If anyone has any questions I didn't answer, please ask them on this thread. I still consider this essay a draft; if anything important comes up here, I'll incorporate it in the next version.
My initial goal is to figure out what kind of group I'm dealing with. Three friends about to graduate from college? Two colleagues who work together at a big company and want to jump ship? Are they all programmers? A mix of programmers and business people? There are maybe 20 or 30 different configurations of founders, most of which I've probably seen by this point.
Is there a subset of these group types that work(s) better than others in your experience? If so, founders might be able to choose cofounders that increase their chance of succeeding.
Also, having worked as a member of a couple of types of groups (startup with room mate / recruiting talented programmers with a similar outlook and goals), I have found that there seem to be problems common to each type.
Since you have a much larger dataset, you might be able to outline the common pitfalls each type of group runs into. Could you do that, at least for the common types of groups?
Not really. It matters much more how good the people are than what type of group they are.
The reason I want to know the type of group is that it helps me to interpret the answers to the other questions. E.g. if the founders are undergrads, I shouldn't have as high standards for what they've achieved; if they're colleagues who worked together, I'm curious about whether the idea grew out of some need they had at work; etc.
If you want to know who to pick as cofounders, pick people who are smart and energetic and that you can work well with. Also try to pick people you've known for a while. You need more holding you together than the startup, because there will probably be some point when you dip below the x axis and the startup seems worthless.
I have also found that wanting similar (or at least compatible) things from the startup is also essential.
I tried to start my first real startup (one where we started writing code) with a friend from gradschool. We had known each other for a while, but it didn't work because we had different goals and approaches at the time. He wanted to build a world changing product and focus on that from the get go. I would have loved to do that but wanted to start with building something small that was useful and build up on that. Thankfully we realized this fast and parted amicably.
I was incredibly lucky the second time. I found and recruited someone who is attending the same school I did, but who I didn't know, mainly because he is a great programmer and a frank person. In our first meeting he was direct about everything ranging from his motivation to his weaknesses as a coworker and he expected the same of me. We have now become good friends but in the interim this transparency served as an effective substitute.
In the past year there have been multiple occasions where one of us has felt like the startup is below the X axis. When that happens, having an enthusiastic, frank and committed colleague who believes in the startup and can boost your optimism is a big boon.
It might be worth discussing the "are any of these the case" (sole founder, keeping an existing job, can't move, etc.) question a bit -- the form says that these are not automatically disqualifying, but if you can give an example in each case of when they would or would not be disqualifying (and thus give people some idea of where the grey area is) it would probably help some people.
The point of this question is just to alert us to go back and check the application for problems. Before we added it, we often used to miss these things.
Here's how the question is used in practice. We vote on applications without necessarily checking it. Then at the end when we have a ranked list, we go back and check to see whether any of the top ranked ones have any signs of breakage. (That's when we check the answer to this question.) If they do we dig deeper, maybe asking the founders questions. What we decide depends on that digging.
So it's not as if we have some kind of rule that if a startup answers this question yes, 30% gets subtracted from their score, or anything like that. This question acts more as a warning light.
Well, yes. I more or less understood all of that based on comments you've made in the past and what happened last time I submitted a "I can't move to the bay area" application -- my point was that it might be a useful thing to explain in your essay.
Yeah, I'm not sure if this is completely relevant, but we have a product that we're going to launch soon, and I was wondering whether you would prefer your applicants have products/demos not yet launched as that might be better for PR purposes, etc.
Yeah, I'd definitely be interested in hearing how much a demo matters when it comes to choosing. I felt like that was a major weakness my group had the one time we applied in the past.
It seems to me that to have people make videos and then discard a lot of them without ever looking at them (which the text suggests is the case) would be a lot of wasted effort ?
The amount of effort that gets "wasted" per unwatched video is probably relatively small. Per the video instructions (http://ycombinator.com/video.html), producing the video really shouldn't take much time at all (my guess is less than five minutes for a group that a) already has well defined goals and b) has a macbook, where there's almost no overhead to record a video).
Additionally, the very act of making the video is likely beneficial to the groups, by forcing them to solidify their ideas enough to be comfortable talking about them and by having them practice giving an elevator pitch about their idea.
It should be even less work than that. We don't care about the pitch in the video. That's already in the application. We just want to see what the founders are like as people.
Trying too hard to pitch in the video is actually a mistake, because it makes the video stilted.
I agree that it take lots of time to make a "professional" looking pitch, but based on the instructions, it looks like pg wants as much spontaneity as is practical.
Try recording yourself doing a one minute pitch. You'll be amazed at how short (to explain what you're doing) and how long (to not blow it) a one minute pitch can be. Now try coordinating 2-3 people doing that.
We're doing a little 1-2 minute video explaining our stuff at the moment and staying rather lo-fi and plan at least 10 hours of work on it.
If that's so, my skills at setting up lighting, choosing angles, and editing, learned on a A-level equivalent Media Studies course, would be more useful than my entire Software Development degree!
If I applied, I would definitely make a video, even if noone looks at. PG has mentioned multiple times that it's statistically helpful. If it comes down to you and some other guy who didn't make a video, I'm sure the extra effort is noticed.
Sounds like a good risk/reward profile for my effort to me.
When we applied during the last cycle, we made videos for each of the founders individually and edited them together. Didn't take much time at all, but it did lead to an interesting thought process about "how do I come across well in a short 'hello' video? what do I want to project?" and of course "what will grab their attention?"
In the end I shot my video with a cell phone camera. Took two takes and about 5 minutes. Finding the right location for it took a little longer, but fortunately the place just popped up one day while walking around town.
It scales better than only requesting videos from teams that are interesting. The latency involved with doing that would make the application selection process take a lot longer than it does to just ask everyone to send in a video to begin with.
