people who are not the developers/not so close to the product, would probably appeal more/make more sense to the interviewers since they in a similar position of seeing a new product.
- JacobJans 12y ago
  Thank you for adding this comment. I find it very valuable, and quite interesting, especially the idea of "not being able to concisely explain what you actually do." I wonder if you could expand on that? I also wonder if you've observed whether or not people want to be "concise" with their goals. In my experience, success has been built around doing certain little things really well. For example, my business is successful because I'm really good at building a certain type of landing page. Yes, there is a lot that surrounds it, but it's basically just this one thing that makes it work. The issue of scope is something that everybody confronts when running a business. Any additional insight you could add would be appreciated. Thank you for your comment. Warmly, Jacob
  - larrys 12y ago
    > "especially the idea of "not being able to concisely explain what you actually do." > I wonder if you could expand on that?" This is really selling. And it's something that comes in handy in business in every situation. If you can't concisely explain what your product can do for someone (either in person or in print) through marketing or salesmanship you won't make the sale unless you have some overwhelming advantage in some other area that holds people's interest (or little competition or maybe a super low price). Obviously in a HN comment there is no way to get into explaining how to be a good sales person in a few sentences. And while I could suggest books [1] the truth is you either have to have some experience and/or you have to be a "born" salesman. Or both. Edit: [1] I don't mean "I" could suggest specific books. Because I've never read books on sales. But I have closed large and small deals, against formidable opponents (right out of college, an example is trained IBM sales people) and I never read a single book on sales. But I do know there are books that can be purchased on selling and sales obviously.
CoffeeDregs 12y ago
[pre-apologies for the CAPS, but they seemed warranted.] I definitely appreciate the analysis, since analyses of any kind of stressful interaction are helpful. But I did want to comment on a small thing: YC is a very special kind of interview. I assume that this is referencing the previous bits of TFA, so I'd suggest that possibly YC is a COMPLETELY TYPICAL INTERVIEW FOR THIS KIND OF SITUATION. HN is a wonderful resource, but the idea that a YC interview is of "a special kind" is naive. [I'm sure the down-votes are heading my way...] YC is a type of VC-ish firm. Getting to pitch to any VC is rare and the kinds of questions mentioned in TFA are pretty standard. YC is going to invest their time in you and that is quite expensive for them to do, so it makes sense for them to push you in lots of directions to see how broadly you've thought about the problem. Random: I was in a board meeting yesterday getting peppered with questions about AWS AMI setups, framework choices and API load resiliency... And I'm just an advisor. Investors care a lot about a lot of things.
- coralreef 12y ago
  10 minute time limit, scheduled into an entire day of interviews against other teams, sounds pretty untypical to me. Plus how often do you get interviewed by the likes of Paul Buccheit?
  - CoffeeDregs 12y ago
    10 minute time limit As TFA said, it's not a 10 minute time limit... 10 minutes is the pressure relief valve. But let's say "10 minutes". That, plus some time for questions, is a fairly standard angel round setup. how often do you get interviewed by the likes of Paul Buccheit Pretty much every time you do a serious VC pitch. There are certainly crappy firms, but my experience has been that good firms select an excellent set of folks and you will be grilled once you get through the initial screens. The differentiator of YC is the stage of investment and the shepherding of the teams, not the "very special kind of interview". [And I don't want to discount that YC might do a superlative job with their interviews, but I've not heard anything to suggest that the concerns/questions are atypical.]
- guymorita 12y ago
patio11 12y ago
In general, when doing sales, sometimes it is easier to lead with the pain point and then introduce the solution. For example, "Setting up a dev environment takes a day. Sometimes you need one in a minute, like if you're interviewing somebody and need them to demonstrate coding ability on a company laptop. We turn any browser window into a fully-functional dev environment, and it's as ephemeral as the browser window is, so if you close it the company laptop is back in its original state without requiring a sysadmin to wipe it and start over. Next applicant gets a new browser window. Is everyone clear on why a dev environment which doesn't take 2 days to set up or tear down is a useful thing to have? Great! Would you like me to talk about who is willing to pay serious money for this, or do you want to hear what special sauce goes into making this Just Work for your favorite programming stack?" My guess is that even technically inclined people connect to that more than "OK, so we have cloud-based virtualization technology which spins up ephemeral application containers then hooks them to a proprietary in-browser IDE and shell prompt. It's a Frankenstein monster of Docker, Github, Heroku, and a browser-based IDE. No, the IDE's not the primary value add. No, AWS/Heroku is not a direct competitor. No, no, you don't get it, let me try again..." Edit: Incidentally if you just conceptualize the product as pain-first rather than solution-first then you'll phrase your strapline as "Dev environment for any stack on any machine in a minute" rather than "Virtualized insert words increasingly disconnected from anything you care about here."
- dully 12y ago
  They would cut you off less than half way through that pitch.
  - withdavidli 12y ago
    Care to explain why? I thought it was a pretty concise explaination. Do you have personal experience with YC interviews and know that they would for a certain reason?
    - rdl 12y ago
      I think they'd interrupt almost exactly at "Is everyone clear..." with "who uses it now?" or "what stack?" or "have you built this already?" Some other key questions you'd need an answer for, either in some kind of prepared way or in response to a question, are: 1) Why do you want to work on this (this is a great opportunity to talk about personal experience, showing the depth your technical skill and market knowledge indirectly 2) Who else does this today, how to do people do it now ("wipe laptop, spend a few hours setting it up" is one way; a lot of people have nice VMs already pre-populated for this and shared within a company, either local or VDI) 3) Any special risks, regulatory issues, etc. (e.g. if you're a medical startup you should know about HIPAA at least in sufficient detail to talk about it) 4) How do you get people to use it (namedropping current users is good, but your understanding of the market and how it's sold would be good to show) 5) (more key for non-YC investors) general market numbers. The top-down analysis is usually bullshit ('we need 1% of a 10b market..."), but being able to do bottom-up and based on comparables is good for a lot of things. In a 10 minute interview with YC, or a meeting with a consulting client, you don't know what they're going to care the most about. You want to make sure you hit your key points, but also can address their likely concerns in depth -- if you hit your points in 5 minutes and they spend 5 minutes drilling into the sales model, it's good to be able to talk about the sales model for 5 minutes, even if your original plan was to only talk about the sales model for 2 minutes.
vqc 12y ago
Thank you for the insanely detailed write up. What I want to know is what kind of magic YC saw in the application that got the team the interview. Because even from the team's perspective "There was no business model to speak of, the market size was unclear, we didn’t have much of any secret sauce, we hadn’t been working on it that long and the list goes on." Is this an instance where the team was so compelling it warranted an interview?
- argonaut 12y ago
  One possibly positive factor is that both founders have several years of previous startup experience (I believe starting their own non-tech businesses). Even something as small as starting a delivery company, or a tutoring company, is I believe a huge signal of someone's determination/entrepreneurial spirit.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
>Shao and I had lots of experience in starting companies, product management, management consulting and developing Maybe this is just me being nitpicky but "lots of experience" to me says that this person is an expert in their field. Guy obviously has done great things, but I wouldn't say he is an expert. Flawed as it may be, the 10,000 hour rule I think is a good rule of thumb to determine expert status and is roughly 10 years of full time intensive work, which he doesn't really have. This is part of a wider issue with the tech community that seems hypocritical. In one breath many in the tech world say that "results are what matter" and that age and experience are nothing but numbers. Then in the next breath these same people will tout about all the experience they have and how they are experts and have this and that experience. Can't have it both ways though. Either experience qua experience is worth something or it isn't. I would generally fall on the side of it isn't, so lets just not even mention it.
- guymorita 12y ago
  Lots is a relative statement and it doesn't mean expert. To put it in perspective collectively we have 6 years of running startups (both exited), 1 year of product, 2 years of management consulting, 16 years of coding. Definitely not expert, but well-rounded enough to start a company.
  - AndrewKemendo 12y ago
    Definitely enough to start a company, though I don't think anyone would argue that is a very high bar. Good luck.
mehrdada 12y ago
It is interesting that they have misspelled 'jl's last name twice, especially since one instance of it is in an email they quote from her.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
skolos 12y ago
I think that ideas have nothing to do with people. There is a general human race intelligence eather where ideas boil and and when one particular human comes up with an idea, there are probably 10 others that at the same time have the same idea. If you investigate carefully you'll notice that there are no breakthroughs. All ideas are incremental. Einstein was genius, but even his work was incremental [1]. Why I am saying this - we applied to YC this year with exactly same idea. It looks like even details of the implementation are similar. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute
- bcjordan 12y ago
  That concept is known as multiple discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery (or "simultaneous invention")
- guymorita 12y ago
  Agreed. That's also why implementation is king. We were building an app 2 years ago that was exactly like 4snaps (finally climbing the charts) but we didn't keep with it or ever do it full-time. Ideas are cheap.
jesusmichael 12y ago
Good job... your insights were great and description of the event was well written. As a developer I think there is a need but I do see point of YC, that your position is precarious. Good luck!
diziet 12y ago
Why rent a hotel on YC's money if you live in SF? That seems wasteful~
- diziet 12y ago
  I am trying to understand why I was downvoted for this.
  - konradb 12y ago
    Have nothing to do with your downvoting but the author explains why - 'No need to stress out more than we already were.'. Whether or not they expensed a hotel room could strike many as tangential to what is most interesting about being interviewed by YC.
- guymorita 12y ago
  Wasteful would be not giving the interview every ounce of effort that we had. I have a passionate hate for the Caltrain and didn't want any additional reason to stress on the morning of the YC interview. Showing up to the interview frustrated or stressed seemed more wasteful.
xiaoma 12y ago
I'm also a Hack Reactor alum who interviewed at YC this round and our team also met with Justin and Gary. Their feedback was basically, "why haven't you guys quit your jobs and started building this?" To be totally honest, I wasn't expecting such direct feedback, but they were right. Not only that but we already have pretty much every thing we need from the Hack Reactor network in terms of hiring advantages and connections with investors. I dearly love YC for everything they've shared with the world and PG essays are the only reason I left my profitable non-tech business and moved to the US, but we can build this without them. I've quit my job and taken the plunge. We've gotten a first customer and we're going for it. I hope Guy and Shu do, too. I know them and they're formidable both in technical terms and in drive. The question isn't about who will "give" you a chance. It's who can stop you. Maybe Github or Docker will both care enough about and make the effort to take your business. That doesn't mean they can succeed or that you'll be helpless wallflowers when it happens. Based on what I know of you, Shao and Guy, you will still find a win.
- justin 12y ago
  Thanks for coming in and taking the time to talk with us. I hope you guys do continue on building and I wish you the best of luck doing so.
  - xiaoma 12y ago
    Thanks for the good wishes. Going over to ask for investment and mentorship was a no-brainer. I'll try again with YC if I do another startup in the future.
winnie 12y ago
What a great writeup! I also interviewed at YC last week but didn't get in. Our product is fairly simple -- we make it easier for anyone to book a service and we're starting w/the massage industry vertical. Here's part of the rejection email we received: "This wasn’t an easy decision because, as you pointed out, there’s clearly a lot wrong with the systems that people use to book massages. It’s a similar problem to the one in many other appointment based businesses, and solving it would be valuable. Given the nature of the market and competing products, though, we could not quite see how you’d build a defensible product. Additionally, based on the way you’re planning on structuring your fees and relationships, it isn’t clear how you’d be able to lock your customers in for long enough to recoup your expenses and profitably acquire new customers." We also applied for and/or interviewed at other incubators. What sets YC apart from those other experiences is the great feedback we get from them.
elwell 12y ago
We were interviewed by the same group (Jessica, Paul B., Trever, Michael), and the experience was very similar. “Here we’ll show you a demo,” Shao offered. “No, we want you to tell us what you’re building,” Paul fired back with a very skeptical look. We, too, tried to show our demo and Paul gave us a skeptical look and said something along the lines of "I'm distracted by pictures." The interviewing team is very skilled in the art of extracting the essence of your startup and the possible shortcomings. I was impressed in how each of their questions had an obvious and very precise purpose. Additionally of interest, I can't remember Jessica asking a single question. I think she was observing the relational chemistry of our team during the interview.
moeamaya 12y ago
In the terms of a venture backed startup, I’m not sure your company makes sense (only based on a shallow reading of what was posted). While you have traction, a talented team, solid tech, and a potential business model, there’s not a clear understanding of the next step whether broadly or even in the developer community. I would love to have a dev environment ready in a few min but I don’t know how that tech extends beyond my own pain point.
dror 12y ago
http://beta.howtox.com/ http://beta.howtox.com/ or someone else with a similar idea?
bambax 12y ago
While it's very nice of YC to send a detailed rejection email stating actual reasons, the reasons themselves don't seem very strong. Isn't it true of any project at an early stage that it could, in theory, be wiped out by a well executed competing offer from an existing player? Would Youtube exist if Google Video didn't suck? Github / Google Code? Whatsapp / Google Hangouts? What prevented Github from inventing Docker? or any big tech company from inventing Dropbox? (etc.)
- flylib 12y ago
  when they try pull that shit, open up and go down their portfolio list and basically every company was or is still in a similar situation
nickstinemates 12y ago
If you want to come work on this product at Docker: get in touch. nick@docker.com
mathattack 12y ago
For those who have succeeded, is boxing the right mindset? I find that boxing is the right mindset for low-thought sales. "I'm going to keep fighting until I hit my quota of 10 gym membership sales for the week." For collaborative discussions, I find the Judo or Jiu Jitsu mindset more appropriate. If you push, I won't push back, I will pull you in the same direction. If you pull, I won't pull back, I will move my momentum in the same direction. In more practical terms, it doesn't treat comments like objections, it treats them as suggestions. "Have I thought about market X? Oh yes, it's a very interesting market. Here is what we thought...."
- _sentient 12y ago
  I don't think you're going to get very far with a contentious approach. Really, I think the partners are just looking for thoughtful and considered answers to any objections they raise. If you wanted to use boxing as an analogy: They would be throwing the punches, and you would be standing strong and blocking the hits.
6thSigma 12y ago
We interviewed twice and were rejected as well. Overall the experience was awesome and we hope to get the opportunity to meet with them again. One thing we didn't realize was how nerve-wracking waiting for the phone call / email would be. Our email came at 11pm. We figured that after 9ish it would be an email but weren't sure.
emmiechang 12y ago
Good Luck for the future! Great to chat with you at the interviews. Keep working hard.

178 points by gdi2290 12y ago

Hopefully everyone feels free to leave their comments about this one, I really enjoy reading it, thanks.

Isn't this pitched idea basically exactly http://nitrous.io/ http://nitrous.io/ -- especially with their recently launched "Hack on Nitrous.io" button for GitHub?

flylib 12y ago
that's what I thought also, can either of the founders talk about what makes it different?

rdl 12y ago

Wow, that's a really detailed and thoughtful analysis of your interview experience. It also successful as a promotional piece for your project -- I'd be more likely to use the tool based on this. In general, the advice is "listen to the no, but not the why", but I think that doesn't apply with YC -- the reason YC gave is probably an accurate reflection of what YC believes based on what you said in your interview (and application, and whatever other information they had).

vecter 12y ago

I've helped a bunch of people prepare for YC interviews and the biggest problem by an order of magnitude is not being able to concisely explain what you actually do. That may sound crazy, but I've yet to review an application that clearly and simply states what the company is building, why it's important, and how they're going to get adoption. It seems these guys had the same issue, since Guy mentioned that they spent the first 5 minutes explaining what they do. This is a symptom of a more general problem: people severely underestimate how difficult it is to convey an idea to another human being such that they actually understand it. Being able to do so is no small task, and I wish more people would recognize the value of this skill.

noisy_boy 12y ago
In this case they did a bunch of mock-interviews with people who had been through the YC process and got other developers to review it. I think at the end of every such interaction they could have asked those people how they will describe the product in 2 lines. Then they can take those responses and build a solid, concise response. That response, presenting views of people who are not the developers/not so close to the product, would probably appeal more/make more sense to the interviewers since they in a similar position of seeing a new product.
JacobJans 12y ago
Thank you for adding this comment. I find it very valuable, and quite interesting, especially the idea of "not being able to concisely explain what you actually do." I wonder if you could expand on that? I also wonder if you've observed whether or not people want to be "concise" with their goals. In my experience, success has been built around doing certain little things really well. For example, my business is successful because I'm really good at building a certain type of landing page. Yes, there is a lot that surrounds it, but it's basically just this one thing that makes it work. The issue of scope is something that everybody confronts when running a business. Any additional insight you could add would be appreciated. Thank you for your comment. Warmly, Jacob
- larrys 12y ago
  > "especially the idea of "not being able to concisely explain what you actually do." > I wonder if you could expand on that?" This is really selling. And it's something that comes in handy in business in every situation. If you can't concisely explain what your product can do for someone (either in person or in print) through marketing or salesmanship you won't make the sale unless you have some overwhelming advantage in some other area that holds people's interest (or little competition or maybe a super low price). Obviously in a HN comment there is no way to get into explaining how to be a good sales person in a few sentences. And while I could suggest books [1] the truth is you either have to have some experience and/or you have to be a "born" salesman. Or both. Edit: [1] I don't mean "I" could suggest specific books. Because I've never read books on sales. But I have closed large and small deals, against formidable opponents (right out of college, an example is trained IBM sales people) and I never read a single book on sales. But I do know there are books that can be purchased on selling and sales obviously.

CoffeeDregs 12y ago

[pre-apologies for the CAPS, but they seemed warranted.] I definitely appreciate the analysis, since analyses of any kind of stressful interaction are helpful. But I did want to comment on a small thing: YC is a very special kind of interview. I assume that this is referencing the previous bits of TFA, so I'd suggest that possibly YC is a COMPLETELY TYPICAL INTERVIEW FOR THIS KIND OF SITUATION. HN is a wonderful resource, but the idea that a YC interview is of "a special kind" is naive. [I'm sure the down-votes are heading my way...] YC is a type of VC-ish firm. Getting to pitch to any VC is rare and the kinds of questions mentioned in TFA are pretty standard. YC is going to invest their time in you and that is quite expensive for them to do, so it makes sense for them to push you in lots of directions to see how broadly you've thought about the problem. Random: I was in a board meeting yesterday getting peppered with questions about AWS AMI setups, framework choices and API load resiliency... And I'm just an advisor. Investors care a lot about a lot of things.

coralreef 12y ago
10 minute time limit, scheduled into an entire day of interviews against other teams, sounds pretty untypical to me. Plus how often do you get interviewed by the likes of Paul Buccheit?
- CoffeeDregs 12y ago
  10 minute time limit As TFA said, it's not a 10 minute time limit... 10 minutes is the pressure relief valve. But let's say "10 minutes". That, plus some time for questions, is a fairly standard angel round setup. how often do you get interviewed by the likes of Paul Buccheit Pretty much every time you do a serious VC pitch. There are certainly crappy firms, but my experience has been that good firms select an excellent set of folks and you will be grilled once you get through the initial screens. The differentiator of YC is the stage of investment and the shepherding of the teams, not the "very special kind of interview". [And I don't want to discount that YC might do a superlative job with their interviews, but I've not heard anything to suggest that the concerns/questions are atypical.]
guymorita 12y ago

patio11 12y ago

In general, when doing sales, sometimes it is easier to lead with the pain point and then introduce the solution. For example, "Setting up a dev environment takes a day. Sometimes you need one in a minute, like if you're interviewing somebody and need them to demonstrate coding ability on a company laptop. We turn any browser window into a fully-functional dev environment, and it's as ephemeral as the browser window is, so if you close it the company laptop is back in its original state without requiring a sysadmin to wipe it and start over. Next applicant gets a new browser window. Is everyone clear on why a dev environment which doesn't take 2 days to set up or tear down is a useful thing to have? Great! Would you like me to talk about who is willing to pay serious money for this, or do you want to hear what special sauce goes into making this Just Work for your favorite programming stack?" My guess is that even technically inclined people connect to that more than "OK, so we have cloud-based virtualization technology which spins up ephemeral application containers then hooks them to a proprietary in-browser IDE and shell prompt. It's a Frankenstein monster of Docker, Github, Heroku, and a browser-based IDE. No, the IDE's not the primary value add. No, AWS/Heroku is not a direct competitor. No, no, you don't get it, let me try again..." Edit: Incidentally if you just conceptualize the product as pain-first rather than solution-first then you'll phrase your strapline as "Dev environment for any stack on any machine in a minute" rather than "Virtualized insert words increasingly disconnected from anything you care about here."

dully 12y ago
They would cut you off less than half way through that pitch.
- withdavidli 12y ago
  Care to explain why? I thought it was a pretty concise explaination. Do you have personal experience with YC interviews and know that they would for a certain reason?
  - rdl 12y ago
    I think they'd interrupt almost exactly at "Is everyone clear..." with "who uses it now?" or "what stack?" or "have you built this already?" Some other key questions you'd need an answer for, either in some kind of prepared way or in response to a question, are: 1) Why do you want to work on this (this is a great opportunity to talk about personal experience, showing the depth your technical skill and market knowledge indirectly 2) Who else does this today, how to do people do it now ("wipe laptop, spend a few hours setting it up" is one way; a lot of people have nice VMs already pre-populated for this and shared within a company, either local or VDI) 3) Any special risks, regulatory issues, etc. (e.g. if you're a medical startup you should know about HIPAA at least in sufficient detail to talk about it) 4) How do you get people to use it (namedropping current users is good, but your understanding of the market and how it's sold would be good to show) 5) (more key for non-YC investors) general market numbers. The top-down analysis is usually bullshit ('we need 1% of a 10b market..."), but being able to do bottom-up and based on comparables is good for a lot of things. In a 10 minute interview with YC, or a meeting with a consulting client, you don't know what they're going to care the most about. You want to make sure you hit your key points, but also can address their likely concerns in depth -- if you hit your points in 5 minutes and they spend 5 minutes drilling into the sales model, it's good to be able to talk about the sales model for 5 minutes, even if your original plan was to only talk about the sales model for 2 minutes.

vqc 12y ago

Thank you for the insanely detailed write up. What I want to know is what kind of magic YC saw in the application that got the team the interview. Because even from the team's perspective "There was no business model to speak of, the market size was unclear, we didn’t have much of any secret sauce, we hadn’t been working on it that long and the list goes on." Is this an instance where the team was so compelling it warranted an interview?

argonaut 12y ago
One possibly positive factor is that both founders have several years of previous startup experience (I believe starting their own non-tech businesses). Even something as small as starting a delivery company, or a tutoring company, is I believe a huge signal of someone's determination/entrepreneurial spirit.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

>Shao and I had lots of experience in starting companies, product management, management consulting and developing Maybe this is just me being nitpicky but "lots of experience" to me says that this person is an expert in their field. Guy obviously has done great things, but I wouldn't say he is an expert. Flawed as it may be, the 10,000 hour rule I think is a good rule of thumb to determine expert status and is roughly 10 years of full time intensive work, which he doesn't really have. This is part of a wider issue with the tech community that seems hypocritical. In one breath many in the tech world say that "results are what matter" and that age and experience are nothing but numbers. Then in the next breath these same people will tout about all the experience they have and how they are experts and have this and that experience. Can't have it both ways though. Either experience qua experience is worth something or it isn't. I would generally fall on the side of it isn't, so lets just not even mention it.

guymorita 12y ago
Lots is a relative statement and it doesn't mean expert. To put it in perspective collectively we have 6 years of running startups (both exited), 1 year of product, 2 years of management consulting, 16 years of coding. Definitely not expert, but well-rounded enough to start a company.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  Definitely enough to start a company, though I don't think anyone would argue that is a very high bar. Good luck.

mehrdada 12y ago

It is interesting that they have misspelled 'jl's last name twice, especially since one instance of it is in an email they quote from her.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

skolos 12y ago

I think that ideas have nothing to do with people. There is a general human race intelligence eather where ideas boil and and when one particular human comes up with an idea, there are probably 10 others that at the same time have the same idea. If you investigate carefully you'll notice that there are no breakthroughs. All ideas are incremental. Einstein was genius, but even his work was incremental [1]. Why I am saying this - we applied to YC this year with exactly same idea. It looks like even details of the implementation are similar. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute

bcjordan 12y ago
That concept is known as multiple discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery (or "simultaneous invention")
guymorita 12y ago
Agreed. That's also why implementation is king. We were building an app 2 years ago that was exactly like 4snaps (finally climbing the charts) but we didn't keep with it or ever do it full-time. Ideas are cheap.

jesusmichael 12y ago

Good job... your insights were great and description of the event was well written. As a developer I think there is a need but I do see point of YC, that your position is precarious. Good luck!

diziet 12y ago

Why rent a hotel on YC's money if you live in SF? That seems wasteful~

diziet 12y ago
I am trying to understand why I was downvoted for this.
- konradb 12y ago
  Have nothing to do with your downvoting but the author explains why - 'No need to stress out more than we already were.'. Whether or not they expensed a hotel room could strike many as tangential to what is most interesting about being interviewed by YC.
guymorita 12y ago
Wasteful would be not giving the interview every ounce of effort that we had. I have a passionate hate for the Caltrain and didn't want any additional reason to stress on the morning of the YC interview. Showing up to the interview frustrated or stressed seemed more wasteful.

xiaoma 12y ago

I'm also a Hack Reactor alum who interviewed at YC this round and our team also met with Justin and Gary. Their feedback was basically, "why haven't you guys quit your jobs and started building this?" To be totally honest, I wasn't expecting such direct feedback, but they were right. Not only that but we already have pretty much every thing we need from the Hack Reactor network in terms of hiring advantages and connections with investors. I dearly love YC for everything they've shared with the world and PG essays are the only reason I left my profitable non-tech business and moved to the US, but we can build this without them. I've quit my job and taken the plunge. We've gotten a first customer and we're going for it. I hope Guy and Shu do, too. I know them and they're formidable both in technical terms and in drive. The question isn't about who will "give" you a chance. It's who can stop you. Maybe Github or Docker will both care enough about and make the effort to take your business. That doesn't mean they can succeed or that you'll be helpless wallflowers when it happens. Based on what I know of you, Shao and Guy, you will still find a win.

justin 12y ago
Thanks for coming in and taking the time to talk with us. I hope you guys do continue on building and I wish you the best of luck doing so.
- xiaoma 12y ago
  Thanks for the good wishes. Going over to ask for investment and mentorship was a no-brainer. I'll try again with YC if I do another startup in the future.

winnie 12y ago

What a great writeup! I also interviewed at YC last week but didn't get in. Our product is fairly simple -- we make it easier for anyone to book a service and we're starting w/the massage industry vertical. Here's part of the rejection email we received: "This wasn’t an easy decision because, as you pointed out, there’s clearly a lot wrong with the systems that people use to book massages. It’s a similar problem to the one in many other appointment based businesses, and solving it would be valuable. Given the nature of the market and competing products, though, we could not quite see how you’d build a defensible product. Additionally, based on the way you’re planning on structuring your fees and relationships, it isn’t clear how you’d be able to lock your customers in for long enough to recoup your expenses and profitably acquire new customers." We also applied for and/or interviewed at other incubators. What sets YC apart from those other experiences is the great feedback we get from them.

elwell 12y ago

We were interviewed by the same group (Jessica, Paul B., Trever, Michael), and the experience was very similar. “Here we’ll show you a demo,” Shao offered. “No, we want you to tell us what you’re building,” Paul fired back with a very skeptical look. We, too, tried to show our demo and Paul gave us a skeptical look and said something along the lines of "I'm distracted by pictures." The interviewing team is very skilled in the art of extracting the essence of your startup and the possible shortcomings. I was impressed in how each of their questions had an obvious and very precise purpose. Additionally of interest, I can't remember Jessica asking a single question. I think she was observing the relational chemistry of our team during the interview.

moeamaya 12y ago

In the terms of a venture backed startup, I’m not sure your company makes sense (only based on a shallow reading of what was posted). While you have traction, a talented team, solid tech, and a potential business model, there’s not a clear understanding of the next step whether broadly or even in the developer community. I would love to have a dev environment ready in a few min but I don’t know how that tech extends beyond my own pain point.

dror 12y ago

http://beta.howtox.com/ http://beta.howtox.com/ or someone else with a similar idea?

bambax 12y ago

While it's very nice of YC to send a detailed rejection email stating actual reasons, the reasons themselves don't seem very strong. Isn't it true of any project at an early stage that it could, in theory, be wiped out by a well executed competing offer from an existing player? Would Youtube exist if Google Video didn't suck? Github / Google Code? Whatsapp / Google Hangouts? What prevented Github from inventing Docker? or any big tech company from inventing Dropbox? (etc.)

flylib 12y ago
when they try pull that shit, open up and go down their portfolio list and basically every company was or is still in a similar situation

nickstinemates 12y ago

If you want to come work on this product at Docker: get in touch. nick@docker.com

mathattack 12y ago

For those who have succeeded, is boxing the right mindset? I find that boxing is the right mindset for low-thought sales. "I'm going to keep fighting until I hit my quota of 10 gym membership sales for the week." For collaborative discussions, I find the Judo or Jiu Jitsu mindset more appropriate. If you push, I won't push back, I will pull you in the same direction. If you pull, I won't pull back, I will move my momentum in the same direction. In more practical terms, it doesn't treat comments like objections, it treats them as suggestions. "Have I thought about market X? Oh yes, it's a very interesting market. Here is what we thought...."

_sentient 12y ago
I don't think you're going to get very far with a contentious approach. Really, I think the partners are just looking for thoughtful and considered answers to any objections they raise. If you wanted to use boxing as an analogy: They would be throwing the punches, and you would be standing strong and blocking the hits.

6thSigma 12y ago

We interviewed twice and were rejected as well. Overall the experience was awesome and we hope to get the opportunity to meet with them again. One thing we didn't realize was how nerve-wracking waiting for the phone call / email would be. Our email came at 11pm. We figured that after 9ish it would be an email but weren't sure.

emmiechang 12y ago

Good Luck for the future! Great to chat with you at the interviews. Keep working hard.