HN Explorer

The Irony of Applying to YC

27 points by karzeem ↗ HN
As we were clicking "submit" the other day, I was thinking about what separates the teams that get accepted from the teams that don't. There are a bunch of criteria we're judged on, but perhaps the most important (and the source of the irony I'm talking about) is that for a team to be accepted, it can't need YC.

That doesn't mean, of course, that being YC alums isn't wonderful and helpful and all the rest. What it does mean is that the people who get in are exactly the kind of people who would respond best to not getting in--namely by keeping busy on the company as if nothing had happened.

It's a frequent theme in PG's essays that YC takes people for whom building cool things is a bodily function, not something they need external incentives or security to do. This same irony applies to nearly every competitive application process (e.g. PG's other advice that companies obsessed with getting bought are the very ones that don't get bought). I feel that keeping that in mind is a very useful approach to these things.

And good luck!

26 comments

[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 67.0 ms ] thread
socmoth
one of the best things about YC is the peer group and the environment. you get a lot from talking to your new friends who are going through exactly the same thing you are.
karzeem
That's definitely the reason we applied. When they came out, reviews of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan said wisely that for people who want to get into scalable jobs^, the main lesson of the books is to expose yourself to as much randomness as possible and to just get out there and do your thing. Success is built on a small number of big breaks, so you need to put yourself in a situation where your chances for lucky breaks are as big as possible. YC fits into that brilliantly, as does the argument in favor of moving to a startup hub.

^A scalable job, according to Taleb, is any job where given success, the amount of money you make is vastly disproportionate to the amount of time you put in--like starting a company, or becoming an actor or musician. A non-scalable job is something like dentistry, where the amount of money you make always stays pretty closely tied to the hours you work.

joeguilmette
i think that is a great point. people look to incredibly successful people like steve jobs and bill gates, and they hear their stories and think 'hey, if i had gotten that lucky i could've done that too.'

it's not about luck, it's about odds. successful people fail on a consistent basis. the more you put yourself out there the more likely it is that the next time you do you'll get lucky.

nailer
"A scalable job, according to Taleb, is any job where given success, the amount of money you make is vastly disproportionate to the amount of time you put in--like starting a company, or becoming an actor or musician. "

That's a terrible misuse of the term scalable.

jsackmann
In fairness (and in context), Taleb is quoting some random b-school guy he encountered. He reuses it, but I suspect he does so that he doesn't have to mess with the original story and/or quibble over definitions.
reidman
This kind of situation is prevalent in so many parts of life. I've wasted so much time trying to concisely explain it that I've often found myself wishing there was a simple name/reference for it.

How about "Catch 4!-2".

adrianwaj
Yeah I know what you mean: the inclusivity paradox: the more something wants to include something else into it, the less that other thing wants to include itself back into it. Or rather, the more a thing wants to include another, the more there is a tendency for the other to want to exclude it.

To equalize matters, a price is set until the two are in balance and a relationship established.

If YC offered more cash and demanded less equity - ie. it lowered its price, then it would be seen as better value to those who would otherwise ignore it for having better alternatives... the Googlers.

Furthermore, in other areas of life, at some times people give up their soul connection to become corporate drones, not knowing the true value of their creativity - yet they think they are gaining... Also, sometimes establishing a relationship can be mutually advantageous for both but for some reason one wants to 'extract more' - they have to feel they are getting the better deal always and anything they give up is a burden and unjustified. This can blow the deal for both, or else cause a poor relationship unlike the one originally envisaged.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Alex3917
From the perspective of future YC startup investors, this situation is roughly analogous to the difference between winning an honorary degree verse getting a "merit-based" degree.

People post all the time on Slashdot/Reddit complaining about the unfairness of honorary degrees. That being said, if you're about to go into surgery then which would you prefer, the doctor who earned a degree from the best medical school in the country or the doctor who was awarded an honorary degree from the best medical school in the country? I'll take the surgeon with the honorary degree any day. All the traditional degree signals is that you had good grades is college, and who cares what grades your doctor had in college? I'd much rather go for the doctor whose already recognized as the best in their field.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this exactly, but I guess my point was that the people who are already most likely to succeed on their own are the ones who get the biggest social signaling value from joining YC, if in fact the system works as you say.

edit: The appropriate buzzwords here would have been "selection effects" vs. "treatment effects" (and that selection is better than treatment for social signaling purposes).

andresoileau
Y-Combinator is an edge. Y-Combinator is a valuable resource; peer review, networking, and heavy motivation. These are things not easily gained on your own. If you really need Y-Combinator to gain success, then you better question yourself and what you offer. Personally, I know my idea will revolutionize the industry it pertains to, but submitting an application to Y-Combinator is giving me the needed kick in the butt to jump on the progress train. It's been brewing for years and tonight I'm excited. I don't need Y-Combinator, but right now I want it!
carter
Agree. It's like to travel from A to B. You can choose a train to get there in an 3 days or you can choose a plane to get there in 4 hours. YC's money are not critical for my team too, cos we're already building our app. But I can't overestimate YC's value.

Good luck. Make something people need.

fleddermaus
The wanting of something never creates the appearance of it, but the continued wanting of it. Life is the dialectic of choosing to create and being surprised by what ensues.
as
Very apt. I'm saving this quote.
imsteve
Sounds nice. I disagree, totally.

It's completely natural to appear to want something that you want/need.

caveman82
Tao of Steve:

1)Be Desireless 2)Be Excellent 3)Be Gone

Tichy
Building cool things != being successful
comatose_kid
What if I believe being successful == building cool things?
rms
I think that's great.

To me, being successful is flying around the world blowing oil and spewing carbon in a decadent state of material excess, until I attain immortality and start meditating while bombarding myself with all of the energy around me.

Tichy
That's fine if you can support yourself and your family financially.
rokhayakebe
If you do not need it, then why try? Maybe you could simply save yourself the anxiety and code some more. I think we ought to stop fooling ourselves. Technically you do not need anything, Heck you do not even need a startup, but if you are applying to YC then you probably need it Now, if you do not make then at that point you do not need it anymore.
pg
I wouldn't quite say we look for people who don't need us. Roughly speaking, we look for people who are like we were when we started Viaweb, and we certainly would have found YC helpful.
karzeem
Let me clarify, since a few people are misinterpreting slightly. YC is certainly very helpful, and that's why we're all applying. Being accepted undoubtedly helps a startup's chances for success. So let me append to "for a team to be accepted, it can't need YC" a parenthetical phrase: "(in order to be willing to proceed full steam ahead)".
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
DaniFong
We're not banking on YC to fund us. We're chasing two other deals concurrently, and if that fails we'll get day-jobs elsewhere to bootstrap.

However, we think that YC is one of the best deals out there. There's the networking of course, but then there's the PR, or the 'social capital'. If we impress PG enough, he'll say something shiny about us in an essay, and suddenly our website grabs the starry eyes of thousands of readers. It's also probably worth a lot in confidence to be picked as a probable winner out of an application pool of more than a thousand.

DaniFong
There was also a lot of value in filling out the application. I had my cofounders write their own version of the application, so that they internalized some of the values -- they even came up with several ideas while doing so (and merging wasn't so difficult as I feared). We've written and rewritten our pitch and our mission several times now, and it's starting to get very good. It was definitely helped by the need to put it into YC's format -- now we have a punchy answer written for all of the common questions.