Reddit Founders' YC Application

http://alexisohanian.com/our-y-combinator-summer-05-application-what-w

by ptn • 16 years ago

178 51 16 years ago

pclark• 16 years ago

It's interesting to see how the application form has evolved.

kn0thing5• 16 years ago

I was telling team YC during interview week that I miss the "animal" question, partially because I really love our answer (the "we're a freaking zoo" line is pure Huffman).

ciscoriordan• 16 years ago

They used to ask for your Slashdot username!

kn0thing5• 16 years ago

And in Steve's defense, his number should be lower, but I think he lurked for years...

philwelch2• 16 years ago

Well, Reddit didn't exist yet (on account of Reddit being a YC startup) and HN didn't exist because Reddit hadn't gotten to a state that HN needed to be created. So the evolution seems natural, assuming they wanted to know whether you made any intelligent comments on tech news sites.

ilovecomputers2• 16 years ago

Now what do they ask for?

jmtame• 16 years ago

Made me laugh: "animals? were a freaking zoo!"

nandemo• 16 years ago

> We are going to build an infrastructure that will allow consumers to order food from their cell phones (via a text-interface, rather than voice), drive to the restaurant and pick up their order.

That sounds like a much more promising business than "a site where users submit news and sites, vote them up and write comments about them". I don't mean this is in a snarky way, I'm a reddit user too. Am I missing something?

axod• 16 years ago

It certainly sounds like it would have made more profit, but less likely of getting bought.

Reddit was a fantastic idea to getting acquired.

jroes• 16 years ago

Good point, I came here looking for the answer to this too. Hopefully kn0thing or pg can shed some light as to why this was such a horrible idea?

tsbaron• 16 years ago

Here is what Alexis had to say answering this question in the comments section of his site:

alexis ohanian said... I believe the biggest thing was the dangers of dealing with both cellphone carriers (this is pre "AppStore," remember) who are notoriously closed and slow-moving as well as restaurants, which aren't typically very tech-curious (all the ones I spoke with were taking online orders via fax).

Indyan• 16 years ago

Edit: Never mind. Someone posted the samething below.

notahacker• 16 years ago

Technical challenges integrating with existing restaraunt ordering systems; probable need for active field salespeople. They acknowledge possibly even needing hardware...

It might stand a chance of being a more profitable business than Reddit, but it's a tough and expensive route to market without experience or a large chain desperate to try the system. Probably pg had good reason to be more risk-averse about the types of business he invested in back in 2005.

philwelch2• 16 years ago

But it seems like more of a risk to think a social news site (of all things) will be a successful business. Without Condé Nast to be the "greater fool" (in the sense of the "greater fool theory" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory) it's really questionable even today whether Reddit could have been profitable.

Something that actual businesses can use to sell things to people? Sure, there are risks, but at least it can make money.

psawaya• 16 years ago

This was like five years ago, before mobile internet was available to most consumers. Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe.

It was a good idea, just ahead of its time.

ergo98• 16 years ago

J2ME apps involved no carrier participation (though often you had to target all of the profiles), and most devices, including standard Nokia feature phones, could run it. Windows Mobile apps...well that was always completely open and with little carrier control.

And of course...WAP. Largely forgotten now, but the Gopher-like WAP was usable on pretty much every feature phone, optimized for limited displays and input technologies. It was a giant dud for a variety of reasons, but it was always an option back to the turn of the century. And you didn't need a data plan, which remains the #1 impediment to the mobile revolution, though you did get charged usurious rates for the packets you did use.

eru3• 16 years ago

> Also, writing mobile apps before the App Store was a real pain, and involved dealing directly with carriers, I believe.

While an app would have been nice, I guess that you could do something like this with just SMS.

ojilles2• 16 years ago

This is essentially Just-eat.com, minus the mobile txt messaging. Depending on the geography here in Europe it's wildly successful.

spez• 16 years ago

One requires significantly more overhead. Also, the whole thing about submitting, voting, and commenting came much later. Reddit didn't even have comments for the first 5 months or so.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

this is actually pretty close to an already existing service in Denmark called just-eat.dk, except it focuses mostly on fast-food, and you order over the internet.

So pg missed the boat on this one. Fortunately I haven't seen this anywhere in the us and it will take some times before these guys will branch out of the country, if at all.

nhangen• 16 years ago

Many restaurants have implemented it on their own via iPhone app or web app. Chipotle is an example.

mseebach• 16 years ago

Just Eat is expanding pretty aggressively, currently in eight countries, UK is the largest. http://www.just-eat.com/

ojilles2• 16 years ago

From personal experience (lived in 3 Just-eat.com "countries") I would say Denmark is the biggest. In the cities, there's a really high coverage of restaurants -- and not just fast-food either.

The problem for restaurants is pretty interesting, and reminds me of the disintermediation RoundTable is doing in the US.

eru3• 16 years ago

I thought it was a UK-only thing earlier. I was surprised when I saw them in Belgium.

ig13• 16 years ago

Just-Eat is the largest player in the market (revenue of around 700 million dollars/year), SeamlessWeb in the US are the next closest competitor but they're a long way behind.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

Compared to reddit, pgs advice must have cost them a fortune.

Damm.

wallflower• 16 years ago

I like Steve's answer: "Steve: Ten years from now I hope that we would have either sold the company for gazillions of dollars, or realized we could not do so and tried to come up with something new."

The application content seems remarkably normal. Even the Restaurant idea. Nothing stands out other than the 'Animal' question. Like, within the realm of most of us at HN (even if the quantity of YC applications has raised the bar since Summer 2005). Thanks for posting this.

meterplech• 16 years ago

I find the number of poeople who end up not working on the startup interesting. We also saw that on a few of the other yc posted apps recently. As a college senior I try to put myself in their shoes. I think a good barometer for startup success could be how good the offers they are willing to turn down to start it. If nothing else, the need to validate their decision could add extra motivation

piers• 16 years ago

So how on earth did it get from that to what is currently reddit?

user24• 16 years ago

> We were rejected after our interview, but Paul called us the next morning as we rode back to Charlottesville to say we could join YC if we came up with a new idea. That idea was reddit.

Reddit Founders' YC Application

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