

How to plan for Y Combinator interview - toomasr
http://plumbr.eu/blog/how-to-plan-for-y-combinator-interview

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iconfinder
We got rejected as well after travelling all the way from Denmark. We landed
saturday afternoon and got to the interview sunday morning and took the plane
home sunday afternoon. We didn't even reach a point where we had jetlag.

I think one of the reasons we got rejected was our response to some of Paul
Graham's suggestions. One of them was to expand the concept to include game
characters (Iconfinder is currently an icon search engine). We didn't respond
to his idea in a positive way but instead defended icons as a large enough
niche to build a initial service people would pay for.

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nanijoe
So do you wish you had accepted his suggestion?

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iconfinder
I still don't like that specific idea, but I regret trying to defend our idea
during the interview. I think they test the teams by suggesting different
ideas to see how we react to new things. The more open you are to new ideas,
the better. Just like Reddit, the team came to Y-combinator with totally
different idea. So I think it's very important to be open and positive to th
ideas bring up during the interview - because if they like you (but not your
idea), you can very well be working on theirs instead.

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davidw
I wonder if they ever flip out "bad" ideas to see if they're dealing with a
"yes man". Doesn't seem to be their style, but it's not like I really know
them well.

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pg
Not intentionally, but we get the same effect unintentionally because a lot of
the ideas we suggest are bad and we later realize it.

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jonpaul
I'm interested to know more about why PG thinks that people typically don't
pay for software tools? Do others feel this way? In my own experience, if a
software tool saves me time, I have no problem paying for it. I've seen this
in others. I realize that my observational sample is quite limited, but what
do you think?

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AhtiK
PG was right. People don't pay for software tools. But companies do. The
number of freelancers who pay is small so focus could be on getting the sales
funnel working for the developers inside the companies.

I'm afraid that memleaks alone would be too small benefit to keep a dedicated
overhead running in production. Leaks are something that you worry only after
it already happened. What could work is a system monitoring dashboard that
includes memory leak detection. Definitely something corp clients and
developers could love at the same time. But the competition is already there,
just none of them has the memleaks detection.

Zeroturnaround has been very successful with the java class reloading business
thanks to the massive pain that java developers face daily with the bloated
frameworks that make you develop inside the running application instead of
writing small batches of test-driven code. Perfect fit for corporate
environments. I'm not sarcasatic here. On the contrary, I'm very happy to see
a very serious problem being solved. It's a huge dedication to work with all
the containers and frameworks to get the live class reloading right.

Regaring VC funding and tools: VC's are surfing the latest waves to reap the
profits and capture the market. Tooling is enabler, not a wave.

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rdl
Generally ill-advised to mention meetings with specific VCs and angels
("Facebook was truly interesting and led to three new meetings. Next four days
went like a breeze - in total we had 15 meetings - with blue chip VCs ([...])
who have presumably passed (otherwise I assume you'd have announced them as
investors).

Saying "met with top-tier VCs and angels" is usually good enough, without the
downside.

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priitp
Ouch, thanks for pointing that out. Rephrased it now.

