I was quite impressed by the organization, intellectual skills and complete and utter lack of BS. Tick tock, it’s the day the YC interview invitation is sent out. Why I Turned Down My Y Combinator Interview. We added over 3,000 customers and things were going better than we hoped for. Here are a few examples: If you can't or you're building something entirely new, don't force it. It was a great experience yet painful. There were roughly 100 to 150 people in the room. Listen, there’s a business opportunity: on YC interview day, come to YC HQ and take photos for startup founders. I'm excited, but also a bit divided. So again, learn how to keep it short. We're republishing it because many people are still asking us how we got into YC. Why will Microsoft or Amazon not f*cking kill you? Review other, more in-depth accounts and preparation tips for interviewing with Y Combinator. I read from HN and Reddit that the invite was supposed to be sent out around 9 PM - 12 AM PT. How to Prepare for your Y Combinator Interview, https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/27/be-concise-the-top-questions-asked-at-a-y-combinator-interview/?guccounter=1, https://join.slack.com/t/askcotter/shared_invite/zt-dxzf311g-5Mp3~odZNB2DwYaxIJ1dJA. I faced the infamous Y Combinator interview for my company Relationship Hero (YC S17). We were disappointed since we put so much effort. Do you have patents? How to pass your Y Combinator interview? (And Y Combinator can use whatever criteria fits them best, they're picking companies, not people) Also remember, YC payed for the interview, hard to think they didn't have a legitimate interest at that point. Below you’ll find the plan we used to prepare and pass the interview. The more you know your stuff, the quicker you answer the more time there is to show of your bubbly personality ... ....and it's over in 10 minutes. The questions that they ask will revolve around them wanting to learn more from you. The lectures were of high quality, but most were aimed at "lower maturity" startups. How much have you improved your users lives. Y Combinator doesn’t recommend you doing mock interviews. The YC Berlin roadshow wrapped up with a short lecture followed by a Q&A. So, you can sense that I was a bit blasé. However, some of the YC folks also put on a "Startup School roadshow" and they happened to hit Berlin. Have a drink of water. Y Combinator: Application & interview advice from a Winter ’18 alumni. How we improved our Lighthouse score from 70 to 96. A lot of startups fail because of conflict between the co-founders, tell them why your team will stick together through thick and thin. It's for entry to the Winter 2020 batch. Tell something that they don't already know! What the market looks like and how your product uniquely solves a problem for that market. If you can use existing companies to describe your business go for it. new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit. Log in to get started. If not, compile a document of comprised of questions that you think you will be asked and make sure you have informative, concise, and short answers. etc. You can also always re-apply (my co-founder didn’t get in his first try). If you make it there, you’ll be interesting to investors, media and other companies (that’s what others say, and YC itself). And this triggered something. Why do you have 2/3/4/5 founders in the team? Read them over a couple of times. Here's my current elevator pitch for Checkly: Checkly is a testing & monitoring SaaS for modern DevOps teams. . If you got the invite, congratulations! But as Kobe said, “Job’s not finished”. Keep it short. I signed up for the "office hours" and joined some of the partners for a 2,5 hour round table with about 12 other people in a then still highly valued WeWork location. Tick tock, it’s the day the YC interview invitation is sent out. Do you want to move to Silicon Valley for 3 months? As of yesterday Y Combinator began its marathon series of interviews to decide which startup teams will ultimately go through the – now world-renowned – … We began to prepare for interview a week before by doing mock interviews and answering on frequently asked questions. Afterwards, when the partner called, here’s what they said: We were skeptical that this could be a big market, but you guys convinced us. No fluff, all relevant product updates & long form content. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ( $125k ) in a large number of startups. But, is joining Y Combinator something for me, or for you? Do you want to give up 7% equity for $150k? That’s because having that Y Combinator brand opens so many doors. Read more on Y Combinator's Blog. We get rejected for YC S15 (April 2015). The actual interview was the right mix of casual and business. Communicate one idea in one sentence. We got ours at 9:16 PM and immediately booked a slot for the interview. If there's something wrong with your project, you want to know what. Meeting the Y Combinator Partners: Sniply YC Interview WE JUST INTERVIEWED AT YCOMBINATOR — HERE’S THE FULL TRANSCRIPT. Who are they? Write down your stuff, then cut it in half. The weekly reporting didn't do much for me. Do you hold a license in a regulated industry? How did you get your users? didn’t go through Y Combinator and they turned out fine. I remember anxiously waiting for my startup’s invite.I read from HN and Reddit that the invite was supposed to be sent out around 9 PM - 12 AM PT. Mock interview – is a test 10 minutes interview, typically with YC alumni. As with any big business decision, it's nice to have options. Our startup already made 7 digits revenue. So start preparing ASAP! “Three strategies…” Max starts to answer. A few weeks later I got an email from interviews@ycombinator.com. How we monitor Checkly's API and Web App (updated), From Bootstrapper to VC backed in three months, Checkly raises $2.25M seed round to push Active Reliability forward, A bootstrapped SaaS cost teardown — and the nuance, Cypress vs Selenium vs Playwright vs Puppeteer speed comparison, It's code! Where are they? All the clichés about the "elevator pitch" are true. My interview was at 3:15pm, but we arrived around 12:30pm. In 2001, Mr. Graham started publishing essays on his personal website which now get around 15 million page views… And I honestly mean every word I said: It's a slick operation run by nice, driven people. Order your thoughts. Startups around the globe will soon travel to Silicon Valley for their chance of "startup fame". But for a non-tech pitch it's pretty condensed. What are their roles? This is a reasonable thing to want. fred_durst on May 8, 2014. Of course, could be better. Sure, I didn’t have much of a company yet, but I had a pretty strong resume. In retrospect I’m in awe and appreciative of having such an epic opportunity to chat with members of the Y Combinator team about my humble project that I started coding a few months prior to the interview. I would really advise doing mock interview with YC founders if you get the chance. Previous Post How I got the Y Combinator interview 46 days late Next Post Pitching a bunch of millionaires for 10 minutes Subscribe to be notified when an … Reasons were: This afternoon I did the 10 minutes Y Combinator interview in Paris. On December 5, 2017, my wife drove me to Y Combinator HQ in Mountain View. By ... On my third day at my new company, I completed my Y Combinator application and sent it off. I'm excited, but also a bit divided. Bit disappointed, but not bitter or disillusioned at all. Y Combinator makes a non-negligible investment ($1,500) to bring applicants to their offices for interrogation. There are numerous YC success stories to back this such as the classic AirBnB story and most recently Segment. Knowing who signs up to your site is just one Slack notification away - no need to check your user database regularly! I was imitating Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. Tell them why each member is critical to the founding team. To start, you can DM me @itsKevinChandra. I'm fairly bullish — sorry, reading Crash of the Titans —  on YC but have not 100% made up my mind whether this is the way to go. There are also some good answers (including from Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit) in this Quora thread. When I cold email people, if I say we’re in Y Combinator, they open and respond. Our experience with CoinTracker (YC W18) was incredible, trajectory-changing, and we hope that yours is too! Long story short: I decided to apply to YC for their winter 2020 batch, if not for the 15k equity free grant that could maybe come from that. It really is like having Harvard on a resume. Here are my notes on: I joined the Y Combinator Startup School program this year mostly for the free AWS credit and Stripe credits. Synthetic monitoring with Terraform Cloud & Checkly, Puppeteer vs Selenium vs Playwright, a speed comparison, Synthetic transaction monitoring at scale with Terraform and Checkly, Numbers: Cost, price, MRR, growth (cash & customers), churn. Here’s how the Cotter team prepared. 50% of the questions fired at the YC people went like this: "So, yeah, like, we're like working on this thing, but then my cofounder quit, and now we have this customer who's really loving the product but then we hit a bug with Docker because it uses React in the Kubernetes and now, you know, I'd like to know if you reimburse travel cost when I do the interview and stuff". Y Combinator Application #2 (Success!) If your product does something similar to an existing product go for "We are building Shopify for online schools". This has so far been a ✨ glowing review ✨ of Y Combinator and their whole enrollment circus. I didn’t apply by the deadline — should I … As our team got in to the interview room, our CCO was shook as one of our interviewer was Michael Seibel himself, CEO of Y Combinator. Remember that the founders matters more than the idea and YC knows that. Y Combinator or not, we were going to build something great. We spent the next 6 months heads down building our business. When we launched our podcast, Scale or Die, I could kind of reach a whole new level of guests because I said, “We’re in Y Combinator. Our responses needed to be perfect, concise, and confident. It's for entry to the Winter 2020 batch. Just got the dreaded rejection email! Why is your pricing so high / low / weird? Along with other interviewers: Eric Migicovsky, CEO of Pebble and Holly Liu, founder of Kabam. As expected, that was the first question that we got during our interview. The chat roulette style weekly hookup with other startups was hit and miss. Just remember that. Watch our interview with Sam Altman, lead on Y Combinator's Accelerator Program: Even Y Combinator was a startup once, says Y Combinator Co-founder Jessica Livingston in this 2014 Startup Grind Global Conference interview with Derek Andersen. 📙 A Founder’s Guide to the Y Combinator Interview Get ready to ace your upcoming interview with YC! In my opinion, they might do a slightly better job at conducting the actual interviews. When we applied, we didn’t have any experience with a startup or writing incubator applications. Getting into Y Combinator was a dream come true for me. ... Y Combinator does look for huge market-sizes and potential billion-dollar businesses, but I think positioning how you have an unfair advantage and are uniquely positioned to solve a big problem is often left out of the application. You REALLY need to be able to explain in short, simple sentences what you are doing. etc. The interview is the last stage to pass before you get accepted to Y Combinator. Indeed. Chas from Aptible (S’14) put together a great list of potential YC interview questions, and so has Brad from Perfect Audience (S’11). Just answer them in some Word document. Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. The 6 months after that rejection, Proof grew at warp speed. And actually the Y-Combinator alumni kind of hose us here because they tell people how to pretend to be determined during the interview. How are they using your product? Have you worked together previously? Copyright © 2021 Checkly Inc. All rights reserved. About Y Combinator; Frequently Asked Questions; What Happens at YC; A lot of groups who don't get invited to interviews would like to know why. Vikrum Nijjar joined as the first engineer at Firebase, and did whatever it took to help the company succeed: scaling out … We had already rehearsed the answer to this question 100 times. So why don't we tell people why we didn't invite them to interview? Welcome to YC Apply! Startup school is a free program where you mix and mingle (IRL and online) with other startups, report on progress and follow online lectures made by the YC partners and alumni. Some of the questions from templates like https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/27/be-concise-the-top-questions-asked-at-a-y-combinator-interview/?guccounter=1 will appear. Which is incredibly short. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started the first software as a service company, Viaweb, which was later acquired by Yahoo in 1998 as Yahoo Store. The tempo is pretty high, but there is some room for jokes, anecdotes etc. Do you have relevant experience? So tell them that your team is the Chosen One. YC acts as sort of a pre-screening. You wait in a lounge for 15 minutes. I’m Barak, CEO of Neema, YC W17. Today Y Combinator is announcing who's going to be invited to Mountain View to interview for a chance to get accepted in what many call the "Harvard of Entrepreneurship". Are they hacking your product to do more? Assemblr founders at Y Combinator, May 2018. Our customers use Checkly for three things: We’re bootstrapped, doing $3k MRR and growing 30% month over month. Do you want to register your company in the US? To keep your mind at peace, they wouldn't ask questions that you shouldn't already know the answers to. How to Ace your Y Combinator Interview. Then cut it in half again. Hell, I did a whole Indiehackers interview recently. If you run out, answer these questions. Not going to lie about that. To craft a good 1-liner, you need to be able to explain what your company does and who you are serving using plain English. Leveraging this, we’ve met with founders of some amazing companies in the US, UK, Germany and Austria: Tandem, S… Know who logs in to your site and get the list of user emails, along with their names and other additional fields data imported to Google Sheets. If you are replicating an existing business model for a different country go for "We are building Robinhood for Country X". This afternoon I did the 10 minutes Y Combinator interview in Paris. And then — depending on how far you are along — you need to know the rest: This blog post by a YC alumnus has a great set of sample questions. Paul Graham is the recently retired co-founder of Y Combinator. Keep in mind that every YC interview is going to be different, it depends on your industry, what stage you are in, where you are doing business, and lots more! Feel free to DM me on Twitter @itsKevinChandra. Sign up for weekly updates from Y Combinator… The barrier to entry and how you are uniquely positioned to break through that barrier. ... Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, etc. Y Combinator has started accepting applications for their Summer 2017 batch. The Interview Invite. We published the written application that got our 4-week old startup, Snip.ly, an interview with Y Combinator.We flew down to meet the partners but alas, we were rejected. login. Here are my notes on: The run up (skip this if you hate long stories) Prepping (most useful info) The interview ; Next steps; The run up: Startup school Y Combinator crossed a major milestone this summer when it hit $100 billion in market value for their portfolio of 1867 startups they’ve invested … It's business, not "family". They keep asking you questions and you have about 15 seconds on each one. I'm Dutch so I like that kind of stuff . You will never be able to control what the partners ask. If you want to have a passwordless auth for your app come check Cotter out or have any questions about authentication reach out to us here: Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/askcotter/shared_invite/zt-dxzf311g-5Mp3~odZNB2DwYaxIJ1dJA. For 10 surreal minutes, the YC partners shotgunned questions at me and my cofounders and interrupted us a few times. Which is totally fine, but still. They had cool Lego stuff in the lounge to play with. After you construct your 1-liner, go ask YC founders for feedback. If YC turned their attention to you, others get more curious about you, too. We meet these guys during the interview and they seem like real butt kickers, and lo and behold as the challenges of doing a startup emerge, they kind of fall apart. So, like your 1-liner, make sure that your answers are informative, concise, and short. I was interviewed by three partners. If others who have been… However, here's a more realistic expectation. The "Interview" with Y Combinator That's Not November 5, 2009, 5:46 am by Scott Wheeler So, in our last installment of the Y Combinator saga, we talked about applying. Just like every other founders, we took photos with the Y Combinator sign outside their building. We work intensively with the companies for three months, to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors. etc. Log in or sign up If you are in SaaS get something like. Getting in as a solo nontechnical founder with very little traction was also a very unique experience that I did not believe could happen. Startup advice from Alex Solomon, co-founder and CTO of PagerDuty , a 2021 YC Top Company: “Talk to customers, understand their needs, and build a product that meets those needs.” "Test out your pitch with some friendly investors early.” If you want to apply now but not be considered for an early interview, just make a note on your application and we’ll honor the request. What makes your team uniquely positioned to win? Use Template 🌱 How to Prepare for YC Interview Michael Seibel's top 10 pieces of advice for Y Combinator interview preparation. I remember anxiously waiting for my startup’s (Cotter) invite. Why not find some nice Angel investors and stake it out for another 18 months. YC partners aren't the expert in what you do, you are. Summer 2021. Nice office of portfolio company Front in the Marais neighborhood in Paris. Hacker News. We were about to interview at Y Combinator (YC), one of the top seed accelerator programs for early-stage startups. If you don’t make it, you’ll be interesting at least to other companies (our experience). Try to construct your 1-liner using this template "We are building X (what does your company do) for Y (who does your product serve)". To be 100% clear, I have no idea if Checkly is "in" yet — I'll find out within a week or so — but these are all questions running through my head. If you haven't launched your product then prepare to educate them about: If you have launched your product and it has traction then prepare your market insights like.

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