If you’ve ever wanted to apply to Y Combinator, here’s some insider info on how this prestigious accelerator selects companies from the man who knows it best: Garry Tan, Y Combinator’s President and CEO.
The Economic Club of Washington, DC hosted Tan Wednesday for a one-on-one interview with General Catalyst board member Teresa Carlson.
It is widely known that Y Combinator accepts less than 1% of the applications it receives — the last batch was whittled down from 27,000 applications, Tan said. These days the group has around 250 companies. So Carlson wanted to know, among other things, what is the “secret sauce” to getting accepted into Y Combinator?
First of all, it may be one of the few places where you don’t need to know anyone to get in, Tan said. Anyone can go to the website, apply and submit a one-minute video. YC’s 14 partners read the application to understand a few things: Who is the applicant’s potential customer and what have the founders built in the past? Top applicants then answer a few questions from the partners.
“A lot of venture capitalists are having meetings week after week and saying, ‘No, no, no, no,’ and then maybe a few times a year they’re saying, ‘Yes,’” Tan said. “YC has flipped that on its head.”
He said YC is looking for founders who can create markets, who can envision technology that no one has imagined yet.
Tan used Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong as an example of a market-making person. When Tan first met Armstrong, he was still working as an anti-fraud engineer at Airbnb. Armstrong had read Satoshi Nakamoto White PaperAnd there was an idea.
“He said, ‘Nobody believes in this yet, but I believe in it, and I want to work on software that will make this crazy idea that you can have a sovereign cryptocurrency a reality,’” Tan said. “It was a very fringe idea at the moment, but that’s what we’re looking for — a fringe thing.”
He further explained that the “fringe thing” is a new technology “that technocrats are very fascinated with” and which “touches the whole of society”.
After YC Partners interviewed and accepted Armstrong into the program, Tan recalled working with him weekly. And during those conversations, he realized that if something like Coinbase existed, “it would be really huge.” Then there was a discussion about how to make it.
“The cool thing about what he was doing was that it was also really hard to get bitcoins,” Tan said. “I have personally experienced this. “These marginal things can turn into something fundamentally huge.”
He also said Armstrong was an example of another thing YC partners look for in candidates: “He was a first-principles thinker.” By this Tan meant that Armstrong not only believed what no one else believed yet, but he also began to figure out what was needed to make this thing happen, whether it was software or Delivery that no one else saw. It’s not enough to just identify something new, Tan said, you have to understand some of the steps to creating it and have a plan to prove that what you’ve created solves the problem you originally set out to solve. Were determined to do.
Y.C. completed a round of interviews last week, and Tan said the founders he chose to finance all “came with some new discovery that they discovered by interacting with technology.”
“Like sitting at the workbench and realizing, ‘Hey, did you know there’s a robotics manufacturer that’s building a humanoid robot now for $16,000. It’s coming to my desk on Monday, and we’ll try to be the first to commercialize it,'” Tan said. “That’s an example of first principles insights being a very interesting field.”
garry-tan-has-revealed-his-secret-sauce-for-getting-into-y-combinator-techcrunch
