My Y Combinator experience

http://marcobambini.com/my-y-combinator-experience/

by marcobambini • 11 years ago

233 143 11 years ago

Too bad there isn't a Creo demo, screenshots, or walkthrough, where you could show off your platform. You must have many potential customers on your site with this influx of HN traffic -- hint hint.

dropit_sphere• 11 years ago

Word. I just visited their site, looking for the same.

reilly3000• 11 years ago

Here is my tiny soapbox: Programming is about making better tools. Business is about programming people. If you go to a business incubator, you had better prove that you can program people, or they won't be interested in your business.

epikur• 11 years ago

Here's a video walkthrough: https://vimeo.com/108812024

Not sure why it's hidden in the footer.

archagon3• 11 years ago

Hmm. To be honest, I think the best bet these guys have is to get bought out by Apple to work on the Xcode team. This tool is too complicated for normal users and too limited and risky for programmers. Also, the apps it produces look awfully basic. It doesn't seem like you could design an amazing, fluid, and responsive user experience with this software, which is pretty much the bare minimum to get any attention in the App Store these days.

Amazing tech, though — for sure.

onion2k• 11 years ago

Strange how in the YC interview they claim they're developing something better than existing app development tools because their technology isn't just a WebviewUI wrapper so it's more performant, but then they release a video of someone developing an app that would be easier to build and just as quick if it was made as a wrapped WebviewUI in Cordova or something.

If you want to impress people with the difference between your tech and something that you believe isn't as good you need to show off the differentiating factor as much as possible.

jmckib• 11 years ago

I haven't interviewed with YC, but I felt like I was missing something while reading their account of the interview. I would assume that the YC interviewers DO read applications, and they only ask questions they already know the answer to to see how the founders will respond. I read somewhere that they do this to make sure the founders have already considered every possible objection to their idea. I wonder if these guys were rejected because of their negative reaction to this type of questioning.

gfosco• 11 years ago

That's my reading of it too. When pitching your product, these types of seemingly ignorant questions should be exactly what you're prepared for. Responding with incredulity is a terrible way to win people over.

david92711• 11 years ago

It seemed to me that the questions (Eclipse? really?) betrayed not just a lack of familiarity or ignorance, but a deep confusion as to technology in general. That question alone made me laugh, as if the person was raising their hand and saying, "I have no idea what I'm doing."

I might possibly await that kind of response if they were pitching people with little-to-no technical background, but from YC I would have expected questions which, if not insightful, were at least moderately appropriate.

From the few minutes I've spent looking at Creo, there were a lot of valid questions to be asked here, but from what I read, none of those were asked. They flew a long way to find out that YC wasn't what they thought it was.

huhtenberg• 11 years ago

We entered the room and facing us there were 3 young boys in their early twenties.

I wonder if YC considers applicants' age when pairing them with the interviewers. Because if not, that's a very fertile soil for all sorts of interesting biases.

WhitneyLand2• 11 years ago

This issue has been discussed on HN previously and even commented on by YC. It left me with the impression there is no problem with age any greater than you would find in general in society.

peteforde2• 11 years ago

Sorry guys - if I was interviewing you as a YC partner, I'd pass on you too.

You repeatedly express frustration that the interviewers were not intimately familiar with your application, but it doesn't seem if you put much into familiarizing yourself with YC and their flavour of logic.

YC: Why are you spending so much time developing this application? Creo: It is not only an application, it is a compiler, a virtual machine, a new language and even a mobile operating system.

YC was asking why you ignored customer development and just jumped into boiling the ocean before doing anything to verify that there was an existing market opportunity in the form of real customers willing to pay you real money to solve a problem. It's not that they didn't understand what you were trying to do, or questioning whether you could do it. They were right to push you for proof that you had more than a few friends who were desperate to use it.

The answer that you gave to the question is just a hairball of red flags. You wrote half a million lines of code before validating your business case? Do you truly believe that your ability to see the future is so strong that you just don't need to back up your vision with data? That is not reassuring to a savvy investor who hears "500klc" and feels fear and/or pity.

Listen, it sounds like the experience was positive and that you are taking answering some of the hard questions seriously. However, I urge you not to move forward without questioning that your entire position that YC blew it on an obviously incredible opportunity might be significantly flawed.

As to your idea itself: I am deeply skeptical that a drag-and-drop UI for building mobile apps is going to turn non-developers into developers. You're not considering that 10% of writing code is syntax and 90% following a strong intuition of what to do first.

Perhaps the reason it doesn't exist is because nobody has that problem.

"What does it do?"

"Anything you can imagine!"

Most people don't understand what they are allowed to imagine. Sorry.

S4M• 11 years ago

I think they missed the point of another question as well:

YC: How many apps has been developed with your software?
Creo: As I already said and as I clearly written in our apply, we are currently in pre-beta so we just developed apps for internal usage, nothing is on the market yet.

So that means that after all those efforts, you haven't even tried yourself to create an app with the beta you have?

aidos• 11 years ago

I just watched the video expecting it to show how to build an app. Instead it felt like 15 minutes of messing around with widgets.

If the Creo guys are reading (and I'm sure they are), take a look at how these guys (http://www.atomic.io) show off their product - https://vimeo.com/120035868

benbou09• 11 years ago

You seem to think that fast product iteration and testing with customers is the only way to go. It isn’t. The most ambitious projects sometimes need bold commitment. For instance if you want to create a space travel company, you will need funding way before you've finished your proof of concept. Now, maybe Y Combinator is simply not their market.

david92711• 11 years ago

Exactly. Applying to YC was a mistake: it's an accelerator for making money, not an incubator for innovation.

dia80• 11 years ago

Space doesn't preclude customer development. E.g Virgin Galatic pre-selling rides

sunir• 11 years ago

The proof of concept for space travel was NASA, the ESA, the CSA, RKA, etc. plus all science fiction plus space camps plus parabolic microgravity flights plus preselling seats.

In their case there are many rapid app builders so it isn't crazy talk to enter that market. What is crazy talk is they haven't entered the market but are forming up on the beachhead (waiting for what?) and (critically) applying for YC before they have tested the market.

graeme2• 11 years ago

For instance if you want to create a space travel company, you will need funding way before you've finished your proof of concept.

There are always some ways to test concept. I've done a fair bit of indirect testing in my business, as my products take years to develop. I always found a way to test the most central aspects of them, usually in a week or two.

I don't know how you'd do it for the product these guys are trying to build, because I'm not familiar with their space. But there must be a way.

dingodoo• 11 years ago

Plus, people like Elon Musk and Richard Branson have built up enough credibility in their own names, that when they say "we're going to make commercial space travel possible" you tend to believe them, because they don't make those kinds of announcements without having done significant research ahead of the announcement.

I'll agree you need bold commitment, but the last thing you want is to commit to a concept that doesn't have any outlooks on whether or not people want it, much less, pay for it.

bobbles• 11 years ago

"I want to expand my lemonade business"

"Great, how much lemonade have you sold?"

"We have 50,000 lemons on backorder!"

dlubarov2• 11 years ago

But some products can't be validated in their early stages. It's hard enough to find early adopters willing to spend hours learning a new IDE and language that no one else uses. If the product is also buggy or missing important features, who would want to use it?

It's also not a brand new paradigm they're inventing. Look at Game Maker which is pretty commercially successful.

yitchelle2• 11 years ago

So if they don't validate their product, are the Creo folks building the product for the love of it?

archagon3• 11 years ago

"Most people don't understand what they are allowed to imagine."

Heh, I'm saving this as a quotable quote. Very true.

solve• 11 years ago

"I give business leaders honest feedback"

Just a side note, I'm ALWAYS noticing lately that there's a certain segment of people like to use the word "honest" as a justification for spreading their negative predictions and negative feelings.

Whether selecting these founders would have worked out well in the future for YC? That's purely a prediction. But somehow people like to throw in the word "honest" for predictions and then suddenly they can give cheap criticism without putting any real effort into making specific suggestions for how to do better.

Plenty of successful entrepreneurs have honestly thought that their success is undeserved and the whole thing is a bad idea that will collapse at any minute. Honest isn't a synonym for useful, in fact it's usually just harmful, for successful startups where 90% of the time everyone feels terrible and confused - because that's just the nature of the business.

peteforde2• 11 years ago

If you're going to quote me, at least quote me in context: I give business leaders honest feedback, new ideas and access to my network. Typically in that order.

This is my actual job, not a vague promise. I have a demonstrable track record and since all of my business comes from referrals, I must not be entirely out to lunch.

I suspect that you are internally switching out my use of the word honest for [something like "prediction"] which has nothing to do with my feedback. I don't predict what any of my clients will do, although I do certainly run the numbers in my head before I take on a new client.

When I say that I give honest feedback, it means that I don't pull punches — no matter how awkward it is.

Humans are trained from birth to tell people what they think that they want to hear. They want to be encouraging. Unfortunately, that means that you've sacrificed telling someone that you can see flaws in their logic for telling them selective truths that will make them feel good. This gets you off the hook socially and gives them no useful information about the hard road ahead of them.

Next time you have an idea, run it past me. I'm happy to give you 15 minutes over Skype. You can decide if I'm negative. The feedback I usually get is "awesome" but I do approach every conversation with the assumption that they have something to teach me.

pizu• 11 years ago

To all you aspiring entrepreneurs, this is all you need to know: "Verify that there was an existing market opportunity in the form of real customers willing to pay you real money to solve a problem"

Now, go!

david92711• 11 years ago

Now, go... build a lifestyle business!

forthefuture• 11 years ago

Your last point is exactly how I feel when I go to Amazon.com. I really want to buy things, I like spending money, hearing the doorbell, and opening packages, it's all a great experience. But when I go to Amazon.com and their front page greets me, I have no idea what to do.

I just want to see 10 new cool things every day and maybe buy some of them. So services like Meh and Massdrop make a lot more sense for my use case.

nickbauman3• 11 years ago

Yes. YC will not fund the company that will invent something new. They will fund a company that looks like it might be a good business and make money. These two things aren't inherently incompatible in theory. But we've seen time and time again in practice that they are. To invent new things you need Xerox Parc (the PC) or a big government program (the Internet). To make a lot of money off the inventions, you need Apple. The ecosystem needs both kinds of companies. Unfortunately (for the future of ideas) YC will select the latter type only.

beambot• 11 years ago

I don't think that's true... YC funds plenty of inventive companies (sometimes based on idea alone). Still, the onus is on the founders to articulate why they're the ones to pull it off and how their inventions could plausibly become billion dollar companies.

mhomde• 11 years ago

The thing is the most ludicrous ideas might also be the most brilliant ones, and the only way to know is in hindsight. I mean hell Google was a ridiculous idea in its day. Tesla was too in the beginning, and numerous other companies.

Some ideas do require a lot of risk in form of up-front development for a shaky idea, but that's the only way to find out if that particular idea works.

There are some ideas where you can simply throw shit on the wall until something sticks and iterate from there but there are also ideas that you have to go all in on.

If someone says they're going to develop a "revolutionary new programming language" that will obsolete java/c# (or something) I'd roll my eyes and call bullshit, and in 99.9% cases it will be true, except for the one that isn't.

Its up to every entrepreneur and venture capitalist to choose what kind of idea to bet on. I'd only hope that the entrepreneur picks something they're passionate about.

You could say that you should at least be aware of the risk and scope of the idea your pursuing, but is that even true? Some might be better of not knowing or they'd never attempt it.

As George Bernard Shaw famously said: "People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it."

mootothemax• 11 years ago

In 10 minutes they had not even bothered to understand what we had in our hands

I think you may be walking away with the wrong impression; it's your business and marketing talents they were concerned about.

Just because you're not on the market doesn't mean that you can't have users, whether friends, family, or trusted third parties; you must be testing with someone who isn't a core team member?

If you're not, I'd take this as a huge signal that you should do so ASAP.

Likewise, what are the apps that have been built with your system?

I'm sure you'll have various test apps, but have none of you built anything more in-depth? Or, again, have no family, friends, or trusted third parties built anything with it?

I think the Y combinator interviewers were worried about what sounds like a lack of market research.

It's not too late to fix that - if the market's after a solution like yours, and you can fix the "we built this without doing any research" red flag - just make sure that you start right this very second!

phelmig• 11 years ago

From what I understand your created a Flash Clone to create smartphone apps (The VM, the simple programming language, it's all there). This sounds quite nice but where do you see yourself making money? On the creator's side (like Adobe did?) or on the customer's side (like the AppStore)?

I like your idea, and the vimeo video doesn't look bad BUT: You seem to make a mistake I often see with (being one myself) Dev/Tech people: Our own enthusiasm a product or idea prevents us from verifying the actual market need. Instead we start doing what we love: Building. Unfortunately the more we build the less we are open to criticism or potential customer's feedback. For this reason we start only talking to people who like our product (but aren't customers) and get stuck in a positive feedback loop that isolates us from the hard truth that we might move in a wrong direction. Wrong, not because the idea isn't good but wrong because without a market the idea won't be sustainable.

I wish you all the best guys. Revenge can be great motivator but don't fight wind mills.

coffeemug• 11 years ago

Negative feedback incoming. Sorry.

Your landing page (http://creolabs.com/) doesn't care about me (the user) at all. There is a big difference between being proud of your product and being self-aggrandizing, and you're on the latter end of that scale.

To quote Henry Ford, you can't build a reputation on what you're going to do. Apple can get away with saying "something big is going to happen" because they've already proved (over and over and over again) that they can deliver. They've earned our trust. You haven't (yet).

The landing page talks about rewriting things from scratch, and a custom compiler, and language influences, but it doesn't tell me what the product does, how it does it, how it fits into my life, and what it will enable me to do that I can't do right now. To put it differently, you're placing a demand on my time (by asking me to get social, or share my e-mail address, or even read the page), but you haven't thought through how to make me feel like I've spent my time on your site wisely.

Your product is important to you, I'm not. That's actually perfectly fine (I get the appeal of building beautiful systems more than anyone), but that's not a company (yet). It's somewhere between a hobby and a research project.

Your video demo has the same problem -- you show off random features of the environment, but you don't show me how I can build a real app. Again, you don't care about me, the user.

Based on what I could get from the demo, the system is actually ridiculously impressive, which is great; but you need to learn to look at the world through other people's eyes. That's way harder than building the most sophisticated of optimizing compilers.

mathrawka• 11 years ago

Another thing about the landing page... there is to much "we" going on. It needs to focus on the customer, not the company. And that starts with writing copy that focuses on the user, not you.

unreal373• 11 years ago

It's understandable. They love their product. It's on their mind all day every day. At 7am, they're fixing bugs they discovered the previous day. Haven't looked up from it to see "you (the user)" yet.

pcunite• 11 years ago

CreoLabs, your work is amazing "and" coffeemug is right on target. Heed this wisdom.

gmarx• 11 years ago

Excellent advice. I've had this problem myself. When you think (rightly or wrongly) that you have amazing, near unique, technology which has multiple amazing aspects, you struggle to tell a concise story about why any specific user should care. It's much easier with simple tech that only does a couple of things

CrackpotGonzo2• 11 years ago

And the most important point is that they are trying to build an environment for non-developers to program in. By definition their target audience won't have any idea what they are talking about. Agreed that they need to retarget their messaging to their audience.

BinaryIdiot• 11 years ago

Through the interview you seemed more annoyed with the questions than excited about your product.

manigandham• 11 years ago

Have to agree with general sentiment here... this seems too much like a product and not something that can turn into a business solving a need.

What's the market size? Compatibility? Pricing? What apps have been built? How advanced? How long to learn a new language? What about the surrounding ecosystem (storage, analytics, notifications, etc)? Do you offer support? Training? What if you disappear in a year, what then?

There are already plenty of tools (as mentioned by the interviewers) for making mobile app development easier but there's a limit to how far you can go with non-developers. I think you're building into a niche of people who might be interested enough to dabble and but not enough to become serious, and that just doesn't sound like something you can build a company on.

Btw, maybe I'm alone in this but being someone in their 20s, it felt strange to read "3 young boys in their early twenties" as if they couldn't handle an interview. I strongly suggest reviewing everything you've done so far and asking more fundamental questions about the viability of the business, because at the end of the day, that's what matters.

julianpye• 11 years ago

While I agree with the conclusions of the other posters, I also think it is difficult for anyone to put themselves into the shoes of these people, traveling over, waiting for the opportunity. Pitches can go bad quickly. I think anyone knows the pitch that you enter well-prepared and in best spirits and you come out 10 minutes later and wonder what the hell just happened.

Anyway, I also think it's great that you posted this in this detail, since it also shows once more that the interview will give you VC type questions and not YC type (well-informed) questions. If you can't explain it to a VC who is not up to date with everyday tech changes, then you're not ready for YC.

Finally, you sum up the feelings nicely - that mix of a feeling for redemption and the highly illogical feeling of a need for 'revenge'. I have felt that and it is so much unlike my personality, that I was really startled by it. Put that negative energy into something positive, right now I think your first priority is to make a non-tech person understand what it is you're building.

unreal373• 11 years ago

This is a great response. I can totally put myself in their shoes, going in with something I'm proud of, and being thrown for a loop when the person I am talking to doesn't even seem to want to understand it.

10 minutes is no time at all.

IvanDenisovich2• 11 years ago

I'm also reading some cultural clash between American and Europeans/Mediterranean mentalities. Prioritizing your business model over your product and answering amiably to annoying questions are decidedly "American" behaviors. That's not to say these aren't great practices for aspiring entrepreneurs. When you're ready to apply again, maybe you should consider hiring an Italian guy with an American MBA who can bridge the two cultures?

(I think your idea is cool. If no one went for the long-shot projects Silicon Valley would be full of copy-cat boring App companies. Imagine how that would be like)

WhitneyLand2• 11 years ago

Totally wrong. The technical bias shown here is every bit as strong in American entrepreneurs who lack experience pitching a product. I see this still all the time and it took a few of these painful holding up a mirror experiences for me to start seeing things from multiple perspectives.

If they have the courage to really examine what went wrong here they will come back much stronger.

IvanDenisovich2• 11 years ago

You're definitely right about the technical bias. Most comments here support this theory. I just offered a supplemental explanation, based on my experience.

Kudos to you for overcoming that bias. I'm still working on it.

72deluxe• 11 years ago

There is much self belief in the article, which is probably passion but it is tricky not to come off as arrogant. I wonder if this is difficult to present face to face.

It is clear that he is very passionate about the product that he has produced, which is a good thing. It must have been a very disappointing experience.

I'm glad they made use of their time there to visit the area and see different local places and to make the most of it.

Having visited the landing page I'm still a bit confused as to what it does as there are not specifics.

creolabs2• 11 years ago

Guys, I just wanted to describe my experience, I really didn't want to criticize YC or the interview process. YC was our first pitch and we were surely not prepared enough. As I clearly wrote in my post I started with the wrong assumption that our product and our technology could make the difference. I was wrong.

Website is more a landing page that a real site. Product is not yet released to the general public. We plan to launch a public beta and a brand new website with more useful information in about a month.

akanet• 11 years ago

Your language is highly critical. There's some wiggle room for English not being your first language but you did not have kind words to say about pretty much anyone from YC, and you look really bad because of it.

david92711• 11 years ago

It's strange you should say that, because I didn't get that at all. He was being honest. Why would that be a problem?

grey-area• 11 years ago

People love to carp and criticise here, don't take it to heart. The good news is your product is impressive, the bad news is you're not great at selling it as yet, and your target market is not clearly defined.

I found the article really interesting, because it highlights what is clearly a huge gulf between what you expected of YC, and how they behave. You were looking for validation of what you think is a great idea, and to discuss an idea with people who have spent a long time thinking about it and perusing your carefully prepared documents. They don't really care about your idea, they care about you, how well you can sell any idea to them, how well you can sell yourself to them (and by extension customers) in limited time, how you deal with pressure, how much contact you have had with customers, and how you plan to make money. You didn't have convincing answers to those questions, because you were expecting entirely different questions and an impressed audience. YC are not even really interested in your idea, they're interested in whether you can execute. That's probably because most ideas do not survive contact with the harsh reality of customers and the market, but companies do if they can adapt.

In this sense YC is behaving far more like a potential customer of yours than you might imagine - most customers spend about 30 seconds evaluating your product, and if you can't sell them in that time, you have a problem. Most customers will never read your sales docs or understand your product at first, they might read the home page if you're lucky. From a customer point of view, there is a fundamental problem with your idea which I think you're going to have a lot of trouble with:

Who could have developed a new multiplatform programming language with a blazing fast virtual machine?

You're asking people to build a business on top of your platform and a new language. There are a lot of reasons why that's a terrible idea for customers (even if it is a great thing for you), but foremost among them is lock-in. This is not really a technical problem, it's an issue of trust, and these decisions are not even often made on a technical basis. IMO you need to open-source your platform (get rid of trust issues), show customers everything, and make money on support/bespoke development if the platform is good enough to actually attract users (that'll be a very tough sell, and not one based mostly on technical concerns).

Thanks for posting and I hope any criticism you find here will be useful to you.

declan• 11 years ago

I think the post above by <grey-area> is on target. I suspect there is a large market for very easy-to-use app building environments (though, because I know how to code and like doing it, I don't know what the competitive landscape is like).

I remember seeing Steve Jobs giving demos of Interface Builder at NeXT -- hey, drag and drop connections between objects! -- and, years later, nobody has solved it yet.

But as <grey-area> says, there may be many reasons why people could be reluctant to switch to your environment. You created a new programming language? I don't care about programming languages as much as having a good collection of libraries -- will I be able to find or convert the ones I need? How about the equivalent of ones like Beautiful Soup, or PIL, or even massaging UTF-8 strings? For reference, CPAN has over 144,000 Perl modules available.

Do I need your build servers to create an app, meaning if your company goes out of business, I'm out of luck? If Apple changes APIs, how long until you support them? Etc. Open sourcing will help.

I understand you're pre-release, and that the site is a placeholder. But you may want to address some of these questions in a FAQ. In any case, I applaud your effort. You're trying to create something new and powerful. Very few people have the courage and fortitude even to try.

UPDATE: I watched part of the video and it seems very GUI-based, so my question about programming languages and libraries doesn't seem relevant.

Red_Tarsius• 11 years ago

Italy hasn't caught up with the "fail fast, fail often" culture, so the comments sound harsher then intended. Don't beat up yourself, You're getting high-quality feedback from users who most likely failed (and learned) many, many times. :)

andrea_s• 11 years ago

To be fair, I'm always very wary of claims going in the direction "programming for non-programmers". We've lived through enough workflow-oriented tools who promised a lot in that direction and delivered very little (I'm looking at you, SAS - can't go around two consecutive corners without having to write a lot of code).

Aside from that, good luck with your efforts from a fellow Italian :-)

DanielBMarkham• 11 years ago

This is a great story, but perhaps not for the reasons intended by the author.

I applied once to YC. As I recall, my solo founder video included a puppet, so fair warning: I'm an idiot when it comes to startups. I only repeat what I've heard and read.

When they asked you guys all those questions, the proper answer wasn't to reply technically, it was to reply with something akin to "social proof"

So, for instance, when they asked "Why are you spending so much time developing this application?"

One good answer might be something like "Because we've talked to 50 people, and 10 of them tell us that if we can finish in the next six months, they want to use it. In fact, here's the money they deposited so they would be first in line"

The takeaway that YC is only interested in money may be at the same time true and misleading. As I understand those guys, they simply want proof from other humans that you are capable of doing something folks will like. Either you already have those humans and proof -- or they believe that you're the kind of guys that can go get them and then they'll take a flier on your ability. In either case, to say it's money is missing the point.

A lot of technical folks confuse the kinds of questions they are getting. When the question is along the lines of "Why don't I do X?", they're not asking you to argue that X is better than all other choices. Hell, X may be worse. They're asking you to explain to them how by talking to other people, you've learned that a significant percentage of them like X better, even if it sounds stupid. (In fact, if it sounds stupid and looks like something other people would not do, yet real people want it? That's a plus!)

I liked this. Thank you for posting. Sorry about the negative feedback.

ADD: There's nothing wrong with building something complex with a grand vision that might take months to put together. The trick is to do it in smaller chunks that get customer validation each step of the way. [Insert long discussion here about how it's easy to get emotionally attached to a codebase and solution that nobody else in the world would ever want]

emmelaich2• 11 years ago

The takeaway that YC is only interested in money may be at the same time true and misleading.

Indeed. There are people who consider mentioning the money aspect to be indicative something lacking. Passion? Innovation?

Then there are those who know that buying your product is the true evidence of sincerity.

ggreer• 11 years ago

In addition to the issues others have pointed out, I think there was a bit of a language and culture barrier. The author says, "We entered the room and facing us there were 3 young boys in their early twenties." I get the impression he felt insulted, but it's not like the interviewers can choose their age. The statement is also odd because I don't think any YC partners are that young. Maybe his estimate was thrown off by their casual attire and demeanor.

The author was annoyed by interviewers asking questions answered in their application. That's a natural reaction, but there are good reasons for this practice. Maybe some of your answers have changed since you applied. Maybe the interviewers want to get an idea of how much thought you've put into these questions. Maybe they're not satisfied with some of the answers in the application, and want you to flesh them out in person. My point is: the interviewers aren't trying to annoy you or waste your time. They want to understand you and your idea. Responding to their questioning with annoyance won't help them.

I found it very unusual that the author ignored the post-interview e-mail. Those e-mails typically contain tailored advice, or at least reasons why the partners passed. That information is extremely valuable. YC's reason for passing will probably be similar to many other potential investors. Even if you don't think it's a good reason, it's worth crafting a solid response to.

One more thing: If you have a demo, show it as early as possible! A demo can obviate the need for many "What are you making?" questions, since it shows the answer. That leaves more time to discuss your product or idea, instead of trying to explain it to the interviewers.

With that feedback out of the way: I wish Creo success and I'm glad they plan to apply again. Good luck!

josefresco• 11 years ago

Have you read our apply?

you really just said Eclipse?

This information was clearly written in our apply

As I already said

Fix these and you'll go a long way towards succeeding in meetings like this and impressing, "3 young boys" who, like it or not, are deciding your business fate at this stage.

smoyer• 11 years ago

I think you should probably look at what you've written with a very discerning eye:

"the only thing that matters for them is the business model … I repeat here again: product has zero value."

The YC partners are pretty good at weeding out ideas that will never make money ... are you prepared for this project to be your hobby? There are a couple other red flags in your post such as the idea "you won't need programmers any more. This has been the holy grail of the business world for years because programmers tend to be (pick as many as needed):

- Expensive

- Odd

- Opinionated

sauere• 11 years ago

While i do agree with some of the negative comments here regarding the lack of market research, i also gotta say: the questions (Eclipse, Xcode) seem rather... well, off.

david92711• 11 years ago

Not just off, kind of ridiculous. I would be embarrassed if I were the YC interviewers.

randomsearch• 11 years ago

Is this not just provoking, probing?

i.e. translates as "so, why I am going to use this rather than an IDE? What's the demand here? What makes you different?"

as opposed to being a question to be taken literally.

archagon3• 11 years ago

Off? Really? As an app developer looking at the demo video, the first question that pops into my head is "why would I use this over Xcode"? (And it's still not a question I have an answer to.)

merrua• 11 years ago

Good Luck to all at Creo.

creolabs2• 11 years ago

BTW the video you discovered on vimeo was just a quick demo we did for internal usage. It wasn't meant to be showed to public and it demonstrates a very old version.

There are a lot of critics here and I really appreciate the "brutal" honestly in your answers, we'll do our best to treasured your advices.

I really think that there are some misunderstanding about the real intent of the article and since the website is just a landing page, the best answer is just to release an impressive product as soon as possible.

As I already wrote, a public beta version is expected by mid April.

Udik• 11 years ago

Despite all the good points made by other commenters here, I see that nobody has yet quoted the other somehow related story that appeared on these pages not long ago:

How I Crashed and Burned in Y Combinator https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867335

It seems interesting because the author of that post basically described how he came to YC without a developed product but only a vague and confused idea, and how his project was nonetheless accepted. He then moves on to describe how, having entered YC, he started frantically working on different projects that had nothing to do with the original idea, until he finally gave up.

Now, I wonder which could be the factors that make YC accept a non-existing project, so shaky to evaporate one hour after the interview, and reject people that at least produce and are entirely focused on a working prototype of a new product.

janekm• 11 years ago

Because the person with the shaky and vacuous idea but excellent marketing chops has far more chance of success than the team with 500klcs written with no market validation (that team will be extremely reluctant to change course if their idea doesn't pan out with customers).

arethuza3• 11 years ago

"the person with the shaky and vacuous idea but excellent marketing chops has far more chance of success than the team with 500klcs written with no market validation"

Well said - that was an incredibly painful lesson for me to learn as co-founder of a UK based startup in the first dot-com boom. We must have raised over £25 million and, to be honest, had very little market validation at any stage - and the revenues to prove it.

soneca• 11 years ago

The factor is that they invest in people. They went as far as to accept applications of people with no idea at all a few years ago (they went back on that).

But I agree with you that a alfa stage built product tell more about a person capacity for execution than a good performance on a 10 minute interview. But maybe, both should be rejected.

outworlder2• 11 years ago

"I believe that our biggest mistake was to think that being able to develop such an extraordinary product could somehow give us an advantage against the thousand of other ideas presented at Y Combinator."

Sorry, you don't get to call your product 'extraordinary' among a crowd of developers. Users may apply that label, and it's your job to try to convince them to do it.

jacquesm3• 11 years ago

Some choice quotes:

". I realized that Creo is an extraordinary technological challenge and we achieved unbelievable results so far. Who could have developed a new multiplatform programming language with a blazing fast virtual machine? Who could have rewritten from scratch a mobile operating system fully UIKit compatible? Who could have a product like ours? Nobody, probably nobody in the world… and if YC’s choice was driven by the product than we would had no rivals."

Ok, you're amazing.

"I believe that our biggest mistake was to think that being able to develop such an extraordinary product could somehow give us an advantage against the thousand of other ideas presented at Y Combinator. We were wrong."

No, your biggest mistake was to think that you are somehow entitled to an investment and that YC was the lucky one. The opening sentence is indicative of that, according to you it started with a letter from YC to you, but in actual fact you applied first. So you're the seeker, you are the one initiating the relationship and you have to prove yourself worthy of the relationship.

"I really think that the complexity of the Creo project penalized us at YC."

Making something complex simple is a communications issue. If you can't step away from the complexity of the engine underneath your offering then you are not an effective person/entity to communicate with capital providers.

"the only thing that matters for them is the business model … I repeat here again: product has zero value."

You state this as though it is a fact, but it is just your opinion. In order I think that for YC team comes first, product/market fit second and business model last.

Then, the actual interview:

" In few words it’s an app that is able to create other apps. We have developed a new programming language with a multiplatform virtual machine and we have rewritten from scratch a mobile operating system (100% UIKit source compatible), all exposed through a desktop application that makes incredibly fast and easy the creation of mobile applications. Development time is reduced from weeks and months to few hours or days."

This is an old story in IT circles, it comes back every time there is a new medium, sooner or later someone will do 'cross-platform', that's not unique in and of itself.

"OK, but there are other similar technologies . For example …"

Did you let them finish their sentence?

" Creo: Xcode? (Have you read our apply?)"

If they had not you would not have been invited.

" … those are solutions that can be used only by professional developers, our software is for everyone, even for those who are not a developer."

That's another thing that's been said since COBOL about every new language/platform.

" YC: OK got it… so why should not I install Eclipse?"

" Creo: (Eclipse Holy God, you really just said Eclipse??)"

Yes, he did, but so what? If you're so incredibly smart that YC alumni seem stupid in comparison why can't you explain in a simple and easy to understand blurb what it is that your product does so that such confusion does not arise in the first place?

And so on...

" We came out of the interview dazed … neither I nor Daniele wanted to talk. My impression was that it was a complete disaster … two years of work, two years spent fighting for an idea that seemed impossible to become reality and in 10 minutes they had not even bothered to understand what we had in our hands. "

No, they did bother, you failed to explain. It's a communications problem on the sender side, the receivers would have been happy to understand you if you had taken the time and the trouble to explain it in their language rather than to expect them to accept the explanation in your language.

That's a pretty common mistake but it is unusual to see such a condenscending and frankly insulting attitude on the part of the person exhibiting the mistake. Your whole rant comes across as though you are somehow entitled to a certain treatment because of your technical expertise when in the real world what matters is how well you manage to communicate your achievements to your target audience (potential investors in this case) whoever they may be.

A few tips:

- turn down the rhetoric about how awesome you are until you have real world results, and preferably have others say how awesome you are

- go and work with your target audience instead of doing all your work behind closed doors

- focus on the product/market fit before you do more work

- get a dose of humility somewhere

- keep your dirty laundry in-house

Good luck!

kriro• 11 years ago

It's an interesting read but I hope the OP takes away more than a renewed drive "to show them".

For an outsider it looks like a classical "overengineering" kind of project. You say it's too complex a problem to test early but if you reapply keep this in mind "validate you're not heading down the wrong path as early as possible" is the mantra. You seem outraged that XCode was suggested for example but you should have had a very clear non-technical response. Maybe list stuff like Ionic or even rapid prototyping stuff like Quartz Composer with Origami. Then link them by saying you can essentially build apps as if using Origami but get close to native performance, better code etc (mind you the JS to native compilers and pure JS folks will make similar claims)

Who's your target audience. Programmers becuse it takes them less time, designers because they can get further without programming?

I think you (the devs) should sit down for a coffee and talk through your project without going technical. Think of it as hacking the application process if you want. Fill out a Lean Canvas for your product even if it seems silly. Grill each other as if reliving the interview.

tl;dr: Pretend you're talking to nontechnical people and ignore everything that feels like "did they even read our application". Just mentally imagine they have invited you because someone recognized this as a hard engineering problem and now they are mostly interested in the business side.

ksikka• 11 years ago

My guess is:

You're just too early for YC. They have so many applications where the business/growth side of things are farther along than in your case, and they'd rather pick those companies for the finite amount of spots that they have at this time.

They wouldn't say they were impressed by your product unless they really truly were. They're just waiting for some more validation because they have had companies try to do this in the past and all (including mine) have failed.

I believe there is an opportunity here, but it's incredibly grueling to spend months developing only to realize after user testing that you've developed something that has significant problems that require months more development time. If there's a lighter-weight way of testing that what you're building is going to be easy to develop with, you should definitely do that and re-apply.

EDIT: Btw, "Y Combinator has been created for one single purpose: to make money." That's definitely false. They do use this criteria to help them select companies, but it's definitely not the single reason it was created.

jlevy• 11 years ago

I am one of the YC lawyers who was in the interview room and I was actually pretty pumped to hear the description of 20 year olds (I'm in my 40's)...

I also take exception to the comment "Y Combinator has been created for one single purpose: to make money." That's a pretty cynical view, but more important: it's not true at all.

simonw• 11 years ago

From reading both the article and the comments here, one common theme seems to be surprise that the YC partners didn't appear to know all of the information that was included in the application.

Here's a tip for anyone who lands a YC interview: go in with the assumption that no one who is interviewing you has read your application form, and you'll have a much higher chance of success!

Think about this from the POV of YC partners. They're interviewing literally hundreds of companies over a few short days. At s guess, they're doing 4 interviews an hour for 5 hours a day = 20 per day (probably higher).

When are they going to read the applications in depth? If they read 20 applications at the start of the day they'll have real trouble remembering which one is yours by the time they get to you. If they read your application directly before your interview, they'll only have time to skim it (my guess is that this is what they do, I'm happy to be corrected).

For you, your application represents days of work, and your interview is the most important 10 minutes of your entrepreneurial life. For them, you are one in a thousand applications.

The application is the thing that gets you the interview, nothing more.

elmar• 11 years ago

The best advice on the thread, just ignore the application.

corry• 11 years ago

Good advice, and to expand on that: Even when they do read your application closely, I'd STILL expect them ask you questions that you answered in the app.

There is a BIG difference between painstakingly writing an answer on your application (refined over days? weeks? months?) and being able to quickly and concisely express that.

I don't think it's controversial to say that being able to concisely and persuasively talk about your idea is extremely important and likely highly correlated with success as a founder.

humbertomn• 11 years ago

I just think they could have had the same questions asked by a potential customer, in a real sales pitch, and then they would definitely need more patience and stronger answers to win the client.

They seem to know their technical needs, but I would spend more time talking to possible early adopters... that would help the project itself and also their pitches for VCs and accelerators :)

helgeman• 11 years ago

I and probably everyone who has ever talked to investors/VCs had a similar experience to yours. And from an Investors standpoint it does make sense to basically ignore the product. Even though that can be frustrating. I think the pitfalls and traps that came with the interviewers questions have been discussed already. You know what they want to hear so naturally you are going to do better next time.

Anyway by all means there was good advice on here but don't get discouraged if you are passionate about your product. Because that, beside product and Team and everything else, is still the most important factor in a startup imo.

sama2• 11 years ago

first of all, we do care about great products. a lot. though we still try not to fund great products that we don't believe will become great businesses (there are many, many reasons why this might not be the case). it's critical to us you have some specific ideas about who your first customers will be.

second, we often ask questions that are already covered in your application. the way you explain what you do is incredibly important. if you can't clearly and concisely explain what you do, and get people excited, you will struggle to recruit, sell, raise money, retain people, etc.

third, we are happy to fund ideas with lots of technical risk. we have funded nuclear fusion companies, rocket companies, synthetic biology companies, etc that are years from a first sale. i don't know where this meme that we will only fund companies with traction came from, but it's not true. that said, we expect you to progress as quickly as you possibly can for whatever you're doing.

fourth, i believe i am the youngest YC partner and i am 29. there is no way you were interviewed by 3 young boys in their early 20s. however, i don't think the age of YC partners should matter, as long as they can evaluate and help companies.

unreal373• 11 years ago

I didn't take the article as anything negative against YC. The founders were thrown off their confidence early in the interview, and the interview is only 10 minutes, so it was impossible to recover. They left the room feeling like they bombed the interview, which was a fair assessment I guess.

That said, you might be missing a lot of interesting people and ideas with only 10 minutes to evaluate both.

sama2• 11 years ago

definitely--it would be great if we could spend more time on interviews.

the tradeoff we make for very quick evaluations is that we are able to look at every company that wants to be part of YC with no introduction or connection to us whatsoever.

Alex39172• 11 years ago

i don't know where this meme that we will only fund companies with traction came from, but it's not true.

Regardless of the selection criteria, would you say that as the batches have gotten larger, there is more of an advantage to having traction going into demo day? I can't help but feel like, at least for a consumer web startup, if you're just launching your product 4 - 6 weeks before demo day then you're probably not going to get as much value out of YC as you might otherwise.

arihant• 11 years ago

I don't think that's true. I think even on-the-napkin stage ideas also can use a lot of YC input to drive development in right direction. I believe it is important to at least have a prototype at least a few weeks before demo day in these programs, but that depends, of course.

I think you're looking at companies that would fail without sucking in every last bit of YC juice. Those kind of companies will fail anyway.

cryowaffle2• 11 years ago

Is your shift key broken? This is funny because it's clearly intentional. I know you have one because you made the parentheses. Ohh, and you made the YC uppercase, no way we can lowercase that.

asadlionpk• 11 years ago

is that the only thing you learnt from his comment? :)

jacquesm3• 11 years ago

You can talk about the form or the substance, I'd prefer you did the latter.

dlu• 11 years ago

I think it is interesting to see it from their point of view, especially their expectations, assumptions and details they remembered.

jl2• 11 years ago

P.S. Carolynn Levy was in the interview and she is a 44-year-old woman. I'm not sure how she was mistaken for a young boy.

giarc• 11 years ago

As I already said and as I clearly written in our apply, we are currently in pre-beta so we just developed apps for internal usage, nothing is on the market yet.

I hope this isn't a verbatim quote from the interview. Your interviewees were obviously very smart people, if they keep asking the same question (or what seems to be the same questions) it means you have not answered it properly. Therefore saying things like "As I already said" leaves an impression that you don't understand what they are asking.

Thanks for writing this up though. All too often we hear about the successful candidates. It's good to hear the other side of things.

evadne• 11 years ago

UIKit for Mac has been done more than a few times.

https://github.com/BigZaphod/Chameleon https://github.com/twitter/twui …

ryanSrich• 11 years ago

Great article and it points out an issue I've seen with a few startups.

It's no one else's job to understand what you're building. Even if you hand me an application saying what you built I still want to hear you explain it. I shouldn't have to work to understand your product. The fact that YC was trying very hard to get you to explain what you were building and you continued to repeat yourself tells me you still don't know entirely what you're building, and to an investor that's a huge red flag.

nattofriends• 11 years ago

By the way, Creo was the name of a Vancouver-based digital imaging software company that was acquired by Kodak in 2005. So there might be some people you are confusing with that name.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creo

jim_greco• 11 years ago

It's good to have a little ego, but I don't know anyone in the batch who talks like this:

I realized that Creo is an extraordinary technological challenge and we achieved unbelievable results so far. Who could have developed a new multiplatform programming language with a blazing fast virtual machine? Who could have rewritten from scratch a mobile operating system fully UIKit compatible? Who could have a product like ours? Nobody, probably nobody in the world… and if YC’s choice was driven by the product than we would had no rivals.

Mz• 11 years ago

I mostly skimmed. (I am supposed to be working right now.) My general impression of a lot of it: Wow, a whole lot of ego. Also: "Can you say Duke Nukem Forever?"

However, the closing list of YC frequently asked questions looks potentially useful:

  Y Combinator’s FAQ
  1.What are going to do?
  2.Potential Users?
  3.Obstacles in your path?
  4.What’s wrong with existing options?
  5.How you’ll overcame the barriers that allow existing options to stay bad?
  6.Who needs what you’re making?
  7.How do you know they need it?
  8.What are they doing now?
  9.What makes you different from existing options?
  10.Why isn’t someone already doing this?
  11.What obstacles will you face and how will you overcame them?
  12.How will customers/users find out about you?
  13.What resistance will they have to trying you?
  14.How will you overcome that resistance?
  15.What are the key things about your field that outsiders don’t understand?
  16.What part of your project are you going to build first?
  17.Who is going to be your first paying customers?
  18.If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
  19.Why did you choose this idea?
  20.What have you learned so far from working on it?
  21.Six months from now, what’s going to be your biggest problem?

Edit: Whoops! Formatting

dxbydt• 11 years ago

Can I ask you what is the point in airing this dirty laundry ? Even as a learning experience, it comes off pretty sour. Do you really want to be known forever as "creo ? oh those guys who trash talked yc ?" , because that's what happens.

Lemme air some clean laundry instead that might actually be useful to you guys.

2012 - am driving with a company co-founder who has just been accepted into YC. He points at an elephant logo on a building and says - "those guys! ridiculous! they have a billion dollar valuation! what did they do - put Notepad on the web ? what we are doing is a million times more complex."

He was ofcourse pointing to Evernote.

I gently told him that his company may be solving a problem million times more complex, but how many people wanted such a complicated solution ? 10 ? 1000 ? 1000 ? Maybe 10,000 ? There is a ceiling on any supercomplicated niche product you are building. Its now 2015, his company has about 5000 customers. So in 3 years they got to 5000. But Evernote has upwards of 100 million users, with its supersimple Notepad on the web product. So this yc company has now pivoted to building a specialized social network, and they already have a million+ users on that front. They'll probably keep the 5000-user supercomplicated business running, because its good money, but the focus will be on now growing the supersimple million user social network business.

A long time ago, we had a guest from Microsoft visiting our compiler theory class. He bemoaned that more people were using something called Microsoft Flight Simulator, which was just a stupid toy, compared to what his team was working on - the Microsoft Visual C Suite, which was such a sophisticated state of the art compiler.

Once again, how many people have a need for such a compiler, versus how many people want to just play video games ?

Focus also on customers, not just on the complexity of your technical problem space.

dkersten• 11 years ago

Regarding the "this was covered in the application", besides what others have already said here, could it be that the person evaluating the application wasn't actually in the room? Perhaps even on purpose?

aregs• 11 years ago

When answering questions in a YC interview you really need to satisfy the top 3 YC criteria for startup success.

1-Make something (a large enough number of) people want.

What YC wants to hear in the interview: who are these people?(show us you made an effort to find them) do they need what you are building?(show us you made an effort to find out) what are they doing now to get what they need?(show us you made an effort to find out) how is your solution much much better at helping them?(showing us who is begging you for your solution)

2-Make something that a small number of people absolutely love. (as apposed to something that a large number of people merely like)

What YC wants to hear in the interview: -Show us a small set of users that would absolutely love to use your solution.(i.e. who would get upset if you stopped building your solution)

3-Teams (and execution) matter more than ideas

What YC wants to hear in the interview: -Less focus on the technical merits of your idea/product and more focus on how you are getting users and the market you are targeting. If you did not give the right answers to items 1 and 2 above then clearly you are not the right team according to YC.(Note: If the product is highly technical you do need to show that you have a technical founder with the right skills. But that is not really the same thing as focusing on the technical details of the product)

My Y Combinator experience

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