Rejection notice here. The application process did help us learn a lot and improve our plan quite a bit though so it definitely was worth the time and effort put into it.
Why would you post your rejection publicly? You can bet that this can be used against you in several ways. (copycats, sharks, people seeing 'rejected by 'x' as a negative'.
Better to learn as much from your rejection as you can, swallow and prove them wrong.
There are lots of times when openness is a good thing, being rejected by YC may or may not be such a time, it depends on a lot of factors and if you open up make sure you've thought through the consequences of doing so.
Typically in the VC world, when a VC passes on an investment they keep very quiet about it to avoid tainting the seeker of funding.
If you're feeling really dejected, just one positive comment can make you feel a lot better. But it's certainly at your discretion; don't post if you feel it would be harmful.
You've got a point about VCs. (Hollywood works in the exact same way) Some industries act like a high school hive-mind popularity contest that runs on social proof over logic. Perhaps it works better for them to think emotionally like customers and users do. However, I've gotten 3 job offers when I posted my failures on HN. I've gotten no job offers when I posted my successes. Overall as hackers/entreps we understand that "failure = successful trying" so sharing failures on HN has it benefit.
I didn't make this round but I am still excited because if one waits until you're 100% sure you will never accomplish anything. Go with 75% sure and you'll get there. I know I will. Thanks for the No Thanks. That's how one gets off their back and keeps going.
Lots of founders were kind enough to give me feedback on Hall.com when I had $0 funding. Since then, we've raised $6m+ Feel free to send over your info and I'll give you feedback. (brett@hall-inc.com)
I got rejected last year for the first time, decided to apply again on the next batch: got refused again. After that we decided not to apply to this batch, and here we are about to close our A round at an above average YC valuation gets at their A round after just 1 year since being founded..
We just followed what PG writes in his essays when in doubt.
In my case I found it under the "Updates" tab in Gmail, only after I read this thread and went looking for it. It might be worth checking it out if you haven`t already.
It would probably make sense for YC to contact late applicants once they have done the interviews. They've mentioned before, they can only take on so many startups per batch and if there are enough after the interview, it really doesn't make much sense to bring on more. That is, unless they are so good, it would be foolish for them to let other incubators get to them first.
Rejection here. Was prepared for this, but still, it stings.
> We're trying to get better at this, but the hard limit on the number of interviews means it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.
Next goal: To reach the point where we can send that email!
Edit: Congratulations to everyone who got the invites to the interview. Good luck!
Rejection here as well. We had applied with a marketplace for used cars, and even engaged in an email conversation with Paul regarding the idea. He had suggested a couple of models & a way to bring supply onto the platform.
That makes me wonder, are there any other examples of a regular business' forum spinning off like this? And to dive into it a little further, in hindsight this can be seen as a brilliant marketing move by pg, but was this intentional?
Devshed. But as soon as the owners realized that was happening they decided to kill off the community with in forum blackberry ads. Every one dispersed within a year including me.
Over all I think Its bad. Eventually the fact that the goals of yc aren't aligned with hn will be revealed. Then every one will disperse.
Couldn't you say that about any for-profit community? In the end it's their goal to make money off the people in the community. With HN at least it's pretty transparent (with submissions like these).
The goals are aligned well enough for this to work for a very long time, the fact that HN is now moderated by someone not directly affiliated with YC should help as well.
HN is aligned with the goals of YC because it provides a useful source of information about [some] applicants. From what I read, the success of a startup is in part dependent upon the communication and technical and social skills of its founders, and HN is a forum where all of those are often on display. A YC application plus an HN profile is going to lead to better filtering than just a YC application.
More than that, in YC's business model the cost of running HN probably doesn't even amount to rounding error. Until recently the website was running on a single server [it may still be, since I haven't heard otherwise since the infrastructure change to Cloudflare] and with PG himself handling a significant portion of the maintenance and coding. In other words, the financial side of a business like YC is incompatible with most people's experience in offices - it's not about profits from sales. It's about internal rates of return on working capital.
Based on http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html, it seems that there's a point in the application where if you're impressive enough, they'll spend more time on it and if not, they'll disregard it.
> If the founders seem promising, I'll now spend more time trying to understand the idea.
It might be a good idea to put the applications that don't get past that point in one pile, and send them a different and more specific rejection letter. (I was just rejected and am naturally wondering how close I was, and this idea came to mind.)
I'm not saying to give "tailored responses". Just maybe put them in a different pile and send out a first rejection letter saying that you didn't make it past the "first cuts".
There once was a lonely developer. Who got rejected by Y-Combinator. Paul Graham said "No!" But it don't make him feel low. He'll make next year's attempt so much better...
I got rejected. Then rereading the email, i remembered Drew Houston didnt get in the first time. The best way to experience success is to overcome rejections and go on to succeed. I personally think between the YC partners blogs, we have enough advice to continue working with our product. In 5 years YC or not, the target is at least 20m users or whatever else is your targets. just target 5% growth.
We've also got rejected, and now I'm pretty sure that Ycombinator is just a great bottleneck itself. It can even be inferred from Kirsty's email or Sam's post: http://blog.samaltman.com/the-worst-part-of-yc.
Anyway, it's now like a challenge for all of the good/promising startups (including ours) to prove them their mistakes or missed opportunities resulting from undercapacity. On the other hand, I wish all the best to every accepted company! You're now on a better track to your success ;)
Ohh, and one more thing. Maybe I missed it, how many applications did you/YC receive for S14 batch? I've read on Sam's blog that it was around 20% more than in the previous edition, but would be great to know the exact number ...
Rejection here. Congrats to everyone who got an interview.
I feel okay with not receiving a reason for being rejected. We put in effort when filling out our application, and YC put in effort (at least according to our Youtube analytics) in reviewing our application. Sure, it would be nice to get some feedback, but all we asked for was a fair shake. And because they watched our video, I feel we got it.
(1) Quality of applications, as in number of people who can write and talk really well, have gone up and the (2) number of applications have gone up; means the gate is even more crowded than ever before. So the pressure to dole out a silkier YC application next time will go up.
Obviously the outcome of this cycle is that the focus of the entire selection ruckus will move towards "best of best applications written in English" and not really start-ups (which look/are bad) but have the potential to go on to become unicorns/home runs.
Meanwhile, this pressure will also give rise to energetic backbenchers. A psychology for those who feel cheated by fate to go after and kill it outside of the incubator loop. Good luck YC, no-YC both!
Sounds neat. How do you figure out the dependencies? I have to imagine this works for a limited set of languages. Was there any language that was preposterously hard to support?
If you get rejected, make sure you don't take it personal and ask yourself: If we needed YC to accept us to succeed were we on the right track? And if the answer is no then make it work without them. After all, YC is a factor in the success of quite a large number of start-ups but there are many more start-ups succeeding without having gone through YC than that did.
If it were the only factor common to all successful start-ups rejection would be a bad thing.
For me it's obvious that rejections are often born out of a very high bar, limited capacity to take on startups and the limitations of human foresight.
It would be one of the more difficult tasks for me to imagine ever being upset at YC for a rejection (Got my 4th tonight, no stranger to it). If this was your first or second, don't worry , it gets better.
I can honestly say I've never felt closer to success and making progress than I do as I, every six months, write up a summary of where I'm at, where I'm going and then compare it with the previous series of rejected applications. Heck next time I could see myself easily with an actual website and customer base, or, if I get lucky, with a co-founder - how novel would that be?
So grow, YC, do it in a way where you don't loose your soul. And hey, if I never get in...well I'm in enough...
I'll make it. That's one of the best feelings. I know that it may look nothing like I presently imagine, but I'll make it. That's the beauty of malleable but relentless dreaming.
Now someone call Hollywood, er Kickstarter, I've got a killer idea for a film about two co-founders in the valley, 'Dotcom Quixote de la Big Chanca' and 'Sancho "the Ramen" Panza' as they go tilting at Heroku Dynos and courting Aldonza Horowitz aka "Andreesenea".
Would love to read your summaries if you have them posted somewhere. Would be a great learning curve for me as this was my first rejection (planning for more ;P)
I've found the best single thing that's helped me, both in terms of conciseness, product and effort focus, and gaining empathy for my target audience, is to see what I can cut out and what I can simplify. Focusing is seemingly among the most important, and often most difficult, tasks.
87 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadCongrats to everyone receiving interview invites.
Better to learn as much from your rejection as you can, swallow and prove them wrong.
There are lots of times when openness is a good thing, being rejected by YC may or may not be such a time, it depends on a lot of factors and if you open up make sure you've thought through the consequences of doing so.
Typically in the VC world, when a VC passes on an investment they keep very quiet about it to avoid tainting the seeker of funding.
See: http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio
It would be very interesting to see the YC equivalent of that!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6673754
If you're feeling really dejected, just one positive comment can make you feel a lot better. But it's certainly at your discretion; don't post if you feel it would be harmful.
That makes good sense, failure indicates 'availability' whereas success indicates the opposite!
Thank you so much for your help. I will see you an email tonight.
We just followed what PG writes in his essays when in doubt.
EDIT- Got it a few minutes after posting.
Mixpanel and others have offered special deals for rejects in the past. Silver lining!
> We're trying to get better at this, but the hard limit on the number of interviews means it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.
Next goal: To reach the point where we can send that email!
Edit: Congratulations to everyone who got the invites to the interview. Good luck!
Little dejected & disappointed right now.
Over all I think Its bad. Eventually the fact that the goals of yc aren't aligned with hn will be revealed. Then every one will disperse.
Let's not give up before the match is lost.
More than that, in YC's business model the cost of running HN probably doesn't even amount to rounding error. Until recently the website was running on a single server [it may still be, since I haven't heard otherwise since the infrastructure change to Cloudflare] and with PG himself handling a significant portion of the maintenance and coding. In other words, the financial side of a business like YC is incompatible with most people's experience in offices - it's not about profits from sales. It's about internal rates of return on working capital.
> If the founders seem promising, I'll now spend more time trying to understand the idea.
It might be a good idea to put the applications that don't get past that point in one pile, and send them a different and more specific rejection letter. (I was just rejected and am naturally wondering how close I was, and this idea came to mind.)
Anyway, it's now like a challenge for all of the good/promising startups (including ours) to prove them their mistakes or missed opportunities resulting from undercapacity. On the other hand, I wish all the best to every accepted company! You're now on a better track to your success ;)
Good luck to everyone, Mark Bain
I feel okay with not receiving a reason for being rejected. We put in effort when filling out our application, and YC put in effort (at least according to our Youtube analytics) in reviewing our application. Sure, it would be nice to get some feedback, but all we asked for was a fair shake. And because they watched our video, I feel we got it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5648760
(1) Quality of applications, as in number of people who can write and talk really well, have gone up and the (2) number of applications have gone up; means the gate is even more crowded than ever before. So the pressure to dole out a silkier YC application next time will go up.
Obviously the outcome of this cycle is that the focus of the entire selection ruckus will move towards "best of best applications written in English" and not really start-ups (which look/are bad) but have the potential to go on to become unicorns/home runs.
Meanwhile, this pressure will also give rise to energetic backbenchers. A psychology for those who feel cheated by fate to go after and kill it outside of the incubator loop. Good luck YC, no-YC both!
If it were the only factor common to all successful start-ups rejection would be a bad thing.
So go prove them wrong.
It would be one of the more difficult tasks for me to imagine ever being upset at YC for a rejection (Got my 4th tonight, no stranger to it). If this was your first or second, don't worry , it gets better.
I can honestly say I've never felt closer to success and making progress than I do as I, every six months, write up a summary of where I'm at, where I'm going and then compare it with the previous series of rejected applications. Heck next time I could see myself easily with an actual website and customer base, or, if I get lucky, with a co-founder - how novel would that be?
So grow, YC, do it in a way where you don't loose your soul. And hey, if I never get in...well I'm in enough...
I'll make it. That's one of the best feelings. I know that it may look nothing like I presently imagine, but I'll make it. That's the beauty of malleable but relentless dreaming.
Now someone call Hollywood, er Kickstarter, I've got a killer idea for a film about two co-founders in the valley, 'Dotcom Quixote de la Big Chanca' and 'Sancho "the Ramen" Panza' as they go tilting at Heroku Dynos and courting Aldonza Horowitz aka "Andreesenea".
:)
But I'm just some repeat offender/y-comb reject.
Another hint which I often receive is to always narrow your market as much as possible. You can always expand later.