Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
nkotov
CamelCaseName
I feel like I've read this exact comment before on another "Apply to YC!" thread.
So I went through and applied for the first time, and honestly, I felt like a lot of the questions were very obvious? Could be because I come from a finance / business background vs. a CS background, but I was shocked that people would consider these questions non-obvious.
Hopefully this doesn't come off as arrogant. If it helps, I was rejected from YC, so perhaps I hadn't thought through the questions enough!
immibis
Programmers like making cool things without regard to profit.
dartos
That’s why programming and business development are different skill sets
meiraleal
I think you are right but even being obvious the questions it doesn't mean your answers were good or what they were expecting.
throwaway2037
This an interesting reply. I did not read it as arrogant. Can you share what questions you felt were obvious?
paulddraper
I've never been thru YC, though I know many who have.
Unless you are already well-informed, well-connected, and well-resourced, it seems like a no-brainer.
(1) Education (2) Connections (3) Near-guaranteed seed fundraising
And two of those three you keep even if you don't wind up succeeding.
999900000999
I feel like YC is a bit like the music biz. They only sign companies which would have a chance without them in the first place.
I think I'll just keep working on my side projects. They'll never be billion dollar ideas, and that's ok...
ghufran_syed
shouldn’t the relevant metric be whether they increase your chance of success more than the cost (equity) you sell them in return?
tikkun
Yes, and in comparison to whatever your best alternative would be (i.e. max increase of success odds of giving someone else the same equity and same time commitment).
throwaway2037
Isn't that the point of the music business? They look at talent, then decide if select the "ramen profitable" ones and (try to) hyperscale their popularity with judicious A&R spending. I think people outside the music industry criminally underrate effect A&R. It is really the difference between nobody and famous.
For anyone not in the know about the music industry, "A&R" means:
> Artists and repertoire... It refers to the department of a record company that is in charge of talent scouting and the creative development of recording artists.fuzztester
>I feel like YC is a bit like the music biz. They only sign companies which would have a chance without them in the first place.
Yes, and also like book publishers.
ahstilde
> They'll never be billion dollar ideas, and that's ok...
Yeah! That's totally ok.
But YC's business model is funding companies which will be that big. Otherwise it can't work.
pclmulqdq
I'm pretty convinced that YC's alpha mostly comes from the fact that they can shine a turd into something that doesn't lose them much (or makes a modest profit) when it fails.
Many other VCs that have survived for that long have a huge IPO under their belt, like Google or Uber. The best in the YC portfolio are probably Stripe, Dropbox, and Coinbase. These are great companies and great exits, but don't support 1000+ $0 failures. They do deliver the goods if your failures have a ~0% return rather than a -100% return.
That is a good thing for you if you want to learn how to grow a company, though, because it is a great sign that YC actually works as an education opportunity.
sebastiennight
I did some back-of-the-napkin math when I first applied to YC, and IIRC just based on their unicorn and almost-unicorn companies, and assuming any outcome below $100M was equal to zero, joining YC still gave you an expected value of about $20MM.
So I think it's a way better deal than you're representing here.
mikepurvis
Twitch and Cruise are other household name ones but it seems there are quite a few others that aren’t: https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/exits
Am surprised not to see Airbnb on the list tbh.
dzonga
not every company is going to massive or in the billions. but plenty of companies in the 100m - 500m revenue range. to get there, yeah you usually need vc money.
999900000999
I work on small games.
I don't really want to waste time applying for funding though. I went through a phase where I was spending a lot of time on just trying to get feedback.
Aside from a few friends saying ohh neat, I didn't really get a response. Indie games aren't really billion dollar prospects...
ikekkdcjkfke
Network effects though
si_164
same here
thecleaner
I love YC and how generous they are with their knowledge and tools. Never did it and wont be applying but just wanted to say that the Dalton + Michael videos make me calm somehow. Not sure why.
breck
the shocking thing is how few (any?) other vcs copied them on this.
- startup school
- hackernews
- safe and other legal docs
- + all the content
Then there's bookface and the internal software.
YC has the greatest business model in the world with (I'm assuming) top returns and seems like it would be so easy for any VC to copy it (write great software and give away useful things to entrepreneurs) and instead, 99% of VCs do Squarespace landing pages instead.
bbor
I think the trick is that they're not a VC at all, they're a startup accelerator. Their primary competitors are TechStars, Seedcamp, AngelPad, and Antler. They seem to be putting up a fight, despite 0 name recognition comparitively!
https://www.techstars.com/blog
Eumenes
Does YC accept founders that aren't 22-26 years old in the Bay area and went to MIT, Berkeley, or Caltech? I've met quite a few in person and they fit a very specific archetype. Perhaps thats whose applying, but I do wonder.
tptacek
Yes.
paxys
Founder profiles are all public, so you can check for yourself – https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/founders
Or was this just supposed to be snarky?
stackskipton
Didn't know that existed. Looking through there, the answer to the question seems to be, most founders come from Top 20 Universities with heavy weighting towards Top 5.
ghufran_syed
thanks for the link, i think this is the best possible answer to the question “does yc accept $people_like_me?”. I love how open yc is about stuff like this - I just learned that 3 people from one of my UK universities were yc founders at some point! (southampton university)
tgma
I always am curious when someone asks this question from an open forum why wouldn't they simply fill out the form and get a definitive answer?
What we know for sure is they don't accept founders that don't fill out the form[1].
[1] with a few exceptions, perhaps.
ghufran_syed
Because that would give you exactly one data point, and for your decision-making, you instead want to understand the distribution
amy-petrik-214
For sure, they accept Stanford grads for example, and Harvard or Princeton sometimes have a shot
aadhavans
> MIT, Berkeley, or Caltech
Don't forget Stanford.
undefined
pxeger1
If you start a spring batch, what letter will you use to disambiguate it from summer batches? (S24)
dang
That was the first question that came up when Dalton announced this at YC yesterday :)
I vote for P because it's the second letter of Spring and it goes with printemps and primavera.
breck
N for spriNg
and then the loop will be: nsfw
santiagobasulto
Nice! But obligatory calling it Primavera all the time, no cheating!
bradgessler
On brand for "do things that don't scale"
ks2048
Easier to just name batches using seconds-since-the-epoch, so you don't have worry about such collisions.
zulban
They'll use daylight savings time, so S25 is spring 2024, until next year where it falls back to S25 being summer 2025.
mattigames
Embrace modern glyphs, use the summer emoji and the autumn emoji (I tried to add them here but unfortunately HN removes them from comments)
undefined
j45
I'm not sure I understand the relevance. More startups can try to happen? Maybe it can be more continuous supports being 4 seasons instead of 2?
wlesieutre
They mean how people write “S23” for summer 2023 batch or “W23” for winter, since there are two seasons that start with S it would have to be abbreviated P25 or R25 or SP25 etc. instead
undefined
slilo
V for Vernal!
re-thc
S24S (Summer 2024 Spring edition)
Oras
I applied for W22, got interviewed and was rejected.
The rejection email was quite thoughtful and helpful. I applied twice after that but didn’t get an interview. Fingers crossed for this one.
Why I’m applying?
1. Been a daily reader for HN for the last 10 years. Seen companies going from “Launch HN” to be a hugely successful within years.
2. As I’m not from the US, getting accepted would mean I will have at least warm intros to US VCs and build a good network.
3. Being through the YC school back in 2021, then bootstrapping for a year and a half, then joining another startup as a CTO, I started realizing how good YC advice is. Some people like me had to go through it practically to understand the value of YC videos.
sroussey
“Joining another startup as CTO”
Here is what that means to my ears:
1) I joined as cofounder. Cofounder can and do take whatever title they want. Great!
2) I joined at CTO because there are 500 engineers and it needs an office of the CTO. Let’s not call it a startup, and YC has nothing to offer you. Great!
3) I joined a small startup and they gave me the CTO title. Yikes!
Bad signal. Don’t have much confidence in the CEO after hearing that and I assume the company will fold.
Or if it succeeds—prepare to be fired. No room to hire above you. Even as a VP, a CEO could hire a CTO. But even better if no title inflation at all. No one like a demotion, so if you aren’t perfect then you are gone. And you will take a lot of (now dead) equity with you.
I guess YC would teach you these things…
mikepurvis
Not that big a deal to correct the inflation later. I joined a startup fourteen years ago as the first employee and it was initially “software architect” on my business cards; later that was revised down to senior engineer when an actual ladder was put in place.
sroussey
For a management and executive position, it is a bit more perilous.
A hired CTO at a startup is often really a tech lead. Not always. Better to use a vague “head of xyz” in such cases. Vague and easily transformed.
You see second and third time founders do that.
Title inflation is fun and cheaper than cash. But not really transferable.
For example, I had a friend, which was a founder CTO and a team of 15 and wanted to be a director at Facebook.
I asked him how he would deal with leveling questions for other managers and their engineers. His company hadn’t implemented ladders yet (no need at that size) and had no idea what I was talking about.
moomoo11
Chill
sroussey
Ok, true.
But also, some of these things seem like secret knowledge, but shouldn’t be.
jhgvhfe
[dead]
kayson
$1M in credits seems insane to me. Is it just from the number of companies offering credits? Or that compute is marked up so highly?
Related - what can you expect in terms of credits if you're not part of YC? Whether going solo/bootstrapping or another incubator?
pclmulqdq
Compute is marked up and a lot of those credits are only for AI compute.
Also, those same credit deals are offered to most "serious" startups, including those with backing from any VC.
paulddraper
> Related - what can you expect in terms of credits if you're not part of YC? Whether going solo/bootstrapping or another incubator?
To follow up, in practice these credits are available for any VC-backed startup. (This is a business decision... they know you have financial means + appetite to spend big in the future.)
There are some credits available to any new startup, but much less.
paulddraper
Compute is a drug.
AWS gives $100k ($400k for AI).
GCP gives $200k ($350k for AI).
Azure gives $150k.
They'll happily give out six figures in exchange for making millions.
dartos
Vendor lock in is real
paulddraper
Right, what are you gonna do? Spend most of a million bucks and a year just to migrate?
levkk
Credits are given on a case by case basis, and being part of an accelerator or being funded by a well known VC helps the application process.
cassonmars
Still have the requirement to stay in SF for three months?
dameyawn
Yes, I'm also interested. Will have a new baby, so while I'd like to do in-person, it wouldn't be feasible for the new few (or more?) batches. Though I still plan on grinding either way.
thimkerbell
Why is it in SF if attendees are encouraged to limit themselves to YC, home and the gym?
topicseed
The "YC" part.
red-iron-pine
VC corporate overlords limit you to minimum gym & home time -- and you need us to explain why?
hobobaggins
SF or the bay area? SF itself is kinda not so nice, but when it was south bay/SV, it seems like it could be a lot nicer.
icy
What’s the realistic likelihood of getting accepted as a solo founder? My potential cofounder dropped out and I’d really really like to apply for this batch.
undefined
meiraleal
Wanna partner-up? :) I'm in a similar situation.
iEchoic
There are solo founders every batch, so realistic enough.
Hermankayy
Interviewed in 22 and rejected. Ended up joining another accellerator and ended up having the startup acquired. Looking to start something new again in the mobile app/ai space. Love to chat with anyone interested in applying together
juanfrank77
I can be that person. Currently working on a web app on the AI space.
dockerd
Can you share more details? Linkedin profile?
vigneshraj009
How do I get in touch with you?
totalnoob2024
Hello, I am completely new to this and the MFN safe/375k$ are confusing me. What if my company gets accepted into YC but never receives any further funding/investment after that?
Do I still get the 375k$ and if so, how many shares do they get for it or is it included in the 7% already? Or do I only get 125k$ initially for 7% and the 375k$ later when there is a next round?
I am a noob in the startup world, but this feels like YC could be abused to get "easy money" while in reality the founders never intend to scale the company beyond that / hope for organic growth.
Can someone explain, please? Thank you!
tamimio
I always wondered, is YC worth the try? Are there any hidden details that are usually not mentioned? I hope to get answers from individuals who went through the process.
pclmulqdq
My suggestions:
1. If you sell dev tools or sell to startups, YC gives you a great captive market in your peer group. They are also highly motivated to make "you scratch my back, I scratch yours deals."
2. If you have no connections to VC or a spotty resume, but your team is highly motivated, YC gives you those connections and overcomes the resume.
3. If you don't care that much about your success in this particular company but want to be a serial founder, being ex-YC is good.
4. If you are not self-motivated, it may be your only hope of developing the habits you need.
Otherwise, ~10% for $500k is probably a bad deal, especially for an AI company or a company with any traction at all.
Applied late once to YC with an idea (not a great one) and got rejected, probably because of solo founding.
tamimio
Thank you for the suggestions!
> Otherwise, ~10% for $500k is probably a bad deal, especially for an AI company or a company with any traction at all.
So it seems.
n2d4
Going through it for my second time now, it's definitely worth it. There's an excess of smart people and it's transformational for any startup, but especially if you build in devtools like us. The network is strong and supportive and there's a strong connection even among people who never met; for example, lots of unicorn+ founders have their personal phone numbers on their profiles.
The strongest argument for YC is how few alums speak out against it. Almost all of the negative comments come from people who haven't done the program.
neilv
> The strongest argument for YC is how few alums speak out against it. Almost all of the negative comments come from people who haven't done the program.
I think YC has merit, but I'm just going to push back on this particular logic:
1. The set of people who've done X is already selected for people who were willing to do X in the first place.
2. In business, burning bridges with an influential network in which you have an in... forfeits some advantage, and probably invites a lot of downside.
(On #2, an occasional person might decide it's a matter of principle, or, less-principled, do the math and decide they can get more individual brand mileage out of saying something provocatively negative. But that seems unlikely and rare. Related dynamics we've seen might help our intuition: how Hollywood almost universally shielded abusers for so long, and how it's very rare for a student wronged by a prestigious alma mater university to go public about it.)
So I think there are stronger arguments for YC.
n2d4
Maybe that applies to people going to Gawker or whatever and writing an exposé on YC, but that's not what I'm talking about. There are very few people who, at the end of the batch in a private one-on-one conversation, say that joining YC was a mistake. That certainly wouldn't risk their career (neither would critiquing YC on HN, for that matter).
Claiming that all human opinions are fake and based on self-interest is a very cynical view. Besides you could apply the same logic to big tech companies, or elite universities, or whatever, but there are plenty of Xooglers who say the company went to shit, or Harvard grads who say they regret the student debt.
breck
> The strongest argument for YC is how few alums speak out against it.
Are you sure this is the case? Might it be that alums who speak out against YC suffer repercussions?
I praise 90% of what YC does. But I also call them out on their mistakes. https://x.com/garrytan blocks me, which is, I'm sad to report, the smallest of the repercussions they've taken against me.
I love YC, but they need to grow some thicker skin and quit hiding in their Silicon Valley bubble.
breck
Here is a perfect example: a nice helpful post, with highly constructive feedback, but is mildly critical of YC gets [flagged] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41180917
YC = YCensornator.
Don't give me the B.S. about "HN != YC". We all know that's mostly untrue.
tptacek
If you're planning to do a business for the first time that will raise money, it's probably a no-brainer.
foldr
Excuse the pedantry, but there seems to be a missing qualification on what kind of business it is. Almost all of the world’s businesses raise starting capital without help from YC.
ant6n
I feel like they may use like soft red flags, and don’t consider you if you have more than one. Perhaps things like solo founder (even with team), not based in US, not working on currently hot topic, something involving physical assets/hardware?
I’m not sure, it’s a feeling I got after I tried applying. Their rejection response was quite short.
tamimio
> something involving physical assets/hardware?
Very interesting. So unless it’s purely software and the $current bandwagon, then it’s out? Better not to try then. As an engineer, all my ideas involve hardware and robotics too. Sure, software is there, but it’s definitely not the only thing.
ant6n
Well, I'd say you're allowed one strike, but not multiple.
hobobaggins
Well, that would make sense, wouldn't it?
breck
> Are there any hidden details that are usually not mentioned?
Yes. In general there are hidden details but what those specifically are, I can't tell you.
I can speak freely since I was expelled from YC.
# Background
I did YC twice, in 2008 and 2009. YC invested ~$15,000 in both startups. I don't keep a close eye on it, but I think nowadays they give you 33.3333x as much money.
My first startup we shut down. I didn't know what I was doing. My co-founder was smarter and went on to do multiple successful companies, I think a couple funded by YC.
My second company got acqui-hired by Microsoft in 2014. YC got $0 since it was only 3 people and YC was our only investor and it wasn't worth it to do a stock acquisition, especially since the Seahawks had just won the Superbowl and the Microsoft Biz Dev folks were in a good mood.
I felt relieved I could at least "pay back" YC, but PG was aghast when I emailed him that: "You don't have to pay back YC. I'd be horrified if I thought you were even thinking about that. We expect to lose money on most of our investments. The small number of big hits compensate-- more than compensate. So don't worry about us at all. Just go work on interesting things. Good luck, --pg"
Ignore how he dresses, the guy is a class act.
# As to the Hidden Details
There's a lot of secrets with YC.
Back in the early days when I was just one of the first HackerNews users, I logged into the site and saw I had "One New Message". WTF?
HN did not have a messaging system.
Or so I thought.
In fact, HN had a secret messaging system that PG used to communicate with promising hackers.
From that point on I was a guest in YC's secret hotel, but never got invited up to the Penthouse.
YC has a lot of hidden tools. I am now on the shittier version of HackerNews that the public has access to (since I got expelled). There's a cooler version with extra features that you get access to if you're in the club.
YC has secret ratings and reviews of all investors worldwide; a huge thing called "Bookface" with all sorts of helpful tools for startups, etc.
They don't really share anything about their returns. They are not like Warren Buffet, who writes a detailed letter explaining the returns each year.
Knowledge is compartmentalized a lot of knowledge between partners, batches, LPs, favorite startups, et cetera.
Now, there are legitimate reasons for doing this.
First, it's obviously a huge competitive advantage, and IMO these tools and this information is likely worth far more than the $500K they give your startup.
Second, YC/their portfolio is _constantly_ under attack from forces all over the world. That's what happens when you are the GOAT and fund so many Unicorns. People all over the world come after you and your portfolio companies. Tom Brady is a hero in Boston and Tampa but the most vile villain in 94% of cities with NFL teams. You get paid the big bucks not to enjoy the love, but to endure the hate.
Anyway, so what specifically are the hidden details? I don't know. Like I said I was never invited up to the Penthouse. But I do know they are more than comfortable to keep secrets. Secrecy does not seem to bother them.
Don't take my word for it. Here's JL: "Some of the most useful things I've learned about startups over the years are also things I'd never share publicly." [0]
If they are holding back "the most useful things", what are they giving us? Why should we trust them?
[0] https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-sound-of-silence
P.S. I love YC and highly recommend it. I give them sht because I've always given them sht, because I always want them to be improving.
tamimio
Very insightful, thanks for sharing this!
einsteinx2
How did you get expelled?
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
I went through YC in S20. The number one question I get from those who apply is, "Is it worth it?". For me personally, 100 percent worth it. The application process alone makes you think through questions you probably haven't thought of before. It's worth it if you are building a venture scalable business. It's also worth it for the people that you get to meet. As someone who lives outside of SV, it opened a new door for me that was previously unavailable.