Whenever someone makes a system to select for the best, someone else will figure out how to game it. Preparation past a certain point might actually do more harm than good.<p>It's a very comprehensive list, and I don't want to imply it's bad to organize such a list. I was just surprised at how much stuff has been written about "how to impress YC." The goal is to make something people want, not to impress YC.<p>Thank you for the list though. It's an awesome collection. I just realized how negative I probably sounded, so I wanted to clarify that your time is very much appreciated in organizing this. I was just wondering how much time YC actually spends defending against people who are primarily trying to game YC rather than trying to make a valuable startup. Maybe it's not even an issue.
I have no data to back it up but if YC interview setup is even slightly inspired by the YC video guidelines [1] then being genuine is better than having scripted answers for everything.<p>Of course there is a point for balance and being unprepared is not the way to go.<p>[1] <a href="http://ycombinator.com/video.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/video.html</a>
Hi,
I'm applying this batch.<p>Is there a way to print-preview my application to see how it'll look after submission? I'm mainly concerned about some of my answers which look lengthy. And does YC have bias against explanatory lengthy answers if they add substance to the meat?<p>I've read somewhere that each partner gets only 2-mins to spend on an appln. With a 1.5 minute video and two founder profiles (which they seemed to have made out separately this time) how do they even skim through these apps?<p>Or is it the alumni who reads deep and based on their comments (say if we are already pizza profitable, yes we are!) our app gets bumped up in priority queue of partners?
Tip: you can get advice posted on dead blogs(e.g. posterous) by using the wayback machine: <a href="http://archive.org/web/" rel="nofollow">http://archive.org/web/</a>