The Worst Part of YC

http://blog.samaltman.com/the-worst-part-of-yc

by dmnd • 12 years ago

354 107 12 years ago

blog.samaltman.com

zbruhnke• 12 years ago

It's nice to see the side of investors that still have a passion for startups so much so that they feel sad when they reject people.

It often feels like noone in that world has empathy.

For the ones getting rejection emails tonight don't sweat it. I got into YC on my Third try and it was worth every rejection.

We're building a company now and spent months getting rejected about raising a seed round before suddenly becoming one of the "hot" companies with investors and being in a position to turn the same people who were turning us away down for a change.

All this to say Sam is right. If you're working on something, there is traction and/or you truly believe in it don't give up.

The only validation to worry about at this stage of the game is user validation.

Talk to Users. Write Code.

Best of luck with whatever you're building and if I can ever be of help feel free to email me (email in profile)

cynic22• 12 years ago

"It leaves me feeling down for many days after our application process." Nothing about this statement suggests he feels empathy for the people he rejects; much more, he feels bad for himself because he had to make a decision that makes him feel bad. Play the world's smallest violin.

datamingle• 12 years ago

15 minutes old, with 1 comment: #1 post on Hacker News.

Killswitch• 12 years ago

As of this comment 66 upvotes in 27 minutes. Popularity will do that.

djt4• 12 years ago

YC employees have boosted stats, it makes sense to me as this is their business

sbuccini2• 12 years ago

Will we be notified regardless of our application's status?

adamzerner5• 12 years ago

We are going to send out YC summer 2014 interview decisions (both yes and no) before 10 pm PDT tonight.

jasondrowley• 12 years ago

How will they let applicants know? Via email?

rafeed• 12 years ago

Rejection is inevitable. If you're not rejected now, somewhere down the road you will be. If you haven't been rejected, get practice in getting rejected. If you have been rejected, feel the frustration and use it as motivation to prove whoever rejected you wrong.

The best analogy I can find for this is that applying to YC is like trying to pick up a girl or asking her out on a date. (I know many of us have yet to try, too). Get over the fear of rejection, and put yourself out there. Will your way to success. YC is like the smartest, most beautiful woman with the amazing personality everyone falls in love with (well, there's always the haters). Don't give up. Exercise, eat right, sleep, and strive to be better. You never know, one day that beautiful woman might actually say yes.

(To all the women on HN, replace girl/woman with guy/man and beautiful with handsome.)

dougabug• 12 years ago

Feynman describes being rejected by Bell Labs several years in a row for an internship, and each year coming back and cheerfully taking the tour. He finally got the job, but the war intervened. His attitude towards rejection seemed pretty constructive.

zodiac2• 12 years ago

Hey where was this from? I probably just forgot but I don't recall reading this in any of his books...

hotpockets• 12 years ago

I always think about the bubble groups. Darn it would suck to right on the bubble. Maybe they could create a separate, remotely managed cohort of bubble groups, that are adopted by HN.

zt2• 12 years ago

While I was in college, I was put on a committee to choose a new Director of Admissions. One of the internal candidates said during his interview: "There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a good reason why people are rejected."

It many ways that seems obvious. To get in you have to have something going for you. To not get in you don't have to do anything wrong, you just have to not have a thing that does get you in. It would be just as hard for my college to write high school seniors a letter saying, well, you were 2nd in your class and had a 1500 but noting stood out as would be for YC to write people direct feedback at scale. What would it really mean? How do you action that? No special sauce isn't really feedback. You can't point to anything wrong other than you can't point to anything great.

This has proven true for me in the admissions processes I've gone through on the other side: whether at a consulting firm, or Stripe, or Standard Treasury, or Echoing Green (I read semi-finalist apps). Most people self-select to apply for good and just reasons but some people really excite you and some people don't. Some people just have that something special, and the people who don't don't really have anything wrong with them.

So to me this commentary rings true and is honestly put.

adamzerner5• 12 years ago

"There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a good reasons why people are rejected."

Yes there is - because they aren't the best of the best.

I don't see a reason to sugar-coat it. Being rejected means that YC doesn't think that you're one of the 50 or so best startups who applied. Nothing more, and nothing less.

zt2• 12 years ago

Sure. I'd agree with that I guess. The counterfactual theory is that YC has something to tell you -- but that suggests there is something to improve per se. But that's not quite right. It's not that you did something wrong it's that you didn't have quite the elements to be right.

ewoodrich• 12 years ago

I don't see a reason to sugar-coat it. Being rejected means that YC doesn't think that you're one of the 50 or so best startups who applied. Nothing more, and nothing less.

True, but that's sort of ex post facto justification.

Theoretically, ten startups could apply and objectively be equally qualified, but YC may still pick only one. The key is that without completely exhaustive criteria for admission (which would not be practical), it's impossible to determine what defines "best" and how to become one of the "best".

dhaivatpandya• 12 years ago

That's not necessarily the case. That's assuming that the admissions process is perfect, which I do not think anyone at YC or any university would even propose.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

No, it might as well mean (and I believe it does) that the difference between the 50th and 51st place is so small that it's either below sampling error or just plain not worth spending time on. It's the "I'm sorry, you're both equally good, but we had to pick one" situation. I'm pretty sure pg wrote about it at least twice (once wrt. college admissions, and once wrt. startups applying to YC).

EDIT:

This [0] explains it nicely.

Put yourself in the position of someone selecting players for a national team. Suppose for the sake of simplicity that this is a game with no positions, and that you have to select 20 players. There will be a few stars who clearly should make the team, and many players who clearly shouldn't. The only place your judgement makes a difference is in the borderline cases. Suppose you screw up and underestimate the 20th best player, causing him not to make the team, and his place to be taken by the 21st best. You've still picked a good team. If the players have the usual distribution of ability, the 21st best player will be only slightly worse than the 20th best. Probably the difference between them will be less than the measurement error.

The 20th best player may feel he has been misjudged. But your goal here wasn't to provide a service estimating people's ability. It was to pick a team, and if the difference between the 20th and 21st best players is less than the measurement error, you've still done that optimally.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/judgement.html

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

You're assuming (or implying) that there's some canonical scale of quality, that it's absolute, and that it can be perfectly determined.

None of these are true.

There is, frequently, a probabilistic scale of quality -- there are works or instances which will, generally, be considered "good" and some which are considered "bad", and, say in an iterated experiment model you'll generally come to at least some level of agreement as to what's what. Sometimes there are even very clear winners and losers.

But there's a hell of a lot of variance. There are things which people, often many people, like, often a lot, which others simply despise. I am, for example, not a fan of rap, hip-hop, house, and similar music. I really like Beethoven's late string quartets. I'm aware that by popular vote my preferences are likely unpopular.

And even where there is widespread agreement after the fact on something, experts in the field may not come to agreement. The Beatles were panned by several early music critics and record labels. Rob Malda's initial review of a new cellphone was less than whelmed. Oh yeah, it was called the "iPhone", you may have heard of it.

Tests for categories as seemingly refined as classical music performance -- both auditions of performers, and trials of classic vs. modern instruments, and fine wines, show that there are huge differences in non-blinded vs. blind trials (for music), and that wine experts are incredibly unreliable in how they grade, or even describe the qualities of, wines. Though this does make for an entertaining way to spend an afternoon or evening with friends.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Blind-Auditions-Putti...

http://freakonomics.com/2010/12/16/freakonomics-radio-do-mor...

In another interesting study, unreleased music was introduced to several different "worlds" of test subjects -- within a world the experiences were shared, but not between them. The result was that, from the same starting selection, different "hits" were selected by each.

http://www.npr.org/2014/02/27/282939233/good-art-is-popular-...

And that's the whole point.

In any competitive selections process, especially where there are far more qualified applicants than there are positions, there will be many qualified applicants who aren't admitted. The reasons for denial will vary, but ultimately the selectors must adopt some arbitrary mechanism. Lottery would probably be the fairest, say, by assigning a rough percentile ranking to each candidate (perhaps by decile), selecting all within the top category (the clear winners), none below some cutoff, and a random selection within the grey range. More often culture, bias, hubris, or other factors will lead to other bases for decision.

But thinking you can, perfectly and without error, assess the quality of something as both nuanced and capricious as the possible value of a technology start-up concept based on a few brief exposures is really pretty arrogant. And all but certainly wrong.

chc• 12 years ago

Which is it: Are they not the best of the best, or has YC's pseudorandom "probability the X is the in the top 50" function just not worked out in their favor this time?

yuhong3• 12 years ago

This is part of the reason why I don't really like anti-discrimination laws.

durbin• 12 years ago

Whether there are laws in place or not, at times it is much smarter to pick the candidate with lesser credentials that has higher upside potential. In sports the intelligent teams don't draft the guys that have the best statistics right now. They draft the people that they can train to be the best. Its the same with schools. If someone went to a nice school and had better credentials than someone that went to a bad school with bad teachers, the latter student is the one that the schools very well should take because with the proper training they will be superior in the long run, even if they aren't currently.

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

I'm not following your reasoning here. Care to explain?

normloman• 12 years ago

Being forbidden from discriminating based on people's race, gender, sexual orientation, etc does not restrict you from rejecting candidates with poor credentials.

I really don't see your point here.

pdenya• 12 years ago

It's interesting that you've always found yourself having too many good candidates, it doesn't seem like a common problem.

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

For a few years I worked as programming director for a local film festival, selecting and scheduling all the films. And I've helped a friend who selects films for a very large film festival, serving as a sort of first-line screener for him, pulling out the worst so he didn't waste time on them.

Even with our local (L.A.) film festival, we had a ton of submissions. I could cut 80-90% of them very easily. They just weren't very good. We got a lot of submissions that simply weren't competent, they had multiple fundamental flaws.

There's always a few that are easy calls. Very good work, and you know you can build a night around them. Then there's some that are obviously good enough to screen, if not to be the keystones.

Then there's the borderliners, and that's where you spend all your time. Trying to make those choices. Sometimes it literally comes down to how long a movie is and if it will fit in the slot you have to fill. Sometimes it's how a given movie will play off the others you've decided on already. It's not completely "fair", but it's how it is sometimes.

But you know, even those awful films (and some of them are really awful, worse than you've ever seen)... They represent a massive amount of work. And perseverance. And dreaming. And I always respected that, and it sucked to reject even the worst. These were people who DID something with their time, and I hated hated hated sending the rejection emails. Even the worst filmmakers deserved some respect for having actually done it.

It's important to separate the work from the person who did it. The person who did it almost always deserves respect and admiration.

triplesec• 12 years ago

Sorry, stupid mobile accidental down vote

LanceH• 12 years ago

I feel this way when I walk past a store that I know is going to fail. Someone threw all their savings and hard work into setting up a place on something they find fashionable, but I can just tell that it's only their personal preference. Very rarely I've been wrong and this makes me happy even if I think the store is ridiculous.

theorique• 12 years ago

"There is a good reason that everyone who is accepted gets in, but there is not a good reason why people are rejected."

It could simply be something like: "we already reached our capacity with 'definite yes' and 'yes', and there wasn't room".

Nothing specifically wrong with the application, just not as obviously strong as the ones accepted.

650REDHAIR• 12 years ago

How many companies that reapply get accepted during the next batch?

notastartup2• 12 years ago

What is the benefit of joining YC? If you are just making a profit and reinvesting some of that into the business, do you have an advantage of joining YC? Why should you give up a piece of your action?

hrrsn• 12 years ago

YC gives a usually quite small amount of money for a small %age, however the value is really in the networking and mentorship.

notastartup2• 12 years ago

I guess that is pretty good deal.

what are the % like? What are the criteria and what are they looking for?

rvivek• 12 years ago

We got into YC only the 3rd time in summer 2011; applied for the two earlier batches. Both of our earlier applications had bad ideas and very little traction.

So, don't give up.

mrchess• 12 years ago

Out of curiosity, the 3rd time you applied (and got accepted), did you have traction?

jlteran• 12 years ago

I'm also curious to hear the answer to this question. Last time I applied, it was only with an idea that had not yet been implemented. Now, I am waiting to see if my current idea has traction before applying to YC. I think they see traction as a very important factor in accepting you into YC. I might be wrong though.

tpae• 12 years ago

This. This is one of the biggest reasons why I want to get in so bad. Never give up. Thank you for this!

VaedaStrike• 12 years ago

As I go through the rest of my life I'll likely be applying just about every cycle simply for the way applying focuses my mind and energies.

And the funniest thing...I get more excited each time. Rejection after rejection, I get more and more certain that I'm getting closer and closer. Totally counter-intuitive from what I thought, both the excitement side of it and the applying for the 4th or 5th time... :) "Y" I ask you...

nomadcam• 12 years ago

This could be the beginning of a great graphic novel...Zen and the Art of Y Combinator Rejection

ipince2• 12 years ago

It's hard (or impossible) to give detailed feedback to every applicant. But maybe telling them roughly in which bucket they fell ("shortlist", "pretty good", "okay", "stopped reading after 30s") would be useful.

_sentient2• 12 years ago

YC is in a difficult position here. Aside from being terribly labor intensive, specifying the reasons for rejection may serve to discourage teams from reapplying in the future. Seeing how often founders get accepted on their nth attempt, it's really in YC's interest to let you down softly.

ipince2• 12 years ago

I'm saying skip the reasons--that's too labor intensive. Just give a general idea of how the application was. Why? mostly calibration, I guess.

I would find it useful to know how I'm doing within the pool. Even if the answer is "bottom 20%", that lets me know how much more effort I have to put into it to improve.

dctoedt2• 12 years ago

But maybe telling them roughly in which bucket they fell ("shortlist", "pretty good", "okay", "stopped reading after 30s") would be useful.

Yes, it would be useful, but YC's lawyers probably advised against it. Doing this could open the door for a rejected applicant to allege some flavor of unlawful discrimination (pick one: race / ethnicity / gender / age / etc.). I'm not sure the anti-discrimination laws would even apply to a situation like YC, but at a minimum the allegation could turn into a bandwidth-sucking distraction and PR headache.

afarrell• 12 years ago

Everyone that reviews applications to MassChallenge rates them along a few dimensions and then gives them at least 30 words of feedback, so it is possible to do. Then again, we pitch, "you get feedback even if you don't get in" as part of the value of our program.

(disclosure: I work for MC)

zodiac2• 12 years ago

Besides the issue already raised, I think it might lead to teams optimizing for YC instead of for success. Of course, it would be ideal if the two optimization targets were the same, but I doubt that's true.

dzink• 12 years ago

Do simple checkboxes

We had concerns about: a) idea b) team c) small market size d) something else

exo_duz• 12 years ago

Whilst not everyone can get in. Best of luck to all that were accepted. We'll try again in 6 months.

tdullien4• 12 years ago

Perhaps as a "cheer up" story: We applied to YC in their very first batch and got rejected. It is unclear what the reasons were -- but there were many reasons why it was understandable for YC to reject us. Among other things, the company had already been incorporated in Germany, we already had a few customers, we had decidedly nonexistent mass-market potential, the entire company was a bad idea from a purely business perspective, and just in almost every imaginable way did not fit the mold.

This did not deter us from continuing; our company was profitable already, and we worked our butts off for the next few years (without any reasonable perspective of ever getting acquired, or even growing the company to be big). The work was interesting, and for a company that size, we had a surprisingly large impact (indirectly) on the wider world, but it was heavy toil with little reward.

Either way - history then shifted under our feet, and it turned out in 2010/2011 that we had the combination of technology and team that out of a sudden had become pretty important to Google, and then after a long and painful negotiation process, we got acquired in 2011. Not a gangbusters acquisition by any stretch of the imagination, but one that worked out nicely for everyone involved.

So perhaps the takeaway from this is: YC is great, but perhaps the great redeeming quality of modern capitalism is that you do not require gatekeepers in order to be successful. "You play shit that they like, and people will come, simple as that." - e.g. if you build a product that people like, people will give you money to build more of that product. Decentralized decision-making and the ability to bootstrap with nothing but a compelling product may be the one thing that led to our current economic system to out-compete the others.

When we started the company, I wanted to build X. This was a huge endeavor, and I knew that on the way to X I'd need to build Y and Z; so I ended up building Z first, then used income from Z to bootstrap development on Y, then I got sidetracked a bit on B because we found a surprising application of our technology to a different field, and just when I was about to get back to X, we got acquired principally for B and Z. So up until today, we have made very little progress on X itself, but that doesn't matter :-)

So if you're rejected from YC, don't despair. Use it to re-examine what you're doing, understand that investment is like dating (some people are just not made for each other, and it will end in horror if you pretend to be someone you are not), and then channel your disappointment into velocity :-P

(PS: pg, if you folks have any notes whatsoever on reasons for rejection in the first YC batch, I would love to have more background info - but it is also pretty understandable if no memory at all exists ;)

MrBuddyCasino• 12 years ago

It seems you are a German startup, is that correct? If so, where are (were) you based?

tdullien4• 12 years ago

We were originally based in Bochum, Germany; the entire team was moved to Google Zurich post-acquisition.

davidw• 12 years ago

Just as the ever-increasing low cost accessibility of technology has made YC possible in that you can give someone just a little bit of money to build something, self-funded startups are also becoming possible for more and more things. Here are some resources:

http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/

https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23microconf - lots of information on the recently concluded MicroConf with patio11 and many others from HN.

http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/

And Rob's book, which is a great starting point: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/...

Granted, bootstrapping is not viable for some things, but for many others, it's a good path.

cynic22• 12 years ago

Pass me a bucket. Fund or don't fund. You didn't pick the companies you didn't pick for a reason. Don't be warm and fuzzy about it. Having a Kumbaya moment is just patronising -- and I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but that's how at least one person perceives it.

dctoedt2• 12 years ago

FTA: [I]t was really striking how much higher the average quality of applications was for this batch compared to any previous batch. Most of the partners independently mentioned this to me.

To me that was the most interesting part of the article.

jameshk• 12 years ago

For everyone who get rejected: don't give up. keep working on your startup and apply next batch, even Drew Houston got rejected the first time.

hyp0• 12 years ago

  If you’re working on something that users love,
  you like working on it, and
  you have a plan for how to build a business around it

Even with the mad hiring of new partners, there still aren't enough to take on all the applicants they'd like to (I assume that's the key resource bottleneck, not funding or space etc) - and the number and quality of applicants are increasing. It sounds like the YC we know so far may have just been the beginning.

A great release, both in facts and vibe; Elon standard.

wildermuthn• 12 years ago

At West Point, I was one of ten cadets in my class of one thousand to make the parachute team. For some reason, the parachute team had become a symbol-status and a fast track to cadet success.

What's interests me the most is that I had no idea, no clue, that the skydiving team was a fast-track to promotion. I just wanted to jump out of planes. That wasn't the case with many of my teammates. We had some great talent on the skydiving team — the most talented men and women at West Point. But some of them hated jumping out of planes, and they did poorly.

Sama writes that the number and quality of YC applications has risen. That might not be a good thing. Talent and ambition aren't the greatest indicators of startup success.

I don't think its a coincidence that Dropbox, Reddit, AirBnb, Justin.tv, Loopt, and Stripe all came within the first few years of YC's existence, and that YC's more recent companies haven't taken off in the same way. It might be because immensely talented people see YC as their avenue to success.

If being immensely talented and ambitious was the prime requisite for startup-success, then YC would be in a great position. But as I understand it, having talent and ambition don't matter as much as having a determined, cohesive, and visionary team.

jbooth• 12 years ago

Someone mentioned in another thread that it seemed (allegedly, I don't know any of these people) like the type of people who apply for investment banking jobs are now applying for YC.

I think the most salient fact about this stereotypical type of person is that they don't know why they're doing it. They wouldn't be doing it if it weren't prestigious. You lose something there, even if the person is theoretically better on paper.

zxcvvcxz• 12 years ago

If so (about the IB-types), that sounds a little worrisome. These are the type of people that one could imagine being good at faking early progress on paper / online, and not following through because building a startup and being poor for multiple years doesn't feel very prestigious.

hindsightbias• 12 years ago

Michael Lewis said somewhere (I think the intro to The Big Short) that he never expected to write another Wall Street book after Liar's Poker. He thought it was the be-all, end-all warning to IB wanna-bees.

But he kept getting letters from college students to the effect of "I read your book, where is that kind of opportunity now?"

It wasn't just the money, or the power, it's just being more whatever than anybody else...

stackcollision• 12 years ago

You wanted to jump out of planes, you were good at it, and you got selected to be one of the elites. Your talent for this and other things drove you towards your success. However, other people see jump school as the key to success, rather than a door to something they enjoy that having talent opens.

The same thing can apply to YC. There are a bunch of people with good ideas and talent who want to be successful, but they hate jumping out of planes. They think that if they can just get into YC and deal with not really enjoying it that much, then they'll be putting themselves on the inside track and it'll be smooth sailing from there. I don't think that's really a great outlook on life.

acgourley• 12 years ago

Stripe went through YC four years ago. Give the newer companies some time.

philwelch• 12 years ago

It's probably worth a mention that (a) there were lots of flops in the early YC batches too, you've just forgotten them, and (b) it takes a few years for any startup to take off so of course earlier YC startups will seem more successful.

paul• 12 years ago

In the early years of yc, people said there weren't any good companies. It took years for Dropbox to become Dropbox. There are actually a lot more great founders and companies now, but it will be years before you realize it. That's the nature of this business.

Your point about ambition is a good one though. Filtering out people who are just there for the prestige generally isn't that hard though -- they have ways of self identifying :)

namenotrequired3• 12 years ago

Determination is the number one thing they look for in founders. I'm sure it's included in the consideration of quality.

mempko• 12 years ago

The worst part of YC is that they make groups of people compete with each other, instead of cooperate. The results are startups that have mediocre ideas that fill the needs of people who have money. If the phrase "vote with your dollar" is true, then it becomes obvious that the services and products society creates will cater to those with the most money.

pincubator• 12 years ago

We all know that it's almost impossible to provide custom feedback to those who are not selected. But is it also impossible to point out what portion of our application went wrong?

E.g. there might be 4-5 checkboxes for reviewers:

- Ideas are not clear

- Ideas are not profound/original

- Not profitable

- No demo

...

So at least we could know what went wrong. As most of the applicants, I think my idea was pretty cool and I am not sure what part I screwed up.

_sentient2• 12 years ago

Check out http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html

eggbrain• 12 years ago

Back about 5 years ago, a prominent VC behind TechStars came to my college and talked about entrepreneurship. I was so enamored that I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur and apply to their incubator program.

I applied about 5 times with various ideas to various programs (Boulder, Seattle, New York). I got close once -- I was a "finalist" for the Seattle program (Top 30), but didn't get chosen as the top 10.

Each time left me pretty crushed. But I decided early on that I could sit around and feel bad about myself, or I could use it to become better. After each time I was rejected, I contacted the head of the incubator and thanked them for their time, and if they could give me any tips towards success. And more often than not, I got responses that helped me become a better entrepreneur.

The first rejection is always the hardest. And so is the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth. But Edison is widely quoted as saying:

  "I have not failed 1,000 times.  I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."

Despite what you may think of Edison, I try to take the same mentality. To those who got rejected -- think of it not as the end, but as the beginning. You'll enjoy the ride if you do.

fayyazkl• 12 years ago

The best I think that can be done is to tell objectively why you didn't fund a company so either they focus on resolving those issues or at worst quit asap or move to a new idea. I dont know how much feedback is provided currently but it is immensely important even to those who got selected so they can focus on their strengths and fix their issues

mfrank• 12 years ago

Interesting that this is pretty different than what other VCs say is the worst part of their job: http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/What-is-the-worst-part-...

maximgsaini• 12 years ago

That is the Best Part of YC!!! If Albert Einstein had not been 'rejected' for 2 years, we might not have had that revolutionary glimpse into our own world (just saying). He might've accepted those stale old ideas by joining the academia of the time. Rejections force you to improve, rejections liberate you from previously held ideas, rejections force you to jump higher.

Inside YC, you help 50 companies. Outside YC, you help 2950 companies by giving your opinion on their performance. Some of these 2950 companies will someday blow everyone away!! They will give everyone a glimpse into a new world, just like the greats of the past did. And the likes of YC will be thanked, because every rejection will have some contribution in shaping them.

The Worst Part of YC

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