So, you got a Y Combinator interview, now what?

This piece was written last year as advice for Y Combinator applicants

As a company from the latest Winter batch of Y Combinator (YC), I can promise you that the YC experience will change the trajectory of your company forever.

What are the main benefits if you get accepted?

It’s important to remember that Y Combinator is the stepping stone for you to turn a dream and a hobby into a real business. For me, it was the first time I could focus on really making a go of building a big business with some very talented co-founders (Jamie, Tim, and now Brad) and really make the transition from PhD drop out to full-time entrepreneur. Many of you have been in jobs you hate, have just left school, or even dropped out to make this happen. Remember that feeling of being trapped and having a dream? Take that frustration and put your all into making this interview happen.

For Snaptalent YC was a great platform for generating more opportunities for our company and really allowed us to focus on gathering enough evidence to launch, build a product and get more funding to move our dream to the next level.

YC has three main benefits for startups that are accepted:

1. Product advice: Paul Graham is one of the most astute product advisers i know. Having seen a lot of startups, his experience from building Viaweb, and his experience with YC, Paul gives you the confidence to go after a big market by focusing on making a product users will hug you for when they see you in the street. It’s that blend of great design, usability, and technical savvy that characterizes a YC startup. If you have the ingredients now, some of the stuff Paul will say will make you go ‘you know what, that’s actually right’ after disagreeing initially. This stuff is Gold dust.
2. Peer group: As the alumni group gets larger the range and depth of experience and contacts just grow. It can be product advice, scaling advice, funding advice, visa advice, experts in different functional languages and platforms, acquisition advice or just contacts to do deals - the YC alumni network can connect you to anyone from Silicon Valley to Europe. Its not just the alumni network, as each batch arrives (there were 21 startups in the Winter ‘08 batch), the range and depth of experience in your immediate peer group is rich and diverse. For example, in our batch, Heroku and Rescuetime were second-time entrepreneurs, Chatterous guys were Python superhackers from Amazon, and everyone swapped contacts and advice like crazy. You may have even spoken with YC alumni pre-interview. In a few years, people won’t just talk about the PayPal mafia, they will talk about the YC mafia. This is a phenomenon and you want to be part of it!
3. Opportunity: YC is an opportunity to make encounters and gain the advice of people who can really help you make the most of your idea. Every second is an opportunity to learn and evolve. From YC dinners with people like Chris Sacca, Evan WIlliams, Marc Andressen, and Paul Buccheit, to Demo Days and open houses, everyone could help you succeed if you talk to them. YC gives you credibility like no other, but its up to you to make the most of it. These folk could be advisors, investors, mentors or give you valuable passing advice. YC is an amplifier for such interactions for you to get funded and move to the next stage, from product to company.

So, what is YC looking for and how can you be best prepared for your interview?

YC are looking for teams of entrepreneurs who are incredibly ambitious, determined to succeed, can listen and learn, and most of all, who can really get things done in a short amount of time. These are people who love building great products and are interested in building a business around that product, doing whatever it takes. Remember YC has to at least return its investment to keep going, so if you get in, your company’s eventual success could help not only you get rich but seed future generations of YC startups.

In the space of a weekend, the YC partners will interview 50-60 startups. Each interview only lasts 10 minutes and the objective is to get a sense of whether you are a good team. The idea is secondary, but as i will discuss the way you present the idea and what you say all link back to showing that you are a good team.

So, here are the things to do well:

1. Have a Demo: you have 2 weeks now to get something up that can show off what you can do. Lock the door and get to work. It doesn’t need to be complete, but if you can show evidence for good design and speedy execution than thats great evidence to have you be part of YC. Work on a usable interface (pg loves that) and be prepared to walk through it if you get the chance. Even if you don’t show the demo the experience of knocking one out will show you the intensity of YC. Our demo helped show our ability as a team to do something fast. When we got the interview we were all panicked by how little time we had. It’s natural, expect it to be like that.
2. Don’t be verbose. Don’t waffle. You only have 10 minutes. Be thoughtful and articulate. Pack as much meaning into as little words as possible. Be concise and clear. PG and co get so many applications and have so little time to read them that you should expect that the YC partners don’t have any idea what you do. Practice the following questions: ‘So, what do you do?’, ‘Why is that different to what exists now?’, ‘Why will people use this?’
3. Be flexible: you will be caught off guard. Expect the interview to uncover areas you haven’t even thought of. The YC partners are going to see how you react to this. There have been previous teams where YC has hated their idea and they’ve had to change it on the spot or had 24 hours to come back with a new idea. This is where your team shines through. Good entrepreneurs learn, are open-minded to feedback and can adjust. These are the kind YC wants to fund. We didn’t even apply with Snaptalent we changed our idea after we were accepted. YC backed the team. Expect the same with your interview.

When you get to California, take some time to relax and get into the mindset. I remember how nervous we were before our YC interview. We solved mental arithmetic problems in the car to keep us fresh and mentally alert. I thought the interview went terribly. We were challenged on everything, why was our idea different, how could we do better. Just relax and be yourself. Don’t be stubborn and have fun meeting and hanging out with the other teams. There will be YC alumni hanging out too - grab as much of their insight as possible. One surefire way of predicting success is when prospective applicants take a lot of time to learn from alumni. It means you care - if you see one of us, grab us and feel free to chat.

The fact that you have been selected for interview shows you are on the right track and are super talented. You now have a great odds of getting in. This could be the chance to make some personal history.

As YC alumni we’re happy to answer any questions, feel free to add a comment to this post or email me on Sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com . Wishing all of you the best of luck!

Football clubs still using Snail Mail!

Being disappointed that Arsenal is selling yet another one of our leading lights, Emanuel Adebayor, I was even more surprised by the way they expressed that communication.

Planetfootball quotes AC Milan vice president Adriano Galliani as saying

"Today Arsenal sent us a letter saying they were willing to talk to us about Adebayor," Galliani told Antenna3 television.

"The letter from Arsenal that says, 'Following our communication of 13th June, in which we informed you we were not willing to deal over Adebayor, now we are writing to tell you that we will consider a deal if it still interests you'.

Being a digital maven, sometimes it seems that writing a letter delivers a much stronger statement.  My prediction is that this is going to be the next product (email --> letter) coming from Moo. 

       Go on Richard. Make it happen ;)

The start up team balance

In a startup you need a combination of visionary people and people who aren't visonary but can understand the vision and execute against it. This is the startup team balance.

Too many visonary people = not enough gets done as everyone is dreaming about the vision all day

Too little vision = nothing big is ever achieved as no one really has a vision beyond what is going on.

One or two visionary people is enough, coupled with people known as executors. These guys/girls are steady eddies who, understand what needs to be done and just get on with it. These are probably the hardest people to find, since they have to be matched on ambition, aspiration, and productivity.

They generally seek out ambitious ventures in which they passionately believe in the vision. Their productivity is what drives turing those dreams into reality i.e. a game changing company.

Are you a visionary or an executor?

The speed of acquiring talent

Not having someone fill a role at a Company costs that Company productivity. It takes time to identify someone who could fulfill that role at maximum productivity i.e. has the right fit for the company. So the ultimate pain killer would be a service which reached as many of the right people as fast as possible and which qualified each of those for fit in the most efficient way possible.

This would make the time to productivity (t) as small as possible for companies. Companies will pay for productivity. 

I guess this is a problem we are thinking about every day. 

Jumpstarting the rollodex

Its incredible how much web services which connect people over common interest can greatly accelerate how quickly you meet like minded people offline. Before our true identities were exposed on the web the same level of connection would be impossible or much less efficient. 

Lets take a business example - with so many people blogging about themselves and their thoughts our true identity is being exposed through social media. It means that when we get connected to people, the qualification stage of whether we want to meet them happens way before we waste time in countless encounters. With twitter, tumblr, linkedin profiles, facebook - there is so much more context to taking a mutual connection. 

This means when you meet in person, you already have a good sense of why it would be worth knowing that person versus prior to when our identities were not on the web it would take a ton of meetings just to get a sense of whether you wanted to do business.

I believe this effect of having true identity on the web, and pre-qualification is giving rise to a new phenomenon in modern business: jump starting the rollodex.

With so much information out there for people - it doesn't take 5 years to get to the top of the industry. Be opportunistic, and make that networking happen more efficiently. At least i know its touched my life in unexpected ways so far. 

The power of a cause

Something i've been thinking more and more about is what happens to performance under situations of stress. Let me share with you some examples of what I'm thinking about - these all refer to entrepreneurial endeavors

1) Moving to a new city to work: So i've moved from London to San Fran. Even though i've been here for less than a day, my unfamiliarity with the local environment means that I'm trying to squeeze as much out of my waking day through work than anything else. I can't really do anything else - so that makes me want to work all the time. So situation 1: if you hire workaholic people from out of town and bring them to work then they are likely to work all day, sleep at night and then work all day again just to pass the time. Certainly this wouldn't be the case in London.

2) Having money pressure: Having less money means you need to be on a budget to survive. This means you generally have to be more creative with what you spend money on and do things which are generally free. This means that if you are workaholic generally you are likely to do everything thats fun and free. Often this involves continuing to work. All the time.

3) Having time pressure: generally mission critical things have a high time value. Move too slow you lose. I'm under time pressure to deliver certain things. It makes me want to be more efficient, find better ways to organise stuff and in general make the most of my time. Bottom line, as a workaholic it makes me want to work faster.

So there you go. Find ambitious workaholics, push them into a startup in a new city, with restricted pay and time pressure and watch their performance soar. The power of the cause makes it worth it - this sacrifice is worth something & the emotional cost is negligible to the benefit.

Now i just need to find some more ambitious workaholics to join me to ease the pain.

Plus i really got to sleep :)...

I like this quote

"If you can track the success of advertising, especially if you can follow sales leads, then marketing ceases to be just a cost-centre, with an arbitrary budget allocated to it. Instead, advertising becomes a variable cost of production that measurably results in making more profit."

I also like this derivative quote

"If you can track the success of recruitment advertising, especially if you can follow candidate leads, then marketing ceases to be just a cost-centre, with an arbitrary budget allocated to it. Instead, recruitment advertising becomes a variable cost of production that measurably results in better candidates."

The latter is what we're doing with Snaptalent.

I haven't posted for a while

I'm still alive but this time doing what i was made to do.

We just started a company out on the west coast called Snaptalent and spent jan-march doing Y Combinator. I'm a huge believer in revolution - we're reinventing a market that hasn't changed in 15 years, recruitment advertising.

Ahh, that you say - its boring. I know, thats why we're making it sexy and cool again.

If one could connect the best people and best companies in a much more efficient manner you can impact the productivity of companies, the productivity of a labour market and ultimately the productivity of local and national economies.

Thats a big vision and what keeps me going with this. We're not in it for the short ride, this one is a long term project which if we do right will impact 100s of millions of people worldwide.

We'll do it right. Expect more cool blogging from me soon.