My YC interview: Tips and reflections

Tl;dr: I had the privilege of interviewing for a spot in the W21 class of Y Combinator for my company, Sellr. Here are my reflections and some tips for future applicants.

If elections weren’t enough last week, I was plenty distracted with YC interview chaos. We had little expectation of getting through when we applied. Being as early as we are, we didn’t have a CTO yet (working on it!), and as <9% of applicants get to the final interview, we didn’t see math being on our side. At best, I hoped to get feedback and validation.  

The final interview was pretty intense. It takes place with a panel of 5-6 YC partners and lasts only 10 minutes. I know every applicant’s experience will vary depending on the interviewers, but I wanted to share a few learnings from my experience, and I’d like to think this goes beyond just the YC.

1) Details, details, details. It’s important to be capable of communicating the weeds of your product, at a very elementary level, and do so quickly. The more details, specific user pain points, and mechanics of your solution you can speak to, the more you sound like the expert in the room.

Tip: Don’t expect the YC partners to know anything, even the most basic facts/technical terms about your space, e.g. we had to clarify what an enterprise seller was (a salesperson who sells to businesses). 

2) Paint the big picture. The conversation went from the minute mechanics of the app to the go-to-market and pricing strategy in less than 30 seconds, and being able to switch gears of thought is important when communicating the strategy.

Tip: Make sure you’re solving a big problem, big as in big dollar amounts. Have a detailed calculation of how much money you can make by solving this problem and back your numbers up.  

3) Founders are key. This one is obvious, and though I wasn’t surprised at the questioning, it did strike me how much time of a 10 minute interview they spent on understanding our capabilities. Particularly around technical and market expertise, things we assumed they already knew based on our application. However, they wanted to hear from us about our ability to communicate a vision with limitations in our cofounding team, and we had the opportunity to assert our vision.

Tip: YC has a very strong bent towards engineers/technologists, if you don’t have one, you have to prove significant traction (read: revenue). They also highly appreciate founders working to solve problems they have expertise in.  

4) They do their research. We were asked specific questions about our typical customer and the partners tried to poke holes in our market problem. All of which are completely fair questions from an investor, but given that they sit through hundreds of interviews in a week’s time, it was impressive that they took the time to learn.

Tip: Be prepared to know competitors in the space and any limitations your target customer/user might be faced with, and get ahead of those conversations. In our case, we were asked specifics about enterprise sales culture and how that might impact our product success. 

It’s been a dream of mine to get into the YC room, sit with the smartest minds in the industry, and pitch a startup that I created. Though it didn’t work out, we did receive positive feedback on what we’re building and encouragement to apply again. The reason behind our rejection had little to do with the product, idea, or market opportunity and that was validation to us that we were working on the right problem. We just need to focus on building the right team.

I remain optimistic and still in a bit of awe. Getting feedback isn't as satisfying as an investment, but it did force us to ask the tough questions about how we would scale and forced us to create a game plan moving forward.

We'll be back.