The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

http://blog.directededge.com/2009/11/05/the-interview-with-y-combinator-thats-not/

by wheels • 17 years ago

167 74 17 years ago

blog.directededge.com

madmotive3• 17 years ago

This is exactly how our "interview" went.

Despite being given the same advice by others that had been through the process we still foolishly wasted time preparing a short 1 minute pitch.

We might have had a better result if we'd invested more time in getting the user experience in our demo right and answering the one critical question - "Why would people want this?"

Don't make the same mistake we did. :)

araneae2• 17 years ago

It seems to me that the pitch is in the application anyway. I can't imagine why they'd want you to just repeat yourselves.

madmotive3• 17 years ago

You shouldn't expect them to remember what was in the application. If they do remember something it will probably only be one line.

chrischen5• 17 years ago

Is a demo required?

aberman2• 17 years ago

No, but obviously better if you have one.

rantfoil• 17 years ago

I think its incredibly foolish to try to get funding for something that has no basis in reality yet. That's what a demo really is -- a toe-hold. But that toehold is usually enough to know whether a team can make it a reality, and whether they have a chance in the real world.

There's so much competition from great teams that it may well be a waste of time without showing your best.

ramidarigaz2• 17 years ago

Slight sidenote. On an 800x480 screen, overflow:hidden is a royal pain.

hussong2• 17 years ago

Not sure why you got downvoted. Thanks for the note, I appreciate it and will look into this.

ramidarigaz2• 17 years ago

No problem! Thanks for looking out for us netbook users.

araneae2• 17 years ago

Another tiny UI thing- for me the search bar overlays one of the results. For the easter egg I thought they had left pg out of the results until I realized it was underneath the search bar.

hussong2• 17 years ago

Heh, waiting for the post-interview phone call was a real nail-biter, we basically spent the entire evening waiting for the phone to ring. But it didn't.

It didn't even occur to us that they might call our land line back home until we got the email the next morning. Remotely checking the answering machine was fun too, hadn't used that feature in ages and the code didn't work (turns out you can't send DTMF tones when calling via Skype).

At the time we weren't sure if they give everyone a call or just the ones they accept, so we didn't take the absence of a call as a 'no', but kept wondering. In the end, we got the answer about 26 (pretty exciting) hours after we left the interview room.

So, unless you're a thrill seeker, put your cell number in the application :-)

madmotive3• 17 years ago

You get an email when you don't get in with a nice couple of lines explaining why.

Our email came in the early hours of the morning. I'd encourage you not to respond to it, at least for a few days. I felt compelled at the time to send a few paragraphs the next morning responding to some of the criticisms. Retrospectively it probably wasn't that all that useful to anyone.

It must be an exhausting 3 days for the YC team. I don't think there are enough hours in the day for them to call all the unsuccessful interviewees. Especially when some of them (like us) will want to take more of their time responding to feedback.

The quantity and quality of the questions and feedback you get in the short 10 minute interview alone is brilliant. Even though we didn't get funded it's had a massive impact on the way I think about things. I'd fly out from the UK to do it again even if there wasn't any chance of funding.

jl• 17 years ago

Or just be sure to tell me at the end of the interview which number you'd like us to call that night.

btilly2• 17 years ago

From the article, We’d given Jessica cards with our cell-phone numbers on them during the interview, but that didn’t seem to have registered.

I take that to mean that they tried to make it clear how to call them, but for whatever reason signals got crossed.

anateus2• 17 years ago

I know people who have sent DTMF over skype. You just need to...try harder :>

SlyShy• 17 years ago

Thanks for the insight into the process. That sounds a lot more useful than an actual interview, because it seems like you are learning something from the meeting through the brainstorming.

gord3• 17 years ago

Interesting read and nice success story...

On DirectedEdge home, can I enter any search term, or does this need to be a well formatted Wikipedia entry url ?

wheels5• 17 years ago

If you type the beginning of an article name it should autocomplete after a sec (it's a little slower than it should be...) There's also an easter-egg you can use:

http://www.directededge.com/?Y%20Combinator

davidw4• 17 years ago

BTW, time to put up a nice looking 404 page or fix whatever's wrong:

http://www.directededge.com/dsfdsfds

gord3• 17 years ago

Thanks.

disclaimer : I'm a radical graph data, noSQL proponent, so you had me at 'edge', however...

The only thing that I care about on that page is the graph.

Id like to see just that graph, but prefetched, fluid interactive javascript. Nothing else, except the text bar at top, and the interactive sliding autoscaling graph data app.

That would be wonderful, a new thing packaged out of old things Id half enunciated a thousand times myself.

the other stuff, Id put in some links.

This way you have all the focus on what your about.

So my 'Crazy Thought' is - make that the whole company, trim away everything else.

What would it look like if you had 2000 data points on the screen, gradually getting smaller at the edges, and fluidly navigating with say 500 nodes of prefetch ahead.

This should be in JS using Raphael if its not already .. [ I didnt see a raphael.js inclusion in your source page. ]

mahmud2• 17 years ago

Anyone know if YC is doing traditional companies? i.e. advertising and real-estate.

Don't need the money but could really use the "blessing". They have some of the most enviable media contacts in the industry right now.

eru3• 17 years ago

They said they need to understand what you are doing.

mahmud2• 17 years ago

Well, we got into these businesses from meeting industry insiders and specialists. You sit down with people, chat, and find out business opportunities. Just today we evaluated festival, trade show and expo opportunities; took me about 10 hours to study the industry and see potential, I am still evaluating it, but there is no reason for YC not to understand it fully.

Seems like the whole startup scene is focused on web-based tools and utilities, while we're focused in real-world businesses.

dannyr2• 17 years ago

How about just hire a PR firm?

Yeah you get good media contacts with YC but that only takes you so far. What's good is the community of founders who have gone thru YC.

pg3• 17 years ago

We'll fund anything that scales like a startup. We had a very promising startup doing real estate two cycles ago, but they fell apart due to disputes between the founders. I still think it was a great idea.

theli0nheart2• 17 years ago

What company was this?

edit: why am I getting downvoted?

bastian• 17 years ago

Wheels, this is brilliant and it mostly matches what we learnt from other startups during StartupSchool and the Y-Combinator reception last month. Thanks for putting this in a post.

JLaramie• 17 years ago

This is a great breakdown of your journey. Thanks for giving us the info.

sailormoon5• 17 years ago

I am sorry if this is completely obvious and I am missing something. But I just do not understand, not one little bit.

Why did you fly to America to get $5000? It is not a large amount of money. I am surprised it covered your air fares.

So why? I do not feel the need at all. You did. I would like to here why. Did they really say something in the interview that justified all that time and expense?

update: I have no idea whatsoever why this is being downvoted. There is no way I would fly to the US to collect a pathetic $5k. I'd genuinely like to know why people think it is a profitable thing to do so. Thanks.

gruseom• 17 years ago

You're being downvoted because people think the answer to your question is so obvious that you must be trolling. However, I'll assume you're being sincere.

The money is the least important aspect of getting in to YC. What matters is the advice they provide and the community/network aspects. These things are so valuable that they are a huge state change for most startups.

sailormoon5• 17 years ago

This is not obvious to me at all. I admit I have difficulty conceiving of advice so compelling I'd travel to America to receive it.

Fair enough I guess. People pay what they think it is worth. That's capitalism; no argument from me. I am not trolling. Carry on.

cedsav• 17 years ago

What's obvious to the people who downvoted you is that the YC program is about much more than $5k. http://www.ycombinator.com/about.html

drusenko• 17 years ago

I'm sorry, but even though the money is the least part of the package, I need to correct you on this one: it's not $5,000, it's at least $10k (2 founders) and probably $15k.

Saying it's just $5,000 is disingenuous.

endlessvoid94• 17 years ago

I just spent 10 minutes playing with the flash visualization on your homepage.

Good luck!

pmorici• 17 years ago

Is it flash? When I right click it lets me save the graph image as an image... what are you guys using to do this? It's really neat.

kam• 17 years ago

It's a <canvas> element.

marknutter• 17 years ago

Wow, I'm going to have to be a lot more thoughtful when I post on news.ycombinator from now on.

btilly2• 17 years ago

And you'll start with your next post, right? :-P

leelin• 17 years ago

Did you guys happen to do much mingling in the waiting area just before or just after your interview?

We got to the interview super early and ended up chatting with Kate (we asked her how to get to In and Out), Skysheets Dan (saw his demo), and two other interviewing teams that were accepted. Then there were two less social teams who sat in the corner with their laptops, I guess nervously testing their demo one last time.

Maybe I'm over-fitting, but for me the nerve-calming benefits of being social in the waiting room was helpful.

anateus2• 17 years ago

They did. I remember them as the first other YC team we talked to.

peripitea• 17 years ago

First, congratulations! I'm curious how you are setting up a company in the United States if you or one of your co-founders is from Germany? I've been trying to figure out the whole startup-as-a-foreigner thing (I'm Canadian), and so far I haven't been able to find any good info.

The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not

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