We applied again this cycle and got accepted for an interview. Our YC application has changed a bit since we now have a much more focused direction, but our technology stack has been pretty much the same from day one.

I hope that this can be an encouragement to those of you who didn't get it this time, but I'm sure that if you try again you can only increase your chances. BTW, last time we applied we did it fairly last minute and I missed an email from pg asking us some questions. This time, we applied a month in advance and I checked my YC mail daily so I wouldn't make that mistake again. And yes, he did email us some questions again but this time I replied on time. =).

Fail :P

oh well, onward and upward I suppose, can't let something like this knock you down. Like it was said many many times. Everyone who didn't make it, please, by all means, keep moving forward because this is not a death certificate.

This is an important point. I would hate to think that we might be discouraging any of the startups we didn't invite to interviews. It's not just to make people feel better that we talk in the "no" email about how bad we are at judging startups. It's really true. The single biggest topic of conversation within YC is how we can get better at it.

In fact, as we often find ourselves saying to YC-funded startups when they're looking for their next round, practically all investors suck at judging startups. But we probably do worse than most, because we have to judge so many based on so little information.

If startups funded by "YC clones" succeed, those are probably ones we missed, since most people who apply to them apply to us too.

For those that just got rejected: Welcome. If you're seriously getting into the startup world that will be your first of dozens of rejections. Learn to take it in stride.

Investors invest in stuff they get, stuff that's presented well, and stuff that they relate to. That's triply true for early phase where they're going more on a hunch than anything even bothering to be hand-wavey with projections.

Just one kind of cute story, both from successful founders cum angels: We've had meetings with two angels now. One of them thought my co-founder was a turd. The other thought he was the swellest guy on the planet and has been telling all his buddies about us. Are either of them idiots? No. In one case things clicked, and in the other they didn't. All of the business plans and prototypes in the world wouldn't have changed that.

All early phase investors make some dumb investments. In fact, most early stage investments are dumb. YC is a bit ahead of the curve there, but they don't have a crystal ball.

news site: http://reddit.com

geolocation on cellphones: http://loopt.com

form builder: http://wufoo.com

server administration: http://virtualmin.com

electronic components: http://octopart.com

Etc, etc. Lack of diversity? It seems like these ideas span the whole range of Internet startups.

You realize the whole "Clone Amazon for me, $100-500" thing doesn't actually work, right? And look at the last batch of YC companies, will you? There's a lot of diversity there.

Maybe the only thing you got right here is that some of the start-ups YC doesn't fund will likely go on to succeed. Since YC themselves admit that, it wasn't much of a point though, was it?

Ycombinator definitely has some diverse ideas many of which are fantastic. Like any start-up catalyst, sure, they have backed some ideas that have already been out there to some degree or are no longer around--but that is totally to be expected. There will always be some overlap and like any regular distribution bell curve will show us, some will fail, some will surpass our expectations and rest will be in the middle. I have a great deal of respect for all that Ycombinator does and the people involved. Good luck guys!

Of course, we won't stop our project if not invited by Paul-and-the-team. Together with Y, or separately, we'll keep working on it, and, as every self-confident startupper does, we truly believe into it and are sure that it will hit the Web, gain several billions and finally takeover both Google and Apple, so that every investor-who-ignored-us will kick themselves thinking of missed profit...

... but holy, where is that email?

should have done that from the beginning IMHO. i fight dirty

Maybe something went awry with the mail script? I don't want to assume one way or another until I get an actual response...All I know is that productivity is going to suffer today! Is anyone else still waiting?

Perhaps providing responses through the HN profile could be a good fix to this problem and the spam folder issue for future cycles?

wanted to see me sweat, obviously

Good luck. Maybe we'll meet one day, in Sequioa Capital or somewhere, and share a laugh on good old YC application times ...

Either we were incredibly clear (having sent out the form long before the deadline and tweaked it numerously since then), or they just tired of reading our form, which slightly (but intentionally) breaks the "200 word" request almost everywhere.

Hard to fit into 200 words, when you have almost everything in mind preplanned and thought, from the scalability-related technical questions and repayment strategy, up to the image-creating plans...

i was ROBBED

  <frisco> lol, didn't pg invent that spam filter?

But pg did invent the most powerful recent spam fighting technique. I'm not sure why one would say the description provided in the essay isn't the same as inventing it? Certainly Bayesian analysis existed long before the essay, but I think it's safe to say that the inventor of the airplane was no less its inventor because the internal combustion engine existed before.

While it may be the case that PGs essay was many peoples first exposure to baysian spam filters, he didn't invent the technique.

The first time I heard of it was in a paper published in 1998 at Microsoft research. This predates 'A plan for spam' by 4 years. http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/junkfilter.htm

I just don't pay as much attention to the spam problem as I once did a few years ago--it seems to be reasonably solved for me. I got over 600 spam messages to my primary address yesterday, and only 3 made it to my mailbox...and all I do is run SpamAssassin with almost entirely default settings and auto-white/black listing (which is Bayesian). Now, the primary things that motivate me are making the system more efficient with regard to resource usage, rather than more effective (though being more effective is also good). Some of our customers still seem to have problems, but I've not really figured out why SpamAssassin works so poorly for them and so well for me.

http://paulgraham.com/firstwatergatesltd.html

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing. We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

Y Combinator Staff

Presumably they decided to use the email addresses entered into the YC application itself, rather than waiting for all main applicants to complete their HN profiles (which would surely have meant delaying the mailout).