first of all, we do care about great products. a lot. though we still try not to fund great products that we don't believe will become great businesses (there are many, many reasons why this might not be the case). it's critical to us you have some specific ideas about who your first customers will be.
second, we often ask questions that are already covered in your application. the way you explain what you do is incredibly important. if you can't clearly and concisely explain what you do, and get people excited, you will struggle to recruit, sell, raise money, retain people, etc.
third, we are happy to fund ideas with lots of technical risk. we have funded nuclear fusion companies, rocket companies, synthetic biology companies, etc that are years from a first sale. i don't know where this meme that we will only fund companies with traction came from, but it's not true. that said, we expect you to progress as quickly as you possibly can for whatever you're doing.
fourth, i believe i am the youngest YC partner and i am 29. there is no way you were interviewed by 3 young boys in their early 20s. however, i don't think the age of YC partners should matter, as long as they can evaluate and help companies.
I didn't take the article as anything negative against YC. The founders were thrown off their confidence early in the interview, and the interview is only 10 minutes, so it was impossible to recover. They left the room feeling like they bombed the interview, which was a fair assessment I guess.
That said, you might be missing a lot of interesting people and ideas with only 10 minutes to evaluate both.
definitely--it would be great if we could spend more time on interviews.
the tradeoff we make for very quick evaluations is that we are able to look at every company that wants to be part of YC with no introduction or connection to us whatsoever.
You guys are interested in funding great products and companies but of course you're interested in making money. That's the only way you can sustain a great thing like YC that has the ability to fund great things.
Your post yesterday about how you haven't yet passed on a unicorn speaks shows that you have succeeded (so far) on your purpose which is to fund companies that will be hugely successful.
> i don't know where this meme that we will only fund companies with traction came from, but it's not true.
Regardless of the selection criteria, would you say that as the batches have gotten larger, there is more of an advantage to having traction going into demo day? I can't help but feel like, at least for a consumer web startup, if you're just launching your product 4 - 6 weeks before demo day then you're probably not going to get as much value out of YC as you might otherwise.
I don't think that's true. I think even on-the-napkin stage ideas also can use a lot of YC input to drive development in right direction. I believe it is important to at least have a prototype at least a few weeks before demo day in these programs, but that depends, of course.
I think you're looking at companies that would fail without sucking in every last bit of YC juice. Those kind of companies will fail anyway.
Given the same company before and after launch, it's hard to see why waiting until you have traction before doing YC would decrease your chances of being successful. At best you get a lot of interest on demo day and save a month you would have otherwise spent raising money, and at worst you're not really any worse off than before. (This is assuming you can figure out how to make a good product on your own, and that not doing YC earlier won't slow you down at all. Not true for all startups.)
There's no question that earlier companies still get a ton of value out of YC and that it's still worth doing even pre-traction, but that wasn't really my question.
Is your shift key broken? This is funny because it's clearly intentional. I know you have one because you made the parentheses. Ohh, and you made the YC uppercase, no way we can lowercase that.
second, we often ask questions that are already covered in your application. the way you explain what you do is incredibly important. if you can't clearly and concisely explain what you do, and get people excited, you will struggle to recruit, sell, raise money, retain people, etc.
third, we are happy to fund ideas with lots of technical risk. we have funded nuclear fusion companies, rocket companies, synthetic biology companies, etc that are years from a first sale. i don't know where this meme that we will only fund companies with traction came from, but it's not true. that said, we expect you to progress as quickly as you possibly can for whatever you're doing.
fourth, i believe i am the youngest YC partner and i am 29. there is no way you were interviewed by 3 young boys in their early 20s. however, i don't think the age of YC partners should matter, as long as they can evaluate and help companies.