HN Explorer

Tell HN: YC Summer 2009 application is due today.

35 points by sarvesh ↗ HN
The YC summer 2009 application is due today at 10pm PST. I am curious as to how many of you submitted, or will be submitting, the optional video of founders?

http://ycombinator.com/s2009.html

69 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] thread
zaius
We submitted on Monday with a simple photo booth video made in a cafe. It was just of us talking about the project and ourselves. Took us about 20 minutes from start to finish - may as well do it!
siong1987
We did the same thing too. We use photo booth to make a real short video intros.
jlees
Yup, Photo Booth is great. +1 to using it to make the YC app video. And +1 to adlibbing, as well. As an ex-improviser (think Whose Line?), scripts just seem wrong ;)
unalone
+1 to all of that as well! We spent about 3 hours just recording a lot and saying different stuff until it worked. As a result, our final video was a bit hyperactive and a lot lame, but we managed to actually convey information without sounding like zombies.
amichail
I wonder if this video will be used to identify founders who would look good in a TV interview... and so enhance their chances of getting funding from VCs, especially early on.
cperciva
No. PG has said what it will be used for, and judging TV interviewability is not part of it.
wwwjscom2
You can give negative points? lol, I require that button ;)

PS. Good luck peoples

suhail
Yes, you need 100+ karma I believe before you can.
nanexcool
We'll be submiting the video. You can say so much (or so little) in one minute though that we're still figuring out if we want to just ad-lib or have like a mini-script to read.
kkocis
We mini scripted - did the intro of the founders, then did a scenario and explained how our idea would address the issue.
pg
From the videos I've seen so far, I'd recommend ad-libbing. The point of the video is to see what you're like, and most people don't seem particularly bright when delivering (or worse still, reading) a prepared speech.

Since this was the first time we'd tried videos we didn't realize this would be a problem. Next year we'll advise everyone to ad-lib.

tokenadult
most people don't seem particularly bright when delivering (or worse still, reading) a prepared speech

Hear. Hear. Delivering a scripted speech well is HARD, and the people who are famous for doing that well practice a lot. Most members of the hacker community are much more practiced in engaging in conversation about the passion for technology, and thus make themselves look better in speech and in print by treating each communication opportunity as a conversation with an unseen interlocutor.

hedgehog
+1, personally I'm pretty comfortable talking to all kinds of people in person but our team found that talking to a camera unscripted was hard (compounded by the amount of information it sounded like we needed to pack in to 60 seconds). It was still really helpful for getting our message straight though, even if we don't get in to the YC summer cycle it will be helpful for raising money.
ealar
Ours was prepared, and admittedly it looked terrible. I would second adding this to the recommendations.
pg
Most people's seem to be, so it won't hurt you much.
unalone
Prepared how so? Like, reading openly from scripts, or just overrehearsed?
nanexcool
Sending the email to Posterous now. My upload is less than 1 Mbps so I'm freaking out.

I had a video where I was alone talking, but my brother (co-founder) arrived at the last second and we recorded a new one. These last minute updates make it all worth while :D

YuriNiyazov
Submitted on saturday, with a video of me in my living room, unshaven and underslept. No expectations :)
pg
Chances are it will be watched in a living room by someone who's unshaven and underslept, so don't worry about it.
kanny96
Oops, the slot for unshaven and underslept is taken! Gotta shave.

It was a good exercise and now I appreciate much better why Cali Lewis, Amber Mac and Natalie Del Conte - show off their fumbling at the end.

It was done with both hands on the cam. The cam's auto-focus had problem adjusting to the tube light in the basement and created a few blurs.

It wasn't scripted, but i practiced it 4-5 times, everytime missing some links or forgetting a key word!

unalone
After shooting ours and giving it a second look, I was filled with a newfound awe for Ze Frank, who makes speaking really fast both interesting and hilarious. I never realized just how hard it is to say stuff quickly and not be a complete weirdo.
pg
We just passed the number of applications from last cycle, so it looks like this will be another record, considering we usually get around a third of the applications on the last day.
sarvesh
Given that picking the right startups is hard how will this increase in applications be handled over time? Increasing the reviewers will not necessarily mean that the quality is still the same. Will the number of days for review be increased in future?
jwilliams
Well they are planning on interviewing and accepting more... So that might help a little.

Paul also mused about getting the YC alumni more involved --but I read this in execution rather than selection (not that there was any indication either way).

pg
It's always been just the 4 partners reviewing the applications. We've added a few improvements in the software that manages the process, but mostly it just takes us longer. We are probably getting a little faster with experience, though.
ajju
I imagine picking the people to interview is an exciting part of running something like YC. And although the act of reading paper applications is probably more prosaic in reality, the videos should make it more interesting.
prakash
How do you sort through all these apps? Do you have 3 piles, Yes, No & Maybe?
pg
Rtm and Trevor and I each read them online independently and vote on them. Then they're ranked in order of their total score (normalized because Rtm always gives low grades). Then we meet to argue about borderline cases. At the end of that meeting we have a clearly defined set of 50-60 groups we want to interview.
prakash
Which company has received the highest grade from RTM? Loopt?
pg
I went back and looked at the applications for the current cycle, and roughly half the groups we invited to interviews tied for the highest grade from Rtm. Which was a B+.
prakash
nice. thanks for digging into it!

Do you think you could make this data public, maybe starting off with startups that didn't make it, including YC's comments when they were evaluated during the interview?

I am sure there is a lot of great info in there that would help other startups. It would be like using etherpad for writing essays :-), we could peek into YC's thought process.

unalone
Now that it's closed - what was the final count?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
pg
Unless my clock is wrong there's still half an hour left. But we never quote the number anymore anyway, because now that we have competitors we don't want to tempt them to get into a number war.
tjcYC
PST vs. PDT ?

:-)

unalone
Damn, I thought it ended at 10 EST rather than PST! All this time I could have been making teensy little anal adjustments!
palish
And yet, if your team is solid, those tiny adjustments are probably a waste of time.
unalone
Absolutely! I doubt that if we don't get accepted it'll be because we didn't tweak our application enough. At the same time, it doesn't hurt, and on occasion I do find things that really could be done better. (As it turns out, I added a good deal to one question that I'd breezed over the first time.)
palish
Yeah, I was just musing that us engineers love to focus on things which don't really matter. It's an interesting phenomenon, and I do it all the time too. I wonder if the solution is as simple as continually asking ourselves, "Am I spending my time on one of the most critical aspects of the project?" Anyway, I didn't mean anything by it. :)
unalone
Yep! No offense taken. :-)

It's not just programmers, FYI. I got that from the dank world of creative writing. Spending a month working on a sonnet = not-totally-fun times.

timtrueman
[I was going to say it's not closed but it says PST not PDT, so nevermind--but that's why this comment is attached here in case you're confused]

PG - it would really rock if they were confirmation emails. The button to submit being gone and replaced with tiny text doesn't inspire enough confidence in me that it worked.

unalone
It also adds the "Thanks. You did." line to the submit form.
timtrueman
I saw it as noted in my above comment. It just doesn't give me the warm fuzzies that it really worked, but that's just my feedback.
pg
It worked. The "Thanks, you did" isn't just something that gets generated automatically as a result of clicking submit. The code that prints this doesn't know where you came from; it decides whether or not to print "Thanks you did" by checking whether your application has been modified since the last time it was submitted.
netsp
At this point, does more applicants mean better participants?
pg
Hard to say. The quality of the top group of applicants (say, the ones we invite to interviews) has definitely gone up, but it's hard to say whether it's because the total pool is larger, or because more smart people want to start startups, or because as YC seems more legit, better founders apply.
netsp
I guess most of the things you can do the positively affect the first also positively affect the third.
grinich
I wonder how the rate of submission grows up until the deadline.
pclark
we're literally deploying our demo now, and then submitting.
pclark
except github is down and we have various gems we need to deploy. Gonna be a late one, first [many] of many we hope ..
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
andrewljohnson
We submitted a video for www.trailbehind.com.

I have a Macbook, and it was really quick to make the video. MacBooks come standard with camera, recording, and editing software.

khangtoh
Paul: Did you guys reviewed early submissions this time round? We submitted our application when it was only half done 2 weeks ago but have been editing and resubmitting for the past 2 weeks and there was quite a bit of change from our very first submission.

We sort of figured out that our application hasn't been reviewed since our demo url did not register any visitors yet on google analytics.

idm
What about percentages? Frequencies are nice, but I wonder what percentage of applications include the optional video.
Eliezer
Remember, everyone, there's no point in sending in more than one copy of your application!

Applying to Y Combinator twice has the same effect as applying once.

iamwil
As an aside, I took a look at your submissions, and it's paltry, meaning that you got most of your 1400 points from commenting. Good comments.
Eliezer
Thanks.

Either the people here don't get math jokes, or I commented too late to catch most readers. I'll try reposting on some more appropriate thread later...

...since if any joke can be repeated more than once, it's that one, right? Maybe everyone's just heard it a thousand times.

grinich
I'm just now clearing my room of coffee mugs, pizza boxes, and bowls of soggy cereal. I'm unshaved, and have hardly stepped outside my dorm room for the past 48 hours. There's a celebratory beer in the fridge, and then I'll probably sleep for an entire day.

We've started building something really awesome, and although I'm sleep-deprived and red-eyed, I'm incredibly excited. I can't wait until the summer when I can go full time on this project. YC or no YC, it's going to be a wild ride.

jdileo
your post is an inspiration.....what it's all about! Best of luck w/ your startup.
flooha
Props to the YC crew for giving all of us this opportunity and hacking (machete, not keyboard) their way through the applications.

I hope our video isn't too boring. We tried to keep it light, but we had to script it to say everything we wanted to say in <= 1 minute. I would have much rather submitted the outtakes, but we aren't getting graded on hilarity. :)

Good luck to all!

ohkanon
What if we never got a rejection letter, BUT We also never got contacted for a confirmation. Does that mean they are still going through them?