I should know better than to make jokes that align with people's existing fears.
Once we funded someone who reminded me of Zuckerberg, and
even then it was far from the only reason. And the fact that the YC partners have taunted me about it ever since shows that if anything we're probably extra skeptical about Zuckomorphs.
I realize it's possible to be unconsciously influenced by applicants' appearance and manner, but can anyone at this point believe we're not aware of that danger, and simply pick people based on matching some crude archetype? That we could remain that naively incompetent after 16 cycles of picking founders and then watching how they do?
I'm going back and forth about how smart it is to reply to this seeing as the point I was trying to make was not "Wah YC rejected us because we're different!!!"
For the record, I've always really respected YC for being honest and up front about biases. I find it very refreshing, because most everyone else is too scared of being accused of discrimination to admit it. Everyone has biases. Every VC and angel is going to try to match what's in front of them to something they know when assessing the potential value. I have no doubt that YC will accept a great company that doesn't fit the "type", we spoke to lot of companies like that before we came out to SF.
What I'm curious about is YC's habit of "fund without idea" or "fund for new idea" ... how likely is it that someone against the traditional startup type would be given that opportunity? I don't know the answer because there's no data on what ideas people came into YC with, vs what they left with ... but it's an interesting question to me because cognitive biases are an interesting topic to me.
The people who think they are smart enough to think their way out of their own biases are usually the ones who fall victim to them the most often. So I've always really seen YC's honesty about this as a GOOD sign, not fodder for criticism.
This isn't a dig, so don't take it as one. But you mention in the article that you have felt like this your whole life - people have tried to fit you against a preconceived stereotype and you don't fit one. You also said that before the interview you were worried about the interview for that reason. Perhaps that's your bias?
The thing working with data has taught me is that humans are bad about guessing outcomes. Expectations are constantly trumped by the data, if you look at the data with an eye for your own biases.
In any case, thank you for sharing your experience.
1) No one is going to believe that you can accurately compensate for your biases. If you are in fact biased towards Zuckomorphs, meta-awareness is only going to help so much with that. You don't have to be naive, you don't have to be incompetent, but you're still biased. OH WELL, LIFE IS HARD.
2) Respectfully, pg, why are you bothering with this, and more with all the other "how to hack YC", "why we got past YC", "why we failed YC" blog posts? I'm surprised you don't have a bot that first-posts the following comment to every such submission:
"On behalf of YC, there is basically zero chance that TFA gives meaningful insight into YC's hyper-evolved process for seeing past such rudimentary schemes. -- the PGBot"
2) Respectfully, pg, why are you bothering with this, and more with all the other "how to hack YC", "why we got past YC", "why we failed YC" blog posts? I'm surprised you don't have a bot that first-posts the following comment to every such submission:
Heh... I'm sorry, but I can't help but be slightly amused by the idea of a "pgbot". So much so that I started on capturing some "pg'isms" in AIML a while back.
I'd love to play with this more, but I have to much respect for pg to do it. Any more and I'm afraid it would go from "cute, maybe amusing diversion" to the realm of actually offensive.
What might be fun though, would be to compile some stock expressions, advice, quips, etc. from a whole range of well known personalities in the startup & tech world, and create a bot that combines them all. You could call it "startupbot" and stick it out there somewhere for people to interact with.
Be careful about assuming that everyone who could productively engage with you understands the world as you see it. Who else has done exactly what you're doing before? Nobody. Frankly, knowing how competently you do or don't pick teams is your job, not theirs. Your comment makes perfect sense, but ends standoffishly.
The main takeaway from this article for me was not the point of failing to look like Zuckerberg, but the importance of being likable and project a certain image of (the promise of) success. It's clear from the beginning of the essay that this was the main issue even among the group of founders themselves, so it was no surprise this deficiency translated straight to the interview.
I realize it's possible to be unconsciously influenced by applicants' appearance and manner, but can anyone at this point believe we're not aware of that danger, and simply pick people based on matching some crude archetype?
I didn't really read that as the main take away of the post. And I didn't get the feeling that they were trying to say that you do simply "pick people based on matching some crude archetype". I read it as a more general analysis of the dangers of making those kind of snap decisions (note all the stuff about how the team-members didn't even necessarily care for each other, based on initial impressions). The bit about you and your Zuckerberg quote was just one element of a bigger picture, from what I saw.
Maybe it's just me, but what I took away from the story was "don't hold too strongly to rush judgements about people, and don't worry so much about what pg and the YC crew think about you, regardless of what you look or act like". But that could just be a reflection of my own biases.
Whether or not we (humans) can adequately compensate for our own cognitive biases, even when we are aware of them, is an interesting topic. Personally, I'm glad this post showed up and helped raise that issue.
10 years ago, an electric car company would sound like objectively the worse idea to many. Tesla was founded in 2003, the same year that General Motors officially cancelled its EV1 program. Toyota stopped selling its Rav 4 EV. Honda had long since ceased production of the EV Plus. If 3 of the largest car companies in the world tried and failed to make a profitable electric car, what hope did a newcomer with no automaking experience have?
This reminds me of one of Warren Buffet's famous quotes:
"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."
Taking this thinking another step, one of the characteristics of good management is probably the ability to avoid bad businesses.
If Zuckerberg were to leave Facebook to start another startup, and analysis of the idea makes an investor think it's a bad idea, I'm guessing they would still invest in Zuckerberg based on the assumptions:
1. He knows something you don't.
2. He'd move from a bad idea to a good idea later and it's worth investing in smart businesspeople.
Reminds me also of one of Marc Andreesen's rules for startup success:
1. When a good market meets a bad team, market wins.
2. When a bad market meets a good team, market wins.
3. When a good market meets a good team, something special happens.
Also, Zuckerburg himself has said that the reason he refused all buyout offers for Facebook was "I'm unlikely to have an idea as good as this ever again." That was probably the quote that changed my opinion of him from arrogant douchebag who got lucky to someone who just might have his head screwed on. It displays an interesting level of humility that's largely missing from his public persona.
" "I'm unlikely to have an idea as good as this ever again." That was probably the quote that changed my opinion of him from arrogant douchebag who got lucky to someone who just might have his head screwed on. It displays an interesting level of humility that's largely missing from his public persona."
You know, Zuck actually seems like a nice guy. Someone I'd love to grab a beer with. He's obviously smart, incredibly humble, (supposedly) easy to work with and doesn't really fit the existing molds of a wunderkind CEO like Jobs or Gates.
Note that a16z invests in startups at a much later stage than YC does. For YC, the quality of the team may be the most important because they're at a stage early enough to significantly change the market they target. By the time a startup is looking for series A (or later) funding pivots are relatively more expensive.
Yeah, I suspect that YC is willing to invest based on team because they figure the idea can easily change anyway. I've heard that one of the points of the YC interview is to weed out inflexible founders that are not willing to radically change their approach. And Andreesen has recommended that "Until you achieve product/market fit, keep the team as small as possible.".
Well heck, he probably didn't have the dev environment set up on his machine. I'll bet it's 90 minutes to find the bug, ten minutes to fix it, and the rest for test+deploy.
I can scratch my toes a lot faster than you can - you don't even know where my toes are right now.
I knew almost for sure pg or someone from YC was going to answer something like this.
This man has probably overseen the early days of more successful startups than anyone else in the world. That huge amount of heuristics (pratical experience) loaded in a single head is the reason I listen to what he says. He's wise.
But wise does not mean "he who gets it right every damn time". I guess there's likely a psychological explanation as to why we love opportunities to pick on the flaws of successful people. "Hey look, pg made a mistake! Ha, I knew he wasn't god!"
An excellent read. Life is rejection. I loved the symmetry between the co-founders' mutual rejection when they first met and then finally their company's rejection at YC.
Cultural matches are important and they drive more decisions than we're all comfortable with. The truth is, we often like to hire, promote, or buy from people who fit a certain stereotype. It's essentially a cargo cult around what successful startup people are expected to look like, and the most uncomfortable thought arising from that is not the number of founders who "wrongly" received funding, but the number of hopefuls who never got the chance.
However, taking the time to really get to know and appreciate a startup person is not something that can reasonably happen a lot when you're in contact with customers, the press, or even your own employees - so the (bad) impression a team makes while interviewing for an incubator or fund raising does tends to follow them around.
People can and do change their appearance to match other people's expectations - and it's a proven, working method of upping your chances. Learning how to interact better with others, while certainly painful, also helps and is more often than not necessary to become successful.
We're often distracted by the Zuckerbergs or Jobs' who are abrasive and embody their own don't-care-for-anything style, but the ugly truth is that those guys got so unbelievably lucky that they never needed to actually work on themselves.
You can create your own luck, too. Not as big s theirs, but enough to open up good opportunities. Its just a matter of spending some time away from the keyboard, talking with the people who have the keys to the doors. Almost all of the time, a simple please will get them to open up the door for you. Just ask.
Depends on how you define "luck" I guess. In a strictly pedantic sense, I agree that you "can't create luck" as there is no such thing. Luck is just a word we apply, in retrospect, to describe what did or didn't happen.
But I would argue very ardently that the expression "the harder I work, the luckier I get" contains a great deal of truth. Work, intent, and focused will can do a lot to shape the world we live in.
I'm reminded of that post that showed up here a year or so back about "how to date a supermodel", which started with something like "move to where supermodels live and go the bars where they go". Yeah, that might not be sufficient, but there's a lot to be said for the "create my own luck" aspect of at least taking the actions that are needed to move you towards your goals.
You should obviously do whatever you can to improve your chances of success. I'm just saying that you shouldn't expect to be the next Facebook or Apple, because that's unrealistic. There's nothing wrong with expecting moderate success.
> I'm reminded of that post that showed up here a year or so back about "how to date a supermodel", which started with something like "move to where supermodels live and go the bars where they go". Yeah, that might not be sufficient, but there's a lot to be said for the "create my own luck" aspect of at least taking the actions that are needed to move you towards your goals.
To follow up on your supermodel analogy, if you were to do that, it would be reasonable to expect that you'll eventually score a date with a supermodel - just don't expect to score a date with $a_top_10_supermodel (whoever that might be).
Yeah, being an average success is great too! I'm average at best, and I have an awesome lifestyle. I dont care about the billions. I just cre about providing a good life for my family.
That is where the being away from the keyboard part comes into action. You have to actually meet with people to be able to talk them into giving you opportunities.
I don't mean physically being in the right place at the right time. I mean that you happen to be interested in and start a company at the right point in history, where a confluence of technological and societal factors enable you to be that one-in-a-billion person like Jobs or the Zuck. Just running around talking to people isn't going to make you Jobs or the Zuck. It's necessary, but definitely not sufficient.
Of course, that's not to say that you can't be a moderately successful entrepreneur if you "hustle" enough. Just don't expect to have books written and movies made about you. I know plenty of people who have started ventures in important niches and have found moderate success. There's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of if you exit for $10 or 20 million after a couple of years of hard work. But, going in, you have to be aware of the fact that you're almost definitely not going to end up a multi-billionaire.
>>We're often distracted by the Zuckerbergs or Jobs' who are abrasive and embody their own don't-care-for-anything style, but the ugly truth is that those guys got so unbelievably lucky that they never needed to actually work on themselves.
This is obviously my opinion. You are free to voice another one or present data that offers another perspective. There is really no "citation needed" for every thesis a person happens to entertain, and that comment alone with no other content accomplishes absolutely nothing besides being rude. Try to reason with me, or if you're lazy, vote me down; though I personally prefer to vote on post quality rather than agreement/disagreement. [citation needed] is not a meaningful interaction in my opinion.
It is my opinion that "[citation needed]" can push conversations in a direction that I value, and as such is often a meaningful-to-me interaction.
We can't live in a world where every statement has citations, of course. So in practice, apparently-factual statements often have to stand on the authority of their speaker. As such, it's regrettable when people utter unfounded claims in the language of authority (like "the ugly truth is"). And so it's useful (to me), for people to call out when other people are doing this, in the hopes of eventually raising the conversation. "citation needed" means "This statement is phrased to sound authoritative, but has no evidence, and I think it's wrong, and I'm willing to be persuaded by evidence". I strongly disagree with the claim that it accomplishes nothing but being rude... unless, of course, the recipient (you, in this case) has no interest in discourse.
Why would fearless reason with your unjustified and implausible claim? And why would (s)he downvote your entire comment, just because the last sentence is silly? Upvotes for fearless!
> "This statement is phrased to sound authoritative, but has no evidence, and I think it's wrong, and I'm willing to be persuaded by evidence".
That is just so damned smug. Why doesn't that person have any of these lofty responsibilities about making a perfectly articulated argument? It's acceptable for them to literally type two words as their contribution to the "discourse," and the onus is pushed back onto the person who actually put some effort into it? Discourse does not mean "you will go on at length, and I will offer a simple rejection until I am satisfied with your argument."
> Why would fearless reason with your unjustified and implausible claim?
Because it's a community, it's a two-way street. If he wants to push the conversation that way, he can help it get there with an actual contribution.
edit: On second thought, removed some unnecessary snark. Others have covered my point anyway, just got a bit riled.
I agree with the sentiment, but I find the actual text of "[citation needed]" too flippant. Instead, I just ask the person to provide a source or an argument.
This is a discussion forum, so the better way to ask for evidence is to present a contrary opinion backed by evidence. That will draw out a meatier response, or if not, still edify the reader. Fearless added absolutely nothing to the conversation in content or in style.
While I agree that "citation needed" is rampant around here, part of the reason is phrasing. You stated an opinion as a fact. A lot of people roll their eyes at this, but if you expect something to be taken as an opinion -- which is totally reasonable -- then you should phrase it that way.
"I get the impression they never had to work on themselves" doesn't beg a citation. It's clearly an opinion and doesn't imply that it's attempting or intended to be anything else.
It may seem pedantic, but when all people have to go on are the words you put in the form, being clear is important.
I think you have a point, but context is important. And I say this as someone who has been repeatedly accused in this forum to make abundant use of "weasel words" just to qualify the boundary between fact and opinion. As a result I don't do it as often anymore, especially when the context of the subject itself already serves as a good indicator that whatever follows will be opinion.
Still, I have to admit that I do believe it to be factual that extremely successful people did not have to work on making themselves pleasant or conformant to the same degree as normal people. I explained the reasoning for this in the sister comment, but the upshot is that I indeed see this as a fact that probably could be supported by biographical evidence.
Meh... I used to feel that way, but over time I've realized that life is too short to stop and waste the time to put "I think" or "I feel" or "in my opinion" in front of everything I write. If I write something, it's implicit that it's my opinion. It may or may not also be a fact. In either case, if somebody disagrees or has a counter-claim or wants to present evidence to the contrary, then let them do it. But bitching because people don't load every paragraph with qualifiers, weasel-words and cop-outs is just silly.
Expecting people to say what they mean has absolutely nothing to do with weasel words or qualifiers. If you can't be bothered to communicate clearly, all you're doing is diluting your message. Hopefully you have nothing important to say, because if you do, everyone loses when you fail to say it clearly.
Right, but adding "in my opinion" and "I think" and "I feel" in front of every opinion has nothing to do with communicating clearly. There are lots of things in communication that are implicit and don't need to be stated explicitly.
vs
Right, but I think that adding "in my opinion" and "I think" and "I feel" in front of every opinion has nothing to do with communicating clearly. In my opinion, there are lots of things in communication that are implicit and don't need to be stated explicitly.
Now, would you really argue that the second version is any more clear, or that anyone's understanding would be changed by adding all those qualifiers? Personally I don't find it to be anything except unnecessarily verbose. shrug
When you say something is "the ugly truth", you're presenting it as fact, not opinion. I don't mean to be rude, but the prevailing attitude on HN of "successful people are successful because they got lucky" is poisonous to say the least.
I'm not asserting that all successful people are that way because of luck, but those two examples are certainly valid in that sense. The citations can be found all over the place, including Wikipedia. That doesn't mean those people didn't have talent. I'm simply stating that they could get by without changing their style because their success predated their need to get along with people.
A lot of extremely successful people got there because of extreme luck. Their extreme luck became an essential component of their success. It's not that they won a planetwide lottery without doing anything for it. It's that they won the lottery and were very competent, and in some cases, hard working. Again, please note that I'm talking about the extremely successful people that we like to iconize.
To be phenomenally successful you typically are extremely young, come from a reasonably affluent background, have enjoyed a very nice education, and your early life is characterized by crossing paths with lots of influential rich people. Contrast that with "normally" successful people, they are just different. They can be any age, come from a variety of backgrounds, and typically they had to deal with (and improve on) a longer streak of rejections.
I don't think it's poisonous to acknowledge luck, it is one of the necessary ingredients of extreme success. And extreme success is usually a necessary ingredient for trend-setting the styles and mannerisms we have come to expect from all successful founders.
I'm mbellotti's cofounder at Exversion. For me, the main takeaway of her post is just how different the YC interview experience can appear even to members of the same team. As the other female on the team, I've always found my chromosomal makeup to be a huge advantage rather than a disadvantage (especially after establishing some level of technical competence). Despite my own belief in merit over affirmative action, it's one of the biggest tools in my toolkit, frankly. Where males have nepotism, we have novelty and the promise of good PR. I would even go so far as to say it may give us a net advantage over all-male teams.
I digress. My own view of the YC interview is such, taking into account the magic of hindsight: that we shouldn't have depended on PB and our interviewers to drive the conversation toward market size. We should have anticipated the concern on our own and brought it up as it's something we're already used to having to defend. Should've, could've, would've -- who knows if that would've mattered, but it's my best guess. Then again, we also spent our 10 minutes successfully selling them on our team and execution abilities, which we evidently did very well based on the feedback we got in our rejection email. In fact, I don't think our interview could have gone much better than it did and I still feel overwhelmingly positive about it. Contrary to Marianne, perhaps, I feel pretty viscerally that we sell our team better than we sell our product/market fit at the moment. And with the caliber of applications YC sees these days that include companies with crazy good traction, we can't properly apply the YC priorities of yore ("great team, not much else yet? You're in!") to our interview and extrapolate that it was our demographics that didn't get us in. As Marianne's (mbellotti's) experience shows, it is certainly something to consider, but it is just one of dozens of possibilities. It's also worth considering that demographics may have helped rather than hindered us in getting the interview in the first place.
Marianne just totally cockblocked me by mentioning that incident! It was a single isolated incident, mind you. Someone I've been talking to on OKCupid reads HN and found this post, which has now led to a heated argument about whether I'm a human capable of love or a Siri-like chat bot optimized for professional networking.
I'm not sure about that, it seems very regressive to me, playing into the stereotype that the way for a woman to succeed is by attaching herself to a successful man. I would say it's one step away from flirting with your boss to get a raise.
I'm not sure if Tal had underlying motives behind her OKCupid use, but I don't see any problems with someone (regardless of sex) going on a date, and going, "Hey, you work at [company]? Do you know [person]? Mind if you introduce me to him/her?"
Especially if the person's also in the startup scene. The ecosystem thrives on people helping each other out.
I fully agree with you that that's perfectly acceptable behaviour (if you didn't know in advance that they knew [person], or else it gets a little unethical...)
But from the phrasing of the OP ("great hustling"), I took it to mean that she was actively "hustling" OKCupid by using her dating profile (i.e. people's desire to sleep with her) to get business contacts (i.e. money).
As the other female on the team, I've always found my chromosomal makeup to be a huge advantage rather than a disadvantage (especially after establishing some level of technical competence). Despite my own belief in merit over affirmative action, it's one of the biggest tools in my toolkit, frankly. Where males have nepotism, we have novelty and the promise of good PR. I would even go so far as to say it may give us a net advantage over all-male teams.
I am not going to hypothesize on this converse. However, having evaluated the team, I'll just leave this here[1].
My full first name is Tal. While I'm far too busy with work to engage in any meaningful fundamentalism, this doesn't stop my friends from giving me irreverent nicknames that start with the three letters of my name. As you can imagine, this particular one has by far the most sticking power, which has oddly morphed into a sort of personal brand over the years.
Fair enough. You might want to consider a rebrand, at least as far as your online persona is concerned. Perception matters, and you might find yourself in trouble for an issue that you have no interest in. See the "terrorista" incident in Boston recently. Or the Duke Lacrosse case. I've seen it happy many times where tiny out-of-context jokes come back to bite hard. At the very least you'd probably save some poor guy at the NSA time who has to monitor your comments. :)
All valid points -- especially the last one, which in all honesty does make me giggle every time. Every word I write, Anonymous NSA Guy, I write for you <333
On a sincere note, breck, I truly do appreciate the thoughtful feedback and will certainly act on it if I come to perceive that the benefit of doing so will outweigh the difficulty of parting with the conversation starter that is my Twitter handle. I'll be the first to admit that this kind of shock value appears to have a high risk of backfiring (which, mind you, wasn't a very relevant concern 5 years ago when no one but close friends knew my online persona), but somehow -- and even I don't know how, really -- it has led to overwhelmingly positive interactions over the years, especially as people become familiar with my personality and sense of humor.
I think the NSA deserves to waste time monitoring comments from "suspiciously" nicknamed users if that's what they are doing, because surely the real taliban would be posting comments under their own name, on hacker news :)
Perception is also strongly influenced by subsequent positive or negative confirmation. It may not be the best way to open up a unsolicited discussion with a YC partner, but even in this case, it served to induce some degree of interaction between you and "taliban". Which I presume ended on an amicable note.
This was a very interesting read and I hope that she continues blogging about her startup journey. Having interviewed the team, I have my own expectations for how it will play out, so I would love to see how that matches with reality.
However, it definitely isn't the case though that we're just looking for a bunch of Zuck clones. In this business, we make all of our money off a small number of outliers, and my assumption is that outliers are likely to be outliers in a number of ways. For example, Brian Chesky was a bodybuilder who graduated from Rhode Island School of Design. If anything, I'm more likely to take a chance on an unconventional team.
Also, a word of advice, if people are consistently getting the "wrong impression" about you, then perhaps you should work on hacking their perception. To build a big business, you're going to need to sell yourself to potential employees, customers, investors, etc.
Also, a word of advice, if people are consistently getting the "wrong impression" about you, then perhaps you should work on hacking their perception.
Danger, Wil Robinson, danger!
If you start down the path of trying to project yourself to somebody as what you think they want to see, you are taking on a big risk, as you never really know what the expectations are. You're probably just as likely to screw things up by trying to be perceived differently, than by just being yourself.
To build a big business, you're going to need to sell yourself to potential employees, customers, investors, etc.
Right, but you have to sell yourself not some alternate-reality, fictional version of yourself. Of course you want to present your best self to people, to the extent that you can know what that is. And maybe that's all you're really saying. If so, then sure. But if it means actively molding your dress, behavior, mannerisms, speech, appearance, etc. to something artificial in order to cater to someone's whims, I'm not so sure.
Maybe we have a different definition of hacking. I'm not particularly good at molding myself to cater to other people's whims, which is part of the reason I have always avoided normal jobs. However, that doesn't mean I can't still be mindful of how others perceive me.
Maybe we have a different definition of hacking. I'm not particularly good at molding myself to cater to other people's whims, which is part of the reason I have always avoided normal jobs. However, that doesn't mean I can't still be mindful of how others perceive me.
Sure. And based on that, I'd say we probably don't disagree much, if at all. I'm just saying that there's a risk in worrying too much about how others perceive you, since you won't (usually?) know - in advance - what it is they want to see.
I do agree with "put your best self forward", I just worry if it goes beyond that.
Of course, my own biases are probably showing here, since I tend to prefer outsider / renegade / iconoclast types anyway. :-)
Always interesting to see how people process their YC experience, it says a lot about where the author's head is.
Any selection process has biases, some intrinsic, some extrinsic. But unless the process is very loosely tuned, such selections are rarely driven by those biases, When I started at Sun the 'top' of the engineering ladder was the title 'Distinguished Engineer' and I wanted to be one, and so to know what it took to be promoted to that role. Some of the best advice I got was that, that was the wrong question. The question was simply whether or not I was a Distinguished Engineer.
The subtle difference in phrasing aligns with whether or not the organization recognizes Distinguished Engineers or appoints Distinguished Engineers. Sun was very much the former and not the latter. It changed my whole perspective from trying to do something which got me promoted, to doing stuff that I was proud of, with the understanding that if that was something Sun considered worthy they would promote me, if not it didn't matter. I know, hard to believe it wouldn't matter but the place you have to be is you're true to your path and in some groups that will be recognized as awesome and in other groups it won't, but that is the group's problem, not your problem.
So in the YC selection process, perhaps it is more about recognizing teams that are building YC companies, than it is picking teams to be YC companies. I've never sat in on the discussion so I can't say but from what I've seen of the demo day presentations there is certainly some homogeneity in the "vibe" these companies give off.
I think YC has reached a point where anything PG says is likely to be interpreted in the worst possible light.
That's unfortunate, because YC really doesn't have a type. I don't think there was a single Zuckerberg clone in our batch[1], a large portion of the batch had a foreign accent (me included), there were several awesome women led teams (Shoptiques, HireArt, TheDailyMuse, 99Dresses...) and we all got in.
As I told a friend somewhat indelicately recently, the best attitude to have post YC-rejection is "Screw YC, we are going to go gangbusters on this anyway". Ironically, this makes you more likely to get in the the next time, should you choose to apply. If not, you still win. Mbellotti clearly got that part right with this: "Everything I have ever achieved in life has started with a panel rejecting me, YC was just another notch." So godspeed to her!
[1] The closest may have been Jason Freedman, and he looks nothing like Zuckerberg http://42floors.com/team
"It’s no secret that YC tends to invest in a certain type” That's simply not true. If anything, what I have found is an incredible variety of backgrounds. In the latest batch you could find from teenagers to people in their forties. From former national kickboxing champions to people who could use some gym time. From really charming extroverts to people who were more on the shy side. Everybody was incredibly talented and passionate, though, and that was what everyone I met had in common. Being rejected by YC is not the end of the world (and you can always reapply the next cycle if you still want to do it) but I would not blame it on not fitting an imaginary "type"
Hi all, Jacek here, and third founder of Exversion. Considering that this post has garnered a bit of attention, I figured I might as well chime in.
First let me say that I found mbellotti's post absolutely wonderful, and find that it serves as an example to the type of team we have become in a very short period of time.
We as humans, all have pre-conceived notions of one another whether they be based on appearance, mannerism, figure of speech, etc. For some of us, these first impressions become much more deeply rooted than for others, and I, at least personally, believe them to be a hinderance in getting to understand people.
Social relationships aside, this knowledge of, and understanding of one another is an absolutely pivotal part of any team as it leads to better communication, and more importantly builds trust, and friendship.
But excellence in teams is also derived from hardship. Mbellotti, in her post mentions that we took the RV to save money, which is true, however, as we started this project on a bus, under somewhat strenuous conditions we noticed that much like a hazing of sorts, the experience brought us, much closer together. Would the discomfort of an RV do the same, I dare say it has.
I don't mean to sound trite by saying this, but team really is everything. How often do you see a team fall apart because of squabbles over who's going to be CEO of a 3 person company, or an argument over the hue of blue that's served as a background.
To me the post was more about this anything, the trust, and belief in one another, and the internal knowledge that we can and will make it regardless of obstacles, because (excuse the mush) we actually do have one another to rely on.
As for the YC interview and later rejection, yes it was disappointing as all rejections are, and as a self confessed PR junkie it would have made that as well as fundraising all the much easier, but it was a great experience nonetheless, as was meeting the brilliant people who interviewed along side us, and whose relationships I would like to continue and nurture, because they really are great people.
With that, I highly urge anyone in a startup to get an RV and go a bouts the bay area or NE corridor in it, is a killer experience, leads to some absolutely brilliant stories and elevates the concept of "The "Mobile" Startup" to whole other level. #hackingWhileMoving.
> As for the YC interview and later rejection, yes it was disappointing as all rejections are, and as a self confessed PR junkie it would have made that as well as fundraising all the much easier
Speaking of figures of speech...after reading this paragraph, I had to go re-check the original post. This sounded a little too close to "If I had brought X number of Bitcoins back then, they’d be worth millions now", so I wanted to see if there were clues this is you.
I love you to death but please watch your double quote-nesting when using marketing buzzwords if you don't want me and mbellotti to deliver 40 lashings in a public square <3
Wow! One of the best self-aware posts I've read in a long time. Looking forward to reading more and following the progress of Exversion (which sounds like an awesome idea, btw).
The game is rigged: anyone with any understanding of math knows that. The house always wins.
Unless he's opening the thing up and downloading firmware, he's not 'hacking' anything. He's just losing money. And if he was somehow up money for the night as he claims, he just got lucky. The expected case is that the house wins.
It is used in the term "life hacking", yes. Originally I had an explanation in the post but I cut it for length (and relevancy) so here's what I was up to: Casinos give out free "slot credits" like candy. I got $30 dollars for taking the bus to AC, $80 for eating at a certain restaurant, etc. The trick is you cannot cash out your credits, only play them, but you can-- of course-- cash out your winnings.
Except the odds of you winning anything over pocket change are astronomically low, so most people gamble away not just all their credits, but all their winnings and some of their own money to boot. That's why the casinos are so eager to give you free credits for everything.
What I was doing was playing the penny slots on the lowest bet level and cashing out anything over ten cents. I was making about 60 to 70 cents on the dollar ... which sucks if it's your dollar, but the whole point was it WASN'T. I was using the slots to convert the casinos free credits to cash.
......Not what I would have done if given free choice of activity, but like I said, my friends wouldn't let me play blackjack :D If I have to sit for hours while the bride-to-be brags about her bullshit "system" for hitting jackpots, I might as well make a little money.
Cool. Where are you getting these deals? I stumbled into Casino Royale a month or two ago and got one of their fun books. The problem was that the only way to cash out was if you got one of the jackpots. So your expected value is > 0, but of course the chance of winning is very low. My email's in my profile if you feel this has now spiraled sufficiently off-topic.
My experience with this (in Nevada) has been that the slot will keep track of your total credit value and cumulative winnings, so if you play a $30 credit for 10 minutes and hit "cash out," it should give you your total winnings, while keeping the remaining credit in the machine. ie. you don't need to print a cash out voucher every time you win.
For anyone in the bay area, Grand Sierra in Reno has the best promotions I've encountered for free play ($50-100) and free weekend hotel rooms.
The theoretical payoff of sticky bonuses is one minus twice the house edge [1]. The house edge of slot machines varies between 5-15%, so with optimal play you should be able to get out $.70 to $.90 per sticky bonus $1. By cashing out earlier than optimal, you get less return at a steadier rate (a reasonable tradeoff).
..., I figured I could at least nickel and dime the casino.
This means SHE was avoiding the losses not actively trying to make a profit. That's how I read first time and still how it reads now. I guess the use of the term "hacking" in this sense wasn't a great idea.
The term is being used like life-hacking.
I have to be in the casino,
I have to play slots (no blackjack)
How do I make this work?
... I play for penny stakes instead of dollar stakes.
The fact that she did actually win something was just dumb luck.
You should really go back and read the rest of it, it is well worth it.
"I walked out of the casino at a profit just by being aware of what the actual odds were and sticking to a system that would milk the machine of as much money as possible. That it did this bit by bit was irrelevant. Cash is cash."
It's certainly conceivable that the A.C. slots have a negative vig under some circumstances, but I'm skeptical. My conclusion from the references to the slots is that the author probably isn't as smart as she thinks she is. Preliminary finding.
I agree that this usage is idiomatically consistent with the HN-standard use of "hacking", though.
Reading the thread she says that she was given credit by the machine owners. She could not cash out those credits, but she could cash out the winnings. Thus, spend all the credits on low-stakes machines and cash out any win over 10c. She claims a return of 60% to 70%. She's aware that with her own money that's a loss, but it wasn't her money.
I could be wrong, but I always thought it was possible to "hack" the algorithm that the slots use, as in notice how it might not be totally random and exploit that (but not like that story of the poker-machine bug). For example, people are saying it's totally random, and you can't win, but is it really? Slots are programmed, and I believe they are programmed to give the near-misses that the article talks about.
One pattern I noticed once is that after a few plays (5-20), I would often get a small win, sometimes more than what I'd played already. If I stayed on the machine, the next small win would be after I'd played those profits and a few more plays--I was losing money. But if I got up and switched machines after the small win (usually, but not always, with a small profit), I could get another small win on a different machine much quicker. Once I made about $20 on 25cent slots this way. Another time, I lost $5 trying and gave up. These 2 data points happened 5-10 years ago, I don't go to casinos often enough to claim to know anything. I could be just another gambler with a "sure-win" strategy. Or maybe that was a "naïve" algorithm used by the early video slots and it was too easy to figure out and has since been replaced by different ones. We'll never know.
>> It’s how the human mind is designed to operate: looking for connections when there’s not enough evidence to support a connection, jumping to conclusions
Psychologist and Nobel econ prize winner Daniel Kahneman has written about this in his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" [1].
I am currently halfway through this book and it's been an insightful read so far.
Thinking Fast and Slow is one of those books that changes your life by permanently altering your worldview. On some level it makes you resent yourself as you start learning how to identify your own biases (and even worse, just how many there are! Good God!) but once the bruises on your ego start fading you'll find that you're a far better person for it.
The more accounts I read of the YC application process the more resolutely I feel that YC alumni recommendations are basically key to getting to the interview stage. I wonder if PG et al could chime in on how applications are ranked, i.e. how much weighting is given to alumni recommendations, alumni reviewer votes (alumni screen applications to prevent poor ones ever reaching partners), and partner votes. It would be cool to have some insight into how that worked.
It depends which alumni. A handful are good judges of startups. Most just loyally recommend their friends. Off the top of my head, I'd guess alumni recommendations are a factor in maybe 5-10 of the 255 groups we invite to interviews.
The strongest recommendation is of employees of YC startups who are leaving with glowing references and support from the existing YC founder to do something new. Those people nearly always get interviews, and should. It is also a benefit for YC companies -- "I know you want to do your own thing, so stay here for 2 years, accomplish a lot, and I'd be happy to help you do your own thing, and hopefully invest." is pretty compelling vs a job at Facebook for some people.
This was a great read, and for the most part it is the exact attitude you should take. YC is a great experience but it is not the end all be all, and if you really should go in to an interview with the mindset "If we don't get in, screw it". Mass rejection is the norm when starting a new company with a new team.
One note though: I really give a lot of credit to YC for thinking outside the box in the interview process, I would consider myself far from the typical tech founder archetype and our company sits in an industry that is typically not that interesting to the startup community. They took a chance on my team and me and we strive to prove them right.
This comment may get a significant number of downvotes, but here I go. I think there has been an increasing number of these types of posts on HN -- especially in the past couple of years (for some reason). Having a good attitude when faced with rejection is great. I'm not a fatalist in the sense that I would encourage anyone to jump off a bridge if they get rejected by YC.
HOWEVER, it's important to understand the role that rejection plays. And it's also important to understand the baggage that rejection carries with it. Sort of blowing off rejection - to me - seems utterly stupid. Especially if it's something you want. The point of founding a start-up is to be successful (whether that's an exit strategy, positive growth, getting into YC, etc. is irrelevant). Failure/rejection loses all of its beneficial characteristics if all you do is blow it off ("oh it's just another notch"). You need to ask yourself:
1. Why did I fail?
2. What can I do to not fail again?
In some cases (1) will simply be bad luck. Consider an athlete that slips and tears his achilles or consider me asking a pretty girl out that happens to have a boyfriend. Oh well -- that's just bad luck. However, if the athlete in question failed to train hard or I made a bad joke that completely irked a girl I'm interested in, that's something completely different. I truly believe that the start-up world is, in many ways, a lottery. By that I mean that not only do you need to be in tip-top shape, but you also need to get pretty damn lucky to end up like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
Blowing off failure prevents any positive improvements (hey maybe I should've trained harder, maybe that was a bad joke, etc.) and encourages a kind of isolated entrepreneurship where you think you know best and you're convinced you're doing your best (even though you may not be).
Also, lets face it: failure sucks. Being rejected by a cute girl/guy sucks. Not being accepted into YC sucks. Not getting into your school of choice sucks. I think that downplaying the suckiness of these events is not the way to go. Instead, figure out how to get what you want next time. It's a careful balancing act. On one hand, you don't want to be a fatalist that gives up after the first failure; but on the other, you don't want to be a hard-headed and obnoxious positivist that doesn't acknowledge failure when it's staring them in the face.
I think I agree with the general sentiment of your post, but I do think it's also important to have a mindset that "getting rejected by YC is not failure". That is, it's not "failure in the large". It's just "failure to get into YC". It doesn't mean your startup is dead, or won't succeed, or that your dreams are over. It's a setback, possibly, but it shouldn't be the death knell. IMO, if you let failure to get into YC translate into "failure of our startup" then you were doing it wrong to begin with.
Now, should you take the feedback (whatever that may be) that you get from the YC rejection, and incorporate it into your worldview, and learn from the process, and use it to grow? Sure... who wouldn't want to benefit from some wisdom from pg, paul, rtm, etc.? But as smart and talented as the YC crew is, they aren't totally prescient, and there are plenty of stories of teams that got rejected and went on to success.
But as you say luck plays a big part in all these things.
When the girl rejects you, saying she has a boyfriend, you might play the conversation over again, and realize you made a bad joke. I know I would. I would be more careful next time I tried. Less natural, less flowing. Less likely to succeed.
There will be weaknesses in your performance whether you succeed or fail, and searching after a failure is sometimes the worst time. Ask yourself about it in a year or so, when it's less raw.
The 'best' way to win the lottery is to play often. You have to enjoy doing it, and making failure personal, painful, will stop you from doing that.
According to the OP the interview process went quite smoothly. Since this appears to not be typical YC style I would think that this shows something else at play here.
It seems to be a matter of perception. They sound like a rather alternate bunch that don't appear to go to great lengths to sell themselves as a team. They were probably doomed in the first 10 seconds. The failure to stress test them out on their ideas would make it appear that the interviewers were just going through the motions to be polite.
Not sure there is any blame to apportion here. The world is what it is and people are what they are. In an ideal world they would have been a given a thorough grilling about their ideas, enthusiasm, skills and approach despite an initial very negative perception - but in an ideal world they would have recognized their potentially negative appearance/behaviour and done something about it, so it would not have been an issue in the first place.
The big optimization I would make during interviews, if you possibly can, is stay with alumni and meet up with them first. That only really works if you know them already, or have some connection to them.
(If anyone applies in the future that I know, I'd be happy to meet up with you if you get an interview. Offer extends to people I don't know yet if it is security, network infrastructure, or if you are US/UK/CA/AU/ZA military or comtractor from Iraq/Afghanistan/HOA, or MIT or Technion. Maybe IL mil too, but in that case you already know plenty of people...)
> I walked out of the casino at a profit just by being aware of what the actual odds were and sticking to a system that would milk the machine of as much money as possible.
Care to explain this in more detail? Are you sure you know what the actual odds are?
If you were actually making money through the odds, why were you only playing for cents? I'd be looking for higher stakes machines with similar exploits.
mbellotti: Just a comment on your blog's style: my eyes didn't take well to the white-on-black colour scheme, and I had to install Chrome's High Resolution extension to finish it without killing my eyes. Of course, YMMV.
Once we funded someone who reminded me of Zuckerberg, and even then it was far from the only reason. And the fact that the YC partners have taunted me about it ever since shows that if anything we're probably extra skeptical about Zuckomorphs.
I realize it's possible to be unconsciously influenced by applicants' appearance and manner, but can anyone at this point believe we're not aware of that danger, and simply pick people based on matching some crude archetype? That we could remain that naively incompetent after 16 cycles of picking founders and then watching how they do?