This advice is disastrously wrong. That's not how YC interviews work. They're interviews, not presentations. We want random access to your thoughts, not to listen to a single path through them, prepared in advance.
When people walk into the room with a predetermined pitch that they're determined to stick to, things usually end badly.
From what I've been learning about sales in the past year or two, this advice is disastrously wrong not only for YC interviews, but for sales in general. If you ever drive in a sales conversation, it should be to dig out what problem the prospect is interested in solving.
"walk into the room with a predetermined pitch that they're determined to stick to, things usually end badly."
True for sales (as I see someone else below also points out).
I'm reminded of a time in the past where I was purchasing a high end typesetter. 6 figure purchase in today's dollars. The salesman kept hitting on the point of the large font collection that the company had over and over again. I kept saying "what's really important to me is your service program". I couldn't have been any clearer than that. (He didn't have to dig for the hot buttons - I delivered them to him on a silver platter).
We want random access to your thoughts, not to listen to a single path through them, prepared in advance.
OK, obviously this is a continuum, and not a binary thing. But why "random?" Wouldn't you think there is some value in giving the startup founders the chance to present things in the way that makes sense to them, before starting with the grilling? Or is the case that you actually do that ( that point wasn't entirely clear from TFA)?
I believe Paul is using "random" (in particular, "random access") in the programming sense of "arbitrary" – the interview is there to dig deeper into the bits they are interested in/concerned about.
Suppose you are using very slow media and it takes a tenth of a second to retrieve the information. That's an acceptable performance penalty ;-)
On the other hand if you are using external storage, with indirect lookups in order to find the information, that might not be so great.
At the same time, networked responses are great. There isn't a problem with having a different node respond to the request, since this approach uses a sort of strange architecture and session state is shared between all nodes.
I'm trying to picture the RAM chip designed by a literal-minded electrical engineer (even more so than most engineers!). It stops responding if it detects any predictable pattern in the memory addresses you're accessing.
Sure, I get that. What I was saying is, would it not potentially be better go give the founders some time to give their thoughts in the order they have them in... before starting to go off on tangents and probe specific areas? Especially considering that the question you're about to ask, may be something they're going to be answering anyway.
I guess that if pg and crew believe that they learn something by intentionally knocking people out of their planned routine, then that's one argument for it. That is, if the idea is "we want to evaluate your ability to think on our feet, react to unplanned questions, etc." then OK.
They've already explained their ideas in the form they chose in the application. So the interview starts with questions we had after reading it.
We don't try intentionally to knock people about to see how they respond. We don't have the time or the energy for such games. We just have a lot of questions and not much time to get them answered, and empirically the questions we have almost never turn out to be the ones answered in prefabricated pitches.
Do I understand it right then that what one might call "idea pitch" has already been passed once you are being interviewed? Because in this case it makes sense to ask "random" questions.
Before I read the discussion I kind of shared the op's point. But seeing it from the other perspective, it almost seems like the basic "fault" (if you might call it that) the op made was preparing for a test he already passed.
We don't try intentionally to knock people about to see how they respond. We don't have the time or the energy for such games.
That's good to know. I think some people have somehow gotten the perception that you guys do just that.
We just have a lot of questions and not much time to get them answered, and empirically the questions we have almost never turn out to be the ones answered in prefabricated pitches.
In my preparation between the accepted application and the interview, I was cautioned that the interviewers will not remember your application when you walk in the room.
As I understand it, random access just means asking you about different facets of your products, probably in the same way you and your teams have been thinking about and solving problems related to your product. You did not sit during Day 1 and outlined every single problem and feature you will support did you? There is randomness involved in your journey towards evolving a products, and that randomness already answered most of the questions PG might have asked.
Remember that YC backs founders much more than ideas. Also remember that they've already vetted both the founders and the idea, with the help of YC alumni, prior to the meeting. I would also imagine they have a strong aversion to BS and a well-honed BS detector.
Ignoring the pre-packaged pitch you have spent months preparing and asking you some unexpected questions would seem to be a great strategy to quickly figure out what they really want to know - which may or may not have any relation to what you want to tell them.
I think that the biggest thing that people on this thread are missing is that the interviews' main point is not to evaluate the idea, but rather to evaluate the team; the value of the idea itself is of secondary importance in that it reflects the ideas and thoughts of the team itself. As pg has said before, one of the things that they look for is confidence. The problem, according to him, is that some people are very good at faking it. Therefore, an objective of pg is to get people away from canned routine and to be original. Therefore, if the people are smart and capable of expressing their ideas, they should do well.
"the startup founders the chance to present things in the way that makes sense to them, before starting with the grilling?"
If you were sitting down in the coffee shop and talking to a friend or someone you met who had an idea you wouldn't allow them to make a presentation. They would give you a sentence or two about the idea and then you might ask a question. They would answer the question and if they knew of something that was related to what you were asking they would offer it. Every now and then they might blurt out a point which hadn't been covered.
(Edit - corrected "you" and "they" which I mixed up..)
Speaking strictly for myself I don't have any patience to hear presentations. I like to poke around and ask questions and engage in conversations. Conversations aren't presentations and aren't one sided. They are back and forth.
Another thing to keep in mind is this. If you are making a presentation it's possible that the person who is listening will be mind stuck at a point you made in the third sentence and tune out something important you said that comes later. So you can be at a disadvantage depending on who you are presenting to and what they know.
Let's say you say "we are using node.js" and the gatekeeper doesn't process that as a chunk of understandable info. He will stop at that point and miss what you say after that until he recovers.
If you were sitting down in the coffee shop and talking to a friend or someone you met who had an idea you wouldn't allow them to make a presentation. They would give you a sentence or two about the idea and then you might ask a question. They would answer the question and if they knew of something that was related to what you were asking they would offer it. Every now and then they might blurt out a point which hadn't been covered.
Maybe I'm just more patient than most people, but I feel like I'd give them more than a sentence or two, if it was clear that they had more than a sentence or two of things to say... I generally try to avoid interrupting other people when they're talking because A. it's rude, B. it's presumptuous, and C. I don't believe it's an effective way to communicate most of the time. Now if they use a term I'm not familiar with, or whatever, and there's no choice but to ask a question or get lost, then sure, asking for clarification makes total sense.
Now if they were rambling without pause for 10 straight minutes, then yeah, sure, at some point you have to interrupt, especially if there are time constraints (which, to be fair, there are in a YC interview). But if I interrupted with a question, I'd expect to get an answer to that question, and then possibly have them pick their initial narrative back up where they left off.
Anyway, it's all very subjective, and I'm sure Paul has figured out a lot about how to do this over the years. I just find myself wondering to what extent the YC interview gives the startup team a chance to get their initial burst of "stuff" out before starting to take them off on tangents.
"I just find myself wondering to what extent the YC interview gives the startup team a chance to get their initial burst of "stuff" out before starting to take them off on tangents."
I believe Paul answered this in a comment on the thread.
I don't see the need for the start up to present anything in what is an interview, not a presentation. As Paul is conducting a ten minute interview based on the application, why would he have to give any time for the start-up team's prepared presentation? Its only ten minutes, and its him asking questions of the start-up to see how well they can answer the questions that arose from their application.
"We want random access to your thoughts, not to listen to a single path through them, prepared in advance."
You can have both.
Without having true insight into exactly what information you hope to take away in 10 minutes, I would think that a cohesiveness to the order of the information, the pain felt by the potential customer, and a picture of that customer - are all valuable inputs.
My suggestion is that startups put that information in order themselves.
That's a very open-ended question. If you had taken things in a good direction from there, I bet he would have just let you talk.
“So people can all write to the same place. So it’s like a wiki?” he asked.
This question isn't really driving either. He's just reflecting his understanding back and giving you more of a chance to explain clearly.
The missteps continued when he asked, “Who needs what you’re making?”
Here's where pg started driving. And he was doing you a favor. You only get 10 minutes to convince him that you're making something people want, and you've wasted minutes already. If you're someone who's bad at interviewing but is good at understanding customers, this question might sift the gold nugget from the sludge. Unfortunately, your answer was just more sludge.
I'm zeroing in here on what you did wrong, but overall I'm encouraged and impressed that you not only owned your mistake, but made a public blog post about it. And now I'm watching to see what you do with the feedback you're getting.
My reaction from reading both your original pitch and your revised pitch is that you were being quite vague. PG knows about the problems of collaboration, limitations of current tools, etc, you don't need to sell him on the existence of pain points. What you do have to sell him on is how your tool is uniquely suited for solving these pain points, which is what I missed entirely in your blog post. His interview style is to cut you off when you are telling him things that he already knows or when you are being to vague. He will force you to be specific and drill down on the points of your idea that are most critical.
The part that is most striking to me about the vagueness of the pitch is:
>“Not really, no. A wiki is more like a google doc – it has one true version at any given time. Sure, there’s a revision history, but nobody lives in the revision history. Rocketr is about having one author for a given note, and a threaded conversation around it.”
The answer to that question is yes it is like a wiki - with these key differences. With only ten minutes to pitch, anchoring your concept to something that is well understood by your audience is critical.
If you really don't think it is like a wiki at all (which would be hard to believe), then anchor it to something else that will be easy to understand, e.g. "it's like email, but the conversations get stored and revisited and edited at will by any of the participants." Anything you can use to make your concept clear in an instant is extra time to sell them on your team and your vision for why this idea can take over the world.
My experience with potential investors is that it's helpful to have a general order in your head, but you should also be prepared to jump around. I've heard this advice from other YC startups as well.
It helps to start by framing your problem space and audience. That's where a story and empathy can come in. But there are people who will "get it" right away and jump right into your product, without ever asking about anything else.
Then there are those who will be laser-focused on your business model and spend the entire time talking about that.
And I've spoken to some who know my market well and just want to hear about our competitors and how we are different.
It all comes down to understanding your audience, speaking to your audience, and addressing the topics they care about. At least, in terms of an interview with an incubator (or potential investor).
> But it's widely assumed that they won't remember the application at all by the time of the interview.
Really? They're calling you in for an interview and they don't have your application in front of them and haven't refreshed their memory? YC gets results, so I guess if it works it works, but I find it surprising that the assumption is they're going to be unprepared like that?
There is only a minute of deliberation between interviews which isn't enough time to pull out the next application and refresh on it before the next interview is scheduled to begin.
I know from experience it is hard to think objectively right after a YC interview rejection - but use this as an opportunity to be introspective and learn from the experience.
I think whether or not they 'remember' the nitty gritty details of the app during the interview is irrelevant.
You need to sell them on your vision and team during the interview. You should be able to do this within 5 minutes whether or not they have the foggiest idea of what you are doing.
Certainly sequential access is a bad thing when looking at essentially partnering with an investor (or partnering with a customer to meet their needs). I also recognize you may have the better reading of the article than me.
But I think there is a form of driving that is important in conversations generally.
If you ask me "what is it?" That's an invitation for me to drive you around a bit within certain limits. How I choose to answer that is a form of driving. If you ask me who needs it, I get to give you a brief tour of the market, the problems and what we are solving.
In essence there is a difference to reacting to questions and seeing the questions as an invitation to act. I guess what I am getting at is that if the focus is on impressing the other individual that leads to reacting. If the focus is on showing you something cool, that leads to the action I am talking about.
The best way to explain something is to respond to your audience's reactions; if they are lost, either decide that point isn't important and get to the implications of it or try another tact. Responding to their reception makes your audience felt heard and validated as well as making it more likely they will actually understand what you are saying. It takes skill and practice, but when done well the difference is staggering.
What you should be sure of is the underlying, abstract thing you are describing. You should know the story is "Snow White", even though this time the audience might not care about dwarves and might not be laughing at the funny squirrel bits, but is really interested in glass coffin construction. If you know your idea inside and out, it is easier to find the part of it that this audience right here is interested in, and you know what the important parts are that make the rest of it make sense. Ideally, you shouldn't have to plan answers ahead of time, because the answers are obvious.
The less superficially you know your idea, the less work presentations are to put together.
Wholeheartedly agree. You simply can't drive all the conversations that happen about your company and product. If your success is determined by your necessity to drive the conversations, you're going to lose badly. The interview with PG notwithstanding, you have a company to run and marketing and sales to tackle -- the latter two of which are notoriously hard to control the conversation.
I see the YCombinator interview as a minimal test - if you can pass that barrier, then you have a chance at possibly getting your customers to understand what you have and its value. But if you can't, then it's going to be tough.
I see the YCombinator interview as a minimal test - if you can pass that barrier, then you have a chance at possibly getting your customers to understand what you have and its value.
Disclaimer: I've never been through a YC interview.
I don't think that's an apt comparison. Pg and the YC crew, as smart, insightful and interesting as they are, are still a very small group of people, compared to the world of customers out there. It's entirely possible that you could fail a YC interview for whatever mysterious reason (maybe pg was having a bad day, maybe something to do with pre-existing (and unconscious) biases, maybe you were having a bad day) and still do fine at getting customers to understand what you do and it's value.
In some ways, the YC interview may even be a higher bar: It's automatically an extra stressful situation, and you're dealing with some "type A" personality types who feel some need to control the interview, and you go in knowing you're limited to 10 minutes or whatever. When you're out talking to customers, you may well find yourself in a lower stress situation, with people who aren't necessarily trying to challenge you, etc.
And I think this is borne out by the fact that there are groups who failed to get into YC, who went on to be successful.
Yes, that is correct. I probably should have qualified it as you did, but you are right. I commented down below here somewhere that the whole idea of Lean Startup / Customer Development is to test your ideas and hypotheses with actual customers who are feeling the pain.
This does bring up the idea then that a YC pitch is a whole animal unto itself. I wouldn't have enough experience to know what the main differences are between a YC and a customer pitch, but as you mention here, in the one case you are presenting your story and value proposition to customers who would be personally interested in the solution and directly feel the pain and in the other case to someone who is managing a portfolio of startup companies and evaluating for "fit" and "merit". Those words are in quotes because I don't know what those measures are specifically for YC, and there are likely many other considerations.
I've commented about how the VC process is likewise totally screwed up with investors who neither feel the pain nor totally understand the markets and wield far too much power in the form of the checkbook. AND they underperform the markets in any case.
'When people walk into the room with a predetermined pitch that they're determined to stick to, things usually end badly.'
Yes and no depending on where you place the emphasis. Predetermined pitches are not a bad thing... know what you do, your strengths, think it through and plan it ahead of time. Nothing wrong with that.
The key part is "...that they're determined to stick to...". You have to know your material well enough to be willing and able to go off "course" wherever the client leads you to. That is where a successful presentation lies, in being able to adapt to the needs presented, not just spell them out as you see them.
Its difficult to " drive " people as smart, well connected and funded as YC. If a team's in such elite position, there would be no explicit posturing required. Basically, quality revenue and traction is inversely proportional to number of questions asked by potential investors ( including YC ).
That's a very good attitude - you can never lose if you learn a valuable lesson and keep on trucking. You only fail if you give up. Somehow I don't see that happening ;)
I think they mean if you'd had a second chance prior to reading the comments (on HN or your blog). Just based on the blog entry, I agree. I read through a couple of times and still didn't know what the product was or if I needed it.
I did like the design though. Would've liked to have seen product screenshots to see how that carried through to the interface.
This advice is disastrously wrong. That's not how YC interviews work. They're interviews, not presentations. We want random access to your thoughts, not to listen to a single path through them, prepared in advance.
When people walk into the room with a predetermined pitch that they're determined to stick to, things usually end badly.