

Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close) - eddylu
http://blog.grubwith.us/interviewing-with-yc-dont-overstep-the-limits

======
onan_barbarian
Given the inherent dodginess of so many 'social startups' already ("get piles
of users now, figure out how to make a big pile of money from later"), this
whole 'naughtiness' stuff bothers me. It's a short hop from naughty to
'actively unethical'.

Here's the question: given that you've already demonstrated that you don't
really have a lot of regard for the privacy of fellow YC interviewees (however
'intentionally' you outed a bunch of people on Twitter), why should you be
trusted with user data?

If you'll pull a stunt like this for seed money, what will you do to get VC
money? Just wait until you've got 2-4 years of serious work on a startup and
you're 'close' to serious profitability. What 'naughty' stuff will you do when
you've actually got some serious skin in the game?

~~~
mattmanser
To be brutally honest, if you're not a bit weird[1] you're probably not cut
out to make it in the social space.

We're talking about people who would have created a hot or not site 10 years
ago without a thought about the pain it could cause people who always ended up
'not'.

These aren't normally adjusted people. They have a lot of good points, and
some very bad ones.

If you want to look at it in a good way they're not bounded by social norms.
In certain scenarios, they're not very nice people.

I'm not judging and to be utterly frank I sometimes wish I was one of them,
they're not like 95% of the rest of us and that gives them some advantages.
Like this stunt.

Edit:[1] I'm having a very hard time finding the right word here. Sociopathic?
It's a bit too harsh given what can be lumped in there, but it does describe
it a bit. A couple of good friends of mine have the trait I'm trying to
describe. I love them, but they make me cringe sometimes.

~~~
onan_barbarian
I don't mind sociopaths; they are what they are. What I mind is the sugar-
coating of sociopathic behavior that's actually flat-out unethical as
'naughtiness' so these people can be treated as innovative rule-benders rather
than creeps.

Doing many of these 'sociopathic' things is a lot like going to a small
country town where people leave their doors unlocked and burgling the houses
there; you're violating a lot of unwritten and only mildly enforced rules.
What bothers me is the idea that you will be specifically rewarded for this
kind of behavior if you can spin it as a 'Country Town Social Hack'.

------
pg
"The problem is, while pg outwardly disapproved of our actions, we know he
secretly loves founders that push the limits!"

You know what, though: the response function around the limit is not a smooth
bell curve; it drops sharply below the x axis as you go past the peak.

~~~
BrainScraps
It took me a while to get this, so I made a helpful graph for everyone else as
slow as I am.

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22926250/pgResponse.png>

~~~
RockyMcNuts
kind of like a Kelly criterion bet

[http://www.math.washington.edu/~morrow/336_10/papers/jane.pd...](http://www.math.washington.edu/~morrow/336_10/papers/jane.pdf)

if you bet like a mouse, you get cheese

~~~
palish
Thanks for the interesting paper.

------
notJim
Is anyone else somewhat annoyed by the wink-and-a-node style this post is
written in? It's like, "Hey look how scrappy we are, willing to push the
limits like this, but oh, that's not appropriate for _you_ , you had better
play it safe."

~~~
yid
It's interesting that the tone of the blog post suggests a desperation about
getting into YC, rather than the old adage of wanting to build something that
people actually want to use.

It's also interesting that HN is full of people who talk about a higher
education bubble, but a YC bubble mysteriously seems to be off-topic here.

(Note that I love and use a lot of YC companies)

~~~
mrkurt
If they're anything like me, it's not "desperation" to get into YC,
necessarily, as much as the ridiculous hatred of failure. They'd probably go
equally nuts for anywhere they applied, be it Harvard or Juliar or for
unemployment checks.

~~~
davidw
Ok, but you're sort of equating 'getting into YC' with 'success'.

~~~
ryannielsen
I got the impression that mrkurt was implying the Grubwithus founders didn't
want to fail the YC interview, not that getting into YC guaranteed Grubwithus
would be successful.

------
kragen
Writing twitterbots to spam people? Man, I wouldn't have just yelled at you in
an interview. I would have engaged in physical violence. Twitter spammers are
right down there with Nigerian 419 scammers in my book. I'm disappointed to
hear that YC is funding one of them.

~~~
follower
Is it any worse than forcing/requiring people to manually tweet in order to
get/win something?

I find both approaches distasteful.

------
mman
I get a bad gut feeling when i read posts like this. It is the same feeling i
get when i watch MTV or elimidate or something.

The MTVification of Entrepreneurship! That sums up the feeling i get when
reading this article and many others like it.

It just feels really... hollow. Like you are building an RPG character based
on the "What We Look For Article". Spent all your points on naughtiness.

Seriously, yuck. Stop it.

------
wolfrom
I'm surprised by the negative reaction that this post has received. I thought
the actions were more "cheeky" than overstepping. But maybe that's more an
indication that I am afflicted with the same easy morality.

------
daleharvey
"It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission"

Thats a mantra that I found hard to take on, but it really has helped me

~~~
dkersten
In uni myself and a friend used this philosophy to get lab space and desks in
the postgrad labs (we were undergrads and normally didn't get our own
"private" lab space). We had keycards because we needed access for project
work[1], found ourselves some unused space, unused desks etc figuring that if
anybody minded we would just apologize and find someplace else. Nobody
complained and by the time I graduated we had three desks, in three different
labs. Besides the two of us, everybody else in my class had no private
labs/desks :)

[1] <http://dublindan.posterous.com/things-ive-worked-on-1>

~~~
shareme
I did as an undergrad in the US states doing both undergrad and grad course
work in Molecular Biology both lab space and computer lab space..keycards, key
licenses to apps using apple's keyserver, etc. Even got an unofficial desk in
one of the Faculty member's offices.

It was not just knowing those Professors but we did enough 'free' work that we
could easily ask for bribes..either pay us or give us space..in my case I
wrote some computer macros/programs to use MS Excel to do stats for certain
science areas as they had particular methods and standards they wanted to
follow in lab data analysis, etc.

~~~
dkersten
Its amazing what you can get away with if you just try.

Of course, like you, we had a reputation for getting stuff done. We got
keycard access and permission to store our project work (since it included
electronics) in the postgrad labs and we then went to see how far we could
take it. We produced some great projects for them in return[1]. We even got a
photo (alongside then prime minister) in a local newspaper.

My project partner is currently doing a PHD there and has used the similar
tactics to get equipment, lab space and other benefits and his supervisors
don't mind because he has opened new research avenues and published papers for
them.

[1] the project I linked to was pioneered by myself and my project partner,
but has since been used for further projects (and has been professionally
rebuilt using expensive hardware - ours cost about €300 in materials to build;
the professionally manufactured version cost approx. €10K - but was (is, I
guess - I haven't been involved) also much, much more accurate

------
Mz
From pg's own remarks on the topic <http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html>:

 _They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter._

I get the feeling these folks can't tell the difference between the two. And I
am thinking "naughty" is not necessarily the best word for this quality and is
bound to be misinterpreted by some folks.

~~~
onan_barbarian
The assumption that these 'naughty' people automatically have a good intuition
for the rules that matter is interesting. It's a bit like all those people who
think that they drive perfectly well when yakking on a cell phone, drunk
driving, or going 20 over the limit, or perhaps both. Everyone's an expert on
highway safety, apparently ("my intuition tells me I'm not distracted here, I
don't care what those statisticians say").

Interestingly, I have known a surprisingly large number of dangerous drivers
(alcohol, speeding or both) in the tech scene and many have fit whole YC
'naughtiness ethos' pretty well.

Playing by the rules without necessarily understanding all of them might have
helped these guys at the moment when they outed a bunch of people as applying
to YC using Twitter.

~~~
Mz
_The assumption that these 'naughty' people automatically have a good
intuition for the rules that matter is interesting._

Language has its limits in attempting to convey what the author really means.
I assume pg was trying to convey that, in his experience, those folks who make
good entrepreneurs do, in fact, have good intuition for when it is appropriate
to break the rules. But I'm not really comfortable speaking for him. He's
perfectly capable of speaking for himself. I just don't feel that I heard it
the same way you did. (Though perhaps neither of us heard what he really
meant. <shrug>)

------
grovulent
Lol... Let's co-opt an unaffiliated brand in the marketing of our product!

The tone of the piece reminds me of a scene from that Capote movie.

\----

Truman Capote: I had lunch with Jimmy Baldwin the other day.

Party date: How is he?

Truman Capote: Hes lovely, hes a lovely man. And he told me the plot of his
new book. And he said, "I just wanted to make sure its not one of those
problem novels," you know. And I said , "Jimmy. Your book is about a Negro
homosexual whos in love with a Jew. Wouldnt you call that a problem?"

------
SkyMarshal
_> So our advice is, be naughty enough to get your goal accomplished, but
retreat if necessary and make sure you apologize!_

I would say the advice is more along of the lines of, "First, do no harm
(unless it's to the industry you're trying to disrupt)."

Sounds like their major transgression was outing other interviewees who wished
to remain discreet so as not to lose current jobs or career prospects. That's
a big _OUCH_.

The secondary one was originally sounding too much like a YC-sponsored event,
which could have enticed customers under false pretenses.

A good lesson to keep in mind not just in applying to YC but in any endeavor.

------
harryh
#humblebrag

------
ddemchuk
These guys certainly seem mature and professional enough to run a company,
especially funded with other people's money

