How does Y Combinator scale Y Combinator?

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/02/yc-y-combinator-scaling/

by dko • 14 years ago

97 61 14 years ago

techcrunch.com

yabbadabbadoo• 14 years ago

Last October, Graham said that the firm was seeing about one submission per minute for the most recent class.

Is this right? It sounds wrong. Or was it just on the last day of submissions or something?

timerickson• 14 years ago

As I recall, yes, it was right near the last day of submissions that they started getting 1 per minute. Most applications are on the last day.

evincarofautumn• 14 years ago

I’d be interested to see a graph of submissions/day from announcement till deadline. Is there such a thing?

pg6• 14 years ago

Yes, that was during the last day.

dmvaldman2• 14 years ago

I've wondered if this is a skewed statistic due to the "resubmit" feature. How many of these submissions were resubmissions, versus "first-time" submissions?

It seems more reasonable to do a last minute check, and update the app with any most recent progress (as I did) on the last day.

brianbreslin2• 14 years ago

Is there a total published anywhere on yc with total applicant teams vs accepted during last two batches? I remember someone saying yc was more exclusive than HBS now. Is that true? (harvard accepts roughly 7% of applicants)

nchuhoai• 14 years ago

As a current applicant, I'm glad to see that YC is thinking hard about scaling. With rising application numbers, I'm sure the noise to signal ratio gets worse and considering that funding a bad startup is probably better than missing a good one, I can only applaud any measures that help in that direction.

Actually, the cost of funding a bad startup are relatively low, aren't they? It's more the time of the partners and the resources of the alumni network, I'd personally be concerned about.

kenrikm• 14 years ago

As another current applicant patiently awaiting the yay/nay email I wish you luck! I know it's got to be difficult for them to sort through all of the applications with so many great teams/companies. I tried to condense mine to make it easier on them but if you do the math (Number of questions * 180 Words) they still come out 3-4k words each! Now I know not all of the questions will fill 180 limit however it's still a lot of reading.

ph0rque• 14 years ago

They once used the program to generate a top 10 list of factors predicting the probability of acceptance. ”I don’t want to share it, but it was fascinating,” Graham said.

This is understandable, but a pity nonetheless. I'm sure HNers would love to read about the factors. PG, can you tell how well these factors sync with the characteristic of a good founder you've written about in your essays?

pg6• 14 years ago

It's at the level of spam filtering: individual words in application fields. So the insights were the sort I noticed when I first tried statistical spam filtering-- e.g. that ff0000 was highly correlated with spamminess (because it's html red).

Incidentally, the past tense in the article is misleading. We're using that software now. It's the product of a company in the w2012 batch. I don't think I can mention the name because they're not launched yet, but we're very impressed by its performance. SV Angel is using it too.

rdl5• 14 years ago

So a wise yc-spammer will take the published YC applications of accepted teams (Dropbox, etc.) as a starting point.

groby_b2• 14 years ago

I'm wondering if it says more about the companies or the people judging them :)

Kidding aside, I'de be surprised if specific words correlated with the probability of success. So there's a good chance this is measuring only if there are key-words that please the reviewers.

I'm sure you've looked at prediction models for individual partners and compared them (or at least considered it, what with days only having 24 hours :)

It'd be fantastic to see you write about the results of that - maybe once the company has launched.

The reason this has me so curious? If the predictive models are not partner-specific, this could indicate that there are very specific things that successful companies/founders say and/or do. Sharing that might or might not mess with the models, but it has a good chance to increase the likelihood of success.

ktothemc• 14 years ago

I just changed the tense, so it's clearer.

solnyshok2• 14 years ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned this (http://www.google.com/m?q=bullshit+bingo ) yet, because what I hear, sounds like advanced version of it. Consider selling online YC-Branded cards.

mcartyem• 14 years ago

Have you considered running it against Viaweb's first business plan?

http://www.paulgraham.com/vwplan.html

cwjacklin• 14 years ago

I can see correlation to 1. connected-ness to existing YC alumni via linkedin and facebook (why else would this be on the applications anyways, except to crawl) 2. site growth (via compete) of company URL 3. keywords: users,traction,growth, 4. age 5. karma score on here any others?

vaksel• 14 years ago

why should they want to scale?

the point of YC is quality over quantity...if they go after quantity, they are just diluting what they have to offer.

If they have 1000 startups, how much support can they really offer?

robryan4• 14 years ago

What if the number of quantity startups has grown though? If last batch they had 66 startups that were judged as good enough to be in the program and this time they see 100 that make that grade, they can take 100 and quality shouldn't drop off.

webwright• 14 years ago

If they can scale, they can create more value (for themselves, for the alumni network, for founders in general). If they successfully can scale it, there'd be minimal dilution (and, as they mention in the article, some additional network benefits to the companies/founders).

paulsutter3• 14 years ago

I don't think there is any shortage of problems to solve / companies to start, so I say, keep scaling.

Higher education is in need of reinvention. YC may be the most successful experiment to date towards that goal. I would really love to see a quantified ranking of top business schools by the total value of companies created per student-month in the last five years.

philwelch4• 14 years ago

Business schools aren't designed for entrepreneurs. The hint is in the title--Master of Business Administration.

Business schools train you to be an officer aboard a battleship. YC trains you to build yourself a dive bomber and pilot it.

pg6• 14 years ago

The reason we want to grow YC is (a) to see how big an effect we can have and (b) as PB says in the article, because it's better for the startups.

As for not being able to support 1000 startups, maybe we couldn't. 1000 is a lot. But if you'd asked me in 2005, I would have been skeptical about the idea of supporting 66 startups at a time, and yet the last batch turned out better than ever. That's the thing about scaling. You can always do better than you expect. I'm not saying there's no upper limit, just that experience has taught me to reserve judgment about where it is.

netcan• 14 years ago

Scaling could also mean ways of making individual startups bigger, on average.

Thats obviously the point with startups but do you have thoughts on ways of scaling in this dimension?

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

It sounds like they have room to grow on the quality scale. They miss some good ones, as a recent HN post on a successful reject (who just missed the cutoff) showed.

ubi• 14 years ago

I find it interesting that articles always point to AirBnB and DropBox but rarely mention Heroku... YC's largest exit to-date.

rdl5• 14 years ago

The valuations of both AirBnB and Dropbox are >5x that of the exit value of Heroku, and are still in play.

It's entirely possible either (or both) could be $10b companies (yes, this seems crazy to me at some level too, but it's consistent with economic reality as it currently exists). If AirBnB totally disrupts the hotel industry, it could be bigger still. If Dropbox totally takes over as how documents are stored, edited, and managed, of course it would be bigger.

robryan4• 14 years ago

These valuations can go just as fast as they come though. I know for me, and a lot of people, the concrete value that was determined because someone actually paid it holds a higher weight than the valuations speculative investors have given the lastest hot startups.

motti_s2• 14 years ago

When it comes to the applications and the fear of missing good startups, I think the biggest bottleneck is how many groups they can interview.

If I'm not mistaken, for W2012 they interviewed 180 groups and accepted 65. That's 36% acceptance rate, but it shouldn't distribute evenly. If the applications were properly graded and the acceptance rate didn't get very low for the lowest graded applicants who were interviewed, then they need to increase the number of groups they interview. I guess that's the case, since pg previously commented that for S2012 they'd probably interview 270 groups. The "problem" is that for every new batch they probably get more applications (and most likely of higher quality), so this might be just playing catch up.

Maybe one day an Anybot robot will perform a preliminary interview so they can scale :)

pg6• 14 years ago

Alas we are in fact going to be playing catch up. We got about 50% more applications than last time, so interviewing 50% more startups will put us exactly where we were before.

Maybe this time we'll do a perfect job at the reading stage. Not likely, but we can always hope.

dmvaldman2• 14 years ago

Have you considered Skype interviews outsourced to the YC network as another parallel process?

solnyshok2• 14 years ago

3000 applications this time?! do you remember by name every founder from last batch? ' cause that's the line that I would draw in the sand re:scaling. Of course it is just me, as 500 startups prove that this criteria is arbitrary.

motti_s2• 14 years ago

I saw your tweet that applications this cycle seem unusually good. Hence with 50% more applications and 50% more interviews, it seems that YC didn't scale when it comes to mitigating the risk of missing good startups. Unless of course the applications are graded perfectly - I'm sure you've been working to improve that. I'll let you know how you did on April 16th :)

staunch• 14 years ago

I'm waiting for "StartupAdvisor", a program written in Arc and trained on paulgraham.com/articles.html

Office Hours will consist of chatting with the program and (if necessary) pushing the "Request a Bag of Mostly Water" button if it reaches its (temporary) limits.

azarias2• 14 years ago

It seems like the academic publishing model would be useful here (and in fact that might be what they are doing with alums reading applications.) Each paper gets a few reviewers, which quickly determines the definite accepts and rejects, and the whole committee need only discuss the ones in the middle. The way partners and alums are structured in YC, it would probably be ideal to weigh reviews accordingly.

There will definitely be some noise, but one would hope things will shake out as they should most of the time. At least that's what I am hoping.

dude_abides• 14 years ago

The academic research community has certainly solved this problem to a large extent, eg. reviewing and program committee meetings at elite conferences such as SigComm and SOSP, or to demonstrate scalability, conferences such as Infocom which get thousands of submissions and still maintain high quality in their accepted papers.

One big difference is in the incentives for a PC member at a top conference vs for a YC partner. The former needs to maintain his and the conference's status/reputation by ensuring the papers are of top quality. He doesn't care that much if some great paper is left out. Whereas in the case of a YC partner, the biggest concern is to ensure not missing out on spotting the next Facebook. This is why in the former case, past reputation and being part of the clique is very important, and in the latter case (YC) it is not so.

eli_gottlieb2• 14 years ago

Ugh, completely disagreed. Do we really want startup funding run by Statler and Waldorf? Academic reviewers tend to be looking for ways to reject your paper, not even trying to give an honest evaluation.

azarias2• 14 years ago

A surprising amount of peer review is actually done by lowly graduate students who are assigned papers by advisors. I really try to give an honest evaluation :) [and my experience is most people generally do]. However, like it was mentioned above, the penalty for rejecting a good paper is really low.

crcastle• 14 years ago

Why isn't the title of this post How Y Combinator Scales Itself? or just How Does Y Combinator Scale?

Is it supposed to be copying this post title? http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-g...

How does Y Combinator scale Y Combinator?

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