Lessons Learned from our YC Interview (with Tips!)

The #1 lesson we learned from our interviews is to be prepared.<p>Pitch everybody you know on your idea, and have the smartest people you know poke as many holes as possible, and address them. Then do it over again.

My best piece of advice... 10 minutes goes by <i>really</i> fast.

For whatever it's worth to you, you will readily get more than 5 minutes of semi-solicited opinions about your prospects and strategy from any VC manager or partner you talk to. You may even score customer introductions. <p>The solid "yes" or "no" is a major feature of the YC process though.<p>

awesome insight on the interview process - thanks for posting this

This seems to indicate that a fully-working demo is not what you want to present to YC. Since all you have is ten minutes, I would think you'd want a more focused form of presentation.<p>Put it this way -- are you a magician? If you present a demo that effectively says "pick a card, any card," you'd better be. If you're demoing Google (the site it is today) for YC, it's probably not the best sell to just let someone type anything they want into it.<p>When you only have ten minutes, you need to retain as much control as possible over your message. Present the article to sell the magazine.

You could of directed them to comics by explaining that it was the what your alpha users had worked on. I think demo's are much better than pp, lets face it a demo proves you can actually deliver a product. Just make sure you take control and not get side tracked on uncompleted stuff.

An interesting corollary might be "Lessons for YC". The extreme time crunch just doesn't seem conducive to making accurate evaluations.<p>Of <i>course</i> the people with the money make the rules; it's not a question of power, but every process can be improved.<p>A 10-minute interview tests presentation skills more than anything related to the idea, technology, or founders' other abilities. This skews in favor of quick impressions and existing YC bias (towards ideas they already were waiting for someone to present).<p>I wonder if the median application received even that much (10 minutes' worth) consideration. It seems like a continuous process would work better, with staggered starts; looking at 20 applications every week rather than 500 in one week would allow a more thorough review.<p>Then instead of going to the same 10 weekly dinners, it would be a sequence of 10; e.g. weeks 31-40. The only real trick would be Demo Day; but that could be rescheduled for every 3 months instead of every 6 months (or monthly, and investors who are vetted get a card that gets punched every time and on the 11th visit they get kicked out if they haven't invested in anyone yet).<p>Now the acceptees have a couple months before the "official" start; other people might be ready to apply <i>now</i> but it's a 6-month wait for the next batch to get in and 8 months to "start"! That's an eternity in Internet Time.<p>Another advantage would be allowing the continuous pool of acceptees to relocate to the #1 spot (Silicon Valley) regardless of the time of year. It's a little silly that the Bostonians have to move there afterward <i>anyway</i> -- it's like a conflict of interest for YC, "Help the individual start-ups by putting them in the #1 spot" or "Try to help the #2 start-up scene play catch-up via imports".<p>Of course I could be wrong about everything, it's up to you.