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Our YC Interviews

178 点作者 gdi2290大约 11 年前

22 条评论

patio11大约 11 年前
In general, when doing sales, sometimes it is easier to lead with the pain point and then introduce the solution. For example, &quot;Setting up a dev environment takes a day. Sometimes you need one in a minute, like if you&#x27;re interviewing somebody and need them to demonstrate coding ability on a company laptop. We turn any browser window into a fully-functional dev environment, and it&#x27;s as ephemeral as the browser window is, so if you close it the company laptop is back in its original state without requiring a sysadmin to wipe it and start over. Next applicant gets a new browser window. Is everyone clear on why a dev environment which doesn&#x27;t take 2 days to set up or tear down is a useful thing to have? Great! Would you like me to talk about who is willing to pay serious money for this, or do you want to hear what special sauce goes into making this Just Work for your favorite programming stack?&quot;<p>My guess is that even technically inclined people connect to that more than &quot;OK, so we have cloud-based virtualization technology which spins up ephemeral application containers then hooks them to a proprietary in-browser IDE and shell prompt. It&#x27;s a Frankenstein monster of Docker, Github, Heroku, and a browser-based IDE. No, the IDE&#x27;s <i>not</i> the primary value add. No, AWS&#x2F;Heroku is not a direct competitor. No, no, you don&#x27;t get it, let me try again...&quot;<p>Edit: Incidentally if you just conceptualize the product as pain-first rather than solution-first then you&#x27;ll phrase your strapline as &quot;Dev environment for any stack on any machine in a minute&quot; rather than &quot;Virtualized <i>insert words increasingly disconnected from anything you care about here</i>.&quot;
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vecter大约 11 年前
I&#x27;ve helped a bunch of people prepare for YC interviews and the biggest problem by an order of magnitude is <i>not being able to concisely explain what you actually do</i>. That may sound crazy, but I&#x27;ve yet to review an application that clearly and simply states what the company is building, why it&#x27;s important, and how they&#x27;re going to get adoption. It seems these guys had the same issue, since Guy mentioned that they spent the first 5 minutes explaining what they do.<p>This is a symptom of a more general problem: people severely underestimate how difficult it is to convey an idea to another human being such that they actually understand it. Being able to do so is no small task, and I wish more people would recognize the value of this skill.
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CoffeeDregs大约 11 年前
[pre-apologies for the CAPS, but they seemed warranted.]<p>I definitely appreciate the analysis, since analyses of any kind of stressful interaction are helpful. But I did want to comment on a small thing:<p><pre><code> YC is a very special kind of interview. </code></pre> I assume that this is referencing the previous bits of TFA, so I&#x27;d suggest that possibly YC is a <i></i>COMPLETELY TYPICAL INTERVIEW FOR THIS KIND OF SITUATION<i></i>.<p>HN is a wonderful resource, but the idea that a YC interview is of &quot;a special kind&quot; is naive. [I&#x27;m sure the down-votes are heading my way...] YC is a type of VC-ish firm. Getting to pitch to <i>any</i> VC is rare and the kinds of questions mentioned in TFA are pretty standard. YC is going to invest their time in you and that is quite expensive for them to do, so it makes sense for them to push you in lots of directions to see how <i>broadly</i> you&#x27;ve thought about the problem.<p>Random: I was in a board meeting yesterday getting peppered with questions about AWS AMI setups, framework choices and API load resiliency... And I&#x27;m just an <i>advisor</i>. Investors care a <i>lot</i> about a <i>lot of things</i>.
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xiaoma大约 11 年前
I&#x27;m also a Hack Reactor alum who interviewed at YC this round and our team also met with Justin and Gary. Their feedback was basically, &quot;why haven&#x27;t you guys quit your jobs and started building this?&quot; To be totally honest, I wasn&#x27;t expecting such direct feedback, but they were right. Not only that but we already have pretty much every thing we need from the Hack Reactor network in terms of hiring advantages and connections with investors.<p>I dearly love YC for everything they&#x27;ve shared with the world and PG essays are the only reason I left my profitable non-tech business and moved to the US, but we can build this without them. I&#x27;ve quit my job and taken the plunge. We&#x27;ve gotten a first customer and we&#x27;re going for it. I hope Guy and Shu do, too. I know them and they&#x27;re formidable both in technical terms and in drive.<p>The question isn&#x27;t about who will &quot;give&quot; you a chance. It&#x27;s who can stop you. Maybe Github or Docker will both care enough about and make the effort to take your business. That doesn&#x27;t mean they can succeed or that you&#x27;ll be helpless wallflowers when it happens. Based on what I know of you, Shao and Guy, you <i>will</i> still find a win.
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mbleigh大约 11 年前
Isn&#x27;t this pitched idea basically exactly <a href="http://nitrous.io/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitrous.io&#x2F;</a> -- especially with their recently launched &quot;Hack on Nitrous.io&quot; button for GitHub?
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elwell大约 11 年前
We were interviewed by the same group (Jessica, Paul B., Trever, Michael), and the experience was very similar.<p><pre><code> “Here we’ll show you a demo,” Shao offered. “No, we want you to tell us what you’re building,” Paul fired back with a very skeptical look. </code></pre> We, too, tried to show our demo and Paul gave us a skeptical look and said something along the lines of &quot;I&#x27;m distracted by pictures.&quot;<p>The interviewing team is very skilled in the art of extracting the essence of your startup and the possible shortcomings. I was impressed in how each of their questions had an obvious and very precise purpose.<p>Additionally of interest, I can&#x27;t remember Jessica asking a single question. I think she was observing the relational chemistry of our team during the interview.
rdl大约 11 年前
Wow, that&#x27;s a really detailed and thoughtful analysis of your interview experience. It also successful as a promotional piece for your project -- I&#x27;d be more likely to use the tool based on this.<p>In general, the advice is &quot;listen to the no, but not the why&quot;, but I think that doesn&#x27;t apply with YC -- the reason YC gave is probably an accurate reflection of what YC believes based on what you said in your interview (and application, and whatever other information they had).
winnie大约 11 年前
What a great writeup!<p>I also interviewed at YC last week but didn&#x27;t get in. Our product is fairly simple -- we make it easier for anyone to book a service and we&#x27;re starting w&#x2F;the massage industry vertical. Here&#x27;s part of the rejection email we received:<p>&quot;This wasn’t an easy decision because, as you pointed out, there’s clearly a lot wrong with the systems that people use to book massages. It’s a similar problem to the one in many other appointment based businesses, and solving it would be valuable. Given the nature of the market and competing products, though, we could not quite see how you’d build a defensible product. Additionally, based on the way you’re planning on structuring your fees and relationships, it isn’t clear how you’d be able to lock your customers in for long enough to recoup your expenses and profitably acquire new customers.&quot;<p>We also applied for and&#x2F;or interviewed at other incubators. What sets YC apart from those other experiences is the great feedback we get from them.
bambax大约 11 年前
While it&#x27;s very nice of YC to send a detailed rejection email stating actual reasons, the reasons themselves don&#x27;t seem very strong.<p>Isn&#x27;t it true of any project at an early stage that it could, in theory, be wiped out by a well executed competing offer from an existing player?<p>Would Youtube exist if Google Video didn&#x27;t suck? Github &#x2F; Google Code? Whatsapp &#x2F; Google Hangouts?<p>What prevented Github from inventing Docker? or any big tech company from inventing Dropbox? (etc.)
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vqc大约 11 年前
Thank you for the insanely detailed write up.<p>What I want to know is what kind of magic YC saw in the application that got the team the interview. Because even from the team&#x27;s perspective &quot;There was no business model to speak of, the market size was unclear, we didn’t have much of any secret sauce, we hadn’t been working on it that long and the list goes on.&quot;<p>Is this an instance where the team was so compelling it warranted an interview?
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mathattack大约 11 年前
For those who have succeeded, is boxing the right mindset?<p>I find that boxing is the right mindset for low-thought sales. &quot;I&#x27;m going to keep fighting until I hit my quota of 10 gym membership sales for the week.&quot;<p>For collaborative discussions, I find the Judo or Jiu Jitsu mindset more appropriate. If you push, I won&#x27;t push back, I will pull you in the same direction. If you pull, I won&#x27;t pull back, I will move my momentum in the same direction.<p>In more practical terms, it doesn&#x27;t treat comments like objections, it treats them as suggestions. &quot;Have I thought about market X? Oh yes, it&#x27;s a very interesting market. Here is what we thought....&quot;
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nickstinemates大约 11 年前
If you want to come work on this product at Docker: get in touch. nick@docker.com
AndrewKemendo大约 11 年前
&gt;Shao and I had lots of experience in starting companies, product management, management consulting and developing<p>Maybe this is just me being nitpicky but &quot;lots of experience&quot; to me says that this person is an expert in their field. Guy obviously has done great things, but I wouldn&#x27;t say he is an expert. Flawed as it may be, the 10,000 hour rule I think is a good rule of thumb to determine expert status and is roughly 10 years of full time intensive work, which he doesn&#x27;t really have.<p>This is part of a wider issue with the tech community that seems hypocritical. In one breath many in the tech world say that &quot;results are what matter&quot; and that age and experience are nothing but numbers. Then in the next breath these same people will tout about all the experience they have and how they are experts and have this and that experience.<p>Can&#x27;t have it both ways though. Either experience qua experience is worth something or it isn&#x27;t. I would generally fall on the side of it isn&#x27;t, so lets just not even mention it.
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mehrdada大约 11 年前
It is interesting that they have misspelled &#x27;jl&#x27;s last name twice, especially since one instance of it is in an email they quote from her.
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skolos大约 11 年前
I think that ideas have nothing to do with people. There is a general human race intelligence eather where ideas boil and and when one particular human comes up with an idea, there are probably 10 others that at the same time have the same idea. If you investigate carefully you&#x27;ll notice that there are no breakthroughs. All ideas are incremental. Einstein was genius, but even his work was incremental [1].<p>Why I am saying this - we applied to YC this year with exactly same idea. It looks like even details of the implementation are similar.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Relativity_priority_dispute</a>
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jesusmichael大约 11 年前
Good job... your insights were great and description of the event was well written. As a developer I think there is a need but I do see point of YC, that your position is precarious.<p>Good luck!
moeamaya大约 11 年前
In the terms of a venture backed startup, I’m not sure your company makes sense (only based on a shallow reading of what was posted). While you have traction, a talented team, solid tech, and a potential business model, there’s not a clear understanding of the next step whether broadly or even in the developer community. I would love to have a dev environment ready in a few min but I don’t know how that tech extends beyond my own pain point.
6thSigma大约 11 年前
We interviewed twice and were rejected as well.<p>Overall the experience was awesome and we hope to get the opportunity to meet with them again.<p>One thing we didn&#x27;t realize was how nerve-wracking waiting for the phone call &#x2F; email would be. Our email came at 11pm. We figured that after 9ish it would be an email but weren&#x27;t sure.
dror大约 11 年前
<a href="http://beta.howtox.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;beta.howtox.com&#x2F;</a> or someone else with a similar idea?
zaroth大约 11 年前
Hopefully everyone feels free to leave their comments about this one, I really enjoy reading it, thanks.
emmiechang大约 11 年前
Good Luck for the future! Great to chat with you at the interviews. Keep working hard.
diziet大约 11 年前
Why rent a hotel on YC&#x27;s money if you live in SF? That seems wasteful~
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