
YC Interviews in India - katm
https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-interviews-in-india/
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rococode
With YC China in the works and now interviews being held in India, it looks
like YC is making a strong push to get a solid foothold in two obviously huge
markets that have fairly weak Western presence. Seems like a smart move, it'll
definitely be interesting to see what YC looks like 10 years from now.

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dalbasal
Interesting!

I'm a big fan of pg's essays. From my pov, it was the "golden age" of
blogging^. Essays like "black swan farming," "high res-society" were
fascinating, and tied abstract ideas aabout startups, investing and the world
to the parcticalities of how YC works. I found it fascinating.

PG did address startup hubs, why "YC of _place_" was a problematice idea and
other reasons why YC is centralized where it is.

But... PG wrote about a lot of ideas. Some might lead you to the opposite
conclusion, maybe increasingly as the startup industry has grown.

Ramen profitable, for example, could be a totally different proposition in
India. "High resolution" is an idea that I think at some scale needs to happen
outside of SV.

Since those essays, YC has scaled. That could put new possibilities on the
table. Many of the reasons startups hub are fixable with scale.

I realize this is just interviews, but I reckon that "just" is not just a
just.

^Another great example was joel on software and the stack overflow podcast.
You could watch Joel and Jeff's abstract ideas about (eg) "social user
interface" and such be implmented in software.

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jmspring
Good to see YC expand. I’m curious, though, if innovation ramps up in the
startup space in both China and India, will there be a decrease in demand for
immigration to the states?

My own experience across the visa spectrum is some want to move here
permanently, some want to make their stake here and return back to their home
country, some want to come here and build new businesses.

I don’t mean it as A discussion about immigration but more about one of
innovation.

We keep hearing, despite obvious growth in other regions, SV is still ground
zero for new companies.

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keerthiko
SV is ground zero and probably will be for some time, but the forces of
present immigration climate are unlike it has ever been in the past, and I
wouldn't be surprised if it topples SV's position as the innovation hub in the
near future. In the past, immigration was a minor barrier comparable to other
barriers founders and innovators face regularly, but one that needed to be
overcome. Today, especially with the freedom of the global internet
infrastructure together nationalist political climates, immigration is
starting to look like a less and less savory distraction that doesn't even
justify the effort needed to overcome it.

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winter_blue
The immigration situation for skilled/educated workers, has to my knowledge,
always been extremely bad in the US. Right now, it's gotten worse to another
level, but it's not like it was anywhere close to good before. There is no
founder visa. A few rare people (including you) have managed to get the O-1
visa; but that's usually an extraordinary difficult endeavor. Even getting a
new H-1B is incredibly hard, with your chance of winning in the lottery less
than 40%, and there being a significantly long (~7 months) before you can even
start working. Moreover, you're prohibited on having majority control over
your company on an H-1B, and need to ensure there's a board that can fire you.
So there's that.

Then there's getting an EB-1 approved ... I don't how you managed to get it,
but kudos to you on that. From what I've read, it's incredibly difficult, and
usually an order of magnitude more difficult than getting an O-1. Immigration
guides often say you need _win the Nobel Prize_ in order to qualify for it.
But I've also heard luck plays a huge factor -- in terms of who your
adjudicating officer is. Anyways, there's very little info out there (on the
interwebs) that talks about how to succeed with an O-1 or EB-1 application.
(It would be great if you could write about it.)

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keerthiko
Getting an O-1 and EB-1, rather than being some extraordinary feat, is more of
an extraordinary _distraction_ , and yes luck factors into it a lot.

My understanding is if you tried to immigrate 8+ years ago, it was relatively
certain and less of a distraction, even if it still took ~12 months to be
done. It has gotten gradually harder every year, until it went up
asymptotically in 2016 (I finished applying for my EB-1 in 2015).

Unfortunately IANAL + immigration landscape is evolving constantly, + the
complexities and options of immigration vary wildly with the differences in
personal circumstances (from passport to education and work history), so
anything I write will be quickly obsolete, and most people would find it
either too generalized, or not applicable to them.

Feel free to DM me, I'm happy to share some advice with anyone who thinks
immigrating will be important for their career.

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raghavkhanna
Great initiative! This should encourage more Indian/ SE Asian founders to
apply, since they no longer have to think about the time spent on the arduous
US visa application process - and can instead keep the focus on building their
company. Kudos to YC!

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jkaplowitz
YC is still requiring accepted founders to be in California during the in-
person program. But yes, they don't have to deal with the US visa process for
the Bangalore interviews, which is an improvement.

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gajju3588
For any company based out of India, working on solving problems for Indian
consumers, I see very less value in applying to YC. First of all their
advisors have very little or no idea about how does it work in Indian context
[because haven't done startups in this area], which mind you is very different
and more complicated then valley.

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ignoramous
VCs and Angels have picked up investments in India [0], and as a result, as
far as India is concerned, YC has missed out on Unicorns, though,
Razorpay/Cleartax/Meesho could be Unicorns in time.

[0] [https://trak.in/india-startup-funding-
investment-2015/](https://trak.in/india-startup-funding-investment-2015/) (URL
says 2015, but the data is latest)

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NTDF9
Well looks like YC is stepping up their game to get a bite of the future.

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gauravjain13
Byte, you mean?

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samravshanov
Means a slice of pizza/future

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dbxgiri
I think he was trying to be sarcastic.

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captn3m0
Nice to see YC doing this.

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justforfunhere
Does someone who only has an idea, but not done the implementation yet ( or
not production ready ) can apply??

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ignoramous
Yes, though stage creep is a real problem and some applicants show up not just
with a prototype but revenue as well.

Imho, to make most out of YC demo day, you'd have to have something concrete
ready, and so it helps to have started working before having interviewed with
YC.

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coder006
It's amazing to see how people are fighting over city names on a YC thread.
Just amazing! When we have problems like climate change and global warming to
solve, please by all means let's first decide the name of the city!

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ai_ia
To remind you, people also fight over if Thanos was right on the internet.

Not everyone is supposed to talk about the big problems like climate change
all the time. That's kind of boring.

My two cents though.

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lalith_c
ycombinator shouldn’t be the medium to discuss non technology period.

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giarc
I don't quite understand this move? Was there a big issue with founders
getting accepted for an interview but then not being able to travel to the US
for the interview?

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sarthakjain
US visas

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giarc
But for the interview they would just need a travel visa right? If they were
accepted they would still need to travel to the US and have the same issue
they did prior?

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winter_blue
Yes, they would just need a visitor visa (B1/B2/VWP-ESTA). I think YC is
conducting interviews in India mainly for convenience. Why force a 100
potential founders to fly to the U.S. to attend an interview -- which would
probably cost for flight+hotel around $1500 per person, so that's $150,000
wasted. Not to mention besides the money, there's time wasted as well -- the
time flying in airplane (34 hours -- 17 hours each way). It's simply
economically, from both a monetary and time perspective, more efficient to
avoid unnecessary travel for an interview.

Moreover, there's also the fact that it's practically impossible to move to
the U.S. as a founder of a company (there's no visa for founders). People from
a select few countries (that the US has trade treaties with) and who have
$100k in savings just lying around might be able to self-sponsor a E-2, but
I'm most YC-funded founders probably don't qualify for this either. Especially
not founders from India, since India is not a E-2 visa treaty country.

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christopher8827
It would be great if YC expanded to the Asia-Pacific region... somewhere easy
for Aussies to reach/apply/interview like Singapore.

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ozzyman700
Who will be doing the interviews?

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timwaagh
please come to europe too :)

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iddan
Is Tel Aviv next?

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LeicaLatte
Very cool

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vesh
Bengalūru, it has been 14 year since the name changed officially would
appreciate if people stopped using the anglicized name of our city.

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dingo_bat
I live here and hate the new name. It feels dumb to say it, whereas Bangalore
sounds very modern. Kind of like Dilli vs Delhi.

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Alterlife
I live here too. I like the 'new' name, it has grown on me. I think it's
endearing and friendly -- like a petname. "Namma Bengaluru" vs stiff-upper-lip
British Bangalore.

Putting my personal opinion aside, it's definitely not catching on:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Bengaluru,bangalo...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Bengaluru,bangalore)

I still call it Bangalore in any formal setting.

