You have a 1 in 20 chance of being chosen by YC. Pretty good odds!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47549

by palish • 19 years ago

17 61 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If we assume there will be 500 applications and that YC will be accepting 25 of them then that's a 1 in 20 chance.

Throw in the fact some applications, maybe as many as half, are broken (thirteen year old founders, clones of existing ideas, etc) and you've got a great shot.

Anyone that still has cold feet, get in there and apply!

vlad12• 19 years ago

Thanks for your advice; I just submitted 20 applications. :)

On a serious note, can one apply as a single hacker who doesn't care about which project he takes on?

SwellJoe2• 19 years ago

I'm certain that's a bad idea. They were overwhelmed by the 400+ apps they got last time...I don't think they'd take kindly to someone gaming the system and forcing them to read an extra 20 apps (I'm pretty sure the round file would be the only one seeing all of your applications).

vlad12• 19 years ago

I went back and made it more obvious I was kidding. But is there any hacker serious about being an entrepreneur and working on a project during the Winter session and beyond?

portLAN15• 19 years ago

> Can we apply as single hackers who don't care about which project we take on?

Not to be YC specific, but just in general, who would want to invest in someone who doesn't care?

vlad12• 19 years ago

Great question. I'm a hacker, so I'd be useful from day one. Secondly, I've stuck with one idea for about four years, selling the product for 3 and a half years, so I have no problem adding features or maintaining code.

Here is what matters to me more than a specific idea:

1) I'd like to have lawyers and accountants from the beginning, versus doing it myself.

2) I'd like to start with an investment from the beginning, versus doing it with nothing, therefore being undercapitalized the entire time.

3) On a daily basis, I'd like to work with smart people, versus working with nobody else. It'd be great to have an even ownership split, and to start with each other from day one.

4) I want to afford to live (by live, I mean sustain, nothing special) in a place with other technology folks, so I never feel bored or get an ego, versus living in the middle-of-nowhere.

The reason I'm asking here is because I've considered visiting big universities or even furthering my college career just to meet people for a future project, but it would be logically crazy to do so. The problem is that a lot of CS majors aren't entrepreneurial, and sometimes even immature. News.YC is the best place to find other hackers who want to do a startup. Period. Even better than attending a great computer science school.

I originally followed pg's correct advice to leave school and release "early."

The problem is that after I released "early", I had a small userbase that I gradually grew, and while they helped me find bugs, I got stuck to a small income stream and could never find the time to expand to bigger sources of revenue considering I was fixing bugs, adding features, doing market research, and tech support.

Releasing early is good if you have the means (money, people, contacts, knowledge) to not get distracted, so it's nice that YCombinators and TechStars exist now to take advantage of your highs and give you advice.

However, creating a product while being undercapitalized is futile. From not having health insurance and getting injured for a while, to having to progressively go from a $2/mo host, to a $20/m host, getting tons of visitors to my site from my specific, paying audience--except my site used up the 15GB of bandwidth in half a day. I've also had to make a lot of 'transitional' ideas to keep it all working, all so I could have this experience on a low budget for many years. Another problem was that I was tied to an income stream and keeping up with it for the $500 or $600/mo just to keep the business expenses, keeping me away from doing 2 important things that I planned my first year, because otherwise, I'd have to fold. It's definitely been worth it for everything except money, of course.

For example, I got dozens of great reviews from different paying customers all over the world, and that was the #1 most important thing to me all those years. So I spent this summer making it run on auto-pilot, this time with my own custom software, and a better self-service (another problem is that before, I preferred to have a simple interface and have users e-mail me with questions to avoid being too public, but now, I will add tons of Q&A's so I don't have to answer questions about what the program can do and what I'm planning on adding to it.)

So, I proved to myself that I can make people happy with no investment. Now I want to do it the right way.

In fact, maybe I should do something for people my age while I can still relate--another reason I don't care about the idea is because mine currently targets adults, and having been Student Body President, founding a newspaper club, a chess club, and being in many different unrelated after-school activities when I was in high school, I found I enjoyed it all. But, there is no reason that while you're spending all your time on a project, that you have to do it underfunded, since even for a realistic web service you'd have to be able to support servers costing hundreds of dollars and not annoy users with ads until you can figure out the best way to make it work, and more importantly, start with good resources (teammates, investors, advisors, money).

rokhayakebe• 19 years ago

Does anyone know if you get some feedback when you apply early?

nostrademons3• 19 years ago

In the last round, we got an e-mail from PG back within hours. It said, basically, "Too many uncommitted founders. Ditch some and hire them back as employees when you have money." We had submitted one day before the deadline (I'd thought it was half an hour actually...I misunderstood the deadline), and he encouraged us to resubmit if we could deal with the founder issue.

We ended up getting rejected anyway, but he turned out to be right. Basically, if there's an obvious problem with the application, he'll point it out to you. Don't expect him to write volumes or fix something that's so far out in left field that it's hopeless, though. Maybe a paragraph or so.

I also got back a long response from Trevor when I applied to SFP05. In retrospect it had a lot of good points, though I wasn't ready to hear them at the time. I doubt they have time to do that sort of detailed fixes/clarifications now, though.

rms4• 19 years ago

I got an email from Paul and a call from Jessica, both asking why we were doing this now as undergraduates. I think it's a very good sign if you get some interaction with them before the deadline, but it's not a bad sign if you don't get any feedback.

thingsilearned• 19 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

SwellJoe2• 19 years ago

Where'd you get the "accepting 25" number? Just curious. It seemed like 19 was a bit overwhelming for them this time. But since the CA office is bigger, and there are more former founders out here that would be able to relieve some of the advisory role pressure, they might be willing to bump the number up again, assuming enough of the applications are good.

palish2• 19 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372

Certainly not hard evidence but the limiting factor seems to be good applications, not how many they're able to accept. That's a great sign.

blored2• 19 years ago

Maybe even more than 500. [link eludes me] But somewhere it was written that the Cambridge session was the unpopular session. And since May 2007 YC has been featured in Newsweek, in addition to getting a groundswell press from each individual company (eg. Weebly in Time).

I'd bank on about 700-800 applications.

portLAN15• 19 years ago

Why wait for someone else's approval? Don't leave your fate up to someone else's whim.

And don't forget there are many, many other investors.

[Edit: Also don't forget you can set up Google ads on your own; or have actual paying customers. You may not need any investment at all.]

pg6• 19 years ago

We work hard enough evaluating applications that we can probably claim our choices are more than whims.

portLAN15• 19 years ago

All personal evaluations are subject to whims. An investor does or doesn't like the idea; does or doesn't like the people. Cisco was turned down by 70 or 80 VCs. Nobody has a crystal ball, and at the end of the day, you guess; the dealmaker or breaker is frequently some arbitrary factor.

aandreev• 19 years ago

You make a surprisingly random assumption (500 apps) and then base your entire post around statistical interpretations of that assumption.

Bravo!

You should become an economist.

palish2• 19 years ago

Ok. There were 435 applications for this summer. I assume that YCombinator's traffic has been growing steadily and that more hackers have been captivated by YC, so therefore more will apply. 65 more probably isn't too far off the mark.

As for the other assumption that YC will accept more than they did last time, I'm basing that off of Paul's words.

Can I still become an economist?

ivankirigin• 19 years ago

Some recommendations for intro to econ books :)

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/08/for_introductor_...

rms4• 19 years ago

Hey, the great economists are the ones who get really good at just making shit up.

Check out Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. http://books.google.com/books?id=nJFFrLX-924C

Isohunt also shows me the book and audio book is available free online.

pg6• 19 years ago

It's doesn't seem that far off. It would be surprising if the ratio was as high as 1:10 or as low as 1:30.

jkush• 19 years ago

Yeah, great. That just made me feel worse.

pg6• 19 years ago

Actually, if you're reading this, you probably have better odds than that. A good fraction of the people who apply clearly have no idea how YC works or what we look for. If you're reading this comment you're probably over that threshold, at least.

brlewis2• 19 years ago

Either we have better odds, or we know exactly the reasons why we're unlikely to be accepted.

cwilbur• 19 years ago

Bzzzt. Bad use of statistics, because it's not a matter of chance. The ideas that fit best with YC's ideas of what a Y Combinator startup should look like and look like they have the best shot at succeeding win.

This is not a matter of chance. If your idea lines up perfectly with YC's vision, you get in, no matter how many other people apply. If your idea is completely unworkable for YC's goals (such as: you have a single founder, you're planning to run the startup indefinitely rather than sell it ), you may as well not apply, because even if there are 25 slots and 20 applicants you'll probably be rejected.

pg6• 19 years ago

You don't know what you're talking about. We've funded several single founders, and we actually prefer people who want to run the company indefinitely. We make very little from early acquisitions.

You have a 1 in 20 chance of being chosen by YC. Pretty good odds!

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