There's a lot of great material in this post, but as a recent YC alum myself, I have a number of problems with it.
1) "If you’re writing your Y Comb application and it takes you less than a month of work, you’re not trying hard enough."
No. You should not be spending that much effort on your application to YC -- or any accelerator. Should you have a few people read it over? Yes. Should you spellcheck? Yes. But not much more than that. Focus on building your product and building your business.
2) "no one’s video is under a minute."
Ours was. 50 seconds, to be exact.
3) "But my point is, if your company and team is solid, than you will get in."
This is the most dangerous statement in the post. This is simply not the case. Every successful entrepreneur was told "no" and turned down time and time again on their path to greatness. Facebook got "no's" from VCs. Airbnb's founders were told they were crazy. Many people outright laughed at Elon Musk's dream to build rocket ships. SendGrid was rejected from YC. If you believe in your team, and you believe in your idea, trek on. The YC partners are some of the smartest people I've ever met, but they're not infallible.
YC has been absolutely amazing for my team and my company, and we're very grateful for having gone through the program. But we likely wouldn't have been accepted and wouldn't have benefitted so much from the program if we weren't focused intensely on what matters -- building our product, talking to our customers, and staying healthy. Apply, hope you get in, but if you don't, carry on.
As a data point, I was rejected by YC 3 times. Once after the interview, once at the application, and amusingly enough the first time we applied for the last batch. We got in after applying again late with LightTable.
There is certainly no guarantee that with a "solid" team you'll get in. At the end of the day, it's all a matter of serendipity.
If you switched projects four times, I can only assume that the last company, the one that YC accepted, has the most potential... otherwise, you would have continued working on the other projects.
I think it's way more than serendipity. I think the YC staff is extremely good at identifying where good teams and good products meet.
This was over a series of years. There are lots of reasons why we stopped working on the different projects, but I'm not sure I believe there was any less potential in them - especially Prospector.
While I agree that they've gotten very good at identifying potential good team/product pairings, that just means they have relatively few false positives. It makes no claim to how many people they pass over who may in fact have an amazing team and product. As the noise in the process increases, you're bound to end up with more and more people who for completely random reasons didn't end up being what they wanted that day. This isn't a purely objective process (thank goodness).
All other things being equal, anything that relies on the judgement of a few people has an element of serendipity to it.
I think Prospector sounds very interesting, even only from a three word description. I know three friends running startups in the healthcare market and it's a tough one (with a lot of entrenched interests).
"All other things being equal, anything that relies on the judgement of a few people has an element of serendipity to it."
Also recall that the judgement is made on the basis of a 10minute interview. Ask any of these startups if they'd ever hire a group of strangers into their company based on a 10 minute interview. (I'm aware that's not really a fair comparison, but it should still make people think).
"When we realized that multiple YC partners had already independently contributed to the Kickstarter project because they wanted to use Light Table themselves, it was not a hard decision." --thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992343
Couldn't agree more on all counts. What works for one team will not always apply to another.
I started filling out our application 2 hours before the deadline, and I am a slow writer. It worked out for us, but I wouldn't recommend this approach. Correlation is not causation.
Best applications consistently keep the video under 1 minute. Given the culture of conciseness in YC I wouldn't recommend intentionally going longer.
Surprisingly, I agree with my co-founder. "Hacking" the yc application process implies that the poster was able to put much less work into the application than others did through cleverness on the poster's part. The post sounds like he thoughtfully filled out the application in a way that highlighted his strengths and minimized his weaknesses, as everyone else does. He also put a lot more work and thought into it than we, and the other yc founders that I know, did.
Instead of building that application for a whole month, he should have been building his product and landing customers.
For #1, I know many YC founders who have gotten in just using half or day or so for the application (usually defying the deadline). We used only one Sunday afternoon for ours on the second run when we got in and I don't see the point of wasting time except getting few rounds of feedback and spellcheck.
Interestingly enough also many alumnus I know thought they failed the interview once walking out of the room. I sure did.
Edit: With the second comment I was referring to section "Once we got the Interview, we knew we were in"
"We used only one Sunday afternoon for ours on the second run when we got in and I don't see the point of wasting time except getting few rounds of feedback and spellcheck."
I think many of the posters who spent relatively little time on their second, third, fourth, etc. applications are underestimating how much time they spent preparing the application. Unless you could have written that application from scratch the first time, at least some of the time spent on your failed applications counts as "writing the application." I'm pretty sure the author didn't mean 1 month of 12 hour days sitting in front of a word processor (and I think has said as much).
I don't comment a lot here, but I did want to come on and make the same point, but you beat me to it Seth. The truth is that we had a quick write up. Our video actually took more than a couple takes because we didn't rehearse or script it and someone would say something silly and we would all laugh. The best way to get in is to have a strong team and understand your product and market. Building your company is the best way to understand your product and market. For the interview I would definitely recommend being rejected as much as possible before the interview so you can quickly and confidently answer any questions or concerns someone can come up with in a 10 minute span. You will find that getting rejected is pretty easy to do. It's just like with women (or men), if put yourself out there, you will get rejected. How you learn from the rejection and better yourself is important.
A month is not 730.484 hours on your application, it's spending a lot of time thinking and musing about your application and your business.
Our application process helped hone and focus our business in ways that nothing else has. I would argue that working hard on your YC application is working hard on your company.
As you've pointed out twice (#2,#3), there are always exceptions to rules.
If a company does not make it past a YC interview, then there was something that YC didn't like... it can only help that company to try to extract that issue and deal with it early on.
"I would argue that working hard on your YC application is working hard on your company."
This is exactly wrong. There are two types of questions on the YC application:
1) the ones about you as founders, and
2) the ones about your business
Spending time thinking about the first type of question (e.g. "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.") does not help you build your business -- not in the least.
And if you spend time building your business (i.e. talking to customers and building your product), then you'll be well prepared to answer the second kind of question.
You have it backwards. Working on your YC app != working on your business. Working hard on your business, however, is the best thing you can do make your YC application successful.
I think we believe the same things here, and are talking around each other.
Spending time thinking about our business for us included talking to customers and asking hard questions. Only after understanding our customers could we build anything at all--for an enterprise product like ours, it's impossible to iterate in a vacuum.
Working on your company should always be the answer, but before we could ship code, we needed to know where we were going.
As PG points out, "The biggest mistake founders make when applying is to confuse us. Half the time when I'm reading an application I'm thinking 'I have no idea what this person is even talking about.' I suspect this often the writer's own confusion showing through."¹
Trying to explain our very-difficult model helped us to both understand it and define for ourselves.
Admittedly, it was a bit weird to just start making money without knowing where the future of the company was going. The YC app itself forced us to talk through these things; but maybe this problem is unique to our company.
One of the most valuable pieces of advice YC offers is that there are lots of things that are a waste of time, but feel like they're productive, and that these things are especially dangerous to spend time on.
Hi sethbannon, idbknox, gleb, and lloydarmbrust, would it be ok to ask you guys for feedback on my YC app? I wanted to check with you first before I start spamming your inboxes :)
I live in Silicon Valley so everyone here is either going YC crazy right now, or absolutely clueless. It would be awesome to get feedback from someone objective but experienced.
I apologize if this wasn't the right place to ask, but with 4 YC alums in the same thread I had to give it a shot!
1) "If you’re writing your Y Comb application and it takes you less than a month of work, you’re not trying hard enough."
No. You should not be spending that much effort on your application to YC -- or any accelerator. Should you have a few people read it over? Yes. Should you spellcheck? Yes. But not much more than that. Focus on building your product and building your business.
2) "no one’s video is under a minute."
Ours was. 50 seconds, to be exact.
3) "But my point is, if your company and team is solid, than you will get in."
This is the most dangerous statement in the post. This is simply not the case. Every successful entrepreneur was told "no" and turned down time and time again on their path to greatness. Facebook got "no's" from VCs. Airbnb's founders were told they were crazy. Many people outright laughed at Elon Musk's dream to build rocket ships. SendGrid was rejected from YC. If you believe in your team, and you believe in your idea, trek on. The YC partners are some of the smartest people I've ever met, but they're not infallible.
YC has been absolutely amazing for my team and my company, and we're very grateful for having gone through the program. But we likely wouldn't have been accepted and wouldn't have benefitted so much from the program if we weren't focused intensely on what matters -- building our product, talking to our customers, and staying healthy. Apply, hope you get in, but if you don't, carry on.