
How we failed our YC interview - mariusz331
http://mr-mariusz.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-we-failed-our-yc-interview.html
======
yesimahuman
Honestly, I wouldn't take it seriously at all. Find a paying customer. Make
them happy. Find another. If you can't find any, try something else.

We got rejected from YC several times and we are doing quite well despite it.

It really means little, unless you make it a big deal. Just move on. The magic
you need to succeed is inside of you, not anyone else.

~~~
plehoux
Exactly, we launched three months ago, have revenues(4 digits monthly), a
healthy 100% monthly growth rate.

We just left the interview really confused about the reasons why they wanted
to interview us in the first place. Since all they really did was arguing our
market had 0 potential and our app was not useful, which in itself is totally
fine. But why interview us, in the first place, if you don't believe in it?

The fact is, we will never know why they interviewed us and subsequently
rejected us. We just need to carry on.

Our goal now is to get ramen profitable(we are really close) and prove them
wrong ;)

~~~
jfoster
The interview from their perspective is probably an opportunity to learn more
about it and see if you can ease any concerns they have. Another possibility
is that they may have liked the team and wanted to see if you would consider
working on something else.

~~~
plehoux
Totally agree with this. And it is where we probably dropped the ball.

------
yurylifshits
Explicit demand and no competition (cancer treatment) — demonstrate
feasibility

Explicit demand and existing competition (fashion ecommerce) — differentiate
and show competitive advantages

Implicit demand (farmville-like games) — demonstrate early traction and prove
that your product is delivering high-order values (entertainment, happiness,
inspiration, meaning...)

No demand — delusion

~~~
chewing_gum
I wonder how this would work for something like the first guy trying to sell
chewing gum...

~~~
itsybitsycoder
Chewing gum (as in, a chewy substance you chew for the sake of chewing) was
discovered/invented a long time ago, probably before money. It was a
naturally-occurring part of the tree. If you mean modern chewing gum, it had
to differentiate itself from the previous iteration of chewing gum.

------
Uhhrrr
How is it better than Octave (<http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/>), which
runs most M-files and is free?

EDIT: Okay, someone posted the website, and it IS Octave
(<http://www.vectera.com/howitworks>). So, all the advantages are from the
cloud part. I guess it might be nice for people who have to use multiple
machines or want to check a simulation's progress on their phone?

------
jurassic
My main experience of MATLAB is fixing pathetic spaghetti code from non-
programmers (think of complex "scientific models" with no concept of DRY
principles), and wasting hours trying to adjust their MATLAB scripts to do
things that are trivial in just about any other high-level language out there.
The "Abandon MATLAB" [1] blog has several articles that really resonate with
me; it's a great read if you enjoy a good rant.

That said, the problem with MATLAB is not a lack of learning resources. On the
contrary, in my experience the MATLAB docs are nearly unsurpassed; all that
money pays for something! The problem with MATLAB is that it is primarily used
by those with no general programming knowledge or broader experience, who are
therefore tolerant of insane defects and defaults out of ignorance that there
is a better way to do things. If it were any other way, they would not have
added a gigantic Microsoft-esque ribbon interface to the latest iteration of
MATLAB 2013.

If I were a Christian, I would thank God daily that MATLAB has a ridiculously
high price. The expensive enterprise licensing means its use is limited mainly
to a few demographics of deep-pocketed non-programmers (e.g. scientists at
large universities), and I can continue to rely on the choice of MATLAB as a
major code smell.

[1]: <http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/>

Also amusing: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lBeungEnx4>

------
graeham
"A solution is a something. But a something isn’t always a solution."

I like this quote a lot: you failed to get into YC but I think you passed on
this. You can build a better mouse trap, but its only helpful in places where
there are mice.

Take it as a learning experiance, either adjust what you are doing or now you
can approach your next idea with improved perspective and experiance. From
what I recall the acceptance rate of companies offered an interview is still
only about 25%. I expect there are a few viable companies that don't make it
in each batch.

(From someone who interviewed in S12, was rejected, and took considerably
longer that you to reach similar conclusions to those you have).

Some unsolicited thoughts:

I do use MATLAB a fair bit in my work (PhD student now). I like it quite a bit
and to be honest I haven't really had any big pain points with it, at least
compared to some other packages that cost even more than MATLAB does (but
probably have fewer users).

I think you'll have to find a new swing on what matlab does. Academics get
discounted licenses and seem to be fine to pay for them, and I'm not sure if a
$2K license is a big deal for corporate users. Without those two groups, I'm
not sure how many people are left. Likewise, I don't think a service to learn
how to use MATLAB would have that big of market.

Maybe an interesting and disruptive swing would be to enable the power of
matlab-functionality to be abstracted to allow less sophisticated users to use
it? Wolfram Alpha is in some ways this, but it could be tied into other
services better.

------
apalmer
Ehhh, I am not sure that this is truly the issue with your presentation.

If it is truly "we can do X just like FamousApplication(tm), except we are in
the browser and we can be profitable charging 10% as much as
FamousApplication(tm)", that is pretty compelling. That is not something that
is really difficult to sell if you can truly deliver and be profitable at that
price point.

I am not sure how it is possible you can replace a computationally expensive
client side application like MatLAB with something that runs in the cloud,
without discovering order of magnitude more efficient solutions for a wide
array of well know mathematical algorithms. If you have discovered such then
you can pretty much write your own check, if not there is no way you can scale
as a service. Thats what I would think you have to convince potential
investors about.

~~~
x43b
"I am not sure how it is possible you can replace a computationally expensive
client side application like MatLAB with something that runs in the cloud,
without discovering order of magnitude more efficient solutions for a wide
array of well know mathematical algorithms. If you have discovered such then
you can pretty much write your own check, if not there is no way you can scale
as a service. Thats what I would think you have to convince potential
investors about."

I am an engineer (not CE/CS) who uses Matlab, so I am probably missing
something fundamental. However, I am curious why you think server side Matlab
requires order of magnitude more efficient solutions to current Matlab. Even
as a poor college student I used to SSH into my personal desktop running
Matlab and it ran acceptably.

At work I will remote into another system running Matlab without issue. Sure
if you are doing heavy plot manipulation it may get a bit laggy depending on
the situation, but why would mathematical algorithms need to be rewritten
unless you mean graphical?

~~~
apalmer
I am basing it on the assumption that you cant pragmatically do 100 matlab
sessions on a single server or VM. While a single Matlab session may run great
on a server you are SSHed into, i dont think you can run 100 matlab sessions
on a single VM or server without problems. Maybe you can in which case great!

If you cant though, then there is some kinda balancing act that the OP has to
optimize, how many matlab sessions can simultaneously be hosted on one of the
OPs VMs in the cloud at what cost? Since most of the cloud infrastructure
providers seem to charge an arm and a leg for CPU, and I am assuming (maybe
incorrectly) that this service will be CPU heavy, as an investor I would have
to be convinced that this team has some technique for bringing down these
costs...

either they would have to have better algorithms, or perhaps some interesting
grid architecture that drastically reduces CPU time and hence costs, or
something.

I am making assumptions here, but I think these are standard assumptions,
these are the kind of assumptions you have to convince a investor you have a
solution for. It may be as simple as saying, we can service 10,000
simultaneous users on 10 VMs, I have no clue what the numbers work out to, but
they would have to at least show how this can scale profitably.

~~~
x43b
"I am basing it on the assumption that you cant pragmatically do 100 matlab
sessions on a single server or VM. While a single Matlab session may run great
on a server you are SSHed into, i dont think you can run 100 matlab sessions
on a single VM or server without problems. Maybe you can in which case great!"
"10,000 simultaneous users on 10 VMs"

Thank you for the response. I appreciate the insights but I do not agree with
the premise that 100 or 1,000 Matlab sessions per server or VM is crucial to
the economics of the business.

I know many engineering firms who are perfectly happy and profitable to buy a
$2,000+ workstation, $2,000 Matlab license, and X*$Y,000 toolboxes for a
single engineer. That engineer might be in meetings all day. They might be on
vacation, they might not be working on a task that requires Matlab. Larger
firms sometimes get floating licenses that may be 10X or more that cost and
still have less 100% software utilization.

I see utilization economies both in software and hardware by licensing out
this resource to small and mid-size firms who do not have constant large
demand and even large firms who need a surge in computation.

~~~
apalmer
Hey man, just wanted to put it out there, I am sure you have a much better
understanding of the space than I do. I dont even think these are 'deal
breakers' i just think they are questions that you have to be able to clearly
answer when looking for investors... you may have covered them in depth during
your interview, just seemed like your original article was trying to divine a
mysterious missing puzzle piece that caused you to miss acceptance at
ycombinator... from the little info we had to go on seemed to be some basic
normal questions that weren't resolved before worrying about the philosophical
something or solution arguement

I sincerely wish you great luck and success!

------
shubb
For what it's worth, I need your product and know other people that do too. I
would pay for it, providing I didn't have to pay much.

Increasingly, we have big data sets, and want to work with them
collaboratively. Because they are so big, the problem of how to proccess the
data is added to the old problem of what to do with it. I think that
centralizing the 'how' would be a great selling point too.

Maybe I explained that badly - in Amazon AWS are a bunch of datasets.If I want
to play with them, I have to create an AWS instance, with the right tools, go
find the data, and spend time figuring out how to read it. If your online
Matlab also helped me handle data, then for opensource data someone would only
need to solve that problem once (ingest), and for closed source data, at least
I'd have a common platform with my team.

Anyway, my imagination of what your product could be, and all the problems it
could solve, has me excited. I encourage you not to give up or lose faith in
the concept.

This is entirely putting aside that yes, Matlab is expensive, and for
occasional / home users, it would be nice to have something subscription based
rather than couching up for a perpetual license.

~~~
mailshanx
There was a startup featured on HN a few days ago (forget the name) that aims
to do similar things. Essentially, they wanted to provide native linear
algebra and associated data analysis tools for large data sets by providing
the user with a Matlab/R like interface, and running appropriate
Hadoop/MapReduce code in the backend. They are backed up by some of the
biggest names in the machine learning community, including Tibshirani of EOSL
fame.

~~~
shubb
Good tip. I'll look out for them.

------
x43b
To the people who say this is an online Matlab replacement, I do not think the
website, <http://www.vectera.com/>, presents itself that way. First it says
"Learn Matlab", to me this presents itself as another online programming
class. I am not saying this is a bad thing, I personally use Matlab every day
and see the value. However, I could not find anywhere it talked about online
Matlab collaboration.

Also even though the word Matlab is all over the front page, when I went to
the about section it said it was powered by Octave. Again, this is not an
inherently bad thing. However, I thought this was an online time-sharing
license of genuine Matlab. I would pay $9/month for that; I would not pay
$9/month for Octave which I have installed on my notebook.

Also you can generally get a student version of Matlab for around $100 so if
the only purpose is learning and not "production" Matlab, I do not think it is
fair to compare to the $2,000 version.

~~~
mariusz331
Appreciate the comment. However, our issue was how we pitched our big vision,
not what we are now (as you see on the homepage, a Matlab learning platform).

------
aashaykumar92
"we focused on replacing Matlab"

Replacement should never be the main goal. Rather, making Matlab IRRELEVANT
should have been/be prioritized.

------
gfodor
trying to improve matlab by building something on top of octave is putting
lipstick on a pig. matlab/octave is a great language for writing quick
algorithms but it's biggest flaw is it is not designed for productization of
those algorithms.

in other words, focus on the real problem with matlab, it's poor
interoperability, deployability, and overall ignorance of good programming
language design patterns, not it's lack of being in the cloud or having good
tutorials. If you really need matlab, you will suffer through whatever god
awful things you need to in order to get it to work because it's the only tool
that will accomplish your goal. .m files have the tendency to be both the
worst and best code you've ever written: algorithmically brilliant,
stylistically abhorrent. The fact that I feel dirty after writing one is a
sign there is something missing, and it's not tutorials.

------
cadetzero
As a recently graduated student... ohmygod I wish I had this in college (only
because I don't use matlab daily). The tutorials are lovely and I don't have
to haul myself to a lab to run it.

I would have paid out of my own pocket in college to have that convenience.

------
JohnsonB
Why is it hard to see the value in making a product that competes in an
existing profitable and developed market space, but does so
better/cheaper/more conveniently? Isn't that a significant portion of the
startups in YC? E.G. Hipmunk - simply a more user friendly flight search and
hotel booking? Mariusz shouldn't have to spell it out for YC in this case.

If the issue is as Mariusz describes, he shouldn't be blaming himself, but
rather YC instead for not seeing the obvious market potential in fairer
pricing. Either YC missed something obvious or the reason YC turned Mariusz
down was for a different reason than stated.

~~~
salman89
If the problem you are trying to solve is inaccessibility due to prohibitive
cost, you'd have to at least show that there is market at that lower price
point.

With regards to matlab, I don't believe the cost to be prohibitive. In most
situations where you'd even require what matlab provides, $2k is not that much
money. There is also already a very good product that competes with matlab on
price - Octave, and its free.

Creating value isn't as simple as just making something cheaper.

------
shoyer
"MATLAB in the cloud" sounds a lot like IPython + PiCloud:
[http://blog.picloud.com/2012/12/23/introducing-the-
picloud-n...](http://blog.picloud.com/2012/12/23/introducing-the-picloud-
notebook/)

~~~
dlib
Exactly, there is definitely a market in further improving Python as the go-to
language for scientific computing. Matlab shines with its toolboxes and Python
has a long way to go in that respect but as a language is much better thought
trough. When I read "Matlab in the cloud" I also figured they simply meant a
Python in the Cloud toolset with the appropriate environments/libraries/IDEs.

------
mvkel
Citing Writely/Google Drive as a "successful" example is a fundamental
misunderstanding of what success is.

A loss leader does not a business make.

~~~
ry0ohki
The creator made (presumably) a couple of million, and has changed the way we
collaborate on documents, I'd love to have that kind of success.

~~~
mvkel
Your understanding of success is a bit skewed as well.

Wealth creation for a single founder based on the _huge_ edge case that a
massive company came and scooped you up is extreme LUCK more than anything
else.

Writely was, and Google Drive continues to be, a cost center. Is this thing
making money, or losing money? That is the sole indicator of business success.

------
Wista
What gets me annoyed is that we also submitted, didn't get an interview and
could have answered those questions easily. We've got some good early
validation of the fact that we are filling a need (or would once releasing a
V1)...

------
angersock
Hah, I was actually trying to pitch a friend on a Matlab-as-a-Service concept
a month or two ago--to say that they were skeptical would be an
understatement. Good luck!

------
gesman
Well, Adobe offering their toolkit as a cheaper, monthly cloud offering. That
is because lots of people cannot shell out $2k upfront for their tools. You
are doing similar thing with Matlab. How does it and why do you think you
failed?

YC failed to see the future potential of your business because they are
looking for the quickest and best bang for the buck obviously.

If you're passionate about your business model, keep going and ignore
naysayers who cannot assist you.

------
Sindrome
I think there is something to be done with an online mat lab product. Google
has it right with Chrome OS, computer software won't be around in a few more
decades. Everything will be in the cloud. So will matlab, but maybe it won't
be matlab, maybe it will be you guys.

There are plenty of examples of companies that didn't get into YC and still
succeeded. Kingmaking can only get you so far.

------
hkmurakami
_1\. A solution (something that solves a problem) 2\. A something (something
that you think should exist in this world)_

Isn't 1. the same as 2.?

~~~
mseebach
If only the author would elaborate on that point. Oh wait, they did.

TL;DR: A something can exist without being a solution. That's not a bad thing,
it's just harder to build a business on.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
Snarky!

------
onatm
today, same failure happened to my team. we created a solution about cloud gis
which takes geomatics engineering concerns into account. some of the investors
asked us "what is the difference between google earth and our project". before
the presentation, we were joking about what if they ask us about google earth.
it wasn't funny.

------
lcentdx
Fred Wilson wrote a similar experience with Airbnb [1], he's more sincere
about it, detail is very thorough. Regard to this article, I only find
personal remorse and popular startup names.

[1] <http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/airbnb.html>

------
auctiontheory
Whenever I hear someone talk about having a "solution," I want to ask "what is
the _problem_ you are solving"?

Too often people cannot describe the problem, or who has the problem. This
does not inspire confidence in their solution.

------
steeve
I found it cool when you guys pitched it to us, I still find it cool today!

~~~
zackzackzack
Would you pay money for it?

------
bkeydub
good thing there are plenty of accelerators in the sea!

------
danpal
Awesome job, Mariusz

