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How to prepare for your ycombinator interview

[WHAT]

1. ] Paul Graham @ ycombinator.com - wrote an essay on preparing for an interview at thestartup accelorator ycombinator(YC)

[WHY]

1. ] Graham is 1 of the founders of YC and I suspect that any advice that he offers up on conducting a successful YC interview, would be considered good advice
2. ] A summary of some of the 'key points' from Grahams essay listed below

[WHERE]

1. ] READ THE FULL ARTICLE
1. ]  http://old.ycombinator.com/howtoprepare.html 

[WHEN]

1. ] circa 2005 ?

[EXAMPLE]

1. DO] We only do two things at interviews:
1. ] we ask questions, and
2. ] we look at what you've built so far.
2. DO] Often ask, What are you going to do?
1. ] So please, please, figure out how to explain in a few simple, marketing-free sentences what you're doing.
3. DONT] Don't try to craft a convincing pitch. We don't need to be sold on your idea; the details are probably going to change anyway.
1. ] We just want to feel that the general problem you're working on is a promising one,
2. ] that you have interesting insights into how to solve it, and
3. ] that you have the energy to make a lot of progress rapidly.
4. DO] learn as much as you can about the problem you're working on.
1. ] Prepare yourself, not a presentation. Ideally you want us to be saying after you walk out "they seem smart and energetic, and they really understand the domain."
2. ] You can't change how smart and energetic you are, at least not in a couple weeks, so
3. ] the best way to prepare is to learn as much as you can about the domain.
5. DO] It's particularly good to go talk to potential users.
1. ] We're impressed by startups who've tested their theories on real users, and can tell us what they learned.
6. DO] It will also be useful to think about obstacles in your path.
1. ] We usually ask about those. And we tend to be more convinced by a candid discussion of the difficulties you'll face than a glib dismissal of them. You're going to face obstacles; every startup does; so if you act as if there aren't any, it will seem to us that you must have overlooked them.
7. DO] You should be intimately familiar with the existing options, and what, specifically, is wrong with them.
1. ] It's not enough to say that you're going to make something that's more powerful, or easier to use.
2. ] You have to be able to say how.
3. ] In some domains, even that isn't enough. It would be easy to make something better than existing dating sites, or eBay, or most enterprise software.
4. ] But these are bad because they're protected by high barriers to entry.
5. ] So it's not enough to say you'll make something better;
6. ] you have to explain how you'll overcome the barriers that allow existing options to stay bad.
8. DONT] We don't expect you to have all the answers. 
1.  So if we ask a question you don't know the answer to, don't try to fake it; just tell us how you'd go about finding the answer. A smart person trying honestly to answer an unexpected question is usually much more impressive than someone delivering an evasive or canned reply.
9. DO] The most important thing to us is probably the demo.
1. ] And by demo we mean a working prototype of whatever you plan to build. Mockups can be helpful too, but they're much more convincing if they do something. Even if you have nothing now, you should be able to build something in the time you have. 
2. ] (Demo = live. Please don't make a video. We won't watch videos.) 
3. ] The reason we like demos so much is that they reduce the amount of guessing we have to do. A startup needs to have (a) good ideas (b) implemented energetically. And while it's fairly easy to tell from talking to someone how smart they are, it's much harder to tell how good they are at getting things done. On that dimension we're practically reduced to guessing. So anything you can do to show us how good you are at getting things done will make us much more sure of you. A good demo multiplies the effect of however well you answer our questions.

[HOW-TO]

1. ] interview questions- @ycombinator - A listing of 30+ of the commonly asked questions in the ycombinator interviews. I have CATEGORIZED the questions by type into Product, Business, Founders and Market questions.

[REFERENCE]

1. ] # 4914 ycombinator.sospep.com - index
1. ] an outline of everthing i know, about ycombinator, aka my notebook
2. ] ADDITTIONAL RESOURCES
1. ] Quora ? - What is it like to interview with Y Combinator? - with answer by Paul Buchheit (yc partner)  and several YC founders who have successfully interviewed at YC.
3. ] Our yCombinator interview experience - successfull
1. ] by - David Rusenko, founder @ weebly.com - Y Combinator interview advice 
2. ] by - Steli Efti, founder @ close.io - Master tough interview questions with 3 simple ideas 
3. ] by - University of Waterloo, velocity - Lessons in Prepping for a Y Combinator Interview 
4. ] by - Tom Howard, co founder @ adioso.com - Our ycombinator interview experience (2009)
4. ] Our yCombinator interview experience - un successfull
1. ] by - Alex Klein, founder @ yogatrail.com - Interviewing with ycombinator:Our Story
2. ] by - Priit Potter, founder @ plumbr.com - How to plan for the ycombinator interview

 

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ID: 4457

NAME: SUMMARY-how-to-prepare-for-your-interview

DESCRIPTION: by Paul Graham @ ycombinator.com - Graham wrote an essay on preparing for an interview at the startup accelorator ycombinator(YC)

AUTHOR: article.author/s

EDITOR: article.editor/s

PUBLISHER: article.publisher/s

STATUS: Write

PRIORITY: 0

OWNER ID: 75

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