HN Explorer

Have people started receiving their YC invitations?

13 points by aliakhtar ↗ HN
Also, if you're not accepted for interview, do you get a rejection email or is it just radio silence = rejection?

Edit: Feel free to share results, thoughts, and your startups.

12 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 38.7 ms ] thread
bgentry
You should get an email either way. They may not show up until late this evening PDT.
gault8121
For the last batch they arrived around 11 pm PST.
byoung2
Even if we don't get an interview, going through the application process was a good exercise for us (https://www.morphmail.com/). From the analytics report, it looks like 4 people from YC viewed our demo (YC-specific URL) and 1 actually sent a test message. YouTube says that the 1 minute video was viewed 8 times for 8 minutes total. So far good signs, but the real question is how many great applicants were at the top of the list. We'll keep our fingers crossed!
penguin_gab
Wow! Your app looks impressive.. I think your team stands a good chance of being invited for an interview. How long have you been hacking on it?
byoung2
Thanks! I came up with the idea back in January, but we started working on the prototype around August. We had a rough demo put together for our YC app, and a more polished demo we're hoping to beta test in the next few weeks. Join our beta list to be one of the first to try it out!
byoung2
UPDATE: We just got an email at 3:49pm, and we were not invited to interview. Not a complete surprise, given the estimated 3% acceptance rate for YC I've seen floating around. We'll keep working on our product and hopefully we can show some progress in the next few months and apply again for the S15 cycle!
aliakhtar
Sorry to hear that. Its surprising, given how many times your video was viewed and usage of your demo, I'd have thought they were interested.
byoung2
Well by the math applying and getting accepted is a long shot. If they review thousands of applications (say 5000), and they hope to have a class of 80, then they probably have to interview a few hundred. So if they want to get 500 to 1000 into an interview out of 5000, they're turning away 80 to 90%.

I'm just curious to know whether we were number 501 on the list when they accepted 500, or if we were the last one on the list of 5000.

aliakhtar
Considering you got 8 views on your video, and they went far enough with your demo to make an account, I would say you were probably high on their list.

For me, my video was viewed two times, and my protoype was only viewed once, no other action was taken on it. This probably means you got higher than average interaction by them.

You might want to reconsider your current idea though - Have you looked into google Inbox? They are coming out with a lot of email improving functionality.

byoung2
You might want to reconsider your current idea though - Have you looked into google Inbox? They are coming out with a lot of email improving functionality.

I got my invite for Google Inbox today, and it's pretty to look at, but not something I'll use long term. In the end any pretty interface you put on email will suffer from the same flaw - it's built on a protocol that is just blobs of text. Inbox does make it easier to visualize what's in my inbox right now but the search is still just a plain text search.

I'm getting a head start on Christmas shopping, so I have a lot of orders being shipped to me. Can I search for all packages that are currently "in transit"? No. Can I search for every Techcrunch article I've sent to my cofounder that mentions YC? No. The reason I can't do these searches in email is because the messages are just blobs of text, when they should be JSON. That's the problem we're trying to solve with MorphMail.

aaronz8
We just got ours:

Thank you for applying to Y Combinator; however, your startup was not selected to interview for the upcoming Y Combinator batch. We carefully reviewed thousands of applications and since there's a limit on the number of startups we can interview in person, we had to turn away a lot of promising groups. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the interview threshold ends up getting accepted to YC. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold.

Unfortunately we can't give you individual feedback about your application. This page explains why: http://ycombinator.com/whynot/

We sincerely hope and encourage you to reapply for the next batch. Applying multiple times in no way counts against you and a surprisingly large number of companies are funded after applying more than once.

We're trying to get better at this, but 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.

-- YC

aliakhtar
Sorry to hear that. What was your start up?