Congrats! You made it to the interview last time, though--did Paul offer any ideas that you used to re-apply and make it this time around? Did you have to go through another interview, or just e-mail them a better demo of what you've done so far, and they remembered you from last time?
Nobody ever writes of their YC interview experience. I promise to write about my experience.
If YC had an impact in our 'going for it' it was probably the encouragement Paul gave us in the phone call telling us we weren't accepted. pg was absolutely classy, and we really realized that YC was cheering for us even though we didn't get funding.
> and we really realized that YC was cheering for us even though we didn't get funding.
...Except I look more at actions than words. In these days of a pool of billions of dollars being sunk into start-ups, if an investor won't put in $15k, that's pretty telling of their opinion.
(Yeah, I know, the value is in the advice, and their limited time is the deciding factor. Still, investors who are really rooting for you will put their money where their mouth is.) Acting nice is insurance in case you do turn out to be a big deal -- always keep your options open, don't burn your bridges, it's a small world, etc.
PG told me in our phone rejection that we hadn't solved the design problem of making computers ridiculously easy to use whereas I thought we had. We didn't make a clickable/video demo because it seemed unnecessary, a click through demo just would have been flashier. The partners moved on right after I showed them my pictures and started comparing our product to Yahoo. We spent the entire interview defending this point instead of talking about the real issues.
I think my company might have got funding if I had opened the dialogue with "We have a product that will change the world and that the world needs. We are capable of developing a demo that will allow us to raise large amounts of money. Where do you disagree?" PG has said that charisma counts for a lot during a YC interview which it does because it lets you dictate the course of the discussion.
Please email me if you'd like to hear my GUI ideas/talk about simplified UIs.
My YC interview was ultimately one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. If I had an hour to interview instead of 15 minutes, it could've been different. It makes me sad that I didn't get the chance to collaborate with Blake Ross on our similar products -- he was designing an interface for 50 year olds and I was designing one for 80 year olds.His platform was a whole lot better than mine though.
Of course, I think we got really lucky in getting the interview.
I made a really good case for our company in the YC application and I think our idea is something that was on the YC partner's radar as something they had discussed before we even applied.
One of our partners was the absolute perfect paper candidate. He was a senior triple CS-HCI-cognitive psychology major at CMU with almost a 4.0 and a Microsoft internship + CMU research. He got an A in CMU's 15 credit "build a Unix-like kernel with a partner" class. He did it in four years. He owns Paul Graham's lisp books.
After the applications were turned in, I got an email from Paul and a call from Jessica asking us if we were really serious about committing to this as undergrads. I told Paul that we all were ready except our truly perfect hacker friend who had one semester until he graduated. Without this friend, we weren't really qualified for YC, but they were gracious enough to give us the interview anyways. Without YC's support, my other hacker friends/partners weren't willing to drop out of college. One has another year in PSU's CS program and the other is my partner on our current biotech ventures.
Perfect hacker friend is starting a PhD program at Indiana University Bloomington where his research interests lie in computerized teaching. He turned down 115k at Cisco. I am sure he would drop out if someone offered 200k/year to do something very interesting in a startup environment, which is probably a bargain for someone with his ability.
