article

SUMMARY - my ycombinator experience

[WHAT]

1. ] by Marco Bambini - founder at Creo, details his experience of being accepted for an interview at ycombinator

[WHY]

1. ] 

[WHERE]

1. ] READ THE FULL ARTICLE
1. ] http://marcobambini.com/my-y-combinator-experience/ 

[WHEN]

1. ] 2015-03-05

[EXAMPLE]

1. [] application
1. ]
2. [2014-10-28 23:22] gets email about accepted for interview
1. ] calls Daniele (? co founder ), pranks him saying application was "rejected"
2. ??]  We had completed the Winter 2015 session (W15) a couple of weeks earlier and YC just informed us that they were going to meet us in San Francisco for an interview.
3. *] August to October, YC had received about three requests per minute from all over the world (3*60*24*90) = 388K applications ???
4. x] booked interview date 2014-11-17 - 17 was his lucky #
5. ] their product CREOS -  a new multiplatform programming language with a blazing fast virtual machine? Who could have rewritten from scratch a mobile operating system fully UIKit compatible?
6. ] Who could have a product like ours? Nobody, probably nobody in the world… and if YC’s choice was driven by the product than we would had no rivals.
7. ] an extraordinary technological challenge and we achieved unbelievable results so far
8. ] it was almost an obvious choice due the radical impact that our project can have on software development
3. [] the idea
1. ] learned how important is to find a way to give to as many people as possible the opportunity to develop their ideas
2. ] my idea about a thin layer on top of existing OS API which did not required to develop huge glue code frameworks
3. ] started looking for financing
4. [] product has no value
1. ] our biggest mistake was to think that being able to develop such an extraordinary product could somehow give us an advantage against the thousand of other ideas presented at Y Combinator. We were wrong
2. ] Y Combinator has been created for one single purpose: to make money. They are neither a charity nor a fund that aims to help the development of new ideas … they just want to make money and they do it through math and the huge network of knowledge they have in Silicon Valley
3. ] A working prototype in the shortest possible time has almost more value than the product itself. 
4. ] YC assumes no one knows what people really want SO companies need to be prepared to rapid and abrupt changes affecting both the business model and the product itself. 
5. ] i believe the complexity of the Creo project penalized us
5. [] raw numbers
1. ] yc finite resource: people in his team that must analyze the thousands of submitted ideas. 
2. ] They should try to rationalize the selecting process that can appear almost brutal in its practical implementation.
3. ] About 8 hours a day, 5 rooms each with at least three YC’s members, a 10-minute interview (with a countdown) plus five more minutes reserved for the team to take a roughly decision. Every room can analyze about 30 projects per day (lunch included) multiplied by 5 rooms then for 5 days, result is about 750 projects analyzed for each session. How many teams are actually accepted? ( believe last batch size 80ish )
4. ] the only thing that matters for them is the business model … I repeat here again: product has zero value.
6. [2014-11-15]
1. ] arrived in SF, hotel by the airport, close to the caltrain
2. ] first and last night booked at the westin SF airport, overlooking the bay
7. [2015-11-16] sunday /exploring
1. ] exploring mountain view
2. ] checking out YC HQ, interviews in progess,
3. ] talked to nerds(geeks) of all types while they were waiting
4. ] much criticized for the fact that it selected very few foreigners and I have reiterated that in this sense Americans have a great advantage than teams from other parts of the world … he then pointed out that by “foreigners” he meant people who don’t live in San Francisco. This statement really amused me but also scared me a bit.
8. [2015-11-17] coffee
1. ] coffee, prep practicing past interviews, questions like “what is your market?”, “how you know that people need your product? “,”what do you have that others do not 
2. ] arrive - directed to building 2, ] building 2 =
3. ] interveiw - running late - approx .5 hour -
4. ] 3 young boys in their early 20's
5. ] the atmosphere as “almost friendly” … but 10 minutes go by very fast and they have to optimize that time.
6. ]  The first impression is to be at a university exam, something like “Mathematical Methods for Engineering” (I still wake up at night thinking of not passing it). Personally I would have expected that we would have been asked a bit about the project, however apart from a very quick question about what we do, the product practically was not mentioned. The thing that has left us displaced was that it seemed that they had not even read our apply, in which we deeply explained what we had achieved, completed with video and demo as they requested 
9. [2014-11-17] the interview
1. ] see transcript  -
2. ] SPOILER-ALERT - it didnt go well
10. [2014-11-17] follow up
1. ] reaction, dazed, slept
2. ] they had not even bothered to understand what we had in our hands
3. ] recieved the rejection email that night
11. [2014-11-18] feelings / revenge 
1. ] feelings -  I do not know what happened during the night, I just know that all the bad thoughts of the day before had gone away leaving a new feeling of revenge and drive to do even more, even better. My concern was for the team, how they would react to the news? How would Daniele react? 
2. ] revenge - I realized that it did not matter how disastrous our experience has been with Y Combinator, it actually was the best thing that could happen to us. I saw firstly in Daniele and then also in the other team members the desire for revenge, the desire for redemption and especially the feeling of being involved in something really big … no matter the opinion that someone can give you in 10 minutes
12. [2014-11-dd] vacation
1. ] We spent several days in California, visiting some mythical places that after having seen pictures and heard their names so many times, they appeared almost familiar … we “stalked” people and visited areas that can not be reported in this article  … we also talked a lot about Creo and Y Combinator.
2. ] We have spent a lot of time writing incredibly complex code, we have produced more than half a million lines of code, we were so buried in all this chaos of numbers and symbols that we were losing the true meaning of the reason why we were doing this sacrifice: the product
13. [lessons] learn by experience -
1. ] We have spent a lot of time writing incredibly complex code, we have produced more than half a million lines of code, we were so buried in all this chaos of numbers and symbols that we were losing the true meaning of the reason why we were doing this sacrifice: the product
2. ] We decided to create a product as complex as Creo not because we wanted to write tons of code, but rather to give to anyone the opportunity to be able to develop applications. Y Combinator, perhaps in a somewhat brutal, but still very effective way, made us remembering that
3. ] we needed to focused the one and only goal … have a product on the market. A very simple mission, that no matter how good we were, at that time we weren’t able to achieve
4. ] Y Combinator was the right impetus at the right time. We decided not to submit any apply until we had a finished product a
5. ] We’ll try again to apply to Y Combinator, because I am still convinced that their mentoring program is invaluable, not even comparable to the money they could give you. We’ll try again when we have a product on the market, with a real user base and with irrefutable numbers
14. [lessons] "go off and do something wonderful"
1. ] I read this sentence from Robert N. Noyce at the Intel museum in Santa Clara and it forces me to think a lot about the startup world. It seems that today the goal of the startups is to raise as much money as possible, as quickly as possible and at all costs instead of invent the best possible products and change people’s lives. Why we were here? For the money? Yes money are important and $120,000 at that time would have been a very good help … but mostly we accepted this so difficult challenge just for one purpose: to create something really innovative that can change the status quo. So we just need to do that, we just need to “go off and do something wonderful”.

 

[HOW-TO]

1. ]

[REFERENCE]

1. ] SRC = hn comments

 

Details

ID: 4394

NAME: my-yc-experience

DESCRIPTION: by Marco Bambini - founder at creos - details his experience of being accepted for an interview at ycombinator,

AUTHOR: article.author/s

EDITOR: article.editor/s

PUBLISHER: article.publisher/s

STATUS: Write

PRIORITY: 0

OWNER ID: 75

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