
Questions you’ll (probably) get asked at your YC interview - kevingao1
http://www.hyperinkpress.com/news/2011/04/22/5-questions-youll-probably-get-asked-at-your-yc-interview/
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pg
These are all things we care about, but they are probably not the most common
questions we ask. E.g. we already know about the equity split because we ask
about it on the application form, so we only bring it up during the interview
if we noticed something odd about it.

The thing we care most about in interviews (at least of things one can change)
is how engaged the founders are with users. How do they know people actually
want what they're building? Have they talked to real, live users? What have
they learned from them?

We don't care super much how big the initial market is, so long as the startup
is making something that (a) some subset of people want a _lot_ , and (b) if
that market is not itself huge, there is an easy path into bigger neighboring
ones. Basically, we're looking for startups building Altair Basic.

~~~
dtran
A good corollary question to "How do you know that people actually want this?"
is "How are people solving this problem now?"

If founders respond that there aren't really any current solutions, then it
usually means that either a) They aren't making something that people really
want, or b) They haven't talked to enough users.

If it's a problem people actually have, then they must be coming up with crazy
hacks or solutions that are much more tedious/inaccurate/expensive/generally
more painful than the one you're coming up with. Very rarely is there simply
not some kind of existing solution.

~~~
pg
This is such an important test that we have a question about it on the
application form. I learned about this heuristic from Sequoia, who care a lot
about it. They call it "proxy for demand."

~~~
6ren
Christensen talks about this too, as "non-consumers" who have a job they need
to get done, but can't because they lack skills, or money. Instead, they pay a
professional to do it for them, or "cobble together a solution". There are
also "non-consuming contexts" where you just can't use a product (e.g. a
landline phone in a car).

What I found really interesting was that the reason successful disruptions are
"more convenient, simpler and/or cheaper" is not because that's an
improvement, but because it enables the disruption to be used by non-
consumers... (who lack the skills for a complex product; or the money for an
expensive one; or access to an inconvenient one.) They are delighted to have a
solution better than what they have now, so it doesn't need to be as good as
the incumbents'. Secondly, if it's not good enough to appeal to incumbents'
customers, it won't provoke a competitive response.

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nhashem
My partner and I got a YC interview last round (no luck this time,
unfortunately) and one thing I'd like to caution is that if you have a
"chicken and egg" situation ("Why would X users use your site until you have Y
users and vice versa?) or an "established competitor" situation ("What's to
stop Google from just adding a link to X product?"), you should have as close
to bullet-proof responses to those questions as possible.

Our interview was pretty much spent trying to respond to those questions. This
is why having an actual product with any sort of customers is so valuable,
because that's live evidence that what you're doing is working. Unfortunately
my partner and I had little more than an idea and half of a web application,
which we didn't even get to demo because we were so caught up trying to defend
our position. I literally never even turned my laptop around to PG and
company, which is probably my biggest regret about the whole thing, because I
had spent every free moment of the past several months working on it and maybe
that could have said more about our ability to execute than a debate on
whether X market for Y users even existed.

Then again, probably not.

~~~
kevingao1
nhashem, great point. i think its important to get users as fast as possible,
and what investors really care about is what you LEARNED from those users
(what they like, don't like, data that supports your hypotheses). better a
poor product + hundreds of early users than a polished product that hasn't
been launched, imo

~~~
pg
IMO too. Though a product that has hundreds of genuine (= highly active) users
can't be that poor.

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ianl
In general, answer the question directly and be honest. Trying to use bullshit
marketing speak similar to what is taught during an MBA is a turn off and
limits their ability to access whether or not you know what you are talking
about.

At least, thats what I get from this article and every single essay I've read
that was authored by PG.

~~~
pg
That's good advice. We're interviewing 21 groups a day, and we have to
converge on a decision in 10 minutes, so there is nothing more important than
speaking plainly. Trying to decode marketing-speak exhausts us.

I think people use marketing-speak to seem more impressive, but on us it has
the opposite effect. The phenomenon is very much like the artificial diction
that inexperienced writers so often adopt, and which does nothing but get in
their way.

I know it's bad form to quote oneself, but I can't put it better than this:

"When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When
you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance."

(<http://paulgraham.com/taste.html>)

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ChuckMcM
Those are great questions. Similar questions I've asked during funding and M&A
interviews;

 _What do you not yet know, how are you developing information about that?_

This is knowing what is risky and what isn't. Some problems are just
'engineering' you do work and get them done. Others need 'new physics' which
is code for an imagined but not yet designed feature or capability to work.
Too many of the latter can be a real problem.

 _How many people do you think you'll need to realize this vision? How many to
keep it current?_

One of the more sad failure modes of startups is over hiring. More people can
be good, too many people is really bad, understanding what the people
requirement is can bite you if you don't get it right.

 _How will customers find you? What does it cost you to be visible to them?_

Customer acquisition, especially in a demographic that doesn't congregate
(small/medium business fits this category) can be unduly expensive. If you
have a product that would sell like gang busters at $X but it costs $X + $Y
dollars to get a customer, you need to fund to _n_ customers such that the $Y
starts going down via word of mouth or other coverage.

 _Stack rank your feature set in 'lifeboat' order, explain how you got that
order._

You should have more features imagined or lined up than you can deliver, that
gives you follow on. But you also need to know what is the minimum set for a
viable product. Understanding how you get to that minimum set says a lot about
your priorities, your sense of the customer, and your reasoning about the
business.

~~~
kevingao1
All great questions. Think ours are more targeted at YC/similar extremely
early stage investor conversations, where the answer to some of those
questions (and this is 100% ok) can be "I simply don't know right now",
especially how many people you'll need to hire (just a core team to build the
first product) and a detailed view on feature set (just a few features that
you think people will really LOVE).

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melissamiranda
Great post, love the short Do/Don't format. I would add "How will you get
users." That's the single most important question Hajj had for us in the pre-
interview Skype chat.

~~~
kevingao1
thanks. absolutely - user/cust acq is extremely important and saying friends &
family + viral is not the answer!

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ulf
Great subset, one has to hope people do not read this as "this is how you game
the interview process" but rather as "reflect about your idea with these
points in mind".

~~~
kevingao1
Absolutely. As paul buccheit likes to say, limited life experience +
overgeneralization = advice. Take what I'm saying with several grains of salt,
and recognize that every interview will be VERY different in tone, style, and
content

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waterlesscloud
"Are you going to work on your startup even if we don’t fund you?"

Do they really ask that? Do people really ever answer anything other than
"Yes"?

I could see it if you had some idea that needed millions in funding to start
moving, but then you wouldn't be at YC, I wouldn't think.

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DTrejo
Please revise the title to conform to the guidelines
(<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>) by removing the "5" at the
start — thank you.

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allanscu
What about something as simple as the expected value proposition or 'why
should we give a sh!t about your idea?' When I've pitched to angels, these
seem to be a common theme.

~~~
kevingao1
yes, absolutely important. something we really struggled with early - both the
one sentence and the 30 second that people instantly GET. this is not just for
investors, but for anyone - potential partners, hires, your mom, etc. and keep
in mind this is def a work in progress - you'll improve on it and often change
it substantially over time!

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kevingao1
Sorry guys but it appears our site is down right now. Feel free to comment
here though, and I'll respond. Thanks for your patience!

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swGooF
Those are great questions for all startups, even if you are not applying to
YC. Thanks for sharing.

~~~
kevingao1
Absolutely! Sorry the site is down right now, we'll get it up asap :)

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rocamboleh
Is anyone aware of the number of submissions to YC per year and the chance of
getting an interview?

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pg
I realize this will sound like a flippant answer, but I mean it seriously: the
chance is either very high or very low, depending on how good your application
is.

It took me a long time to realize that when the odds of getting into something
were described as e.g. 1 in 10, that didn't mean the odds for any given
applicant were 10%, but rather (to the extent the people deciding were good
judges) that for 10% of applicants the chance was nearly 100%, and for the
other 90% nearly zero.

~~~
paulgerhardt
See also "Ecological Fallacy":
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy>

The famous example mentioned is W.S. Robinson's 1950 study of literacy among
immigrants[1]. He found that states with higher populations of immigrants had
higher literacy rates, but the average literacy rate among individual
immigrants tended to be less than the average population. He concluded that
immigrants must move to areas where the literacy rate was higher.

It's not too much of a stretch to make a similar argument for Silicon Valley
as a whole or refute any individual startup's odd's of success as 1 in 20.

[1] <http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/2/337.full>

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allanscu
Good posting. I'd be interested to hear what other questions YC alums have
gone through.

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deviantflux
inspiring Q&A to really sit down and think through these pertinent issues...

