I'd like to know, what happens if your answers are over 120 words, are they cut off? less likely to be read? not read for not following directions?<p>We've got a very long answer to one question but the rest are all under 120 words.
If it's the "What is your company going to make?" question, you have a problem on your hands. If you can't reformulate your pitch to be convincing and succinct, I would bet that your idea is just not a compelling idea. So try to come up with a short and sweet pitch, and if you can't, you should really rethink whether your idea makes sense. Compressibility of the pitch is probably a good first-order heuristic for judging the worth of an idea.<p>If it's a different question, just delete stuff until you get it under 120 words. We just wrote too much stuff for all of the questions, then deleted the least important stuff to get it under 120 words.<p>These are just my talking-out-my-ass, non-expert and non-YC-partner-mindreading two cents.
I'm actually kind of surprised so many people are asking this question. There's really no reason to cut off your response after 120 words (we're talking words, not characters). To implement something like that would require splitting the response by a ' ' delim, and then dropping everything after 120 words. Talk about a waste of resources on the server. Storage is much cheaper than time in this case. Plus, if I were reading the applications, I would get annoyed really quick if the last few words of every long answer got cut off.
Check out this thread: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61901" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61901</a>, it has PG's response to the 120 words and verbosity along with others.