7 ms·

The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

167 points by wheels 17y ago

madmotive 17y ago
This is exactly how our "interview" went. Despite being given the same advice by others that had been through the process we still foolishly wasted time preparing a short 1 minute pitch. We might have had a better result if we'd invested more time in getting the user experience in our demo right and answering the one critical question - "Why would people want this?" Don't make the same mistake we did. :)
- araneae 17y ago
  It seems to me that the pitch is in the application anyway. I can't imagine why they'd want you to just repeat yourselves.
  - madmotive 17y ago
    You shouldn't expect them to remember what was in the application. If they do remember something it will probably only be one line.
    - wheels 17y ago
      That actually goes for investors in general, from what I can tell. Biggest mistake we made with the first investor that invited us in was assuming that he knew what we did. (One of his associates apparently had said that he should talk to us; he'd never looked at our website.) In the case of YC interviews, that paragraph that says what your company does is buried in the thousands of pages of text that are going across their eyes during the screening process. Don't expect them to remember it verbatim. ;-)
- chrischen 17y ago
  Is a demo required?
  - aberman 17y ago
    No, but obviously better if you have one.
  - rantfoil 17y ago
    I think its incredibly foolish to try to get funding for something that has no basis in reality yet. That's what a demo really is -- a toe-hold. But that toehold is usually enough to know whether a team can make it a reality, and whether they have a chance in the real world. There's so much competition from great teams that it may well be a waste of time without showing your best.
    - chrischen 17y ago
      I understand but Paul Graham really makes an emphasis on the team, and that a demo is not required. I mean there has to be a way to prove that that the team can produce what they claim: past work, past startups, etc right?
      - joez 17y ago
        I think YC is sufficiently competitive that teams without a demo (on the application) will not even get an interview. Also (I believe it has been said), the two weeks from when you're notified to the weekend of the interview should be sufficient to produce some kind of early stage demo. Your startup idea might be unfit for YC if you can't at least have something to show in two weeks of fervent work.
        chrischen 17y ago
        Thanks for the advice. I was under the impression that the demo would be unimportant, and since I'm in school right now, I thought I'd go slow at it unless I am accepted. I can whip up something in two weeks easy (even with school), but I didn't submit a demo in the application because I didn't think it would be necessary, so I focused on developing the idea instead.
        17y ago
ramidarigaz 17y ago
Slight sidenote. On an 800x480 screen, overflow:hidden is a royal pain.
- hussong 17y ago
  Not sure why you got downvoted. Thanks for the note, I appreciate it and will look into this.
  - ramidarigaz 17y ago
    No problem! Thanks for looking out for us netbook users.
    - wheels 17y ago
      Fixed.
- araneae 17y ago
  Another tiny UI thing- for me the search bar overlays one of the results. For the easter egg I thought they had left pg out of the results until I realized it was underneath the search bar.
hussong 17y ago
Heh, waiting for the post-interview phone call was a real nail-biter, we basically spent the entire evening waiting for the phone to ring. But it didn't. It didn't even occur to us that they might call our land line back home until we got the email the next morning. Remotely checking the answering machine was fun too, hadn't used that feature in ages and the code didn't work (turns out you can't send DTMF tones when calling via Skype). At the time we weren't sure if they give everyone a call or just the ones they accept, so we didn't take the absence of a call as a 'no', but kept wondering. In the end, we got the answer about 26 (pretty exciting) hours after we left the interview room. So, unless you're a thrill seeker, put your cell number in the application :-)
- madmotive 17y ago
  You get an email when you don't get in with a nice couple of lines explaining why. Our email came in the early hours of the morning. I'd encourage you not to respond to it, at least for a few days. I felt compelled at the time to send a few paragraphs the next morning responding to some of the criticisms. Retrospectively it probably wasn't that all that useful to anyone. It must be an exhausting 3 days for the YC team. I don't think there are enough hours in the day for them to call all the unsuccessful interviewees. Especially when some of them (like us) will want to take more of their time responding to feedback. The quantity and quality of the questions and feedback you get in the short 10 minute interview alone is brilliant. Even though we didn't get funded it's had a massive impact on the way I think about things. I'd fly out from the UK to do it again even if there wasn't any chance of funding.
- jl 17y ago
  Or just be sure to tell me at the end of the interview which number you'd like us to call that night.
  - btilly 17y ago
    From the article, We’d given Jessica cards with our cell-phone numbers on them during the interview, but that didn’t seem to have registered. I take that to mean that they tried to make it clear how to call them, but for whatever reason signals got crossed.
SlyShy 17y ago
Thanks for the insight into the process. That sounds a lot more useful than an actual interview, because it seems like you are learning something from the meeting through the brainstorming.
gord 17y ago
Interesting read and nice success story... On DirectedEdge home, can I enter any search term, or does this need to be a well formatted Wikipedia entry url ?
- wheels 17y ago
  If you type the beginning of an article name it should autocomplete after a sec (it's a little slower than it should be...) There's also an easter-egg you can use: http://www.directededge.com/?Y%20Combinator http://www.directededge.com/?Y%20Combinator
  - davidw 17y ago
    BTW, time to put up a nice looking 404 page or fix whatever's wrong: http://www.directededge.com/dsfdsfds http://www.directededge.com/dsfdsfds
    - sailormoon 17y ago
      What is wrong with that 404 page? It's a 404. Form follows function. I prefer it to a prettified version, honestly.
      - davidw 17y ago
        "Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request." suggests that something is amiss. I'm not a big fan of overboard, fancy graphics (just look at my sites), but just a little bit of looking nice goes a long way.
        sailormoon 17y ago
        It's a standard Apache error. No big deal. Really, if the user hits a 404 then something has gone badly wrong and I think it's appropriate for them to get an ugly message.
mahmud 17y ago
Anyone know if YC is doing traditional companies? i.e. advertising and real-estate. Don't need the money but could really use the "blessing". They have some of the most enviable media contacts in the industry right now.
- eru 17y ago
  They said they need to understand what you are doing.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    Well, we got into these businesses from meeting industry insiders and specialists. You sit down with people, chat, and find out business opportunities. Just today we evaluated festival, trade show and expo opportunities; took me about 10 hours to study the industry and see potential, I am still evaluating it, but there is no reason for YC not to understand it fully. Seems like the whole startup scene is focused on web-based tools and utilities, while we're focused in real-world businesses.
    - eru 17y ago
      I find real-world business refreshing (compared to the reality bubble of web-startups-only). I'd say, go ahead apply. You will at least get noticed easier than the next twitter clone. By the way, I am also interested in operations research. (I write my thesis about the very real-world problem of scheduling at Deutsche Bahn.)
    - aberman 17y ago
      What you describe sounds more like a small business than a startup. YC only funds startups (i.e. scalable and disruptive). The two are not synonymous. YC primarily funds software and web-based companies because you can create a scalable and disruptive web-based company on $20k.
      - eru 17y ago
        I wonder where all those recent down-voters come from. It used to be more friendly around here. When only trolls got voted down to 0 or less.
bastian 17y ago
Wheels, this is brilliant and it mostly matches what we learnt from other startups during StartupSchool and the Y-Combinator reception last month. Thanks for putting this in a post.
JLaramie 17y ago
This is a great breakdown of your journey. Thanks for giving us the info.
sailormoon 17y ago
I am sorry if this is completely obvious and I am missing something. But I just do not understand, not one little bit. Why did you fly to America to get $5000? It is not a large amount of money. I am surprised it covered your air fares. So why? I do not feel the need at all. You did. I would like to here why. Did they really say something in the interview that justified all that time and expense? update: I have no idea whatsoever why this is being downvoted. There is no way I would fly to the US to collect a pathetic $5k. I'd genuinely like to know why people think it is a profitable thing to do so. Thanks.
- gruseom 17y ago
  You're being downvoted because people think the answer to your question is so obvious that you must be trolling. However, I'll assume you're being sincere. The money is the least important aspect of getting in to YC. What matters is the advice they provide and the community/network aspects. These things are so valuable that they are a huge state change for most startups.
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    This is not obvious to me at all. I admit I have difficulty conceiving of advice so compelling I'd travel to America to receive it. Fair enough I guess. People pay what they think it is worth. That's capitalism; no argument from me. I am not trolling. Carry on.
    - dannyr 17y ago
      The travel expenses is reimbursed by YC up to a certain amount. It's no expense for the founders except time. I'm curious what led you to Hacker News if you don't see the value of YC more than the money.
      - pyre 17y ago
        Lots of people (me included) are on Hacker News because of the community and the quality of articles (as compared to Digg, Slashdot, Programming.Reddit, etc).
endlessvoid94 17y ago
I just spent 10 minutes playing with the flash visualization on your homepage. Good luck!
- pmorici 17y ago
  Is it flash? When I right click it lets me save the graph image as an image... what are you guys using to do this? It's really neat.
  - kam 17y ago
    It's a <canvas> element.
marknutter 17y ago
Wow, I'm going to have to be a lot more thoughtful when I post on news.ycombinator from now on.
- btilly 17y ago
  And you'll start with your next post, right? :-P
leelin 17y ago
Did you guys happen to do much mingling in the waiting area just before or just after your interview? We got to the interview super early and ended up chatting with Kate (we asked her how to get to In and Out), Skysheets Dan (saw his demo), and two other interviewing teams that were accepted. Then there were two less social teams who sat in the corner with their laptops, I guess nervously testing their demo one last time. Maybe I'm over-fitting, but for me the nerve-calming benefits of being social in the waiting room was helpful.
- anateus 17y ago
  They did. I remember them as the first other YC team we talked to.
peripitea 17y ago
First, congratulations! I'm curious how you are setting up a company in the United States if you or one of your co-founders is from Germany? I've been trying to figure out the whole startup-as-a-foreigner thing (I'm Canadian), and so far I haven't been able to find any good info.

167 points by wheels 17y ago

This is exactly how our "interview" went. Despite being given the same advice by others that had been through the process we still foolishly wasted time preparing a short 1 minute pitch. We might have had a better result if we'd invested more time in getting the user experience in our demo right and answering the one critical question - "Why would people want this?" Don't make the same mistake we did. :)

araneae 17y ago
It seems to me that the pitch is in the application anyway. I can't imagine why they'd want you to just repeat yourselves.
- madmotive 17y ago
  You shouldn't expect them to remember what was in the application. If they do remember something it will probably only be one line.
  - wheels 17y ago
    That actually goes for investors in general, from what I can tell. Biggest mistake we made with the first investor that invited us in was assuming that he knew what we did. (One of his associates apparently had said that he should talk to us; he'd never looked at our website.) In the case of YC interviews, that paragraph that says what your company does is buried in the thousands of pages of text that are going across their eyes during the screening process. Don't expect them to remember it verbatim. ;-)
chrischen 17y ago
Is a demo required?
- aberman 17y ago
  No, but obviously better if you have one.
- rantfoil 17y ago
  I think its incredibly foolish to try to get funding for something that has no basis in reality yet. That's what a demo really is -- a toe-hold. But that toehold is usually enough to know whether a team can make it a reality, and whether they have a chance in the real world. There's so much competition from great teams that it may well be a waste of time without showing your best.
  - chrischen 17y ago
    I understand but Paul Graham really makes an emphasis on the team, and that a demo is not required. I mean there has to be a way to prove that that the team can produce what they claim: past work, past startups, etc right?
    - joez 17y ago
      I think YC is sufficiently competitive that teams without a demo (on the application) will not even get an interview. Also (I believe it has been said), the two weeks from when you're notified to the weekend of the interview should be sufficient to produce some kind of early stage demo. Your startup idea might be unfit for YC if you can't at least have something to show in two weeks of fervent work.
      - chrischen 17y ago
        Thanks for the advice. I was under the impression that the demo would be unimportant, and since I'm in school right now, I thought I'd go slow at it unless I am accepted. I can whip up something in two weeks easy (even with school), but I didn't submit a demo in the application because I didn't think it would be necessary, so I focused on developing the idea instead.
        17y ago

ramidarigaz 17y ago

Slight sidenote. On an 800x480 screen, overflow:hidden is a royal pain.

hussong 17y ago
Not sure why you got downvoted. Thanks for the note, I appreciate it and will look into this.
- ramidarigaz 17y ago
  No problem! Thanks for looking out for us netbook users.
  - wheels 17y ago
    Fixed.
araneae 17y ago
Another tiny UI thing- for me the search bar overlays one of the results. For the easter egg I thought they had left pg out of the results until I realized it was underneath the search bar.

hussong 17y ago

Heh, waiting for the post-interview phone call was a real nail-biter, we basically spent the entire evening waiting for the phone to ring. But it didn't. It didn't even occur to us that they might call our land line back home until we got the email the next morning. Remotely checking the answering machine was fun too, hadn't used that feature in ages and the code didn't work (turns out you can't send DTMF tones when calling via Skype). At the time we weren't sure if they give everyone a call or just the ones they accept, so we didn't take the absence of a call as a 'no', but kept wondering. In the end, we got the answer about 26 (pretty exciting) hours after we left the interview room. So, unless you're a thrill seeker, put your cell number in the application :-)

madmotive 17y ago
You get an email when you don't get in with a nice couple of lines explaining why. Our email came in the early hours of the morning. I'd encourage you not to respond to it, at least for a few days. I felt compelled at the time to send a few paragraphs the next morning responding to some of the criticisms. Retrospectively it probably wasn't that all that useful to anyone. It must be an exhausting 3 days for the YC team. I don't think there are enough hours in the day for them to call all the unsuccessful interviewees. Especially when some of them (like us) will want to take more of their time responding to feedback. The quantity and quality of the questions and feedback you get in the short 10 minute interview alone is brilliant. Even though we didn't get funded it's had a massive impact on the way I think about things. I'd fly out from the UK to do it again even if there wasn't any chance of funding.
jl 17y ago
Or just be sure to tell me at the end of the interview which number you'd like us to call that night.
- btilly 17y ago
  From the article, We’d given Jessica cards with our cell-phone numbers on them during the interview, but that didn’t seem to have registered. I take that to mean that they tried to make it clear how to call them, but for whatever reason signals got crossed.

SlyShy 17y ago

Thanks for the insight into the process. That sounds a lot more useful than an actual interview, because it seems like you are learning something from the meeting through the brainstorming.

gord 17y ago

Interesting read and nice success story... On DirectedEdge home, can I enter any search term, or does this need to be a well formatted Wikipedia entry url ?

wheels 17y ago
If you type the beginning of an article name it should autocomplete after a sec (it's a little slower than it should be...) There's also an easter-egg you can use: http://www.directededge.com/?Y%20Combinator http://www.directededge.com/?Y%20Combinator
- davidw 17y ago
  BTW, time to put up a nice looking 404 page or fix whatever's wrong: http://www.directededge.com/dsfdsfds http://www.directededge.com/dsfdsfds
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    What is wrong with that 404 page? It's a 404. Form follows function. I prefer it to a prettified version, honestly.
    - davidw 17y ago
      "Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request." suggests that something is amiss. I'm not a big fan of overboard, fancy graphics (just look at my sites), but just a little bit of looking nice goes a long way.
      - sailormoon 17y ago
        It's a standard Apache error. No big deal. Really, if the user hits a 404 then something has gone badly wrong and I think it's appropriate for them to get an ugly message.

mahmud 17y ago

Anyone know if YC is doing traditional companies? i.e. advertising and real-estate. Don't need the money but could really use the "blessing". They have some of the most enviable media contacts in the industry right now.

eru 17y ago
They said they need to understand what you are doing.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Well, we got into these businesses from meeting industry insiders and specialists. You sit down with people, chat, and find out business opportunities. Just today we evaluated festival, trade show and expo opportunities; took me about 10 hours to study the industry and see potential, I am still evaluating it, but there is no reason for YC not to understand it fully. Seems like the whole startup scene is focused on web-based tools and utilities, while we're focused in real-world businesses.
  - eru 17y ago
    I find real-world business refreshing (compared to the reality bubble of web-startups-only). I'd say, go ahead apply. You will at least get noticed easier than the next twitter clone. By the way, I am also interested in operations research. (I write my thesis about the very real-world problem of scheduling at Deutsche Bahn.)
  - aberman 17y ago
    What you describe sounds more like a small business than a startup. YC only funds startups (i.e. scalable and disruptive). The two are not synonymous. YC primarily funds software and web-based companies because you can create a scalable and disruptive web-based company on $20k.
    - eru 17y ago
      I wonder where all those recent down-voters come from. It used to be more friendly around here. When only trolls got voted down to 0 or less.

bastian 17y ago

Wheels, this is brilliant and it mostly matches what we learnt from other startups during StartupSchool and the Y-Combinator reception last month. Thanks for putting this in a post.

JLaramie 17y ago

This is a great breakdown of your journey. Thanks for giving us the info.

sailormoon 17y ago

I am sorry if this is completely obvious and I am missing something. But I just do not understand, not one little bit. Why did you fly to America to get $5000? It is not a large amount of money. I am surprised it covered your air fares. So why? I do not feel the need at all. You did. I would like to here why. Did they really say something in the interview that justified all that time and expense? update: I have no idea whatsoever why this is being downvoted. There is no way I would fly to the US to collect a pathetic $5k. I'd genuinely like to know why people think it is a profitable thing to do so. Thanks.

gruseom 17y ago
You're being downvoted because people think the answer to your question is so obvious that you must be trolling. However, I'll assume you're being sincere. The money is the least important aspect of getting in to YC. What matters is the advice they provide and the community/network aspects. These things are so valuable that they are a huge state change for most startups.
- sailormoon 17y ago
  This is not obvious to me at all. I admit I have difficulty conceiving of advice so compelling I'd travel to America to receive it. Fair enough I guess. People pay what they think it is worth. That's capitalism; no argument from me. I am not trolling. Carry on.
  - dannyr 17y ago
    The travel expenses is reimbursed by YC up to a certain amount. It's no expense for the founders except time. I'm curious what led you to Hacker News if you don't see the value of YC more than the money.
    - pyre 17y ago
      Lots of people (me included) are on Hacker News because of the community and the quality of articles (as compared to Digg, Slashdot, Programming.Reddit, etc).

endlessvoid94 17y ago

I just spent 10 minutes playing with the flash visualization on your homepage. Good luck!

pmorici 17y ago
Is it flash? When I right click it lets me save the graph image as an image... what are you guys using to do this? It's really neat.
- kam 17y ago
  It's a <canvas> element.

marknutter 17y ago

Wow, I'm going to have to be a lot more thoughtful when I post on news.ycombinator from now on.

btilly 17y ago
And you'll start with your next post, right? :-P

leelin 17y ago

Did you guys happen to do much mingling in the waiting area just before or just after your interview? We got to the interview super early and ended up chatting with Kate (we asked her how to get to In and Out), Skysheets Dan (saw his demo), and two other interviewing teams that were accepted. Then there were two less social teams who sat in the corner with their laptops, I guess nervously testing their demo one last time. Maybe I'm over-fitting, but for me the nerve-calming benefits of being social in the waiting room was helpful.

anateus 17y ago
They did. I remember them as the first other YC team we talked to.

peripitea 17y ago

First, congratulations! I'm curious how you are setting up a company in the United States if you or one of your co-founders is from Germany? I've been trying to figure out the whole startup-as-a-foreigner thing (I'm Canadian), and so far I haven't been able to find any good info.