
Ask PG: How would you fill out a YC application with YC as your idea? - trysomething
For the sake of argument, suppose this is right after the 1st summer founders program or right after the talk you gave at Harvard, whichever is more interesting.
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Aqueous
Dear founders of Y Combinator,

We regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you a spot in this year's
Y Combinator class. Do not take it personally. It does not reflect poorly on
the quality of your company, "Y Combinator," or its founding idea. We received
a huge number of compelling applications this year. Unfortunately, there just
weren't enough spots to go around, so we had to make some difficult choices.
As a result, we were unable to admit "Y Combinator" to this year's Y
Combinator batch. Please do not be discouraged. Many fantastic ideas like 'Y
Combinator' were also not admitted. In fact, we strongly encourage 'Y
Combinator' to apply again next year!

Sincerely,

Paul Graham

Y Combinator

~~~
yogo
"We could not accept Y Combinator due to the obvious name and branding
conflict. We strongly encourage you to apply again next year with a new name."

There's a more personalized version :)

~~~
Aqueous
Yes. I also should have placed my response in reply to mlchild's application.

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philip1209
This reminds me of the Jeff Bezos philosophy of writing a press release as the
project proposal.

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keketiko
How would you fill out a "Ask HN" submission asking HN how pg would fill out a
YC application with YC as his idea?

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krapp
Lisp? Is it Lisp? I bet it's Lisp.

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rmrfrmrf
Nope. Scheme.

~~~
mattdeboard
Excellent troll. I'm surprised this went 16 minutes without a correction.

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javajosh
If pg actually answers this for any other reason than to see me eat my shorts,
I'll eat my shorts.

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vbv
I think it would be even better if it was for Viaweb.

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dutchbrit
Agreed.

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mlchild
Apologies in advance to Sam Altman—I know writing HN comments is not work. But
I had fun answering! Back to the code.
_____________________________________________________________

Tell us in one or two sentences something about each founder that shows he or
she is an "animal," in the sense described in How to Start a Startup.

Paul and Robert built the first SaaS company, Viaweb, which allowed users to
build their own stores on the web. It became Yahoo Stores after its
acquisition.

Jessica is an excellent writer, marketing whiz and is already working on the
idea for our second major product—a one-day version of our summer program in
which a number of successful founders give talks to prospective hacker-
founders. We think this will inspire even more of the kind of companies we
like to invest in.

Trevor built a robot that duplicated the Segway’s functionality in a weekend
using off-the-shelf parts.

Tell us in one or two sentences something about each founder that shows a high
level of ability.

Trevor is working on the first self-balancing bipedal robot. It’s almost
ready.

Robert discovered buffer overflow, which helped bring the internet into the
mainstream press.

Jessica managed a highly successful rebranding of the investment bank Adams
Harkness as VP of marketing.

Paul is the author of On Lisp (1993) and ANSI Common Lisp (1995). (Have you
ever tried programming in Lisp?)

For founders who are hackers: what cool things have you built? (Extra points
for urls of demos or screenshots.)

Trevor—[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunicycle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunicycle)
Robert and
Paul—[http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/](http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/)
Paul—[http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html)

How long have you known one another and how did you meet?

Several years, mostly at school. [Ed. note: ???]

What is your company going to make?

A “summer school” for young, inexperienced hackers that are interested in
starting a company but lack early-stage funding.

The founders will meet with us once a week for dinner, during which a speaker
from the technology industry will answer questions and speak from hard-won
experience.

If your project is software, what OS(es) and language(s) will you use, and
why?

ARC

If you've already started working on it, how long have you been working and
how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?

A few months—most of the work has been planning the program, the code for the
site is fairly simple.

If you have an online demo, what's the url? (Big extra points for this.)

[http://ycombinator.com/sfp.html](http://ycombinator.com/sfp.html)

How long will it take before you have a prototype? A beta? A version 1 you can
charge for?

Once this application process concludes, the beta should be ready for launch.

How will you partition the work this summer; who will work on what?

All partners will help select companies and advise from past experience. Paul
and Robert have more experience with investors and shepherding small companies
through the necessary phases towards becoming big ones. Jessica has experience
with marketing, branding, and working with large companies. Trevor is a
hardware/software savant and is running a growing company of his own.

If you already have a business plan, what's the url? (Don't send us your
business plan. Put it on a server and tell us the url. Ascii text preferred.
Don't password protect it.)

[redacted]

How will you make money? Who will your customers be, how many are there, and
how will they hear about you?

Our basic assumption is that young founders can succeed in building startups
with good advising and seed capital. Given our average investment is $18k for
6% of 8 companies, just once company has to be worth $2.4 million for us to
break even.

We’ll advertise in the computer science departments of prominent universities
(e.g. Harvard, MIT) to recruit hackers who are looking for an alternative
summer job to working at a big company.

Will you do price discrimination?

We’ll give slightly more money to larger groups, although we suppose that’s
“investment discrimination.”

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear
most?

Obvious investment-side competitors are early-stage VC firms, who have more
money and the trappings of success. We’re banking on them ignoring our target
group of early founders.

The competitors we’re really afraid of are competitors for these hackers’ time
and attention. Fast-growing tech companies, graduate school, and even cushy
jobs at big companies might have more superficial appeal. We need to make sure
the most promising companies follow through on their potential.

Who will lose most if you succeed? (This need not be a competitor; TV networks
have been hurt by email.)

Likely those very same competitors for our founders’ attention. Google and
graduate CS programs might lose some great hackers, although we think in the
long run they’ll do better if younger programmers see the potential to start
companies. The big losers will be the R&D/quant trading/IT/etc. departments at
ossified giant companies—they’ll lose the kind of brilliant people they use to
bury in back offices.

Which companies, in order, are most likely to buy you?

KPCB/Sequoia Google Microsoft

What do you know about your business that other companies in it just don't
get?

Young, inexperienced founders can start massively successful companies. They
don’t need much money or training—just seed capital and a push in the right
direction.

What's new about what you're doing?

Our focus on such early-stage companies and our plan to invest and work with
these companies in batches are both quite novel. Most funds operate
asynchronously and make much larger investments in much later-stage companies.

Why would it be hard for someone else to duplicate?

We have experience in starting companies from the ground up and insight into
what matters (people, making something people want, thriftiness) and what
doesn’t (“market size,” the initial idea, “professionalism,” having an office,
etc.)

Have you made any discoveries you consider patentable?

We think we move fast enough to not need patents.

What might go wrong? (This is a test of imagination, not confidence.)

Perhaps all of the startups will fail. Perhaps the founders will go back to
school and the companies stagnate. Perhaps founders do actually need
experience at a “real job” to succeed in business. Perhaps Bill Gates and
Larry and Sergey are true needles in the haystack and we won’t be able to find
hackers who could be huge successes.

But we don’t think so.

If you're already incorporated, when were you? Who are the shareholders and
what percent of the company do each own? If you’ve had funding, how much, at
what valuation(s)?

Self-funded.

If you're not incorporated yet, please list the percent of the company you
plan to give each founder, and anyone else you plan to give stock to. (This
question is more for you than us.)

[Ed. note: ???]

If you'll have expenses beyond the living costs of your founders, Internet
access, server rental, etc., what will they be?

Space to hold our dinners, the food, and the investment money, of course.

Describe, in one sentence each, any companies any of you have started before.
If they failed, why? (We consider failed companies valuable experience too.)

Paul and Robert founded Artix, which let art galleries go online. This failed
(reason below) but became Viaweb, which allowed people to build their own web
stores.

Trevor started Anybots, which has developed several wheel-based self-balancing
robots and is closing on a bipedal robot.

If you could trade a 100% chance of $1 million for a 10% chance of a larger
amount, how large would it have to be? Answer for each founder. (There is no
right answer.)

Let’s go with the cold mathematical answer and say $10 million.

If your startup seems at the end of the summer to have a good chance of making
you rich, which of the founders would be likely to commit to continue working
on it full time over the next couple years?

All of us.

Which of the founders would still want to be working for this company in 10
years, if it were successful, and which would rather sell out earlier and do
something else? (Again, no right answer.)

All of us [Ed. note: just one year left!].

Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property
agreements that overlap with your project? Will any be under consulting
contracts this summer?

No.

Was any of your code written by someone who is not one of your founders? If
so, how can you safely use it? (Open source is ok of course.)

No.

Will any of the founders have other jobs, responsibilities, or consulting work
this summer?

No.

Tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered, and
who discovered it. (The answer need not be remotely related to your project.)

Paul and Robert discovered that art galleries didn’t want to go online in
1995. This may not seem surprising now, but it was to us then!

What else would you have asked if you were us?

There’s a joke here somewhere.

~~~
swombat
This is definitely not work. However, it's a great example of nerd sniping[1].

[1]: [http://xkcd.com/356/](http://xkcd.com/356/)

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d0m
He wouldn't tell you. However, he would connect with the right people and
sneak his way in.

~~~
d0m
To be clear, I didn't mean to sneak in illegally. I meant that smart startups
who really want to get in YC don't just write an application. They find people
_in_ (other startups in YC, mentors, investors) and network their way in.
Obviously, if the startup is dumb or the application is really bad, it won't
work.

Lots of current startups in YC are founded by first-employee of previous YC
startups. Most YC founders I talked too knew people there before sending the
application.

PG said that some startups joined YC with only the application. I trust him!
But that doesn't mean that lots of others didn't networked hard. If you have
a) A good application b) A good application + a previous positve experience
talking with the team, who would you pick?

~~~
jon_dahl
Be careful, though. For every legitimately good startup that gets to know the
YC partners through other channels, there are 1,000 founders who just look
desperate.

You only have so much time. Building a great company is the most effective way
to get into YC.

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redtexture
If this is your aim, you should have a disposable sum of money amounting to
around 10 million US Dollars available to devote this project that you don't
mind losing entirely. The potential of losing all of your money is a mind game
you must deal with.

You don't need to fill out any damn application, nor do you need a badge to go
ahead and do this right now.

Paul Graham reluctantly came to the conclusion that he could afford to go
ahead and finance this idea and did. He didn't know he could do this until
went ahead and did it. You could look it up. Here.

Do you have what it takes? OK then, get going.

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dutchbrit
Filling in an application to a VC wanting to be a VC? Doesn't make any sense.

~~~
hackinthebochs
I don't see why it doesn't. If someone had an awesome idea for finding highly
valuable companies in a previously underserved market, you don't think YC
would invest in them? If you don't then you're missing the point of for-profit
companies in general.

It's like every time we see an argument that some company would never do X,
because obviously they are in the business of Y and Y is so far removed from
X. Well that's just missing the point altogether. Companies are in the
business of making money, and if X is an opportunity they can capitalize on,
of course they're going to pursue it! Drawing lines in the sand is only
limiting your own vision, others will not be so constrained.

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nichochar
Dan?

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goldenkey
This is just silly considering that YC grew out of a sustained and developed
system, not some silly one-off idea.

