

Advice for Your YC Interview - myoung8
http://myoung8.posterous.com/advice-for-your-yc-interview

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patio11
My one piece of advice, and this is not confined to YC interviews but goes for
any time you are selling (and make no mistake, you are selling), is to talk up
the problem a little bit before you lead into your solution.

I expect PG and company are experts with regards to the needs of web startups
and inexpert with regards to many fields of human endeavor. If you're going to
be targeting one of those fields, mention the importance in ways which are
easy for non-experts to understand. Our field is important: it employs X
million, supports N companies on the Fortune 500, and did $ZZ billion in sales
last year. Our problem keeps these people up at night -- they write journal
articles about it, they spend hundreds of millions addressing it, it might
even have killed a few thousand people they care about last year.

After you do that, people will be more inclined to view your solution in a
positive light. Without the perspective of the problem, folks tend to latch
onto things they understand about the solution: hmm, that button placement is
off, this visualization lacks a bit of panache, I can't see myself ever really
using this...

These are not the thoughts that typically precede writing big checks.

~~~
wheels
That's good advice in general, and I something companies interviewing would do
well to be able to answer, but at least from what I've gathered from our
interview and others we talked to is that you don't even get a chance to set
up that sort of framing.

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pg
Yes. No prepared speeches please. It drives us nuts when we ask someone a
question, and instead of just answering they launch into some long preamble
they prepared in advance.

Interviews are only 10 minutes. We need random access; there is no time for
sequential.

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suhail
In our experience (Mixpanel), your goal should be conveying what you're doing
in the most basic form (nothing convoluted), getting all of them behind your
computer checking out your demo with pg interacting with it, having pg throw
out suggestions on what your product could do, and having Jessica distracted
about the time limit while telling you "we're already 2 minutes over guys."

If you can do that I think you've sold yourself reasonably well as long as
market size is reasonably resolved as an issue.

I would say showing that you're passionate about your company is important but
it's not something you can make up. Having an actual product with real
customers can easily help you prove your case.

I don't know if we would've got in without Garry from Posterous' help, so Tim
and I are happy to grab coffee just like Garry did with us right before your
interview and hear the pitch. Just let us know: support@mixpanel.com (goes to
Tim and I)

~~~
wheels
Did you even get a chance to explain, fundamentally, what your product was? I
got the sense almost that it needed to be 80% self-explanatory from a 1 line
description, and that already in that it had to set up the "this could be
potentially big".

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jlees
This is right in line with the three things early stage investors look for in
a company: technology, market and team.

While we're sharing, we interviewed and didn't get selected for S09 also.
Leaving aside any flaws with the idea itself, I believe the main thing we
should have done during the interview -- and didn't -- was coherently express
how we were going to make a ton of money out of the idea. pg et al may totally
disagree on that, of course, and there are other things that -- in retrospect
-- could have a) been better or b) been communicated better. But that's my
main 'I wish I'd said...' from our experience, anyway.

The other thing is demo. Ours really wasn't great - it was a screenshot
walkthrough which didn't show the tech in action. We had to do a lot of
talking to overcome that, which meant not enough time to talk about everything
else. If your demo explains everything in 30 seconds, you'll have a way
stronger foundation than we did.

~~~
avk
I recently had a similar experience doing a 3-minute pitch for a startup
competition. We didn't get it and assumed it was for all the wrong reasons. We
later met with one of the judges and he said we had everything right, we just
really didn't stress how we'd make money and that killed it for us. Lesson
learned.

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avk
I enjoyed the bit about differentiation:

"Another way of approaching this challenge is to think: what's different about
what you're doing? If the only thing that's different about what you're doing
is that the product is easier to use, then you need to think long and hard
about a better way to differentiate yourself."

I would also stress the value propositions and benefits of your solution and
how those are exemplified in the features. It'll make for an excellent
transition into the demo and not read like a boring feature list.

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rams
"they're looking to fund companies with IPO potential" - Is that correct ?
Difficult to make that out from PG's essays, maybe some founders can clarify.

~~~
pg
Every investor prefers companies with IPO potential. However, IPO potential is
more a property of founders than ideas. In 1975, writing a Basic interpreter
for the Altair was an idea with IPO potential, because Bill Gates had it.

