
How to Prepare for the Y Combinator Interview - tzier
https://tryzen99.com/blog_posts/prepare-y-combinator-interview
======
anaskar
Great post Tristan. Solid advice. I'd also add
[http://ipaulgraham.herokuapp.com/](http://ipaulgraham.herokuapp.com/) in the
list of resources on the bottom. It forces conciseness.

------
jaf12duke
We're alums (YC W12 and S09). We do mock interviews every batch. If you're
interested, reach me at jason at 42floors.

~~~
sethbannon
Also happy to help here (S12). seth at amicushq

------
late2part
Good article.

I'd suggest that your strongest points are:

1\. "Traction trumps all." Demonstrable opportunity is the primary currency.

2\. "Be a nice person." Successful people don't like to work with assholes.

3\. "Prepare, and be brief." Anything that doesn't add significant value needs
to come out of your pitch.

4\. "Don’t be deterred by interruptions." These are opportunities. Think of
these as buying questions. If they're asking you questions, they're telling
you what you need to do to convince them to believe in you.

Good luck all in the next round or other endeavors!

------
Alex3917
Nice, I think this is actually by far the best thing I've seen written on YC
interviews.

~~~
tzier
Appreciate the kind words!

------
solve
> It’s relatively easy to pick up on someone’s personality in their
> application.

From the written application that's supposed to be as terse as possible? I
think I could get a feel for someone in person since I could dig into
particular questions on the spot, but seems I'd have a real hard time judging
meanness if I could only see the 1-way communication of the written YC
application.

~~~
tzier
Good point, I could have made that clearer. Wasn't meant to be specific to
"meanness", more so just personality. This can obviously be complicated by
things like language barriers/etc, so isn't a catch-all.

In general, the point was that humans usually make subconscious judgments
before they even start talking to you; at the least, you should be aware of
this.

------
Nicholas_C
Y Combinator sounds like such a great experience. Now if only I had a startup.

~~~
coolandsmartrr
I used to think so too. But then again, is it advisable to start a startup
just for Y Combinator?

------
explosion
I'm having trouble understanding how one would demonstrate traction at the
idea stage.

Would it be a combination of 1) demonstrating past successes gaining traction
and 2) having a catchy prototype? Or are there other things?

~~~
ryanSrich
Have a list of 400,000 users waiting to buy your product [1].

1\. [https://getfinal.com/](https://getfinal.com/)

~~~
tzier
+1...just make sure you ship before everyone forgets about you :). I've heard
10% conversion from signup list isn't unrealistic when products finally ship.

~~~
gokhan
It's great to have a blog with some traffic where you can find interested
future users. If you have enough traffic, you can keep the signup-to-invite
time short so your conversion will be better.

Keep in mind that if the idea is novel and something people want, you'll get
most of them converted no matter what if you initially promised that novel
thing during the signup.

