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We're going to send out invitations to YC interviews close to midnight

181 points by pg ↗ HN
The person in charge of sending out the invitations to interviews is in a different time zone, so we're going to be sending out invitations close to midnight Pacific time. So please don't worry if nothing seems to be happening.

The good news is, we got so many good applications that we decided to add another day of interviews, so we'll be inviting 20% more groups than we planned to.

(No, that doesn't decrease the probability that a group we interview will get funded. We don't and in fact couldn't aim to fund a target number of startups.)

126 comments

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zekenie
What about rejection emails? Same time?
pg
Yes, all the emails go out at about the same time.
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gemstone
I'm full of excitement and hope
roryreiff
Thanks for keeping us informed - excited to see the results!
clola
Thanks...We too are in a different time zone. No sleep until 3am :)
pgrote
Good luck to those that are waiting!
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FYI
Likewise!

Thanks pg.

colingrussing
Thanks for the update, I had already become despondent, but am now reinvigorated!
GuerraEarth
Okay, well, don't please anyone be despondent. Do something fun to pass the time and start thinking about what we will all build tomorrow. We need every man on deck for our future. And remember, if we don't get YC, there are mass Angel investors out there, and there is Kickstarter (did you see that Dark Mail Alliance is taking bids!?). And I applied for a Shuttleworth Fellowship. Or alternatively, we can just build our stuff with no help at all. We actually don't need any cash. Just good advice because navigating the processes are full of pitfalls. Honestly, I am in my school library reading a Gothic horror novel to pass the night. That and doing an investigation of radium dial painters in the 1920's.
bthornbury
"We need every man on deck for the future." I really like that.. I may say it myself.. do you require attribution? Lol
jamescraft34
you said it... guess these are the ups and downs of the game
PabloOsinaga
But you did decide to fund "less" startups when you had some scaling issues. Does this mean you said "no" to startups that you would've said "yes" to if you had scaled well?

It looks like the increase in quality of startups is an independent factor to your ability to accept all of the really good ones.

Does this mean that you will need to figure out how to scale more aggressively or start rejecting more and more good startups?

pg
The way we managed to fund fewer startups was to train ourselves to pick better. So essentially we said no to startups we would have mistakenly said yes to before.

Unless we can improve our ability to pick winners at the same rate the number of startups increases, which is unlikely, we'll have to grow.

Fortunately we can now. The reason we tightened up our filters in w2013 was to buy ourselves time to figure out how to shard YC. We've now done that, and we can probably grow another 2 or 3x before hitting the next bottleneck-- which will probably be the format of Demo Day.

PabloOsinaga
Interesting. So hitting a bottleneck was an external constrain which forced you to be better at picking startups (your core thing).

Is this another example of arbitrary constrains as a forcing factor for effectiveness? (as in don't raise too much money).

socksy
What kind of traits now make you say no that would have previously made you said yes?
petervandijck
So you 1. optimized the algorithm and 2. sharded the backend.

Next: buy more hardware and scale horizontally? (aka partners)

kennethtilton
"we said no to startups we would have mistakenly said yes to before"

Reminds me of dating.

X4
self-organization @work
saihan-tal
Good luck to everybody. Let's get more productive in the waiting hrs. May the force be with you.
smaili
Thanks for the update!

Good luck to all who applied!