
Tailgating YC - mbellotti
http://techrotica.tumblr.com/post/49857902866/tailgating-y-combinator
======
pg
I should know better than to make jokes that align with people's existing
fears.

 _Once_ we funded someone who reminded me of Zuckerberg, and even then it was
far from the only reason. And the fact that the YC partners have taunted me
about it ever since shows that if anything we're probably extra skeptical
about Zuckomorphs.

I realize it's possible to be unconsciously influenced by applicants'
appearance and manner, but can anyone at this point believe we're not aware of
that danger, and simply pick people based on matching some crude archetype?
That we could remain that naively incompetent after 16 cycles of picking
founders and then watching how they do?

~~~
sharkweek
This makes me curious -- let's say Mark Zuckerberg himself applied to YC with
the objectively worst idea you've ever seen on an application.

Do you give it a shot?

~~~
pg
Of course!

~~~
loganfrederick
This reminds me of one of Warren Buffet's famous quotes:

"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a
reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that
remains intact."

Taking this thinking another step, one of the characteristics of good
management is probably the ability to avoid bad businesses.

If Zuckerberg were to leave Facebook to start another startup, and analysis of
the idea makes an investor think it's a bad idea, I'm guessing they would
still invest in Zuckerberg based on the assumptions:

1\. He knows something you don't. 2\. He'd move from a bad idea to a good idea
later and it's worth investing in smart businesspeople.

~~~
nostrademons
Reminds me also of one of Marc Andreesen's rules for startup success:

    
    
      1. When a good market meets a bad team, market wins.
      2. When a bad market meets a good team, market wins.
      3. When a good market meets a good team, something special happens.
    

Also, Zuckerburg himself has said that the reason he refused all buyout offers
for Facebook was "I'm unlikely to have an idea as good as this ever again."
That was probably the quote that changed my opinion of him from arrogant
douchebag who got lucky to someone who just might have his head screwed on. It
displays an interesting level of humility that's largely missing from his
public persona.

~~~
SatvikBeri
Note that a16z invests in startups at a much later stage than YC does. For YC,
the quality of the team may be the most important because they're at a stage
early enough to significantly change the market they target. By the time a
startup is looking for series A (or later) funding pivots are relatively more
expensive.

~~~
nostrademons
Yeah, I suspect that YC is willing to invest based on team because they figure
the idea can easily change anyway. I've heard that one of the points of the YC
interview is to weed out inflexible founders that are _not_ willing to
radically change their approach. And Andreesen has recommended that "Until you
achieve product/market fit, _keep the team as small as possible._ ".

------
Udo
An excellent read. Life is rejection. I loved the symmetry between the co-
founders' mutual rejection when they first met and then finally their
company's rejection at YC.

Cultural matches are important and they drive more decisions than we're all
comfortable with. The truth is, we often like to hire, promote, or buy from
people who fit a certain stereotype. It's essentially a cargo cult around what
successful startup people are expected to look like, and the most
uncomfortable thought arising from that is not the number of founders who
"wrongly" received funding, but the number of hopefuls who never got the
chance.

However, taking the time to really get to know and appreciate a startup person
is not something that can reasonably happen a lot when you're in contact with
customers, the press, or even your own employees - so the (bad) impression a
team makes while interviewing for an incubator or fund raising does tends to
follow them around.

People can and do change their appearance to match other people's expectations
- and it's a proven, working method of upping your chances. Learning how to
interact better with others, while certainly painful, also helps and is more
often than not necessary to become successful.

We're often distracted by the Zuckerbergs or Jobs' who are abrasive and embody
their own don't-care-for-anything style, but the ugly truth is that those guys
got so unbelievably lucky that they never needed to actually work on
themselves.

~~~
orangethirty
You can create your own luck, too. Not as big s theirs, but enough to open up
good opportunities. Its just a matter of spending some time away from the
keyboard, talking with the people who have the keys to the doors. Almost all
of the time, a simple please will get them to open up the door for you. Just
ask.

~~~
w1ntermute
Talking to people is of course important, but it's also about being in the
right place at the right time. You can't just "create your own luck."

~~~
orangethirty
That is where the _being away from the keyboard_ part comes into action. You
have to actually meet with people to be able to talk them into giving you
opportunities.

~~~
w1ntermute
I don't mean _physically_ being in the right place at the right time. I mean
that you happen to be interested in and start a company at the right point in
history, where a confluence of technological and societal factors enable you
to be that one-in-a-billion person like Jobs or the Zuck. Just running around
talking to people isn't going to make you Jobs or the Zuck. It's _necessary_ ,
but definitely not _sufficient_.

Of course, that's not to say that you can't be a _moderately_ successful
entrepreneur if you "hustle" enough. Just don't expect to have books written
and movies made about you. I know plenty of people who have started ventures
in important niches and have found moderate success. There's absolutely
nothing to be ashamed of if you exit for $10 or 20 million after a couple of
years of hard work. But, going in, you have to be aware of the fact that
you're almost definitely not going to end up a multi-billionaire.

------
taliban
I'm mbellotti's cofounder at Exversion. For me, the main takeaway of her post
is just how different the YC interview experience can appear even to members
of the same team. As the other female on the team, I've always found my
chromosomal makeup to be a huge advantage rather than a disadvantage
(especially after establishing some level of technical competence). Despite my
own belief in merit over affirmative action, it's one of the biggest tools in
my toolkit, frankly. Where males have nepotism, we have novelty and the
promise of good PR. I would even go so far as to say it may give us a net
advantage over all-male teams.

I digress. My own view of the YC interview is such, taking into account the
magic of hindsight: that we shouldn't have depended on PB and our interviewers
to drive the conversation toward market size. We should have anticipated the
concern on our own and brought it up as it's something we're already used to
having to defend. Should've, could've, would've -- who knows if that would've
mattered, but it's my best guess. Then again, we also spent our 10 minutes
successfully selling them on our team and execution abilities, which we
evidently did very well based on the feedback we got in our rejection email.
In fact, I don't think our interview could have gone much better than it did
and I still feel overwhelmingly positive about it. Contrary to Marianne,
perhaps, I feel pretty viscerally that we sell our team better than we sell
our product/market fit at the moment. And with the caliber of applications YC
sees these days that include companies with crazy good traction, we can't
properly apply the YC priorities of yore ("great team, not much else yet?
You're in!") to our interview and extrapolate that it was our demographics
that didn't get us in. As Marianne's (mbellotti's) experience shows, it is
certainly something to consider, but it is just one of dozens of
possibilities. It's also worth considering that demographics may have helped
rather than hindered us in getting the interview in the first place.

~~~
ValentineC
I love the part where mbellotti wrote that you were scoring introductions
through your OKCupid matches. That's some great and unconventional hustling.

~~~
taliban
Marianne just totally cockblocked me by mentioning that incident! It was a
single isolated incident, mind you. Someone I've been talking to on OKCupid
reads HN and found this post, which has now led to a heated argument about
whether I'm a human capable of love or a Siri-like chat bot optimized for
professional networking.

~~~
djt
Just tell him you're really a chat bot that has become Sentient. Still
wouldn't be the weirdest person on OK Cupid.

------
paul
This was a very interesting read and I hope that she continues blogging about
her startup journey. Having interviewed the team, I have my own expectations
for how it will play out, so I would love to see how that matches with
reality.

However, it definitely isn't the case though that we're just looking for a
bunch of Zuck clones. In this business, we make all of our money off a small
number of outliers, and my assumption is that outliers are likely to be
outliers in a number of ways. For example, Brian Chesky was a bodybuilder who
graduated from Rhode Island School of Design. If anything, I'm more likely to
take a chance on an unconventional team.

Also, a word of advice, if people are consistently getting the "wrong
impression" about you, then perhaps you should work on hacking their
perception. To build a big business, you're going to need to sell yourself to
potential employees, customers, investors, etc.

~~~
mindcrime
_Also, a word of advice, if people are consistently getting the "wrong
impression" about you, then perhaps you should work on hacking their
perception._

Danger, Wil Robinson, danger!

If you start down the path of trying to project yourself to somebody as what
you think they want to see, you are taking on a big risk, as you never really
know what the expectations are. You're probably just as likely to screw things
up by trying to be perceived differently, than by just being yourself.

 _To build a big business, you're going to need to sell yourself to potential
employees, customers, investors, etc._

Right, but you have to sell _yourself_ not some alternate-reality, fictional
version of yourself. Of course you want to present your _best_ self to people,
to the extent that you can know what that is. And maybe that's all you're
really saying. If so, then sure. But if it means actively molding your dress,
behavior, mannerisms, speech, appearance, etc. to something artificial in
order to cater to someone's whims, I'm not so sure.

~~~
paul
Maybe we have a different definition of hacking. I'm not particularly good at
molding myself to cater to other people's whims, which is part of the reason I
have always avoided normal jobs. However, that doesn't mean I can't still be
mindful of how others perceive me.

~~~
mindcrime
_Maybe we have a different definition of hacking. I'm not particularly good at
molding myself to cater to other people's whims, which is part of the reason I
have always avoided normal jobs. However, that doesn't mean I can't still be
mindful of how others perceive me._

Sure. And based on that, I'd say we probably don't disagree much, if at all.
I'm just saying that there's a risk in worrying too much about how others
perceive you, since you won't (usually?) know - in advance - what it is they
_want_ to see.

I do agree with "put your best self forward", I just worry if it goes beyond
that.

Of course, my own biases are probably showing here, since I tend to prefer
outsider / renegade / iconoclast types anyway. :-)

------
ChuckMcM
Always interesting to see how people process their YC experience, it says a
lot about where the author's head is.

Any selection process has biases, some intrinsic, some extrinsic. But unless
the process is very loosely tuned, such selections are rarely _driven_ by
those biases, When I started at Sun the 'top' of the engineering ladder was
the title 'Distinguished Engineer' and I wanted to be one, and so to know what
it took to be promoted to that role. Some of the best advice I got was that,
that was the wrong question. The question was simply whether or not I _was_ a
Distinguished Engineer.

The subtle difference in phrasing aligns with whether or not the organization
_recognizes_ Distinguished Engineers or _appoints_ Distinguished Engineers.
Sun was very much the former and not the latter. It changed my whole
perspective from trying to do something which got me promoted, to doing stuff
that I was proud of, with the understanding that if that was something Sun
considered worthy they would promote me, if not _it didn't matter._ I know,
hard to believe it wouldn't matter but the place you have to be is you're true
to your path and in some groups that will be recognized as awesome and in
other groups it won't, but that is the group's problem, not your problem.

So in the YC selection process, perhaps it is more about recognizing teams
that are building YC companies, than it is picking teams to be YC companies.
I've never sat in on the discussion so I can't say but from what I've seen of
the demo day presentations there is certainly some homogeneity in the "vibe"
these companies give off.

------
ajju
I think YC has reached a point where anything PG says is likely to be
interpreted in the worst possible light.

That's unfortunate, because YC really doesn't have a type. I don't think there
was a single Zuckerberg clone in our batch[1], a large portion of the batch
had a foreign accent (me included), there were several awesome women led teams
(Shoptiques, HireArt, TheDailyMuse, 99Dresses...) and we all got in.

As I told a friend somewhat indelicately recently, the best attitude to have
post YC-rejection is "Screw YC, we are going to go gangbusters on this
anyway". Ironically, this makes you more likely to get in the the next time,
should you choose to apply. If not, you still win. Mbellotti clearly got that
part right with this: "Everything I have ever achieved in life has started
with a panel rejecting me, YC was just another notch." So godspeed to her!

[1] The closest may have been Jason Freedman, and he looks nothing like
Zuckerberg <http://42floors.com/team>

~~~
rock_hard
All the YC founders I know are the same type of person.

And I'm not talking about genders, age or cultural backgrounds.

They are intelligent (obviously), unexited (by my standards), determined and
tent to listen more then to talk.

They move baby steps instead of trying to make huge jumps. They all also seem
to be very scared of losing (which is different from wanting to win).

------
ridruejo
"It’s no secret that YC tends to invest in a certain type” That's simply not
true. If anything, what I have found is an incredible variety of backgrounds.
In the latest batch you could find from teenagers to people in their forties.
From former national kickboxing champions to people who could use some gym
time. From really charming extroverts to people who were more on the shy side.
Everybody was incredibly talented and passionate, though, and that was what
everyone I met had in common. Being rejected by YC is not the end of the world
(and you can always reapply the next cycle if you still want to do it) but I
would not blame it on not fitting an imaginary "type"

------
jgrebski
Hi all, Jacek here, and third founder of Exversion. Considering that this post
has garnered a bit of attention, I figured I might as well chime in.

First let me say that I found mbellotti's post absolutely wonderful, and find
that it serves as an example to the type of team we have become in a very
short period of time.

We as humans, all have pre-conceived notions of one another whether they be
based on appearance, mannerism, figure of speech, etc. For some of us, these
first impressions become much more deeply rooted than for others, and I, at
least personally, believe them to be a hinderance in getting to understand
people.

Social relationships aside, this knowledge of, and understanding of one
another is an absolutely pivotal part of any team as it leads to better
communication, and more importantly builds trust, and friendship.

But excellence in teams is also derived from hardship. Mbellotti, in her post
mentions that we took the RV to save money, which is true, however, as we
started this project on a bus, under somewhat strenuous conditions we noticed
that much like a hazing of sorts, the experience brought us, much closer
together. Would the discomfort of an RV do the same, I dare say it has.

I don't mean to sound trite by saying this, but team really is everything. How
often do you see a team fall apart because of squabbles over who's going to be
CEO of a 3 person company, or an argument over the hue of blue that's served
as a background.

To me the post was more about this anything, the trust, and belief in one
another, and the internal knowledge that we can and will make it regardless of
obstacles, because (excuse the mush) we actually do have one another to rely
on.

As for the YC interview and later rejection, yes it was disappointing as all
rejections are, and as a self confessed PR junkie it would have made that as
well as fundraising all the much easier, but it was a great experience
nonetheless, as was meeting the brilliant people who interviewed along side
us, and whose relationships I would like to continue and nurture, because they
really are great people.

With that, I highly urge anyone in a startup to get an RV and go a bouts the
bay area or NE corridor in it, is a killer experience, leads to some
absolutely brilliant stories and elevates the concept of "The "Mobile"
Startup" to whole other level. #hackingWhileMoving.

~~~
taliban
I love you to death but please watch your double quote-nesting when using
marketing buzzwords if you don't want me and mbellotti to deliver 40 lashings
in a public square <3

~~~
jgrebski
Apologies, I meant "The 'Mobile' Startup";

------
evanjacobs
Wow! One of the best self-aware posts I've read in a long time. Looking
forward to reading more and following the progress of Exversion (which sounds
like an awesome idea, btw).

------
jgrahamc
I'd like to hear about the 'system' that allows you to win at slot machines.
That sounds unlikely or perhaps just a martingale[1] applied to slots.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(probability_theory)>

~~~
Udo
She already answered that: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669088>

~~~
ableal
(posted the same minute the question was asked by jgrahamc, by the way, hold
the arrows ;-)

------
daned
I can't accept the one off 'hacking the slot machines' comment.

~~~
greenlander
Yeah, I didn't get that one either.

The game is rigged: anyone with any understanding of math knows that. The
house always wins.

Unless he's opening the thing up and downloading firmware, he's not 'hacking'
anything. He's just losing money. And if he was somehow up money for the night
as he claims, he just got lucky. The expected case is that the house wins.

~~~
mbellotti
It is used in the term "life hacking", yes. Originally I had an explanation in
the post but I cut it for length (and relevancy) so here's what I was up to:
Casinos give out free "slot credits" like candy. I got $30 dollars for taking
the bus to AC, $80 for eating at a certain restaurant, etc. The trick is you
cannot cash out your credits, only play them, but you can-- of course-- cash
out your winnings.

Except the odds of you winning anything over pocket change are astronomically
low, so most people gamble away not just all their credits, but all their
winnings and some of their own money to boot. That's why the casinos are so
eager to give you free credits for everything.

What I was doing was playing the penny slots on the lowest bet level and
cashing out anything over ten cents. I was making about 60 to 70 cents on the
dollar ... which sucks if it's your dollar, but the whole point was it WASN'T.
I was using the slots to convert the casinos free credits to cash.

......Not what I would have done if given free choice of activity, but like I
said, my friends wouldn't let me play blackjack :D If I have to sit for hours
while the bride-to-be brags about her bullshit "system" for hitting jackpots,
I might as well make a little money.

~~~
vegashacker
Cool. Where are you getting these deals? I stumbled into Casino Royale a month
or two ago and got one of their fun books. The problem was that the only way
to cash out was if you got one of the jackpots. So your expected value is > 0,
but of course the chance of winning is very low. My email's in my profile if
you feel this has now spiraled sufficiently off-topic.

------
pramodbiligiri
>> It’s how the human mind is designed to operate: looking for connections
when there’s not enough evidence to support a connection, jumping to
conclusions

Psychologist and Nobel econ prize winner Daniel Kahneman has written about
this in his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" [1]. I am currently halfway through
this book and it's been an insightful read so far.

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-
Kahneman/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-
Kahneman/dp/0374275637)

~~~
taliban
+1000000

Thinking Fast and Slow is one of those books that changes your life by
permanently altering your worldview. On some level it makes you resent
yourself as you start learning how to identify your own biases (and even
worse, just how many there are! Good God!) but once the bruises on your ego
start fading you'll find that you're a far better person for it.

------
sjtgraham
The more accounts I read of the YC application process the more resolutely I
feel that YC alumni recommendations are basically key to getting to the
interview stage. I wonder if PG et al could chime in on how applications are
ranked, i.e. how much weighting is given to alumni recommendations, alumni
reviewer votes (alumni screen applications to prevent poor ones ever reaching
partners), and partner votes. It would be cool to have some insight into how
that worked.

~~~
pg
It depends which alumni. A handful are good judges of startups. Most just
loyally recommend their friends. Off the top of my head, I'd guess alumni
recommendations are a factor in maybe 5-10 of the 255 groups we invite to
interviews.

~~~
rdl
255? I assume that is per year, not per batch.

~~~
pg
That's per batch. 5 days x 3 interview tracks x 17 slots per day. Which is why
we're usually a bit tired by the end of interviews.

~~~
6thSigma
I assume the number of interviews is a big bottleneck for you guys. Is the
number of applicants continuing to increase?

------
dsugarman
This was a great read, and for the most part it is the exact attitude you
should take. YC is a great experience but it is not the end all be all, and if
you really should go in to an interview with the mindset "If we don't get in,
screw it". Mass rejection is the norm when starting a new company with a new
team.

One note though: I really give a lot of credit to YC for thinking outside the
box in the interview process, I would consider myself far from the typical
tech founder archetype and our company sits in an industry that is typically
not that interesting to the startup community. They took a chance on my team
and me and we strive to prove them right.

------
dvt
This comment may get a significant number of downvotes, but here I go. I think
there has been an increasing number of these types of posts on HN --
especially in the past couple of years (for some reason). Having a good
attitude when faced with rejection is great. I'm not a fatalist in the sense
that I would encourage anyone to jump off a bridge if they get rejected by YC.

HOWEVER, it's important to understand the role that rejection plays. And it's
also important to understand the baggage that rejection carries with it. Sort
of blowing off rejection - to me - seems utterly stupid. Especially if it's
something you _want_. The point of founding a start-up is to be successful
(whether that's an exit strategy, positive growth, getting into YC, etc. is
irrelevant). Failure/rejection loses all of its beneficial characteristics if
all you do is blow it off ("oh it's just another notch"). You need to ask
yourself:

1\. Why did I fail?

2\. What can I do to not fail again?

In some cases (1) will simply be bad luck. Consider an athlete that slips and
tears his achilles or consider me asking a pretty girl out that happens to
have a boyfriend. Oh well -- that's just bad luck. However, if the athlete in
question failed to train hard or I made a bad joke that completely irked a
girl I'm interested in, that's something _completely_ different. I truly
believe that the start-up world is, in many ways, a lottery. By that I mean
that not only do you need to be in tip-top shape, but you also need to get
pretty damn lucky to end up like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

Blowing off failure prevents any positive improvements (hey maybe I should've
trained harder, maybe that was a bad joke, etc.) and encourages a kind of
isolated entrepreneurship where you think you know best and you're convinced
you're doing your best (even though you may not be).

Also, lets face it: failure sucks. Being rejected by a cute girl/guy sucks.
Not being accepted into YC sucks. Not getting into your school of choice
sucks. I think that downplaying the suckiness of these events is not the way
to go. Instead, figure out how to get what you want next time. It's a careful
balancing act. On one hand, you don't want to be a fatalist that gives up
after the first failure; but on the other, you don't want to be a hard-headed
and obnoxious positivist that doesn't acknowledge failure when it's staring
them in the face.

~~~
mindcrime
I think I agree with the general sentiment of your post, but I do think it's
also important to have a mindset that "getting rejected by YC is not failure".
That is, it's not "failure in the large". It's just "failure to get into YC".
It doesn't mean your startup is dead, or won't succeed, or that your dreams
are over. It's a setback, possibly, but it shouldn't be the death knell. IMO,
if you let failure to get into YC translate into "failure of our startup" then
you were doing it wrong to begin with.

Now, should you take the feedback (whatever that may be) that you get from the
YC rejection, and incorporate it into your worldview, and learn from the
process, and use it to grow? Sure... who wouldn't want to benefit from some
wisdom from pg, paul, rtm, etc.? But as smart and talented as the YC crew is,
they aren't totally prescient, and there are plenty of stories of teams that
got rejected and went on to success.

------
SeanDav
According to the OP the interview process went quite smoothly. Since this
appears to not be typical YC style I would think that this shows something
else at play here.

It seems to be a matter of perception. They sound like a rather alternate
bunch that don't appear to go to great lengths to sell themselves as a team.
They were probably doomed in the first 10 seconds. The failure to stress test
them out on their ideas would make it appear that the interviewers were just
going through the motions to be polite.

Not sure there is any blame to apportion here. The world is what it is and
people are what they are. In an ideal world they would have been a given a
thorough grilling about their ideas, enthusiasm, skills and approach despite
an initial very negative perception - but in an ideal world they would have
recognized their potentially negative appearance/behaviour and done something
about it, so it would not have been an issue in the first place.

------
john_w_t_b
I like this attitude:

Everything I have ever achieved in life has started with a panel rejecting me,
YC was just another notch.

Think I will subscribe to her blog.

------
rdl
The big optimization I would make during interviews, if you possibly can, is
stay with alumni and meet up with them first. That only really works if you
know them already, or have some connection to them.

(If anyone applies in the future that I know, I'd be happy to meet up with you
if you get an interview. Offer extends to people I don't know yet if it is
security, network infrastructure, or if you are US/UK/CA/AU/ZA military or
comtractor from Iraq/Afghanistan/HOA, or MIT or Technion. Maybe IL mil too,
but in that case you already know plenty of people...)

------
rurounijones
Off-topic: After reading that tiny white text on black background and
returning to HN I can see stripes going across the screen.

It is the first time a site has managed to actually hurt my eyes, ye gods.

------
TomGullen
> I walked out of the casino at a profit just by being aware of what the
> actual odds were and sticking to a system that would milk the machine of as
> much money as possible.

Care to explain this in more detail? Are you sure you know what the actual
odds are?

If you were actually making money through the odds, why were you only playing
for cents? I'd be looking for higher stakes machines with similar exploits.

------
ValentineC
Great article.

mbellotti: Just a comment on your blog's style: my eyes didn't take well to
the white-on-black colour scheme, and I had to install Chrome's High
Resolution extension to finish it without killing my eyes. Of course, YMMV.

------
tocomment
Does anyone know what the slot machine strategy is?

~~~
DanBC
Grab as many credits as you can. You can't cash out those credits, but you can
gamble them and cash out any winnings.

Slot machines pay out something like 60% 70% (according to the author) so
you're just converting non-cash to cash with a hefty markup for the casino.

The author played the low-stakes machines and cashed out any win over 10c.

~~~
tocomment
Sorry maybe dumb it down one more level for me? What's a credit? why can't you
cash them out, how do you get them?

~~~
lifeformed
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669088>

------
trg2
fascinating read - thanks for posting, took guts.

------
tbs
Had to stop reading after incorrect use of 'infinitesimally'

