Michael Young's Posterous

Advice for Your YC Interview

I am in the unique position of having interviewed with YC, having gotten rejected, then having joined a team that did get accepted so I'll talk about what NOT to do in the interview as well as what seems to make for a successful founding team. But first, a little background.

When I interviewed, I was applying with one of my roommates from college, Vikram. I think we had a great team--Vikram and I were both seniors at Stanford, he was about to graduate from the CS department and had interned at Amazon and Meebo. I was about to graduate from the Economics department and had interned at a slew of startups and had quite a bit of experience developing and deploying pretty large web apps (and a pretty good knack for graphic design). Our idea was to build awesome software for non-profits--something like Weebly meets Basecamp meets Salesforce to be more specific. The idea had grown out of the problems I'd encountered as CTO of a Palo Alto non-profit called FACE AIDS (they are doing amazing work fighting AIDS in Africa).

The interview was a whirlwind of rapid-fire questions and demoing our prototype. We thought it went really well, but that evening we got an email saying that they just didn't think we'd be able to displace the existing competitors in the market. In retrospect, I think they were absolutely right and made the correct decision in deciding not to fund us. We pursued other avenues of funding for a month or two (and actually got commitments for more than YC would have given us), but in the end Vikram decided to take a full-time job at Meebo. I was a bit disconcerted at first, but there were no hard feelings. In fact, we're still roommates and best of friends.

I was determined to join a startup, though, so I started looking for other jobs. One day I came across a post on Hacker News where a company that had been accepted to YCS09 was looking for a front-end engineer. The job description matched my skill set pretty well. I applied. They liked me. I interviewed and built a little app to prove I had design/coding chops. They hired me. Things worked out really well and they realized I could do a lot more than just front-end work, so they brought me on as a third co-founder. The rest is, well, history in the making.

Now I've been through YC and I'm still in the trenches. I think I've got a better grasp on what makes entrepreneurs and their companies successful. And I definitely know what didn't work for me and Vikram. So here goes.

The greatest risk you run when interviewing with YCombinator is having Paul, Jessica, Trevor, and Robert not understand the full extent of your opportunity. It's a classic curse of knowledge problem. Odds are that you have been slaving away researching your problem space, interviewing customers, building a demo, and preparing for this interview. Odds also are that Paul et al. have NOT been doing those things. This presents three challenges for you: first, you must actually be able to get them to understand what it is you're doing. Second, you must convince them that your opportunity is viable. Third, you must convince them that you are the right team to pursue the opportunity. In 10 minutes. But here's the thing: it's not as hard as it seems.

1. Get them to understand what you're doing

Admittedly, this is easier said than done. The key is NOT trying to create an all-encompassing description of your company, rather, it is to embrace constraints, to be as concise and precise as possible.

I'm sure you've heard of a couple different heuristics for condensing your company's description into bite-sized chunks--to me Sequoia's still seems best: your description should  fit on the back of a business card. In other words, it should just be a single sentence, perhaps even a phrase. Greg McAdoo always likes to use Cisco as an example: they were in the business of "Networking Networks." It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Take a look at some of the companies YC has funded and see if you can figure out their "tagline." As I'm writing this on Posterous, I'll use them as an example: they are the "dead simple way to post everything." Try to condense your description into something less than 10 words.

Coming up with a good tagline isn't really all that important per se--it's the exercise of trying to explain what you do in a clear and concise way that is. Once you've done it for your tagline, try to do it for everything else you might say.

In fact, assume that you are going to be talking to four children with ADHD. While that is far from the truth, if you *were* talking to four kids with ADHD, you'd want to be able to explain things in a very simple way before any of them lost interest. Similarly, in the interview, you need to explain things in a very simple way before you run out of time. If you've been working on answers to the questions in the prepartion guide, make sure they are all one or two sentences long and no more. It was shocking to me how many people far exceeded the word limits in the application, don't make the same mistake in the interview!

2. Convince them the opportunity is viable

In essence, this means that you must prove to them that: (1) the market is big enough (they're looking to fund companies with IPO potential, not two or three developers whose goal is to run a $1M/year software company), and (2) that the market is capable of supporting a new entrant (i.e. that there is enough money to go around if you enter the market and that barriers to entry are low enough to permit you to attack the market).

Most companies shouldn't have much trouble with this part. If you happen to be tackling something in the telecomm industry (or some other industry with relatively high barriers to entry) then you might want to come prepared with some well-thought-out answers to these types of questions.

Another way of approaching this challenge is to think: what's different about what you're doing? If the only thing that's different about what you're doing is that the product is easier to use, then you need to think long and hard about a better way to differentiate yourself.

3. Convince them that you are the right team to pursue this opportunity

Essentially, they want to see that, as individuals, you are each incredibly driven, and that as a team, you are determined to make your startup succeed. As Paul has said many times, determination is the single greatest indicator of ultimate success and as far as I can tell, that is true.

Unfortunately, determination is not an easy thing to prove. The best proxy for it in the interview is your product. The further along you are the more it suggests that you have the wherewithal to start a real company.

Do a quick thought experiment: who are you more likely to fund, the three guys who have a couple hundred paying customers already (which, make no mistake, isn't many in the grand scheme of things) or the three guys with an idea and no prototype? Put another way, it's too easy for Paul et al. to assume that if you haven't built anything yet, you are depending on YCombinator to move forward. Whether that is true or not, the surest way to increase your chances of being accepted is to not need YC.

Finally, it's ok if you're nervous. I know the preparation guidelines say "don't be nervous." An trust me, having gone through the interview, you really don't have anything to be scared of. As Scott already said, this isn't a typical interview. It really is more of an excited conversation. But you won't know that until you've been through it, so right now, it's ok to be nervous. The best way to calm yourself right before the interview is to talk to some of the other YC founders who will be hanging out. Ask them about their startups. We'll ask you about yours. It's good practice.

With that, good luck and hopefully I'll see some of you on interview day!

Michael