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For anyone saying "I definitely won't get in" here's a counterpoint that has little to do with whether your application succeeds or not: Do it for yourself, not for the approval.

I found that filling in the application, without even sending it, is a useful exercise. It makes you think hard about what it is you are trying to achieve with whatever it is your building. It's very helpful when you come to talk with clients.

You know how they say launch fast, launch early? That's part of it, because launching means talking about it to other people. Those people will have questions or objections or an incomplete understanding of pre-existing solutions. A lot of the application is about this kind of stuff.

Personally, I wanted to fill the application irrespective of YC. I figured, if I'm serious about building something useful, I shouldn't just build it and que sera, sera. I should know what to focus on. And since they've learned a bunch about building companies, if they care about something enough to ask about it, that's a good pointer that I should care enough about it to be able to answer it.

For example, I filled it in when a solution was just an idea, as if it were already built. So it made me set expectations, and clarify what I want this thing to be. Then, once it was built, the first thing that happened when that solution met with clients was this: I'd give them the short description I've written in the application, and they'd ask - Oh, but does it have to do just that?

Without the application, there wouldn't have been the short description, without which there wouldn't have been the useful client feedback...So, again: do it for yourself, not for the approval.

Applied for the 3rd time (B2B AI SaaS, 300% YoY growth, $109k revenue last month).

Decided to take a risk with the founder video. On my first 2 applications I did what everyone does and shot 100 takes to get one "right"... On this one though, I shot the whole video in one take (with warts and all) and used our own software to edit it, and then used that as the demo as well[0].

In a way, it feels like I can't win on this video thing

- if we follow instructions to "not edit" the founder video, the result is 100 takes for a basic video that is unworthy of a video-based startup.

- If we use our own tool, the video is "too polished" (even though it took less work to do!).

Hopefully the application stands on its own merits. A year ago I took the first rejection hard. I really really hate applying for stuff or having some kind of "jury" reviewing things when the only truth is what the market wants and whether people use what I've created. So as an engineer I prefer marketing to fundraising, by far.

If we don't get into YC I'll just keep bootstrapping. I see the value though, because with the right pointers we could grow way way faster. So, fingers crossed!

[0]: https://my.onetake.ai/b9502ad6/9dcd6eb6/

Congrats on your success.

Why would you even want to join YC? They give the same deal to everyone. So you're lumped into a batch that basically has 30% of people in it with just an idea. It's pretty offensive if you actually proved yourself and your business idea. But don't worry, you prob still won't get in

I don't compare myself with others much. Why should I care if there are earlier-stage startups in there?

We always think that our current stage is pretty high up the mountain already (see a rough July 2022 ARR update[0] when I thought I was on top of the world) but if you zoom out, you see things with much better perspective (18 months later, the whole year of 2022 looks way less impressive[1])

If we're on the road to $100MM+ in ARR, the current spot we're at will be flattened to almost zero when you look back with perspective a few years down the line.

So there's that.

And then, "why join YC", well the answer is simple.

- We are growing, but we could grow so much faster. Everything is still on a shoestring budget.

- We have an epic roadmap and could grow the product to mind-boggling levels of awesome. YC could help us shave years off of that.

- Plus we finally cracked breakeven acquisition on cold traffic but we're strapped for cash.

- And finally, I've joined several founder "communities" in the last few months (online and local) and those are all just a dump-your-promo Slack channel with zero added value or interaction. The local "startup" events are full of startup consultants on the hunt, designers, would-be employees and the like (but zero founders). So it feels a bit lonely when you've got a challenge which is clearly in the "thousands of founders must have solved this exact same problem before, so why should I bang my head on the wall" category.

So: advice, founder-friendly terms, a network of peers, and not having to chase investors for capital. That's why I applied.

[0]: https://nuro.video/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Capture-de%CC%...

[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSEOGmySAAyv...

Thanks for answering. I misread your orig post. When you said you had 109k last month I thought that was monthly rev, which would make your arr 1.3mm. The standard offer 500k for 7% is pretty bad (5x rev multiple with x00% growth)

Overall the money isn’t a lot. It sounds like you’re strapped for cash. If you optimize for that you’ll likely find much better terms. The point about cohort being so many idea stage is that they focus on that and have resources geared towards those people. And the community (cohort) will be much less mature business wise. They give you the golden touch which helps for cos selling vapor ware. I think you’re beyond that and can go more traditional route to raise money. Did you reach out to other vcs?

> The standard offer 500k for 7%

They will not give you all of that in one go. $125k initially and rest of $375k if you are valued at-least at $15M post money round.

Unless it changed very recently, which from my reading it didn’t, that’s not correct.

The $375k is an uncapped safe with mfn, but you do get the whole $500k upfront.

Source: https://www.ycombinator.com/deal

Also sourced from getting said $500k, thus the confusion on my end.

> In a typical scenario where you raise your next safes at a $15M post-money valuation cap, the $375,000 MFN safe would convert into $375,000 / $15,000,000 = 2.5% of the company.

Maybe, I misunderstood then! I thought they were referring to next funding round to hand over rest of $375k. But in fact, it was just the calculation to explain the valuation of the company in ref to that balance.

Love the product!

I’d actually love to use it as a hobbyist, but the pricing is a bit steep. Anyway to come down to 30$ or so?

It's a great product. With a SaaS with 109K revenue a month why do you need YC? I guess you want the network and advice which makes sense. Can help you reduce risk and provide an imprintaur of "premium credibility" (for want of better word!!) and aid access to US market and investors.

Your costs must be high, have you considered colo or lower cost cloud providers like Hetzner? I'm sure you have but just sayin!! :)

But I'm curious what have other investors said? It seems like with your combination of desire to raise, AI, revenue and great product you will have investors already beating a path to your door??

Great idea; good luck.

I don't know if it's just me but your site takes some time to load(on my laptop)

Your app is great. Good luck.

I think one thing that people don't realize is that the YC application process is really one of the best tools for "sharpening" your idea/business.

The written applications forces you to articulate your ideas in a concise yet easy to understand way.

And as much as YC doesn't recommend this, the mock YC interviews we did with alums was one of those most beneficial things that happened to us. Because so rarely will you get the opportunity to ask dozens of other YC founders to grill your business, and have 80%+ of them say yes.

We did about 30 at the time, which is a lot of time to be taken off product/building, hence probably why they don't recommend it, but looking back it *really helped us understand our own business. Given how young/naive/early we were.

> I think one thing that people don't realize is that the YC application process is really one of the best tools for "sharpening" your idea/business.

I'm seeing this a lot through the comments but I have to ask, why is it? Do people just not think about how their product will make money, who the competition is or how are they going to get customers?

> Do people just not think about how their product will make money, who the competition is or how are they going to get customers?

The short answer is "yes, people don't think about those things."

The longer answer is that they think that they've thought about those things, but in reality, they put more thought into what they had for dinner last night than they did into those things.

At least for me at the time, I knew nothing about start ups. Didn't come from a prestigious school. Nor the bay or even US. Didn't work in big tech. The closest thing was that I was studying EE.

Honest it was quite inspiring to chat with these founders who were in a different world, and realizing that they're not all that different from myself.

So yea, maybe I was young dumb n broke.

> I think one thing that people don't realize is that the YC application process is really one of the best tools for "sharpening" your idea/business.

Meh. Sharping your concept, yes. It is a snapshot of your concept.

The best way to sharpen your idea/business is to sell. That way, the "sharpening" process is iterative instead of a once-off event.

Honestly, YC isn't what you think it is. PS: I have a few YC customers and their founders aren't what the media make them out to be.

The market is tanking again and interest rates may go up and or continue into next year. YC graduates are expected to present and raise their seed rounds around Demo Day in 3-4 months. Raising any kind of money sets an interest rate that you pay with your equity % to investors (at high interest rates they expect to own more equity as time goes by.) What are the current fundraising terms you guys see for YC startups because the timing looks dicey for this cycle?

NVDA just tanked 10% today and with it a whole bunch of AI valuations. Did YC startups from in the 2022 batches see positives or negatives?

What is the upside to fundraising in the next few months vs waiting for a better environment? If we have a startup and it’s profitable, does it make sense to apply it to wait?

Not only do I not know the answers, I am so devoid of such knowledge that you would find it hilarious. But from my perspective (FWIW) it's all sort of optimizing for the wrong thing. If you want to do a startup, YC is such a force multiplier that none of these details matter in the end.

I do know that one reason the YC deal is far larger than it used to be is to give founders resilience against market ups and downs. You get a lot of runway now.

Who cares?

Your deepest motivation should be to build something amazing that people want to use, to create a great business, to have fun, to go on a great adventure.

If stock market performance plays a major role in your decision to start a business or raise capital then perhaps your motivations might need a rethink.

VCs care. The way they make decisions has changed wildly in different ways multiple times within just the last 5 years.

There’s a very good argument to be made that they shouldn’t care and that their investment theses should be more stable as well as their criteria, but that’s an academic argument that doesn’t do a whole lot for the founders who have been attempting to fundraise amid those varied VC spasms.

It doesn’t in mine, but it does in the VC’s who are investing in YC startups - making them and their LPs a lot less patient due to increased cost of capital for the whole industry.

> What is the upside to fundraising in the next few months vs waiting for a better environment? If we have a startup and it’s profitable, does it make sense to apply it to wait?

You make it sound like you have a 100% success rate. A lot of applicants apply multiple times so getting in at a worse rate vs not getting at all, what's the pick?

Alright, yolo, I just did it. I did it because of these reasons:

> (1) "probably not good enough / won't get in" - you'd be surprised at how many people feel that way, whether because of impostor syndrome, lack of credentials, whatever—and often they turn out to be among the best founders. So this a terrible reason not to apply!

I have nothing going on at the moment. I am starting to apply to new jobs (have an interview with Google coming up). But I'm open to do the entrepreneurship thing. I always wanted to do it for years, strongly (I created my study program in such a way that it'd help if I'd ever do entrepreneurship). Nowadays it's not strong, I'm simply open to it.

> (2) "too early" - there's no such thing. YC looks for good potential founders—meaning anyone who can learn what they teach—and nothing else. You're already yourself, which is all you need.

Well, I don't have a project started. I have nothing. I did build stuff in the past and I do have a bunch of ideas, which I showed in my application. So let's see if there is no such thing indeed ;-)

> Some of YC's big successes start off as last-minute applications on a whim

Basically this.

I like the quote in your about @ Dang. Very helpful:

"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression." Marion Milner, 'The Toleration of Conflict', Occupational Psychology, 17, 1, January 1943

I'm glad! I finally got a copy of the paper and unfortunately that quote was the only interesting thing in it, as far as I could tell. But Milner is fascinating and did many other things - for example she wrote a brilliant book called "A life of one's own" about experiments she did with self-observation. She was already using the word 'mindfulness' in 1934.

The parent comment about conflict made me think that surely Montaigne must have an essay "On Conflict". Not so, but a quick search turned up [0].

More generally Montaigne's writings (which you may well know) are sometimes cited as "mindfulness" long before the term was invented [1].

[0] https://psyche.co/ideas/for-montaigne-verbal-jousting-is-the...

[1] https://thehouseilivein.me/2023/10/21/my-year-with-montaigne...

I’ve always been intrigued by YC, but the commitment to relocate is hard to justify. I have three kids (with the oldest finishing up her junior year next month). So I’m not in a place where being in SF for the summer works very well for the family.

I remember during COVID that there was a remote option, but I don’t believe that’s available now. So for someone more established (erm, no longer 20) that lives in the middle of the country, I’m not sure it’s a great fit.

But man am I interested… I can never quite tell myself “no” and move on either… I’d love to be wrong. Because I’ve got a great one cooking right now!…

For better or worse, the relocation requirement is probably a good proxy for "can commit to their startup 24x7 without any other responsibilities standing in the way".

That sounds like a system that leaves out a lot of people who might be better at starting and running companies than the persona willing to throw their family in the garbage for their company.

A startup founder who is 40 years old is 2.1x more likely to start a successful venture than a 25-year-old. [1] The kind of people who tend to have kids and families.

And it’s kind of pathetic for an industry that’s supposed to be creating innovations like spatial computing, augmented reality, and fully remote companies to be unable to set up an online school.

[1] https://www.founderjar.com/startup-statistics/

Maybe, but that’d be playing into a tired stereotype.

That’s nonsense. Startups are only for the young and unencumbered? I’ve had several successful startups and managed to combine that with a family life as well as time off for R&R and mentally recharging.

If this is your belief, I strongly advise you to reconsider your life choices and priorities

Please make your substantive points without name-calling (in the sense that the site guidelines use the term - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and without crossing into personal attack. Your comment would be just fine without the first and last sentences.

Re: "won't get in"

How do I balance this encouraging advice with everything I've heard online about YC basically being a post-Ivy League thing? Seems like there's basically a 0% chance a random person would get into YC. And often those who did get in went to Stanford, Harvard, etc. and don't even have a product - sometimes they don't even know what they're going to build yet.

I wrote the idea of VC stuff off long ago. My wife and I have a profitable business here in SF that would be perfect as a startup, but the concept of raising funds to expand literally hasn't even crossed our minds because it seems so geared toward post-grads - like something only Stanford and Harvard people get access to after they graduate.

Not only that, we're profitable, and can even articulate a realistic vision about how it becomes the next $100M household name, but the numbers I've read online that most VCs want to see are not realistic - or if we were hitting those numbers I wouldn't even need a VC, we would be able to fund our own expansion.

So we're just doing it on our own.

I mean, I didn't even graduate college :P

> So we're just doing it on our own.

IMO if you can become a $100M household name without VC, that's absolutely the way to do it.

Even if you do take the VC path, YC for me was a massive boost in network, knowledge, and resources that I didn't have before, but it's also not the only way to acquire those things. You can even find that YC knowledge online, e.g. https://www.startupschool.org/.

That said, if anyone's even considering applying to YC, I'd recommend it, at a minimum it's a forcing function to think more deeply about your idea or business when assembling the application.

> I mean, I didn't even graduate college :P

Yes, but did you go to one of those colleges where dropping out is even better than graduating? Because most of us didn't even get the chance to drop out of one of those.

I'm a YC founder and I dropped out of not-one-of-those colleges (RPI). My cofounder dropped out of high school.

Why not just give it a shot? Find the powerful parts of your story (I'm sure they exist) and share them!

We applied, as GP advocates for, mostly to sharpen our thinking. Just the application process would've been worth the time, even if we had gotten declined immediately. The interview 10x'd that value, then the YC batch itself was another multiple on top of that.

I would definitely count RPI as one of "those" colleges! I guess everyone has a different list, but for me, RPI is in the same category as Rose-Hulman, Olin, Harvey Mudd, etc. Perhaps not Ivy League level in the sense of being a household name, but still known among people in the field.

The "Ivy League" consists of precisely these eight schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.

Honestly I feel like some of these are negative indicators when it comes to engineering cred.

Meanwhile, stellar engineering schools like Caltech, Stanford, and MIT are in a league of their own.

This comment is mostly to complain that using "Ivy League" as a shorthand for prestigious engineering schools is inaccurate.

Silicon League?

It’s definitely a great, high caliber school. But it’s not one of the dropout-porn inspiring ones like Stanford/Harvard.

For example, a lot of people drop out of RPI because it’s actually difficult to get good grades there (not why I did it FWIW). That’s not why anyone drops out of Harvard.

Not that I'm aware of, no, just the local state school.

My impression of the YC application process was that it was way more holistic than just educational background.

YC approval process is pretty much this:

- Do I even understand your idea.

- Have you talked to customers.

- Am I impressed in your use of time.

- Do I believe that your team is capable of delivering.

- Is it a good idea.

Most people can't get past the first two but obsess over the last two.

This is the process. They want people with high agency, a bias to action, and who make progress in the face of uncertainty.

This is a really good point because the vast majority of YC members (97-99%) either graduated or dropped out from Ivy League level schools, or really highly rated state schools. (Dropouts are also a very small minority.) There are YC members who didn’t come from prestigious schools, but they are outliers. Maybe it’s changed the last 4 years? That’s when I stopped tracking it.

That's definitely not true. Where did you get these numbers?

I had a side project that was meant to be an “IMDB of everything”. For my initial focus, I targeted YC, its companies and members. This involved looking at a lot of LinkedIn profiles and recording their alma mater because I wanted to give credit to organizations as well and not just individuals. That’s how I came to that conclusion.

The result surprised me as well but it also makes sense. Investors would be more eager to invest if the founders were already part of some of their networks. People from these schools also tend to be more inclined to be higher achievers than other places on average.

The only time where there was more educational diversity was probably only during the 1st two years of YC.

Has it changed in recent years? I would rather be wrong on this one.

Assuming it's true/accurate it seems like the kind of research you should share (for free or otherwise) with YC, because it seems like the kind of bias that they would be interested in correcting for.

Not just from an equality perspective, but also that good ideas and founders can come from anywhere. Top Schools are going to produce one type of founder and idea. People that have walked different paths, another.

I’ll see if I can scrounge up the data. For some years, I had the entire batch covered, but most had holes since not everyone had a LinkedIn account. Unfortunately, the more recent the years the less the data.

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with what YC is doing. Startups are hard enough as is, and they found a formula that works consistently.

Dang going around saying, "no no apply anyway" says to me that even if it is in that state, that's not what they want.

As a unknown university dropout (2001) I wouldn't feel intimidated to apply, and may well go after the next batch (have just found a cofounder). I have to trust that they'll evaluate me on merits rather than prestige.

That’s the thing. They were clearly judging people on merits if you look at the founders closely. They just all happened to have graduated from really good schools.

The LinkedIn page for a lot of these companies showing you "Where they studied" can be a bit intimidating. Chockablock with Stanford and Ivy League.

I was filling out the Co-Founder matching service application and it has a required text area for education. The placeholder text examples? Standford MS in Comp Sci, NYU BS in Physics.

As a college dropout with "some college" but a 14+ year career in systems/software engineering roles, that was quite discouraging.

I'm with you and wish that we were more careful with this sort of signaling risk. However, there are tons of college dropouts and uncredentialed software people who make it in to YC.

What I'm basically trying to tell everyone, and hoping to convince a few, is: don't listen to any of this, just do it.

I'm also with you! Just wanted to share my experience in case it helps as a data point.

Gates, Jobs, and Zuck all famously dropped out of college of course.

It's an interesting and tricky social dynamic matching within and between these somewhat distinct groups.

> Gates, Jobs, and Zuck

Harvard, Reed, Harvard.

Any drop out from any of those has hurdled more than 98% of the general college corps. Or at least that would be a rational assumption by the VC cadre that is probably in the top 0.1% and an Ivy League grad.

People are commenting on this but failing to stake out a real point.

Is the point that just having been accepted to those schools is a strong signal? I would concede that it could be, sure.

But a lot of people drop out of Ivy league schools and simply flame out. Many would consider dropping out of those schools after a few semesters as failure. And many companies still require degrees; a few semesters at Harvard won't cut it.

I guess my point is that college dropouts are also successful at creating startups. Two have started the two most valuable companies in the world.

I'd argue getting accepted is almost the entire signal.

These people dropped out to chase extremely lucrative business opportunities - that they created as a student, likely aided by structural/networking support inside that institution - due to timing risk.

One could argue they not only got into a highly prestigious institution, but they quickly leapfrogged everyone there. That's the opposite of flaming out.

[flagged]

So did Elizabeth Holmes.

They were arguing success is possible without a college degree, not that lacking a college degree guarantees success.

No. They were naming famous people who dropped out of college.

I didn't say it was a good argument, just want their intention was. But they did at least give examples that showed the claim was potentially valid, whereas your example wasn't relevant at all (nor did it make the point you've switched to about them not making an argument).

Yes, within the context of the "conversation" I was pointing out examples of why a required "enter your Ivy League history here" box might push away famously successful subset of startup founders.

You could argue YC wants people that wouldn't be discouraged by that. I'd argue that due to survivorship bias that would be hard to quantify, and that YC is competing with others for the best ideas so they might just end up somewhere else.

To expand a bit; I wasn't actually discouraged.. I was more put-off and slightly offended. It did make me stop filling out the co-founder match in the moment, but I was always planning to swing back around on it.

There is a trend I notice where people just drop low effort argumentative responses. They aren't even fully realized counter arguments. I try not to engage when they are targeting me; it's better for a third party to shut them down. It's super bad on Reddit and unfortunately ruins r/dotnet .

Didn't they ask drop out from Harvard or something? It's a bit disingenuous to say that.

Steve Jobs went to an obscure private school called Reed which seems to be something he became obsessed with due to LSD.

Zuck and Gates both dropped out of Harvard after founding their companies.

Reed is a great liberal arts college. Very intense and quirky academic culture, and being in Portland OR lends to an amazing college town vibe.

Sometimes I wish I went there instead of my Alma mater.

There is likely some level of selection bias to it as well. If I think it's unlikely to get in without that ivy/engineering school background I might not bother to apply.

I don't personally believe that -- I'm confident in my 23 years of experience. It's unlikely I'll apply this weekend, but I did find a cofounder through the YC dating app. Maybe next batch.

Just curious, I was filling out my profile and it says Education History required. Normally that means college experience. I only did one year at a local community college. Should I just put that? My cofounder is attending a well respected school though.

Sure why not? If I were you I'd try not to worry too much about what will/won't seem good—what YC is pattern-matching for is usually quite different than what people assume.

Does it have to be US citizens, living in the US?

How about a native South African, born in SA?

Anyone can apply - you needn't be a US citizen (I'm not, for example) and you are most welcome to be South African.

Edit: I asked my informant and they said that YC has funded 6 South African founders since 2017, which I guess is how far that data goes back to. We agreed that it seems like there should be more!

Thanks!

I'll keep in mind, so won't make it for this intake.

Still on the fence on whether I need the rocket fuel or not, and my co-founder hasn't yet weighed in either (we're still in exploratory phase of some potential products, so not in 100% yet).

Just finished W24 batch with no Ivy/FAANG background.

Everyone I met in our batch was very friendly, curious, and razor-sharp. Many people have credentialed backgrounds, many people do not.

I generally buy YC’s justification that many of the smartest people happen to go to Stanford/Ivy which is why they are over-represented.

> the smartest people happen to go to Stanford

There's no way this is even possible, let alone true.

This might be a hot take but if you're under the age of 25, it's likely that you know very few things total. And the things you do know, you're just not going to have a master level of understanding of in your 20s yet nor the drive to focus on it the way it needs, especially with other social pressures at play. What is extremely high in your 20s is your ambition - your loftiness of ideas and goals and your expectations of yourself - these can land you exceptional jobs, opportunities, and get you to a great starting point, but that's not the same as intelligence and ability.

For manual labor work, there's a definite peak - college age and the years just after. But for knowledge work, math, programming, business, politics, etc. being older is almost always an asset - you get better at things, you get smarter, your networks grow, you become an adult among the children and are far more aware of timing and can predict and speak on things with more accuracy. You simply know more.

Besides that, I don't think raw intelligence is selection criteria for a good founder anyway. It has a lot more to do with your particular situation - how well you're situated to pull it off, which can mean many things. In terms of personal qualities it probably has more to do with determination and obsession (work ethic) than intelligence, especially these days where information is so cheap and available.

Ah sorry for clarity I didn't mean "currently attend", and agree "smartest" here was probably excessively casual.

I think there's different benefits at different ages, and agree on importance of determination and obsession. A good market is the only thing that might be more useful.

There is a lot of variance in how words are used, so I'm not going to say you're wrong here.

However, my usage of the following words deviate from yours:

* intelligence - raw intellect, having absolutely nothing to do with anything ever learned

* smarts - synonym for raw intellect, but often more on the 'crafty' side of raw intellect

* ability - short for 'capabilities', and is a merge of 'intelligence' and 'learned information'. Information is useless without intellect, and intellect is vastly reduced in capability without learned information. Ability is a metric for these two conjoined. 'Skilled' fits here too.

So from where I sit, you never get "smarter" as you age. You do however grow your abilities, you may become "wise", and skilled.

By the way, agree 100% with the context of what you're saying. And just passing on term usage from another geolocation.

That's fine, but then measuring 'raw intellect' is like measuring 'raw strength' when you're selecting members of a soccer team. It will help, no doubt, but it's one of many factors.

I don’t think you can make that argument in good faith: “many of the smartest people happen to go to Stanford/Ivy”.

I think you _can_ say that many smart people go to Stanford/Ivy.

In the usage above “many of” I read to mean “smart people are significantly over-represented” at those places rather than anything stronger.

I dropped out of the University of Wollongong in ~2001 (points if you know where that is without looking it up), I've had a great 23 year career so far.

I agree that the cofounder dating was intimidating, and even some of the people fit into that category. Far more didn't though, and I've found an exceptional cofounder through it, which is one of the most exciting things in a very long career.

(I'll get around to doing YC at some point)

i was hanging around the Gong around then; I'm in Rads and was attempting to make a game with some friends from there at the time.

Those were some fun times.

Discouraging, sure, but now the real question: did you apply anyway? :) I hope you did!

> YC basically being a post-Ivy League thing

I have a lot of friends of mine who are decade+ YoE first time founders who have done very very well in YC.

Lots of Enterprise SaaS companies have went thru YC and done very well - you just don't hear about them as much because Direct Enterprise Sales doesn't require as much marketing.

There are similar B2C successes by older founders and non-Ivy/Ivy Tier founders.

> we're profitable, and can even articulate a realistic vision about how it becomes the next $100M household name

You could easily pitch a Seed or Pre-Seed round depending on the numbers and location right now.

I guarantee you that you are a 2nd or 3rd degree connect with plenty of VCs.

Leverage that network you have and doors will open

The YC label does help to open doors if you don't know or don't have the network to do it.

(Note: this advice is US centric)

How many years do you have to go back to find 1 company that is on par with a dropbox or airbnb

i feel like if you went back 5 years it would be hard to even find more than 1-2 companies that has achieved a moderate level of mainstream success in the same way

It takes 10-15 years to successfully IPO an Enterprise/Infra/Cybersecurity SaaS (eg. ZS started in the mid-2000s, work on Rubrik started in the 2013 time period).

One notable mid-late state Enterprise firm I've been following is Vanta. Others have been very successful acquihires (eg. Squeen becoming a core part of the Security BU at Datadog). Salt Security is a good product as well, but will most likely be acquihired.

Usually, most enterprise companies choose to be acquired because even though the pot of gold at IPO is amazing, it is annoying to work on the same product for 10-15 years (though occasionally you do have startups just being stupid at strategy - looking at you Lacework smh, coulda acquihired Wiz or Orca 4-5 years ago).

Consumer != mainstream

I had ambitions of cranking out an MVP and pitching it to VCs in my late 20s. After a year of solid rejection ( including YC not even responding), I gave up.

You end up spending alot of time trying to pitch your work. I've had a few idea guys expect me to build MVPs for free with an offer of like 1% or something silly like that. Never any pay, poorly thought out concepts.

I've accepted I'm never going to be rich, it's easier this way.

The filters are self-fulfilling.

For twenty-somethings ideas are easy and all opportunity is in front. Might as well swing for the fences and yes people do hit home runs. At this stage, debating the actual statistics is misguided use of energy. Because justifying a reason not to play still means you're not playing.

And the older you get the more gray this calculus is. There's more reasons not to do something. We put the filters on ourselves.

This isn't a moral argument. No one really knows how the statistics will land, we can only back analyze them. Yes it's statistically very unlikely you're going to get funded. So you stopped trying. Maybe your ideas really weren't very good. That's ok, you've got a lifetime.

edit: fwwiw I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur and now decades later when I'm more financially secure and the reality is here, I really really really question if I am cut out to be an entrepreneur. I don't think I care all that much. Not really.

I turned 50 this year and have one moderately successful startup experience as a co-founder about 8-10 years ago, but if I do another (which I'm considering) it will either be bootstrapped or I'll look for funding out of my personal network vs. the VC path. This is probably aligned with YC as well; far more than the education expectations in their signalling is (generous interpretation) that they'll trade experience for youthful ambition.

It's more like I don't think cold calling ( tweeting) VCs yields results.

It's the equivalent of singing with a guitar outside of Columbia records. It's not like Paul McCartney is going to just tell you to step into his office and record a demo.

I do plan on taking some time off to work on my side projects though. Maybe I'll try again...

I’m in the same boat, except now actively planning to take off to work on a side project. Rather than spend another year building a prototype for a potential $100M idea (last two landed me really nice jobs) I have my eyes set on ideas that will generate $3-6M/year that I can realize on my own with minimal/no outside funding.

I may apply to this YC round for giggles, but totally get the same feeling as you that I’m probably not good enough in their eyes. As Paul Graham said, if you are out chasing VC funding, you are not building your product. So just going to focus on making my life comfortable and launching another successful product or service.

Good luck!

What market are you targeting 3 to 6 mil a year is amazing for a solo startup.

I'm basically a hobbyist game dev outside of work and games are just so risky as a business.

- AI (sell them shovels)

- Hospice

Games should be developed for fun. I would totally fund game development with profits from another venture.

I figured solo game devs were more in it for passion rather than anything else. The Choo Choo Charles guy has an interesting YT video on his dev/launch procedure. He basically spent 4 months full time advertising his game after he finished developing it.

Cold emailing or tweeting investors only works if you have eye-popping results to point to or credentials that stand out.

Otherwise the way to get to them is via accelerators like YC. And the way to get into accelerators with no credentials is to launch something and get some traction. It doesn’t even need to be a lot of traction. Just having users who use your product regularly puts you near the top of the pile.

You can still be rich. Tech culture, or rather modern capitalism, tells us that businesses need to raise a bunch of money, capture a bunch of users, and then squeeze them for all they'll take.

It fails us in two very distinct ways. It encourages us to think that is the only viable option and it's unethical. Primarily because it requires the perception of customers (and often employees) as a means to an end (not humans).

However, the possibility for ethical, sustainable business models is still very real. I tend to believe we're going to see another wave of those soon as people figure out that it's actually easier to make a living that way.

> the possibility for ethical, sustainable business models is still very real.

Those exist everywhere in the trades. Every major city has dozens of small businesses doing plumbing, electrical, roofs, etc., with the goal of sustainable, loyal customers based on doing a good job at a fair price.

Well put. The difficult part for us software folk is learning to apply that model to software. Customers in the world of software generally don’t know what they want. I think the low hanging fruit here is to copy products from the unethical companies and beat them at caring for the customers.

The real value is probably in new product models that can only exist given an ethical perspective. Perhaps reviving the mostly dead pay once use forever model of software would work well.

That model requires abandoning DRM which the unethical companies will never do.

Customers for other trades similarly "don't know what they want", unless it's "fix this for me".

The main difference in the software world is that you can potentially build things "once" (or rather, keep building it forever) for a huge global market, which means that it's hard to know when something is good enough. With roofing or coffee, you do good enough work (differs between companies, sure) and move on to the next customer.

But you don't think about adding continuously running rainfall test for the roofs you do to ensure no regressions (leaks) appear.

> YC not even responding

The only way that would happen is a bug. YC always responds to applicants. Rejections usually aren't personalized because that can't scale - but not hearing back at all should never happen.

If you want me to look into what might have happened there, I'd be willing to try if you email hn@ycombinator.com.

Correction, I got a response, but no specific feedback.

I double checked my emails.

Anyway, I'm realistic in knowing my ideas aren't going to garner investment.

I would love if you had a YC Junior for just getting help on ideas vs capital.

No investor is going to give you specific feedback.

Your best bet is to go to onto Reddit, Discord etc, find the startup communities and ask for advice there. There are a lot of people who want to support other founders. Or even better go on Linkedin, find some prospective customers and ask them for advice. I've had about 10% of people reply back some with page long answers.

If you are willing to spend money there are plenty of services like Kintell, Intro.co which will allow you to book an hour with investors or successful founders. But there are plenty of free options that I would start with first.

> No investor is going to give you specific feedback.

That depends on what you mean by "specific."

Several Sand Hill Angels members, who are investors, provide feedback almost every month. (It's in the context of a pitch, but...)

See https://www.sandhillangels.com/raw

("pitch practice" is somewhat misleading.)

[edited to add some detail]

The typical angel-group pitch has three parts, the pitch, the Q&A, and then the "with the entrepreneur out of the room" discussion.

This event lets participants listen to that discussion, as well as those three parts for the other folks pitching the same night.

Then there's an "ask investors anything" session at the end.

Reconsider writing ideas off so quickly! Just completing the application is a great way to test your thinking on each. The process could be enough for you to transform one of them into something that excites you.

In addition to the application, it's worth exploring https://www.startupschool.org/ if you're looking for a "YC Junior"

I think there are things that need doing that can't be done profitably, so giving up on being rich had a really nice focusing effect on my dreams.

I'm seeing a few "founding engineer" roles that pay pretty well and offer up to 1% equity for highly experienced candidates. Honestly some pretty unique opportunities.

But yeah, I'm not building out and MVP without pay for 1%.

1% at seed stage also become 0.1% after a few rounds of funding, plus you are way down the preference stack and have no liquidity power.

Startup equity is pretty much objectively a terrible deal except for founders. Be a founder or get paid market comp in cash.

A factor 10 dilution is huge and I'd like to see the math on that.

There are different roles founders hire for under the "founding engineer" umbrella.

There is your fresh out of bootcamp "founding engineer" brought on during pre-seed or seed stages to help bash out POCs and mocks used to sell the vision.

Then there is the "founding engineer" they bring in post money and customer commitments to actually deliver the MVP and help build out a professional engineering program.

I'm in the later category and those roles can pay very well for early stage startups.

If you actually get 1% at seed stage and the company goes through a "few rounds" of funding (and subsequently exits), you're doing great. You've basically won a small lottery and have an excellent chance of being a millionaire.

The problem with startup equity is that this is a very rare scenario, and most of the other scenarios aren't so good. If the company doesn't exit, your equity is worthless. If they exit at a value below your strike price, and you exercised your options, you could end up in debt. Lots of ways for this to end badly.

That’s my point. Even in massive outlier upside cases getting a 1% equity deal at seed is not really worth more than just being a standard FAANG worker. And that requires many rounds of funding an and dilution and an exit. It’s worth remembering exits are very hard right now and founders have far more liquidity options. There have been multiple unicorns I’m aware of in the past 5 years with founders taking 8 figures in secondary and employees getting nothing. Now those unicorns have worthless equity for employees and the founders are on the beach.

It can certainly be worth more; I know engineers personally who became wildly wealthy, tens of millions of dollars from their equity—— but you’re right that most of the good outcomes are comparable to working in big tech over the last few years. (Worth noting that big tech itself has had some remarkable stock gains, which plays into this as well.)

>There have been multiple unicorns I’m aware of in the past 5 years with founders taking 8 figures in secondary and employees getting nothing.

I assume you are referring to employees who have an equity stake in the company. Can you explain how the scenario you describe happens?

> My wife and I have a profitable business here in SF that would be perfect as a startup

Keep doing what you're doing.

Being VC funded shouldn't be the holy grail - the holy grail is having a business you enjoy doing, that's making you the life you want.

For some the life you want is pitching, raising, getting the kudos of the big numbers, onto the next raise etc.

For some the life you want is the complete opposite and bootstrapping it.

For some it's just all about the technical aspect, coding the next crazy thing.

There's no wrong or right answer in how you get to the 'happy place'.

You know in your heart of hearts what drives you, and what you'll be happy doing.

Me : I'd been with the money men for a period of years and it's super stressful, board reporting, projections, market analysis etc.

Now I've got my little B2B SaaS startup that's blended a life long passion with my software chops, and our clients love us, we get to work with the absolutely best people in our industry, we're making a difference in their lives, and they in turn pay us money.

It's hard, rewarding, graft. At the end of the week when the money lands in stripe (for me..) there's nothing artificial, there's no projections, there's no-one to pay back, it's a 100% value exchange of 'heres my(our) hardwork, here's a product and you're giving me money for it'.

Sure - could I potentially have gone the VC route (maybe!). Would it be different, hell yes. Would I (probably) earn more ultimately 5 years down the line (sure?). That 5 years would be very, very different...

I really appreciate this comment. Service offered / payment received is irreplaceably wholesome and satisfying :) especially when they come back as repeat customers or become regular clients. Repeat business and gradual growth gives us both an exciting feeling about the future that I never quite felt at a startup. I've found too often a venture-backed startup is really a lifestyle business in disguise for the founders, not really about serving customers, so it's hard to truly get excited about them anymore. Where running a business that solves a problem for paying customers feels more like changing the world:

> we're making a difference in their lives, and they in turn pay us money

We've felt this too in our community, it's the real meaning of "Make something people want" (and why we haven't had a day off in like 62 days or something lol). It's strange to refer to our business as a "startup", but it is one, moreso than most VC-funded ones and I bet we have more customers, higher revenues, and a better growth outlook than the average local seed-funded startup. For us, a loan or VC route would just let us expand nationally right now to other major cities, instead of focusing first on the Bay Area and expanding nationally over the next several years which feels inevitable.

The amount a VC might pressure us to go in the wrong direction is another worry, and because it's just capital we'd need (not advice), they might just get in the way and throw off timing or team structure.

Thanks for your comment! I needed the reminder of how rewarding it is compared to conventional employment as today has been exceptionally hectic!

You're welcome ! Best wishes for your business :)

You too!

I fully agree with you. I witnessed numerous small & stable companies that decided to go with the "startup" route and pick VC money because "that was the way". As soon as the first funding tranche arrived, once stable business suddenly became a hectic mess of hires and crazy projects, and, ultimately, they ended up with MBA managers installed by the VC board to salvage things as much as possible. Won't mention founders that usually go from very happy, loving persons to coke/alcohol/xanax junkies.

This was not my experience. I have no degree, I'm not American, and I applied back in October 2021 about 3 hours before the dead line and filmed my application video from a coffee shop. I didn't have a good network. I didn't have a product yet. I was accepted first time.

As you say, a lot of YC founders don't have a real business yet, but they're not there because they're well connected. They're there because YC thinks they fit the profile of someone who really wants to build a big business and might pull it off. They're wrong most of the time but it's a numbers game.

>> They're wrong most of the time but it's a numbers game.

I'm not sure you meant to communicate this VERY important point, this is a huge reason NOT to do YC.

You're right that I didn't mean to communicate that, but it's a good point. I agree with you entirely that this is the big downside of YC and frankly all VC backed entrepreneurship. It is not the path of highest expected return for a founder. If you want a high expected return then a FAANG job or a bootstrapped SaaS product you can build yourself are good options. Some days that's what I wish I was doing to be honest.

I think a lot of VC backed founders aren't just in it because they want to get rich though. Sure, we all want that, but we're also all predisposed to irrationally believe that we're the exception. That trait (for better or worse) comes with implications, and many founders I speak to are simply compelled to try because it's hard, and it's theirs, and they're impatient.

I also very much agree with the sibling though. Getting rejected does not carry that much signal, because YC are wrong more than they're right. So just keep trying.

This is not a reason not to do Yc, but to not take the if rejection seriously

or still do it, but know that YC's incentives and yours are pointing in different directions. Sometimes taking their advice is good for both of you, sometimes it is only good for them.

When the startup I co-founders applied to Techstars, we had to fill in the lean canvas diagram and it makes you think and write down a whole bunch of stuff that we were lacking. channels in, user-acquisition strategies etc.

That process was super worth it. Ultimately we got rejected, but going forward I'll use that (well I try) to do that when joining/founding any startups.

Worst case scenario is they say no, best case scenario... :-)

I hope you applied to YC as well!

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms to be made of YC and of VCs in general (please do not take this as me going "there is nothing wrong in the VC world at all", because I absolutely do not believe that!), but I don't think excessive academic elitism is one of them. If anything, I think they're quite a bit better about avoiding that elitism than the average you'll find among organizations of comparable wealth and power (compare top law firms, leadership of more traditional companies, politicians, etc). This isn't my strongest opinion - I've never done any proper formal study of the question - but your impressions contradict my own experience living in that world.

I used to be part of the leadership team for a YC company. Here's where the four YC founders I know off the top of my head went to school: SUNY, Oxford, Epitech, Tufts. Only Oxford among those is truly elite, though the other three are good schools. The one who went to Oxford (Harj Taggar) is a bit of an odd one out here, since they were a partner with YC itself first before founding the company that I know them from. Granted, three of these were founders many years ago, so perhaps this has changed, but one (the Tufts alum) got funding only about a year ago.

I looked up a few other founders that are second- or third-degree connections and found the same: a handful of truly elite schools, a peak in A-tier-but-not-truly-elite schools, and a handful of no-name schools like my own alma mater. I expect that that's a reasonably representative distribution of where you find extremely smart people, and especially smart+motivated ones.

As for this bit:

>> And often those who did get in went to Stanford, Harvard, etc. and don't even have a product - sometimes they don't even know what they're going to build yet.

YC is pretty explicit that they try to pick founders, not ideas, most of the time. That approach is all over the Startup School videos, for example; they don't exactly make a secret of it.

>> but the numbers I've read online that most VCs want to see are not realistic - or if we were hitting those numbers I wouldn't even need a VC, we would be able to fund our own expansion.

Growth demands, both realistic and unrealistic, are a much fairer criticism IMO. They're the primary reason I haven't sought VC funding personally (from YC or otherwise).

Out of curiosity, I'd love to know more about what you're doing - I checked your HN profile but it didn't have a link or anything.

>>> "YC is pretty explicit that they try to pick founders, not ideas, most of the time. That approach is all over the Startup School videos, for example; they don't exactly make a secret of it."

If Y Combinator truly prioritizes founders over ideas, as indicated in their Startup School videos, repeated rejections might suggest a fundamental mismatch. If you haven't been accepted after one or two tries, it may be a signal that you're not the type of founder they're looking to fund. People do not change that much usually.

> People do not change that much usually.

I don't know what YC thinks about this, but I disagree with this pretty strongly. None of the skills or advantages I think I have as a founder were things I had five years ago. I would never in a million years have been able to do even the things I've done in the last 24 hours if I had tried to when I first arrived in the Bay Area for my first "real" job.

People's fundamental values and motivations usually don't change that much, but their philosophy, resilience, and pool of cached ideas absolutely can. That's especially true for people who, like me, came in from outside. It takes time to get your bearings and learn how business is done, what things matter and what things don't, what a normal level of "on fire" is, and even a person with a low of raw intellectual ability/domain talent still needs time to train their internal models.

It's exactly the other way around.

You'd be right if YC were perfect at assessing founders every time, but of course they're not. Applying repeatedly gives you a chance to prove that they got you wrong the first time (and the second, and the third, and so on, if need be). Not only does this work, it's the majority case (I just double checked this). Most founders that YC funds are repeat applicants.

Applying repeatedly demonstrates persistence, which is one of the qualities YC looks for. Better still, if you can show continued progress since your previous application, that demonstrates resourcefulness, another core quality. Repeated applications can move the needle on what sort of founder YC thinks you are. Especially if you were a borderline call the last time—keeping going, and applying again, is a way to get on the other side of the line.

YC frequently heralds persistence as the most reliable indicator of future success. However, a closer look at their selection practices reveals a profound contradiction. Despite their public endorsement of this trait, YC often rejects applicants who demonstrate true persistence by reapplying after initial failures. In contrast, they appear to favor individuals with prestigious academic or corporate backgrounds—those who might be perceived as career opportunists lacking deep commitment to their ventures—over genuinely dedicated founders.

This pattern not only questions the sincerity of YC's stated values but also suggests a broader inconsistency. If such a discrepancy exists in their evaluation of persistence, one can reasonably doubt the authenticity of other virtues YC promotes. This insight casts a shadow over the overall integrity of their selection criteria, hinting that what YC publicizes may not always align with their actual priorities.

Persistence is not "the most reliable indicator". It's possible to be persistent at something that isn't working and isn't going to work (I know; I've done it). That's not useful, so persistence is far from sufficient. It is necessary though.

If there's a most-reliable-indicator at all, it would be something like what pg called 'relentless resourcefulness'. The includes persistence and a lot of other things as well.

This inclination to "raise funds" is so foreign to me. VCs may tell you all the magic they can do for you, but at the end of the day you're trading ownership in your company for money (that you can't get elsewhere).

You are running a profitable business, why play that game?

To go faster. You trade part of your company (and your freedom) for time. Maybe as a profitable startup in one part of the US, for example, you could use reinvested earnings to spread into the rest of the US in 5 years, then Europe in another 5 years. Perhaps with VC funding you could do the same in 3 years rather than 10.

Not my first choice, but neither is it irrational.

My partner wants nothing to do with a VC or even a loan - basically because what you're saying here.

The other side to it, as rfrey said, is it would enable a hyper growth mode and let us make moves earlier.

But stable growth mode is working fine, and overall there's not a huge reason to take out a loan or raise money, it doesn't feel like we're racing against a clock on some trend or any other reason to rush things.

It's important to be aligned with your partners before you start because people rarely change what they want.

Many people are happy running a small business without much pressure.

Also understand the VC industry is inherent with learning from the ideas submitted to them as part of curating deal flow; and it's common for them to justify it with a mantra that ideas are supposedly not worth anything, and it's all about execution.

When and who to share ideas with - and any market traction you may have as proof points there's an opportunity - is possibly the most important part of executing, and where you may be shooting yourself in the foot if sharing that with people in the business of funding ideas.

> VC industry

Well said, and you reminded me to be more careful about what I share haha

>> ideas are supposedly not worth anything

If ideas are worth nothing then a great team executing well should be able to create a billion dollar company selling dog droppings.

Anyone who says ideas are worth nothing is flat out wrong.

I think the claim is rather that idea is not the high-order bit in an early-stage startup funding decision; founders are.

There's no success without eventually finding a good idea, especially since 'successful in the end' is practically the definition of 'good idea', or close enough to be inseparable.

So it's not so much "ideas don't matter" as "starting ideas don't matter", as long as you're the type of founder who can excecute on an idea, change it as needed, and drop it when necessary.

A great idea is incredibly valuable. In fact the idea is the key to great success.

However, it is true that without great execution, timing and luck, a great idea will go nowhere.

Trouble is there are many people who have heard "ideas are worth nothing" and failed to understand that the full sentence is "ideas are worth nothing without execution" - that is certainly true, but it is a totally different statement to "ideas are worth nothing".

Good ideas are arguably emergent from "time spent on problem" - where time spent on problem is also considered a key metric.

If people do want to play the VC industrial complex game - then at least understand the pros and cons of it; otherwise it's good to understand it so you know how to better position yourself.

I mean, there are shit (literal?) businesses our there with stellar marketing and therefore stellar revenues. It's famous that a charming person can sell you almost anything, even your own things.

> Seems like there's basically a 0% chance a random person would get into YC

This is simply not true.

There are countless examples of people from outside the US or who went to non-Ivy league schools. Does it move the needle ? Probably. But it's easy to counteract it by having better answers to the other questions e.g. traction, team.

It’s not false, either. What were the stats on the last round? IIRC 20k applications and how many got there? It’s not zero, but it’s a small chance.

Congrats! These are great stories to hear.

Our team has build a business without venture capital in a space where it’s commonly sought after.

Instead we did find a strategic partner in the industry who invested earlier on but then later we established a venture banking relationship and credit facility.

I had almost no idea the options that existed so wanted to post some ideas here for anyone reading.

Venture Capital is one source of funding. So is Growth Equity or even private equity —- but different from “venture”. It sounds like you’re past the “venture” stage anyway.

We’re paying about ~9% interest on a multi-million credit facility now from a bank (several other banks will do this type of lending - not just SVB I also learned along the way recently). There is also minimal warrant coverage provided of 1-1.5% equity which we are happy with.

Some names of banks who are lending - just a few names but wanted to share some ideas as alternatives to venture capital, especially if you have revenue:

* Texas Capital Bank * Cambridge Trust * East West Bank * Bridge Bank

Thanks, and very cool, thanks for breaking it down! I appreciate you sharing numbers.

A bank seems like a much better option if you just need the capital but you don't want to give up too much (or any) equity. That's likely the route we'd go if we ever wanted to tap into funding.

Both private equity and venture funding seem more like you have to give up the company and go work for the investor. Investors bring some value sure, network and what-not, but I wonder how valuable their "advice" and network really is.

This... what you just said. I am creating a business with my kids, so it is both educational for them, develop creator habits and that we create future together.

I don't think we would be taken seriously by YC even though this would be perfect educational setting for them. BTW, kids are 17 and 15 and 11, not sure if I would fully include all of them.

All I can tell you is it's not true and that's why I posted this!

(and if it's true that everything you hear about YC is telling you otherwise, then YC has a serious messaging problem)

> YC has a serious messaging problem

It does. I've met some founders who went with Tribe8 (edit: Team8) or Sequoia Surge due to YC messaging issues and the (imo incorrect) perception that it's B2C or SMB B2B SaaS oriented.

The Open-Core RFS will probably help though, but maybe highlighting additional successes beyond B2C or Coinbase types would help.

"then YC has a serious messaging problem"

People have been signaling this for quite some time.

Throughout this thread you attempt to dispel this perception, but I can't help but wonder why this isn't being addressed on a higher level at YC. Whether misperception or not, this view is certainly not contained to just HN, and is even shared by those who have no idea that this forum exists.

One of the reasons I like this site is that it feels slightly academic in a way that a competing site like Reddit does not.

And being a somewhat exclusive post-academic institution is not a bad image or message IMO. Maybe there are more pros than cons in terms of curation (of content, of founders).

Really didn't see it as a "everyone should apply!" kinda place, thought the messaging was intentionally "here's the latest out of Stanford" which I'm fine with.

You're right about HN - pg always used to say he wanted it to look 'bookish'. But not for academic reasons. He's just a bibliophile and a massive reader.

When it comes to YC, however, I'm way closer to the "everyone should apply" end of the spectrum. Or rather: everyone who thinks they might like to start a high-growth startup.

One of YC's biggest impacts has been in growing the number of startups that get created in the first place. It's not so much about picking founders out of a limited pool, it's about the much larger set of potential founders who can maybe get bumped out of the "I could never do that track" into the adjacent "maybe give it a try track"...which can lead to life-changing places.

pg's essays have been one of the biggest such bumping devices. I would like HN to be that too. (While remaining interesting in all the other ways it can be.)

Bookish, yeah, the look has aged well.

My intuition was that there are more overly-confident types who think they want to be a founder rather than those not confident enough to do it, but after reading some comments here maybe my intuition was off. Then there's people like me who became a founder out of survival lol I'm a founder whether or not I want to be, need a cohort for that! xD

Thanks for sharing the motivating insights!

I see YC as doing what every successful mature business does, which is come to rely on its experience and market position (it’s hard to disrupt yourself), which for better or worse creates habits, which in YC’s case means very coarse investment heuristics. As an outsider they seem very obvious. I’ll omit how that relates to my own experiences and biases (I’ve only ever made one half-baked on-the-deadline application so I don’t think they are relevant). Just my 2c as a long-time follower.

I think it would be awesome to see YC break at least some of itself off into some more elite and disruptive units (where elite refers to the quality of the intake and YC expertise, not the founder education history).

Congratulations on having a successful business. There's nothing wrong with a business that grows slowly, pays you a salary, and remains profitable.

I've walked a similar path and, while I'll never be a multi-millionaire, I'm very comfortable and have more than I need. Small, stable, businesses that offer good secure jobs are the backbone of the economy.

All that said, there are investors out there who are interested in folk like you and me. A track record of success, coupled with potential, and immediate returns is attractive.

VC investors are ultimately investing in people, not businesses. The idea matters to some extent, but its more of a pitch in the person or team. This is partly why college is so predominately material. In the folk "starting out" there's little else to look at.

(Always have your first date on a famous college campus, then you can forever drop "we met at harvard" into the conversation.)

To be honest, VC investing isn't for me at this stage in my life, and it may or may not be a good fit for you. For many it's a great fit though, and in some ways their "first good job".

So I think the advice in thr post is fine - if you -want- to go this route then go for it. The worst they can say is "no".

Very good points, especially about timing / stage of life.

> track record of success

This is another factor - I didn't work at Facebook or Google and am not a member of the Bank of Mom & Dad, so if I got into investing I'd want to have enough extra time and money built up that I could participate in (or lead) the round and get a number of others involved, rather than being a candidate/applicant asking for funds and help - I'd want to be active in it.

Great points, thanks for sharing!

> (Always have your first date on a famous college campus, then you can forever drop "we met at harvard" into the conversation.)

That was hilarious. Do people really do that?

Probably not, but it sounds like an excellent strategy :)

>how it becomes the next $100M household name

Unfortunately this is too low for a VC/YC. The min valuation they are looking for is around $1B

I meant $100M in annual revenues :) Your point is taken though, I think a lot of VCs would scoff at our present-day numbers despite our growth and outlook. It's very much still a small business, yet by far the most impressive thing either of us have ever done and the hardest we've ever worked. Been at it since July of last year pretty much non-stop.

$100M from only July last year is far far impressive. We have been on this for 3 years and barely reaching $1M revenue (Although I wasted two years of my life applying for YC/VC/Pitching)

That's not so. At the last YC talk I attended, founders of $100M startups were cited as successes (anything else would be pretty weird, no?) That's incredibly successful, even though startup investing is a power-law game.

That’s totally true, though there’s a difference between “founders of $100M startups” that already have that valuation, and working on a company in a market where $100M is the max you could expect.

If you aim for $10B and hit $100M that’s great, you aimed for the Sun and landed on the Moon! But if the max you can hit is $100M, then everything needs to go right to reach the Moon, and the Sun is fully out of reach — and it will be much harder to raise money.

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Here is the YC rejection letter for my startup

> "... we felt this was unlikely to be a unicorn, even though it might have a solid chance of reaching 10-100M in valuation."

If that's an accurate quote then I owe you an apology and I'm sorry!

That's a verbatim quote copied from the rejection email.

You don't owe an apology because you are not the one rejecting it. However keep in mind that what your beliefs are, they are not the same held by colleagues/friends/families.

Sounds like cope. The downside of applying is like.. close to zero? It's obviously +EV

That’s essentially how the whole world operates. Y Combinator isn’t an exception. Do you think a wealthy investor would prefer to fund an unknown individual, or someone whose father is a well-established law professor at Stanford?

However, I do believe that YC tends to be somewhat more egalitarian and merit-based compared to others, although it’s not by a significant margin.

> That’s essentially how the whole world operates

What if regarding slavery or horses as transportation people were like "that's essentially how the world operates", not that investing has anything to do with those, but that this excuse doesn't add a ton of insight if you think about it.

There are a lot of ways the world has operated that are not fair or optimal. It would be a logical fallacy - an appeal to tradition - to use that as an argument against the way things could be, or according to OP the way things should be (are intended to be).

Investing is a regulated activity that affects the economy and individuals, so I think it's at least worth exploring things like nepotism and exclusivity when it comes to the flow of capital. And it's obviously important to notice when the same relatively tiny group of people keep receiving the majority of "acceptance" (investment) while the vast majority outside that circle are totally ignored and/or marginalized.

I completely agree that there’s a need for change in terms of inclusivity within tech entrepreneurship. However, I’m not convinced that YC is necessarily the starting point for this shift.

You mean like Sam Bankman Fried whose both parents are in academia?

Sounds like you are making a lot of progress. What’s the business?

What happened? Not enough people applied?

Here's the last batch.[1] Gives a sense of what's being funded.

Ideas:

- MoneyNow - leverages the new FedNow instant payment system. FedNow is run by the Fed and transfers money in seconds with a charge of just US$0.045 per transaction. And they mean seconds. If the money isn't there in 10 seconds, the transaction times out. Few banks support it yet, but some do. It needs consumer-facing support. The Fed just does the back end. There's a big security problem with consumer side payments - these are irrevocable no-holds transfers, like cash. Figure out how to handle that. Competes with Venmo and PayPal; could make them obsolete. Venmo isn't really instant; try to withdraw the money you just "received".

- Reading Teacher - teach illiterate kids to read with a phone app using AI. Text to speech and speech to text all work now. A true automatic reading teacher should be possible. Gamify it so kids use it. Sell to parents, not schools.

- Rust Game Engine - the Rust language ecosystem has some game engines and libraries that almost work, but the open source maintainers got bored and didn't finish the job. Modest amounts of cash would push that over the top. Monetize by selling back-end services for such games.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?batch=W24

No idea how many people applied but I'm sure there's no lack - I just felt bad for forgetting to put the usual footer at the bottom a month ago. And I worry about the comments I see on HN interpreting YC as just for credentialed-elite applicants. It's deeply not true and I have a personal feeling about the question - being one of the uncredentialed-unelite-self-doubting types who could have been dissuaded from applying if I had been reading comments like that instead of pg's essays at the time.

This is just an empirical question, right? What are the proportions of credentialed elites among all applicants and successful applicants? If this number is surprising, it would mean a lot more to people than any amount of insistence.

People invent all kinds of reasons to support the path they choose. People with confidence/optimism select data that reinforces their “go for it” decisions. People who want to find elitism as a reason to not do something will be able to that as well. Elitism surely exists in the world, but letting that stop you seems like cutting off your own nose to spite your face.

"And I worry about the comments I see on HN interpreting YC as just for credentialed-elite applicants".

Eh, I feel like it's partly true but not by design. The people who are smart enough or connected/rich enough to get into ivy league schools are more likely to be able to dedicate resources to an idea or creating a better sales pitch. I would guess that post-grads and ivy league grads are over-represented compared to the population in general or the population of college grads.

Of course a good idea can come from anywhere, but I'd imagine the data supports the idea that the odds are better for some groups vs others.

FWIW you did make me consider it. As others have said, the mere process of writing out an idea means thinking about the idea in a new way, and can lead to new insights.

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Forgetting something like the footer thing happens. Forgive yourself for it. Maybe set a calendar event now for one month out from the next batch. It's how my ADHD brain remembers things.

As for the 'uncredentialed' thing, there are a ton of forces at play and I'm sure there will be more credentialed folks applying due to financial and access reasons. I'm an uncredentialed person (state SUNY school) who got flown out for an interview for YC Winter 2020. I didn't get selected due to my proposal itself and shortcomings within it, not due to a lack of any credentials. I enjoyed the experience and learned a bit about it. I may apply again at some point for another venture I'm working on.

Last batch had 27,000 applications [1]. I think it's just a moment where VCs have a lot of money to spend after 1-2years of recession, and a whole new market has open with AI (or to say it better, every markets are now open to AI disruption)

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-yc-winter-2024-bat...

Unfortunately the rust game engine idea (as much as it kills me to say this) is a perfect example of not YC material. Every VC, whether early stage or late stage, must fund companies that have a chance of growing by 5% every week. It’s remarkably hard to start anything that can maintain that growth. https://paulgraham.com/growth.html is worth internalizing.

But there’s a second caveat here: YC invests in people, not in ideas. From pg himself: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-reddits

> Their idea was bad though. And since we thought then that we were funding ideas rather than founders, we rejected them. But we felt bad about it. Jessica was sad that we'd rejected the muffins. And it seemed wrong to me to turn down the people we'd been inspired to start YC to fund.

So it might be worth applying with a particularly bad idea. Or at least it used to be; I have no idea whether YC ever encourages strong founders with a bad idea to re-apply with a better one, or if you get any feedback from the partners that they almost accepted you but rejected because of the idea. (One of my neat memories as a 19yo is getting a thoughtful email from pg saying we almost made it to the interview with an idea that was essentially “blackboard sucks; make better school software," but the biggest factors against us were my age and the fact that selling to schools was about as hard as selling to governments back in 2008.)

I know that. I just threw that in because I've been doing game work in Rust and the graphics stack suffers from too few devs.

Better school software is worth another go-round, now that we have large language models.

Somebody already emailed me offering to fund the MoneyNow idea. That's a bad idea for another reason. The big problem with money transfer is fraud. PayPal is mostly a fraud-management service. Money transfer and user interface are the easy part.

I’d be very curious to see what you’d choose to work on if you were forced to pick something with the highest probability of growing at 5% per week minimum.

I suspect you have a few ideas, but it becomes a different sort of question when you imagine yourself committing to one for the next 10 years. Which idea could you see yourself throwing all of your effort into growing each week till you’re today+10 years old?

> the highest probability of growing at 5% per week minimum

I don't think this is a helpful frame, because you can't know this in advance, and I'd hate for anybody to read something like this, feel "I have no idea what could grow 5% per week minimum", and close the page on getting started. No one knows this in advance.

What YC teaches is to start by making something a few people actually want, no matter how small it is or seems, and then iterate. It's much more important, for example, to work on something you're personally interested in than something you've persuaded yourself has a chance at growing "5% per week minimum".

That’s a good point. Thank you.

Happy one-decade anniversary, by the way. I just noticed https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over... was almost exactly 10 years ago.

The trouble with your frame is that you can’t know what people actually want until you try to get them to use what you’ve built. There’s a sort of chicken and egg problem here: you have to think of an idea first, before you build anything. "Choose what people actually want" begs the question.

It’s probably true that it’s better to work on something that you personally believe in (in the https://paulgraham.com/earnest.html sense), because you’re more likely to find ways to grow it. It’s hard to be earnest about an idea that only interests you because it might grow at 5% per week. But pg chose Viaweb, and he couldn’t have known ahead of time that anybody would actually want it, since it was the first webapp. Nobody even understood how to try it out, since this was the era of desktop software. All he had was a hunch that lots of people would soon want websites for their businesses.

So which frame would you choose, if you had to decide today? Suppose you and Scott were trapped in a room, and the door unlocks only after you pick something to build together. How would you decide, other than "X seems most likely to be something that people will actually want"? (Which is similar to "has a chance of growing at 5% per week," just phrased a little differently. pg originally thought museums would want websites; if he’d asked himself whether it might morph into an idea that could grow at 5% per week, he probably would’ve realized museums didn’t actually want that.)

I think your premise is flawed: > The trouble with your frame is that you can’t know what people actually want until you try to get them to use what you’ve built.

I would argue that if you’re building something in a vacuum, you’re wasting your time. You should find your customers first. Find their pain points in their industry. See how those could be fixed.

I would work on what I was most passionate about. Which btw is also the advice that pg and Jessica (specifically Jessica in this case) gave at their last YC talk, and you can't get more YC than that.

Did they?

It’s surprising because your description can’t possibly be a recipe for generating startup ideas. pg was most passionate about lisp. There must be more to it than what you said.

I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand, but this seems like bad advice for someone explicitly trying to become wealthy. It’s great advice for YC to be giving, because it would maximize YC’s returns over decades: if everyone works on what they’re most passionate about, YC would get a flood of applications from exactly the type of people most likely to be effective founders. But for every passionate founder that chooses to build Stripe, there are dozens who would choose to work on programming languages, or game engines. “Passion project" is practically synonymous with an artist not intending to make money.

Even if today you were most passionate about spreadsheets, would you really choose to build skysheet again?

It’s impossible to imagine pg writing "If I wanted to start a startup, I would work on what I was most passionate about, since it’s the most likely way I’d succeed." The sentence seems mistaken, so pg must have said something more precise.

I was probably too concise. What I mean is that if I had to choose between two different ideas for what people want, I would pick the one I was more interested in, even if it seemed smaller at first, over one that had a better cover story but which I was bored by. And yes this is what Jessica said, advising a particular founder who had grown weary of what he was working on.

I think the basic philosophy is that your starting point is not so important—you can get anywhere from anywhere, as long as you are (in pg's phrase) relentlessly resourceful. Given that starting point isn't so important, you're better off starting with something you have a lot of energy for. You're going to need it.

Of course I would work on Skysheet again! When did spreadsheets stop being the most important thing in programming?

No advice has a 100% success rate. The existence of failure cases doesn't inherently make the advice bad. The advice to pursue your passion as a startup idea is still relatively good advice. It's the best way to avoid the most trite and cliché ideas. I don't know what someone passionate about spreadsheets would create, but it would be more unexpected than building a generic AI writing app. Whether it succeeds or fails.

Unrelated, but they _charge_ you for transferring money???

Is the US ever gonna have true free instant transfers? Without none of this venmo paypal shenanigans?

Why wouldn't they charge you? The fee is completely insignificant, and they are providing a valuable service that costs money to maintain.

Most (all?) countries do this. Consumer banking services will offer free transfers as a loss leader.

I think SEPA Instant in the EU is probably free, seeing as EU will require banks to provide SEPA Instant for free to their users (or at the same cost as normal transfers)

This isn't true:

> Contrary to what many believe, SEPA transfers are not entirely free. Sure, most banks do not charge for SEPA transfers, but some banks still do. When there are charges, you pay the same price for a SEPA transfer as you would for a domestic wire transfer. Regulation 924/2009 mandates banks to apply the same charges to cross-border euro transactions as they do for domestic transfers. Banks are prohibited from levying different charges based on the recipient bank's location. Therefore, if your bank in France charges you nothing for making transactions within France, then you will also pay nothing for euro transfers to Portugal, for example.

https://www.quanloop.com/en/investing/are-sepa-payments-real...

I was unable to find out what the cost to banks was, but it's possible there is one and it's covered by the monthly fees that European banks charge, which are relatively rare in the US.

Right now you do have to pay for it at many banks. Some include it in the monthly cost if they have one. Some just cover it with their marketing costs...

That's a whole lot of "AI"...

How are you in the least surprised?

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My co-founder and I have applied twice and been rejected twice, and we don't regret it.

There is no real downside to applying. In fact, as others have said, applying helps you to refine how you pitch your startup.

The only negative is that there's a 99% chance that you will be rejected, and rejections can hurt. But being able to deal with rejection is important in itself.

Rejection sucks, it's true. But one thing a lot of people don't know is that the chance of being accepted to YC goes up with repeated applications. I even think most founders who YC funds get rejected before they get accepted. (I may be wrong about most* but certainly it's a large chunk.)

The main thing is to demonstrate progress since your last application.

* Edit: I asked the team and got back: "most is true! for w24 companies, 58% had applied previously"

I could've sworn there was a cap, like apply and be rejected three times and that's it or something, but I can't find that now - is that not the case? Just could be quite significant to people considering 'just apply' advice quite last minute over this weekend is all :)

That's definitely not the case.

Well then I think I might have plans this weekend. Thanks!

My informant says "for w2024 most companies applied 0-3 times previously, but it went as high as 12!"

(Edit: disappointingly to me at least, 12 turned out to be a bug. The highest number of applications for W24 was 6. Still pretty high!)

Good luck with your application if you go ahead with it!

I might beat that for this batch! This will be my 8th application. 2 for my previous company, and 6 with my current startup and co founders.

Might as well have a webpage about "myths about applying" at this point with how much confusion and misinformation there seems to be.

As a long time HN reader, eventually participating in YCW21, the main thing i would like to highlight is there's so many misconceptions about YC on HN.

It would take too long to refute them all, but just remember the HN readerships' view of YC is pretty distorted. ("it's all about VC money" , "it's just for ivy league grads" etc).

I could go on, but just read Paul Graham's essays - that's probably the best way to understand how YC thinks.

After all the horror stories I have read on here about YC and VC in general, I'm genuinely surprised that many people are still keen to go down that path.

It's me. I'm posting the horror stories to increase my chances of getting in.

Another question (as a seperate comment incase dang is replying to the other one):

This is the equity deal: https://www.ycombinator.com/deal

What if I don’t want to raise any more than the 7% (which in itself is $125k I don’t really need but happy to give 7% for the higher P(success))

What if I want to bootstrap from that point or at least keep options open?

My understanding is: it's fine. You're not required to do follow-on financing. Perceived preferred access to the market for syndicated convertible rounds is a big reason people do YC, though, so I think most people do end up raising.

This is my biggest worry. I'd like to get some help building my stupid golf wiki (which I actually think is an extremely profitable long-term venture), but I'm desperately trying to build something that is good for golf, which is a space notoriously saturated with bad actors. I'm honestly even considering going in a not-for-profit direction eventually, so the idea of applying for a bit of VC money honestly hard to square, but the connections would be what's valuable.

Keep in mind that if you never raise again, YC still owns 7% so they have no reason to complain. If you're successful, 500k for 7% will have been a good deal.

tptacek answered your question, but here's a rule for answering similar questions in the future: YC supports what founders choose. That's partly because it's the DNA of the organization (whose origins go back to a time when founders were much lower on the startup totem pole than they are today) and partly because it's a losing bet to do anything else (which is related).

I'll play devil's advocate. I have applied to YC for at least 8 times in my 20s? They rejected me everytime. Not even an interview.

I now run a $XM SaaS (scale-up, not startup) growing at Y00%/annum. 100% bootstrapped with a healthy profit margin. Thanks YC.

The only thing I'd say that YC is good for is their network of existing startups. Then again, startups aren't the best customers IMO given that they die too much.

Advice is free on the internet as marketing material these days. And there are better VCs.

You only have to look at some of the businesses that launched the last couple of batches. The AI products in particular were of very questionable quality.

Congrats on the bootstrapped business! Could you please share some of the marketing for founder resources you mentioned? I'd like to avoid taking investments too.

A simple google will do. Also, most of the advice don't really sink in until you're in the position.

Instead of "Just apply to YC", I'd recommend to just start a company.

Do you mind listening some of these "better VCs"?

I wanted to sell samosa on the internet. Would YC be a good place to seek funding for such a business?

Samosa because they are versatile across many dimensions: ingredients, taste, shelf-life, and can be easily made in a combinatorics space of these dimensions. They are kind of like how Bubba describes shrimp to Gump.

I once wondered if YC is a good platform for such a business?

YC is a good platform for founders who want to build a high-growth startup (which is basically the original pg/YC definition of what a startup is). So your question reduces to whether selling samosas on the internet can be a high-growth business or not, and whether you would want to optimize for that.

We have specialized samosa delivery drones and utilize existing shipping and storage infrastructure. Our samosas are "just add water!" variety and are appropriate for a variety of events and occasions! Weddings, parties, wedding parties, parties with incidental weddings, pizza and beer and samosas, Netflix and chill, and so much more!

...

I started with a pitch and it became a late night commercial.

holy moly, if you setup a kickstarter for this, a bajillion desis would support it. curious though, are they going to be frozen samosas?

They could be three types on that dimension: 1. Freshly made and delivered locally on hourly scale; 2. Take and bake or fry perhaps same day; and 3. Frozen for longer term.

I find that desis and non-desis alike are samosa fans.

You forgot the best reason to apply -- because just filling out the application makes you think about your business in ways you probably have never thought about it before.

I tell every startup I talk to to fill out the YC app, even if they never turn it in.

The weirdest thing people do is make up criteria that YC supposedly uses to reject people. There was such a huge diversity in our batch: From 20 y/o to 40+. Foreign, domestic. Credentialed, not credentialed. $1M rev run rate, $0 run rate. Just apply.

This comment scares me that YC is desperate for applications now after burning through so many early stage founders for years. Has YC peaked?

I'm going to post something vulnerable, but I hope people take my comment in the right light, as in general I love YC and what it has done for the startup community.

I've been building startups for a long time, and have applied to YC several times, mainly with the same idea (although I've always listed 4-5 other ideas I'm interested in as well). I have always gotten rejected, and while that was disappointing, I 100% understood that getting into YC was the exception rather than the rule, as YC had a smaller acceptance percentage than Harvard.

After a few batches of these rejections, I decided to take a break from applying and instead build up my startup experience more by working at growth-stage startups, and just in general started focusing on my career as well.

Fast forward a few years, and about a year ago YC reaches out to me (via automated email) saying they had identified me as being in the top X% on the Cofounder matching platform, and encouraged me to apply to their next batch cycle.

I was reluctant to do so -- I hadn't been thinking too deeply about any new startup ideas in the past few months (so I'd most likely have to apply with a previous startup I had built), but after encouragement from friends and family I decided to take a chance anyways and apply once again.

I went all out on the application -- I reached out to some YC friends and mentors to get their recommendations, and had them help me edit and perfect my application as well. I even traveled for a month to San Francisco, just so I could absorb more of the ecosystem, network with as many entrepreneurs as possible, and help give back to the community if I could.

I submitted my application, waited for the fateful "interview email" day, and when that day came -- I got the standard "...we're sorry, we're not going to move forward with your application".

I'll admit -- getting that email stung. I know looking back there were a lot of things I could have done better (e.g. not applying with the same idea as previous applications, among other things), and just like when I applied years ago, I knew that the chances of getting to the interview stage were slim to none.

But yet somehow, that rejection hurt more than any of the others.

Sorry to hear that experience.

I've come to discount any form of flattery in intro emails. E.g. when a FAANG recruiter emails me "wow, we were impressed by your public project!", I used to believe it.

Now I know it's just a synonym for "join the back of the line of 17,639,838 applicants."

Yeah, if PG takes me out for a steak, I will believe it :-). An email that cost $0.000001 on SES, nah!

$0.000001 plus some credibility

I love a lot of what YC has done but their application process is fundamentally broken and has been for years. It appears to just be a just a factory and numbers game now, all clinging to previous successes from when PG and Jessica used to run things.

Curious about the story behind applying to YC as a founder and ending up as a moderator for hacker news.

Startup in W09, worked on it for 4 years, started saying no to pg about moderating HN, ran out of money, needed a job, said yes to pg about moderating HN.

Seems like it was a needed option for you at the time. Are you still enjoying it? Waiting for someone to take the baton?

You all talk about the work Dan does moderating this place, which, fair enough, but "Launch HN" is low key one of the coolest jobs in startups. The before/after on what those launch posts become after Dan gets involved would knock you out. A sibling comment asked him what his comp was (which is very funny) but it's a question with a simple answer: whatever he's getting, it's probably not enough.

> whatever he's getting, it's probably not enough.

I mean, all YC employees get to participate in the fund, so he's got a small piece of every YC startup, including the ones that he helps with Launch HN. So in a sense he has a lot more control over his comp than most employees.

Is this the only path to the job?

In the sense that wanting the job is disqualifying, yes.

A reasonable and logical litmus test. Thanks for sharing.

How much are you paid for this job? Is this your only source of income?

The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

——

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052 - Aug 2019 (777 comments)

YC is totally a non starter for non US aspirants and it's not YC's fault.

Best case scenario - you end up having a company that's registered in US, would be paying taxes in US when it comes to that but you yourself wouldn't be allowed to set foot on the US soil, and even if that, would be shuttling for visa renewals every now and then.

There are tons of international startups in YC including many successful ones. And YC has well over a decade of experience helping international founders navigate all the barriers including visa issues. Don't let this stop you!

Edit: I want to emphasize this. Being an international founder is not an obstacle for getting into YC. Hundreds of founders have done it, from all over the world. Probably thousands at this point.

Not a YC founder, but this is factually not true. YC allows Delaware, Cayman, Canada, and Singapore corporations [0].

Pre-empting the accusation that "cayman companies are about tax dodging": Cayman companies are a great fit for heavily international businesses that do not reside in the USA, but that want to be governed as if they were, because cayman corporate law is basically delaware's.

A good example is Nubank, which is a cayman corp that does most of it's business in LatAm.

The reason a company like this should not be a delaware c-corp is so that, in case of an acquisition of the companies assets, the holding company doesn't have to pay usa taxes (which is reasonable, since the company didn't have usa operations to begin with).

[0]: https://www.ycombinator.com/deal

These are still incredibly limited options for locating your company.

YC has apparently been helping many founders get the O-1 visa.

And there are plenty of services that allow you to manage US companies remotely.

O-1 visas are pretty darn hard to get by. Most start-up founders would lack the national or international distinction and that too way before even they have started their journey.

Those having such kind of distinction would already have going too good for them (unless they're just good on the paper) that it wouldn't make much economic sense for them to relocate elsewhere.

Receiving money from one of the most well known VC firms seems like a pretty good distinction. I know people who received O-1 with far less (no tricks involved)

Got rejected twice. And twice ended up creating great businesses, not billion dollars but profitable enough to have a full team. It's so much better than VC money! No stress, you can really follow your ideas, move at your own pace, have a healthy life/work balance. If you can avoid VCs do it!

Another (is this bogus?) reason for not applying is I am not in the US and would prefer not to migrate there due to family. Can a founder do YC with minimal time in USA or even do it remotely.

YC is leaning into in-person heavily.

But e.g. there was a great team in our batch (W24) with very young kids who flew to SF for in-person events. Some people were unable to come to the US (visa issues) that took part remotely.

No requirement to intend to stay in the US – many foreign teams heading back, but many more haven chosen to stay in SF on O1 and other visas (YC helps with this).

I think YC admissions see the intention to be based in SF as a net positive, because SF is in most situations the very best place to start a startup (regardless of YC).

The last I heard (but my information may be out of date), that remains an option.

You don't need to migrate to the US.

But I believe you do need to be there with your co-founders for 3 months.

And if you can't manage that then running a VC backed startup isn't what you should do.

Because you will need to visit customers and it's often not feasible to just fly to/from constantly.

What if all my customers are in Europe?

It's one of my great regrets that I didn't get into YC in 2007. There was no Dropbox yet, but we were building essentially the same thing except integrated into Windows rather than on the web, with an office collaboration focus. (Doing it on the web was such a better idea!) I vividly remember droning on at Jessica through a dry demo because I thought the team that showed the most features in the least time would win.

We ended up with a modest exit - life changing but not stop-working-life-changing. There was so much startup wisdom that we didn't know, that has now become Obvious and Trivial, that I think we would have learned. We made every mistake YCombinator warns against, and I like to think we wouldn't have if we had only been told. Would have been well worth the (IIRC) $14k they were offering at the time.

Now with kids and so on the residency requirement makes it tough. But even in my dotage as I am, with 5 startups in my past, I think it would be worth it.

Big fan of YC and pg. I'm waiting for some immigration related things to fall into place before I apply, but it's been several years. Potentially crass question: what is the age or industry experience distribution of a typical YC batch these days? Would a founding team in their early 40s be dinosaurs in a room full of young stars? Asking for a friend.

I was in the last batch. The average is probably ~28 years old, but there are plenty of founding teams in their 40s and on. Plenty of folks with families. You wouldn't be a dinosaur.

Apply.

I had the same question.

Most YC founders seem to be new college graduates instead of seasoned FAANG folks. I'm in the latter camp and believe I'm better off leveraging my connections because I've aged out of YC.

Co-founder and I are “seasoned FAANG” folks. We went through YC last summer. It’s true - many founders are on younger side, but a good number seemed (i didn’t actually card anyone) to be same age as us and we didn’t feel out of place. Would recommend.

We're not in AI :( and it seems like YC isn't interested in our space. Outside of the current wave of interest in AI I think we would have serious interest. Would you still apply, or wait?

This should occupy 0% of your attention. If you're the kind of founder YC would fund, applying with an AI idea vs a non-AI idea won't change anything.

YC supports founders. It's as simple as that, hard as that is to believe, given the assumptions many people make.

The reason AI startups are so prominent in recent batches is that it's what many founders want to work on. If you're the type of founder YC funds and you want to work on something else, YC will support you to work on that. If at some point it's clear that it's not working, they may advise you to change—but not because of the AI bit.

I find these kind of messages distasteful. When people are focused on building, they need feedback from the market. That rejection/feedback helps, but any other kind of rejection - especially a VC or investor rejection - hurts. You could argue that founders should be used to rejection, still this is a needless rejection - without any specific feedback and from a group not their TG - not something people should spend their energy on. You apply, there is hope, then there is a rejection (given the acceptance rate highly likely), then you see the kind of companies that got in, and it becomes a distraction. That's human nature. You can correct something when a prospect says they do not want your product and understand the reasons, but how do you correct anything when a popular investor passes on and says "they could be wrong"? Yes, "keep building", which they were already doing with more enthusiasm and less distraction before the whole bandwagon of YC alums came along.

You could argue that "filling the application gives clarity to a founder". Again genius marketing. That comes at an opportunity cost of talking to their leads, their prospects. At any rate, it takes you away from what you originally set out to do. You get more clarity from talking to your target market than filling an application.

Another thing is "people got in applying on a whim". Yes, those are exceptions. But, any average founder understands that if the decision is likely to be determined by what they write in the application and their application video (and several factors outside of their control), they will optimize it to the max. The videos you see are always multiple takes. The applications are always pruned and reviewed and rewritten before submitting.

When your goal is getting into YC, all this is worth doing. When the goal is building and growing a product, such advice, no matter how well intended, hurts more than helps the founders. It's okay if YC picks 200 startups out of 15000 instead of 20000.

This is all a just-so story. Rejection is the air you breathe. One of the better things YC does is offer quick, no-nonsense rejections, which is a stark difference from the institutional VC market which will happily string you along, offering feedback and meetings for months with no intention of ever taking anything but an option on joining your round if a real buyer shows up.

Meanwhile: if you're so busy talking to leads that the time to apply to YC is damaging, you know why you're not bothering to apply. Fair enough! But nobody's selling you a bill of goods.

I totally get the whole jaded bootstrapper angle on this. You're on HN, and HN+YC can sometimes make entrepreneurship feel like college application season, rather than something that happens in the real world. And there are many good reasons (ie: circumstances to be in) not to apply!

But notice how people generally aren't calmly laying out what those circumstances are, and laying out the alternate paths. They're people venting about how YC is overhyped. It's emotional and I don't think it's very helpful.

I am not coming from a jaded bootstrapper angle at all. My point is simple: if you are in fundraising mode and are fundable, apply to YC. And talk to as many investors as you can. If you are not, don't do any of those. Focus on building. YC would have another application in six months.

YC is better than other investors, but it is still an investor.

> the time to apply to YC is damaging

It's not damaging but distracting. Focus is your biggest asset as a founder. And you need to minimize distractions. PG's essay on fundraising talks about the same.

I do not have a viewpoint about other people venting about YC. I am not coming from that angle, and I have ignored those posts mostly simply because YC's content has helped me.

We agree more than we disagree. I'll only say that while it's ultra-clear to me what's distracting about talking to VCs, it's not all that clear to me a YC app is all that distracting. It's a one-and-done thing, you get an answer pretty quickly, lots of people apply so go in expecting not to get it this round; it feels low cost to me.

Going out to talk to actual VC firms too early can put you into a tailspin, for sure.

I think applying to YC should be seen as fund raising activity. And pg's essays clearly state that fund raising is a distraction, so when you do that, just focus on it, and get it over with, so you can continue building.

I must have applied at least 4 times now with Practal in various forms (at some point it was a different project called ProofPeer), got a rejection each time. The idea has been developed further each time, but in ways hard to communicate to a VC (or anyone, really). Reading this announcement I now have a choice: prepare another YC application in the next 2 days, or finish chapter 2 of my book about the logic used in Practal instead [1]. I think the choice is obvious, there is indeed such a thing as applying too early. I mean, I am not going to pivot to something else, there is no idea other than Practal I will ever be interested in. Working on anything else feels like a waste of my time. Hopefully I have something to show for when the winter batch comes around.

[1] http://abstractionlogic.com

One of PG's blogs talk about being fundable. For a founder, there is always a transition from being a builder to being an entrepreneur (business owner) where you must be able to access whether you are fundable and know what you need to do to get capital. I think it's the same thing with YC. There is an investor who says they like it as early as possible, but fundamentally you know if you are investible. It's sensible to only do fundraising activity when you have some confidence you are fundable.

Exactly. Previous applications have taught me a lot about what VCs expectations are, and I know when I am fundable in their eyes. My ideas work and are a game changer. But until I can explain this clearly and have objective proof of that, I am not fundable. So no real sense to apply until then.

If rejection hurts you so much I think your life as an entrepreneur will be tough.

The right mindset would I think be to show them that they were wrong if they reject you.

Ultimately fundraising is selling. And in sales, your goal should, funnily enough, be to get as many rejections as possible. To eat "no" for breakfast, as it were.

Easier said than done, I know.

Fundraising is about focus. If you are in a fundraising mode and applying to YC, great. Would learn a lot, and I think it makes sense to do that. When fundraising, many rejections are great. When not fundraising and a VC reaches out, it's distracting. How is the case different here? PG himself says so [1]

When you are building and selling a product, shifting your focus to fundraising in the middle (and not committing to it) is stupidity and would leave you to neither be able to build/sell well or fundraise well. It's a mindset shift, and one of PG's essays talk about that too.

Problem is not with rejection. Rejection from the customers is what motivates people. I am not motivated by "wanting to show others they are wrong", but by solving a problem, creating value, and impacting people. What you wrote is a weak justification for the time you spent on application - that could have spent on building product or a sales pitch.

Again, my point is not rejection but distraction. It's about focus. When you are in the middle of building, it's unhelpful to just fill out an application for "what if". Don't do it. Most entrepreneurs know when they are fundable.

[1]: https://paulgraham.com/fr.html

you need to graduate from the "right school/alumni" and i would discourage anybody else from wasting their time

That's definitely not true (I wouldn't be here if it were), and it's mistaken assumptions like this that I'm hoping my post can nudge some people out of.

If you noticed any of these phrases in what I wrote: "lack of credentials", "needn't look impressive", "doesn't look like", "nothing else", "out of nowhere", "you're already yourself"...that's why I put all those in there. Edit: oh and "impostor syndrome" of course.

you are an outlier and the stuff you wrote is marketing fluff

No right school/alumni people at Fly.io (W20). I don't even got no learnin'.

great. now lets ask the other 97% in YC what school they dropped out/graduated from.

Your theory here is that YC just has a weird soft spot for the University of Oklahoma?

It's a program you apply to get into. That's what strivers do: apply to get into things. Of course there are lots of college strivers there.

You are not reading what I wrote and instead replying to continue pushing that false narrative we've established here to be untrue: that most in YC aren't from an unknown university.

Your insistence only confirms the rumours, does not dispel it.

As much as the YC app is gamed (based on winning applications I've seen from friends and strangers), alumnist is only one piece of the puzzle of a few.

im not saying you have to graduate from ivy league to get into YC but bulk majority of people in YC are.

they are almost always going to favour people from their own league.

im basing this off people who are coming from YC and telling me how it is.

some folks applied to YC in the past, get rejected and then find some Harvard graduate running with their ideas they submitted.

isn't this just correlation vs causation?

2 people submit the same idea. 1 gets in, the other doesn't. yc, basing their decision on the founder themselves and not so much the idea, chose person 1, who had more of the founder characteristics (determination, ... i forget the rest).

maybe there's a higher chance that between 2 people, 1 from harvard 1 not, the harvard person has those characteristics. could be they "learnt" it there, or they had to use those same skills to even get into harvard, or whatever. but it doesn't mean they got in because of the harvard degree

apply that same logic of thousands of people, maybe it looks like they prefer harvard candidates.

correlation doesn't rule out causation and anecdotes should be heeded with caution.

to YC you are just another lotto ticket out of the thousands of founders, be very wary about divulging information such as finances or what works.

its akin to going to a hedge fund, letting them in on an edge you discovered, and expecting them to not trade on that information without you.

I've long had a bet that these posts contain lurking single founders looking for potential co-founders. So, if you are on the prowl for a jack-of-all engineering founder, shoot me a note. I'd love to see if you might be all-in on what I've got going on or vice versa. Here's building awesome stuff with awesome teams.

It would be nice to be told roughly what the process is before having to 'sign up'.

You're already signed up, because you can use your HN account to log in. (All YC accounts are HN accounts and vice versa.)

The process is that you fill out a form and make a 1 minute video* and click 'submit'.

(* I know...I hated the video thing too... but it gives a sense of what someone is like that doesn't come through in text, and you just talk for a minute about what you care about. nothing fancy.)

(edit: also, if you're the type of founder that my post is trying to reach - the video is very much in your interest. Other people can see potential in you that you don't see in yourself, even after just a minute. Especially because the people reviewing applications have massive amounts of experience with this.)

Video is fine(it's just a minute), but why LinkedIn URL is required(not optional)?

LinkedIn is about education, career, and networking. I am under average in all of them, so I'm not registered. This is the only thing which holding me back from applying. Otherwise, I work full-time on kick-ass product for months with 1000+ commits.

Sorry about that! Based on this thread, we removed the requirement for a LinkedIn profile.

Thanks for this! I'd like to drop a note of explanation here, for future readers:

Yes, anyone can "just create a LinkedIn account." However, quite a few people across the globe are trying to decrease their online surface area. While many of us (myself included) just have a password manager filled with thousands of entries and 32-character passwords, some folks are not comfortable living that way. I also find myself unsubscribing from or filtering emails from these services at least once a day, so I can appreciate why many folks are increasingly trying to simplify their lives by eliminating SaaS logins.

Even without creating a LinkedIn account, one could fill in a dummy URL to satisfy the JavaScript validation and submit the application. However, we chose not to do this because of how the YC application itself is structured. The submission requirements are intentionally strict (60 second founder video, <3mins demo, very specific questions, etc.) and subverting the application process feels antithetical.

Having the option to opt out of the LinkedIn field is greatly appreciated.

Thanks, a lot. I'm applying.

Just enter some kind of dummy text/fake profile URL that indicates you don't have an account? I can't imagine it's seriously a hard requirement; you creating a basically empty account now just to be able to provide a real URL isn't better than 'N/A'.

Yeah I can't believe that either. Can you imagine pg being on LinkedIn? Never in a million years. I'm trying to find out who to talk to about this.

I just went through the application because of your post. I don't have a lot to bring to the table so hopes are not high but what's the worst that could happen? They say no.

Anyway, I got hung up on the video, I definitely have no idea what to say, so I saved the application for later and will come back to it. Perhaps my plan for the video should be to read what I wrote in the plan fire it off and forget I did this. :) But yea, as someone who has issues with presenting to others visually in this way, the video requirement is really hard. I'll do it because this is all to see what happens, but definitely not confident on that part of things.

I'm definitely on the side of everyone who hates the video thing but all you have to do is talk for a minute about what you're working on. You're not being evaluated on any of the things that "video" normally implies—quite the opposite. For example coming across as an "influencer" would be a bad idea, and coming across as an awkward introvert probably helps you and certainly won't hurt. But don't try to "come across" in any way at all—just talk about what you're working on or interested in.

For people who feel the way that you and I both do, whoever watches your video as part of reviewing your YC application is probably going to see you an order of magnitude more positively than you see yourself. Self-evaluation of video is painful.

Serious question: Does YC recognize and remediate the unconscious bias that comes with looking at said videos? It seems like it may be comforting, but potentially counter-productive.

So back in the day when Skype was still new tech and I worked for small remote company we did interviews over the phone. It was absolutely wonderful for eliminating bias. We had a very diverse cross section of employees from many backgrounds doing very good work for us.

I kind of miss those days now that Zoom is everywhere and it's an expectation that you present yourself on video for others.

I get why a sales job might want to make sure you keep up appearances but just writing code, I really hate turning on video. No one I know wants to acknowledge that we aren't solving bias with video though. I am glad you brought this up though. I believe it's true.

What’s the acceptance rate, 1%, most with cofounders? So if you’re making a video by yourself it’s like 1/500 ?

Seems like a better use of time making a video and filling out the app once you have above average team and traction.

You don't need traction. Team is good because having a cofounder is statistically such a huge success factor. But YC does found solo founders, and you shouldn't make a team just to make your application look better - I'm pretty sure doing that would weaken your chances.

I was under the impression that this idea of cofounders being a huge statistical success factor was pretty much just a myth.

Moreover, all reasons given by YC as to why you should have a cofounder are qualitative e.g. https://www.ycombinator.com/library/8h-how-to-find-the-right....

Would love to see the statistical evidence because if anything it seems to be the other way round and this is pretty much just reflective of YC’s personal preference as it were (and many VCs prefer otherwise). Personally I would only advise someone to take on a cofounder if they already know them well and need their skill set. There is so much risk in a poor fit that it far outweighs any theoretical benefit.

I don't have citations for you but I don't think it's anything like a "personal preference" - YC has tons of data on this. But it's fine to apply as a solo founder—many do get funded; and you're quite right—the risk of picking a wrong cofounder is also high and is not something one should do lightly (e.g. just to try to improve a YC application).

The thing is, YC heavily signals against solo founders.

So it seems like there could be a lot of adverse selection in your data where good solo founders don’t bother applying, or good solo founders take on value destructive cofounders just to satisfy YC.

That’s then a vicious cycle where YC sees increasingly lower quality solo founders which reinforces their opinions and data about solo founder outcomes.

What about, "I don't ever seem to have any good ideas worth pursuing" and "everything I can think of doing has already been or is currently being done by people way better funded than me"?

I'm the only one that cares about ____.

You know, I wasn't going to submit anything, but now I am. I'll almost assuredly get rejected for my half-baked idea, but hey, might as well try. Thanks for the reminder.

That's the spirit :)

But I can't count the number of times I've heard about YC saying 'we don't think it's a great idea, but we like the founders'. YC funds founders, that's the whole deal. It's hard for many people to believe this because it sounds too simple and it's counterintuitive in all kinds of ways.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H2sRRzQHwJX8JAgXUS0vyhZg... I finished writing up my response. Still need to do the video tomorrow.

Like I said, I'm positive this just isn't compelling enough, but hey it was fun answering all the q's :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0jLIYKko4U and here's my 1 min video if anyone is following along :D

I have applied to YC with multiple ideas in the past and have been rejected without interview. In my current iteration what I have going against me - solo founder, late 40s, building in a crowded consumer space.

I have no idea what YC looks for and it doesn't matter. I will still apply last minute. Almost all my past applications helped me refine and rethink about my ideas.

It is highly discouraging to hear a reject but that's the life of a founder.

Thanks for sharing this. I have one question: given similar quality of applications, is it just a dice roll?

I am asking this as a trying founder who:

  - has built early stage engineering at multiple startups
  - has applied many times and been rejected
  - is reading about many others who have been rejected and ended up building without funding

I don't think it's just a dice roll, no, but it's a helpful metaphor for communicating the 'what have you got to lose' sentiment.

But I don't think I understand your question fully - do you want to explain?

Hey, thanks for getting back to me.

What I mean to ask is: given high number of applications, how does YC generally pick within a bucket of similar applications?

Similarity based on domain, product status, etc. If there are 40 which are quite similar, what then?

I'm not involved in the process so not the best person to answer but I think it boils down to: team, team, team. Not that YC assesses every team perfectly, of course, but it's the principle.

Domain, product, and so on, are relevant, but mostly for what they reveal about a team. If there's already a product with users and/or revenue, it proves that these founders a.k.a. the team is able to build a product that gets users and/or revenue, which is the kind of team YC wants to fund. For example.

Thanks for sharing this.

Guys just pick a fun project and apply. If you get in then you get to build a fun project really fast. If not, then just have fun building your project.

Rejected nine times.

Re the “won’t get in” point..

We applied a few years ago. I won’t lie, I was sad and disappointed we didn’t get in, but even more so because our application was just ignored. Left a very bad taste in our mouths.

I won’t again spend days on an application to have it be ignored. Since then, we have been grinding away at the same business and it’s now making 7 figures, giving us the perfect life of a 20% YoY growth business with no VCs breathing down our necks trying to 10x that growth rate. Not taking VC money was the best thing we ever did, albeit inadvertently.

So sure, you won’t get in (statistically), but it could be the best thing you ever don’t do!

I spent most of the last 20 years in bootstrapped companies, helping grow two of them into 8 figures (which, when you don't have a board, is pretty neat). Bootstrapping is where my heart is, and almost all of the best memories of my career are from times when those kinds of companies were at the knife's edge of maybe having some kind of market fit and maybe just starting to have an identity and maybe just getting up on their legs. If that's your happy place --- again: it is mine! --- probably don't apply to YC.

I'm at a company now (Fly.io, W20) that simply would not make sense without funding (we rack hardware all over the world). I've advised close friends through other startups that might could have worked without funding, but worked better with it. I've seen the before/after on YC, years into the life of some companies (Fly.io started in 2016) and the win was significant.

It depends on what you're trying to do.

But like, pretty obviously, the point Dan is trying to make here is that there are lots of people negotiating against themselves, talking themselves out of taking the swing. And I'm not all that great at business or whatever, but one thing I think I've learned is that overriding the instinct not to take swings, succumbing to the urge to avoid potential nociception, it's a pretty important tool in the toolbox of entrepreneurship.

There are good reasons not to apply to YC, but "they will probably reject me" is maybe not one of them, unless your time is very scarce, in which case you probably already know why you're not applying to YC.

You don't need YC to raise funds.

You don't. It helps a lot.

> our application was just ignored

The only way that would happen is a bug. YC always responds to applicants. Rejections usually aren't personalized because that can't scale—but not hearing back at all should never happen. If you want me to look into what might have happened there, I'd be willing to try if you email hn@ycombinator.com.

Congratulations on your success in any case!

(I'm breaking the rules by copying https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092169 here, sorry but I want to make sure this is clear.)

> YC always responds to applicants.

With templated responses. No difference from not responding.

I wish I had applied when the sessions were still remote. Can't leave my fam for 3 months(I'm on the east coast)

OK. I finally gave it a shot. But https://apply.ycombinator.com/bio/edit is broken. So I can't submit my application.

Not interested now. You guys need to fix your website.

Are you sure it is in your interest to give up at the first hurdle?

I think a firm with 600b in equity can fix an html form.

"in an area where there are no snakes"

Surely that isn't true, right? I'll point out the obvious truth that this funding model encourages businesses that are boom or bust. That seems like a big snake to me. Bust is like taking a snake all the way back to square 1.

After applying last time without success, I tried again this time but this time just did it super quick without investing too much time and effort.

I figure if it’s a good idea they’ll be interested and if not we’ll then I won’t have invested too much time in it.

I'm in the same boat and feel like this is the only logical approach. Such a potential timesink for such low odds. I think the effort should be somewhat symmetric: spend as much time as YC will in reviewing.

Especially without feed back signal, you'll never get to improve your application/odds. Dang says above that feedback won't happen because it doesn't scale -- not everything has to scale, Dang.

I am on a h1b visa and can't really work anywhere outside of my primary employment due to visa restrictions. Has anyone with the similar profile gotten into YC? and if so how did you make it work with all the legal blockades of h1b?

I'm no expert but I've been hanging around YC for a long time and have the consistent impression that when it comes to visa issues, something can nearly always be done. If I were you I'd just apply and mention in the form that you'll need help with this. If it's the kind of application YC would fund, they're not going to turn you down for this reason.

thank you, I will take your advice and apply!

Good luck!

it's not their problem. If you have issues or any issues or they smell any issues, you will be rejected. Too many people take VC/YC personally but try to put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself if your startup would be worth it. Your answer will be their answer

I couldn't disagree more! If anyone is feeling this way, please re-read my text at the top because the whole point is to convince you that YC might be a lot more interested than you'd assume.

Look at it this way: if there's even a small chance that an application could lead to a major startup, would it make any sense for YC to reject it because of visa reasons (or similar)? Absolutely not. That would be how startup investors fail.

On the contrary what would make sense is to fund it and then help get the obstacles overcome. This is a no-brainer and is one of the big ways that YC helps founders—not just about visa issues, but lots of other things - legal issues, cap table issues, prior investor issues, cofounder conflicts, god knows what else.

Unfortunately dang we will always be yin and yang (founders and vc/yc).

If I have a thousand applications lying on my desk, my first task would be to remove everyone that has even the slightest issue. There is absolutely no way you would know who is going to be successful so your job is not to find the winners but get rid of the losers.

Unfortunately VCs have a power over startups. Any startups they touch will have higher chance to succeed. And when the winds are strong even the chickens can fly so it's not that you choose the right startups, its just that the startups YC chooses become right.

Not saying you are wrong but let's just agree to disagree ;)

> your job is not to find the winners but get rid of the losers

As I understand it, that's exactly backwards. The fatal mistake is not funding losers, it's missing winners. Certainly that's true of YC but it's well known among investors generally.

That's also consistent with YC's view that founders matter most. If Larry and Sergey cross your path and you decline to fund them because they're on an H1B or some other issue like that, that would be...really bad.

> Not saying you are wrong but let's just agree to disagree ;)

Ok :) - I read your comment as saying that founders are fungible and we can definitely agree to disagree about that.

Going through the application helps provide clarity to the founders themselves as well.

We are an early stage startup, $75K ARR (not a lot), 3 engineers, partnership with Accenture in 3 countries, working with top tier brands and got rejected 3 times.

We will apply again.

Would someone be kind enough to review our application?

Thank you so much.

I'm sure your application will get reviewed but if you want to email me at hn@ycombinator.com I can double check that it has. Maybe wait a few weeks though.

Awesome! I will send it over. Thank you, Dang!

Dan, can you share stats on the age distribution between those who applied and those who got accepted?

Clearly there'd be a spike in the 20s, but I'm really curious what the long tails are like.

I've thought about it, but the target market for my project isn't a high growth one; it's US middle school teachers (years 6-8, typically). Public schools aren't exactly flush with cash—individual teachers even less so—and while I (and my school teacher wife) think I'm on to something that would change teachers' lives, I can't imagine a world where that market would lead to a six figure MRR.

Starting to think I need to find grant money rather than startup/seed money.

if your idea can be morphed into non-profit one, YC does fund it - but they suggest for charging small fee for your service or product. Worth checking out in that case.

Does anyone know if there is a way to expedite the decision-making process? We've received a term sheet and are under some time constraints to respond.

If you email hn@ycombinator.com I'll try to help.

All YC's group partners are speaking at Startup School today so it might be hard to wrangle one immediately!

I just checked out the form and I'm pleasantly surprised. For some reason, I was sure it had questions like "what's your super power?"

My friend is part of a team of PhDs working on hard tech research problems without much interest in becoming a viable business (in the sense of counting dollars). It seems like YC would not be the right fit for them, is that correct? They seem to have gotten interest from other VCs but they have the impression that YC is more of a traditional firm focused on startups that are very close to revenue or are post revenue

We got rejected (2nd time applying) and ended up raising a substantial seed/pre-seed round at excellent terms a month later.

Is there a compelling reason to still apply?

The compelling reason to apply would be that going through YC can increase your value by more than 1.07 or whatever number represents break-even on the standard deal. Whether that's true of your startup or not I can't say, but I do know that lots of founders go through YC after raising seed rounds because they're answering that question with a yes.

That means nothing though. If you (N=1) apply to Google and get rejected but take a Facebook job, it doesn't mean people shouldn't apply to Google.

It was a question more for us than general public. I think YC is probably the best first check you can get since they invest in companies with nothing more than an idea.

Fuck it, I am going to do this. Thanks for writing this.

> what reason do you have not to

For starters I don’t have a passport, I wouldn’t want to create a US company, I prefer bootstrapping and dislike unreasonable pressure on growth.

I would be interested in taking advice and networking, I wouldn’t mind signing off equity unless it’s too much hassle (US company, relocation)

Sounds like local hubs and accelerators would be a better pick for me. Unless YC has a remote & chill option?

Can you give a recent example of a number 1? The problem I see is that a a piece of advice that got thrown out on twitter was "We applied without an idea and we got in, here's how we did it!" and the advice ends up being along the lines of "We didn't know what else to do, so we reached out to our Penn alumni network and got a referral"

Also: reading through the questions in the application form and thinking about them is worth it even if you don't intend to apply.

Wow what a timing? Thanks Dang for penning this. My friend and his cofounders are just getting ready to record their demo. Question for @dang. How much does it help to have a paying customer that has at least agreed to do a pilot? Is that sort of signal compensate for " I don't to Stanford"? Asking for my friends.

I'm not the best person to ask but I believe it helps a lot! How much signal it adds, relative to others, I couldn't say. But obviously they should mention it in their application.

The ability to make something people want is so central to what YC is looking for that it's the company motto; and sooner or later "want" has to mean "want enough to pay for". Sounds like your friends are already there.

Biases are the result of our collective experiences, exposures & limitations accumulated over time. And we all have inherent biases to some degree shaped by our past & present, hence biases with all its flaws is a mental apparatus that people employ to understand stuffs. As such YC or any VCs aren’t immune to forming biases of their own. And given the massive volume of applications they have to go through under time constraints; they must definitely take into account multiple factors and signals that aligns with their biases in the context of their past successes.. And whatever biases that’s taken shape over time, as long as they are right most of the time, it does make it reasonable albeit it’s inherent flaws which might miss out on some exceptional founders in few cases.

However biases mostly work in information vacuum or when there’s limited set of information to take way from on ideas that are really early or unexplored. I imagine measurable results on the context of your startup idea is the best antidote to YC biases in most cases. For founders lacking in other aspects; I imagine the only viable option is to weigh in with quantifiable results. YC and other VCs might have their biases in some aspects, but there’s one common bias everyone is victim to which is “RESULTS”. So for simple founders like me who is limited by the structure of the application process, I have found a loophole which is for every section that vaguely masks your background or accomplishments, there are also sections that asks for results and numbers which is where you can derive favorable outcome from. And for that very reason, I am trying to game YC biases by focusing primarily on results.

Thanks, Dang - for the encouragement! You made my friday with this post, so might as well give it a shot as a gratitude

Tried submitting an application for fun™ but encountered a visual(?) bug. When I tried saving a new founder profile after filling out some sections and tried editing it, I was met with hundreds of repeated rows of work/education/etc sections. Anyone else have this issue?

Do you guys still offer deferred admissions for juniors who wish to join a batch after graduation?

I just asked and this is what I got back: (1) if you're sure you want to complete your senior year, just wait till then to apply; (2) if you're not sure, apply now; (3) there's not currently any process for people who want to apply to batches farther out than the next one. I suppose (1) and (2) follow from (3) but there you go :)

Either way, good luck and please do apply when you're ready!

awesome, thank you so much.

I wonder if there is any rules now for funded folks coming to one's linkedin saying "Hey, thank you so much for starring {{insert here YC-AI repo}} on github, that means a lot" when one's never even heard about them before.

I don't know but that sounds bad.

I’ve applied a few times, considering stopping applying.

What I’m more concerned about is (a) everyone seems to be incredibly young, I’m not, and (b) being a solo founder means you’re almost certain not to be accepted.

Are these correct? Is it worth bothering with?

The forms to apply seem to have a bug where textareas often lose focus.

Also, does the product demo video have to be uploaded? Why not allow users to paste a link to an existing video?

Why would I sell my code to you guys when I'm already giving it away for free?

It depends on whether you want to make a high-growth startup or not. If you do, YC can help with that a lot.

I guess you might be joking, but there are tons of open-source startups these days, for some definition of "open source" or other.

Yup, wanted to inject some humor into the thread if possible!

Also entertaining direct VC offers via my telephone number in my HN bio. Kind of still joking, but in the AI era I find it's the best way to cope.

Tell you what @dang, I'll apply if you want to be my cofounder.

I applied 9 times and never got an interview. I've moved on from entrepreneurship (for now?), but would love to know what percentile I'm in for consecutive rejections as a consolation prize ;)

So does it bump your chance to practice mock interview questions? I feel it's a waste of time and energy. Or am I wrong to assume some of the brightest people YC accepts have it down pat?

A realistic perspective for non-elites to balance out opinions such as "applying will help you think through your idea" or "the upside is completely worth it".

1. Imbalanced niceness: If you get convinced or are in a good mood, you must know that YC is a private company that works to serve its founders, employees and current startups (any private individual would do that so nothing wrong!). The goodwill that is put into filling out a well researched application will be met in around 95% [1] of cases with a cold email with no feedback. The gain from "thinking through your idea" or having romantic thoughts of getting in will most likely be wiped out with the rejection trauma. Also, to temper expectations, it is useful to know that YC actively seeks elite networks with more vigor than the general public due to obviously higher odds of selection and future success of elite founders (again nothing wrong here but these things should be known by non-elites). Just search "yc mit" for how actively MIT alumni and students are reached out to by YC partners through in-person events.

2. Competition from elites: If a person with an elite background (company or university) applies with a similar idea to a person with a non-elite background, the elite person gets in due to stronger odds of succeeding in hiring, raising follow on money etc. The non-elite person's capabilities will most likely not be compared objectively to those of the founder with the elite background due to lack of resources. It will most likely be assumed that the elite person will pull it through rather than the non-elite. This is one of the reasons many highly capable non-elite founders feel a lot of whiplash because an elite founder with only an idea will often make it through while the non-elite won't. The whiplash originates from there being such small delta between the non-elite and the elite individual in many cases. The claim here is not that all elite get through. The elite are weighed with other elite but it's obvious that there are higher odds of getting through if you're an elite. It must be realized that just a couple hundred elite applicants will almost completely wipe out the odds of thousands of non-elites.

I'm a non-elite and I've applied and been rejected thrice and just don't have the strength to go for these schemes anymore. I know "we should learn to deal with whiplash" but I'm done with the way the world is designed. I believe the individual must rise higher than having to depend or listen to such schemes and feel pulled into them while in most cases ending up worse off in the process. Schemes such as these are designed to cause more whiplash to the non-elite without any fault of YC - this is just how the world works.

Follow up thoughts Q- Why didn't the non-elite strive harder to become the elite when they had the chance? A- I think we generally thought that we'll hit our home run at the next attempt but didn't know how quickly the odds slide to impossible. Also just ignoring the fact that the elite group is a relatively small and stable number of people that doesn't elastically increase with the population or with with one's capabilities. The elite just get more elite - the lindy effect.

[1] assuming 2% selection odds and 4-5% odds of an interview call

Been there, done that, got rejected. As they always point out - like here in (2) - "YC looks for good potential founders" it must have been me (or us back then), not the project.

A great way to contradict the claims here about requiring ivy league credentials would be dropping some statistics on acceptances. Curiously nobody - for or against - has done that.

I would apply but my co-founder has a kid and can't move to the US for 3 months. Also, we don't want to setup a parent company in one of those 4 suggested countries.

I’d love to apply, but I’m building FlingUp.com and there is no chance in hell anyone would ever want to fund a lone founder hacking on this project when the kids have gone to sleep.

Let’s say I have an idea but it’s a niche, I know it won’t be more than ~1M in yearly revenue at its best. What is interesting for YC and what not when it comes to potential size?

YC's in the business of high-growth startups. You don't have to know how to build a high-growth startup—YC partners are experts in teaching and helping founders to do that. But if you're sure you don't want a high-growth startup, that might mean it's not a good fit.

However, your question is trickier than it seems because so many major startups begin as 'toy' or 'niche': https://paulgraham.com/altair.html. If you make something people want, there are often ways for it to grow—and perhaps grow big—that aren't obvious at first. The Airbnb founders stuck for a long time with their 'airbed' idea before making the obvious-in-retrospect (but not at the time) leap to a much larger market.

is it still no co-founder no go?

Oh YC definitely funds solo founders (and always has - Dropbox was one famous example, and Renderlet is one that comes to mind from this recent thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39907845). See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092556.

The way I understand it is: cofounder is preferred because it's so much harder without one; solo founder is second choice; worst is pairing up with a cofounder you don't really know because you think you're supposed to.

we got into YC, and decided not to take the offer. Even the act of applying was immensely valuable; it created structure and momentum for us and is the reason we're a company today. so apply apply apply!

(I'm not going to engage on whether or not YC is for you -- it's a personal decision, and it's an awesome program and we have great founder friends who loved it.)

OMG - My video was so bad, it took down the server. ;-)

Well, I did the thing... I have a very low expectation, but it's worth trying anyway, right @DanG?

Do you need an MVP or an idea? US or international?

I have a #3 - I don't have a marketable idea.

You don't need a marketable idea. YC cares about founders and that's it. Everything else can be taught.

But you're absolutely right that that is on the short list of bogus reasons not to apply.

Well then I have the real version of #1 - I have no meaningful skills. I have enough problems that I can't even see myself as a founder, stuff like lack of soft skills from a disability and massive home responsibilities.

>You don't need a marketable idea

Seems like most of the application is describing your idea.

Many of them turn out not to be marketable, though, and that doesn't necessarily count against you. It's not the high-order bit—the high order bit is the founders. Ideas can and do change.

> could change your life, like it did for me

Did you apply to be a mod for this site and if so are they accepting more applications of that sort?

How much time do you actually have to spend in San Francisco? I've seen 3 months mentioned, but also relocating...

> Upload a founder video

Yeah definitely not. No thank you.

It's a great filter though. I am exactly the type of person who you don't want to see a video of, and therefore perfectly unsuited for YCombinator/SV/etc. which are all about personality.

I totally get it as video is anathema to me too, but I think you're drawing exactly the wrong conclusion. YC doesn't care about any social commonplaces (personality, dress, etc.). They just want a sense of who you are as a potential founder. A lot of what might be considered 'negatives' in more conventional contexts aren't negative at all in the YC context, and might actually help an application.

p.s. YC is definitely not "all about personality" - I don't know where you got that idea, but the spectrum of YC founders is about as wide as you could get that way. There are extraverted outgoing types and introverted awkward types and pretty much everyone else too.

You make a compelling argument as usual.

Even with all the questions, it's not a lot of effort, you're right. I apply for the diversity visa every year and that's more work for maybe, oh about the same chance of success?

> I don't know where you got that idea

Admittedly I haven't seen a large percentage, but of the founders I've seen speak, all of them had a certain charm. Granted, there's a bias where people with these personalities put themselves out to be seen.

> but of the founders I've seen speak, all of them had a certain charm. Granted, there's a bias where people with these personalities put themselves out to be seen.

Correct, and also, people change over time as they learn and become more comfortable in a role. The difference in some founders' confidence even between the start and end of a YC batch (only 3 months) can be striking. That isn't true of everyone, of course, and it's fine if it's not.

I don't know how to "Make something people want", still applying it anyways. :)

Note that I get 422 responses from the server when I attempt to submit the form.

i applied several times and never got feedback which doesn’t help

YC responds to every application, so unless there was some weird email problem, I can't imagine why that would happen. Especially several times—that is really odd.

If you want me to look into what might have happened there, I'd be willing to try if you email hn@ycombinator.com.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40093529

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092169

"Rejections usually aren't personalized because that can't scale"

that says it all.

Has there been any founders that took the money and ran?

Do they still take 7% of the company off the bat?

Makes sense to apply just with less than a MVP?

Yes - there's no such thing as 'too early'. Of course if you've been working for a while, you should certainly show what you've made so far.

If you consider the rather common case of a YC application where the founders (1) have been working on X, (2) get into YC, (3) eventually drop X, and (4) eventually find something else that goes better...you're essentially skipping to step (4). (Not that the analogy holds in every way, but it does for "should you apply" purposes.)

i recently updated my iOS chatbot and it grew to 100$ mrr. do i have a chance? is it me or the market? :)

Should we apply? https://www.movably.com/

The title of the post indicates you should.

Dang is basically saying what we all know: it is very difficult to predict future performance of people, and YC deliberately tries to avoid common traps like “where did you go to school?” I mean, they still ask, so they aren’t exactly all-in on avoiding noisy heuristics, but they have a history of finding founders who can perform at a level most would-be founders can’t.

Like the blub paradox, only past high performers can recognize future high performers. YC uses the “are you one of us?” heuristic, which isn’t perfect since many “high performers” are accidents of fortune, but it is (as of now) still the best way to identify high-impact people — be one yourself and talk to people.

It’s the same story with hiring, especially in sports drafting. Even with million-dollar budgets and years of game-film and intensive pre-draft workouts, sports teams are effectively guessing when they draft someone. Analytically, it would be better to trade down for more picks. Dang’s post is analogous to trading down, in the sense of letting people know that the net is wider than most of us think, precisely because high-performing founders don’t fit the same mold as high-performing non-founders.

Having said all that, I’d be very surprised if the people reading all the applications and conducting all the interviews were all true high-performers. Surely some proportion, if not a majority, would merely be excellent human beings that were fortunate enough to find success. In fact, perseverance and grit may not be as important to founders as we think. It may be that the trait of never giving up is just very effective at leveraging fortune — given enough time, something good is bound to happen. This feels like an algorithm-smell. What we really want are founders who don’t need fortune, not those who optimize for fortune.

PG is a good example. I only know what he’s told us, but it seems to me that his defining trait is not grit. After one obvious pivot, he worked hard, provided value to users, and exited. Now, anyone who works 18 hr days for years has grit. You can’t succeed at something without persevering at it. But that’s not what stands out about PG. Neither does his intellect. There’s plenty of brilliant people in the world. What stands out about him is his genius — a unique mental perspective that sees straight lines where others see jagged lines. He and his partners basically invented the web-app. Where others saw a broken road going nowhere, they saw a highway to immense value.

The problem with genius is that it is really hard to distinguish from delusion. Someone tells you the road is straight but you see nothing but curves — what is one to think? When the person telling you this obvious untruth is also brilliant, it makes it that much harder to discern genius from delusion. PG writes about this when talking about “black swans” — the best ideas are the ideas that seem wrong but are actually right.

To return to YC and applying, I think it is likely that the brilliant geniuses (like PG) have largely moved on to other things that seem of far more interest to them. Raising children, speaking from experience, definitely fits that bill. If true, then what remains of YC would be brilliant, persevering, but not necessarily genius. That still makes for a world-class accelerator, but one that would struggle at identifying the best founders.

I would propose a new heuristic: has the applicant ever accidentally discovered the truth of something already known to be true, but which the applicant was unaware of. Did they make a straight line out of a broken one, without knowing it had already been straightened by others.

Call this the “unknowingly reinventing the wheel” heuristic. When did the applicant accidentally reinvent the wheel? As stupidly black-swan as it sounds, I want founders who are not merely brilliant and persevering, but also genius enough to invent something as profoundly valuable as the wheel.

I bet there are plenty of people in this thread who have unknowingly reinvented the wheel, and would love to hear the stories!

No thanks. I've applied every year for the first ten years since I was 20 and have not received any feedback on my rejections. The only times I did not apply, I went on to raise series A & B. I've seen friends get accepted with nothing but an idea and a Stanford degree.

POOF!

"Long time listener, first time caller", as they used to say in talk radio. [This is my first post; please be gentle... :-) ]

At least two reasons my apply.ycombinator.com submission will likely forever remain in "Save for Later" mode...

1) Founder's Personal Work and Education Histories: are both (a) highly-structured, and (b) can't auto-link/-copy from LinkedIn.... Like most prospective employers' "lazy" external-facing HRIS'. [Aside: Why can't Workday at least link to/ copy from LinkedIn for job app completion already?!] I'm already spending umpteen hours on-end doing this for all the prospective employers offering jobs I'd prefer to not need to take... And thus I was "spent" when I entered this form. Alternatively... Why can't I just attach my resume?

2) 1 min video, with audio, required. Feel free to label me "shy"/ "tin foil hat"/ have a paranoid threat profile/ etc.... But I'm just not comfortable voluntarily submitting recorded audio/ video of myself for "pre-short-listed" "one-off" use cases such as this. As an HN post from earlier today illustrates... M$FT (and, presumably "et al") can now make a deep fake of me with just one still image and less audio than YC is requesting. Why do I want to help them along? ;-) [Yes, Zoom et al likely has many hours of recorded video of me, because prior employers... And said employers likely signed away my audiovisual likeness without my (explicit) consent because "AI training", etc... And I've had to consent to recorded interviews for job opp'ties (but at least those were post-short-listing)... But I prefer to remain in denial about all that. :-) I've never claimed to be either rational or consistent... ;-) ]

And no, my idea(s) aren't Bookface/ Instagrim/ ClosedAI -caliber, so... No biggie, I guess. shrugs

Anywhoo... Thanks for reading! :-)

POOF!

Slow the earth's rotation using magnets.

hmmmm maybe i should make a video game with yall? its enticing meow idk

YC has increasingly come to resemble a selective community, with an almost cult-like allure. It presents itself to a broad audience, yet only those who share its unique ethos are granted admission. Nowadays, many applicants use the platform not just for entrepreneurial ventures but also to enhance their resumes. Consequently, a number of them lack genuine commitment.

Moreover, YC is notorious for advocating an intense work ethic—bordering on having no life outside of work—and for creating a tightly-knit community that some liken to a mob. Although these dynamics are not universally appreciated, many individuals join to benefit from the network. Nepotism also plays a role, as mediocre founders who have personal connections with partners often find an easier path in. In addition, there is a prevalent sense of self-deception among the members who offer startup and life advice, advice they themselves might not be equipped to provide. This is particularly questionable in today’s era of AI and new technologies, which challenges the relevance of their supposed wisdom.

Despite these criticisms, if you are young, hungry, and perhaps a bit naïve, giving YC a try could be worthwhile if you feel your vibe might align with theirs.

It is absolutely a cult which preys on the naïve. It’s amazing that young founders give up equity so cheaply to chase credentials that pay so poorly, on average, relative to FAANG.

Someone will win in every YC batch, and it’s YC itself, which holds all the lottery tickets. Most everyone else loses.

In asymmetric high risk/reward environments, what YC does is not unusual. When a trade has 99% of failing but 1% will pay for all the bets and then some, you simply cannot take large positional bets that results in equal power dynamics.

They've built something heavily coveted and exclusive that people participating cannot see that they are gambling with their time and life.

It's very comforting to founders to feel safety in numbers when operating in an illiquid market (the goal is to sell your shares to a buyer whether its secondary market or IPO) but know this:

Illiquid markets are rife with manipulation and false positives.

no. never.

YC is just a circle jerk for rich kids.

> If you've ever thought about applying to YC, here's a tip: just do it

Please don't.

Imagine you are looking for a plumber and there are 1000 postings, 900 of them people who've watched a couple of youtube clips about plumbing.

Does that sound like a good idea to you?

This is what's ruined the internet (and society). Instead of domain experts being thoughtful, we have marketers being full of shit. Oh well :)

Reason 3:

3) They know all your alt accounts and shitposting history (via device_id)

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You would say that, wouldn't you?

Yes, I'm super interested in reaching people for whom YC would be a great fit, but who don't apply because they doubt themselves. Partly because that's been such a big part of my own experience.

My original comment was really meant playfully, I don't think there's any reason to doubt your good intentions.

Like many jokes though, there was a grain of earnest feeling there. To be totally pretentious about it, take Koan 16 from The Gateless Gate

> Ummon asked: "The world is such a wide world, why do you answer a bell and don ceremonial robes?"

If I could rephrase that to "tech startups are so hot, how come you moderate/lurk a forum and just talk about entrepreneurship instead of doing it?", I like to ask it you Dan, or anyone else who thinks YC is cool but isn't quitting their day job to pitch their moonshot.