There's a phenomenon I've noticed in job interviews where the interviewer will in a sense torture the interviewee if it's a domain that the interviewer has expertise in, asking needlessly complex questions as if to grandstand and show off. It becomes theatrical and I can only attribute that to some level of sadism- or narcissism-like traits. I am not impugning Adora's motives here just commenting on my own experience.

I had an interviewer do that once, and it was clearly just to show that he knew more obscure technical info that I did, even though it was at a much lower level than was required for the job. The other interviewer even sighed and rolled their eyes at him, so I'm guessing it isn't the first time he'd done it.

Can anecdotally confirm this when I've been on the interviewer side, alongside coworkers who I am/was also close friends with. I'd agree with you on the traits.

I always felt really gross afterwards because I felt like the interviewee was wronged, but it just wasn't worth the potential conflict with my coworkers/friends if I did anything about it, either during or after. Walking on eggshells and all that.

Some mutant form of bikeshedding.

Seems like we made a mistake, and congratulations on your success!

If you're open to it, I'd love if you could email me the name of your company ([email protected]). We are extremely interested in learning from mistakes like this.

Why would I do that?

Wouldn't you expect nxmnxm99 to find that tone insulting?

It's true if you have a capital-intensive business, I will ask some of the toughest questions. I do this to figure out where you are in your journey of learning, not to find reasons to not accept you. In fact, we all take super-extra precaution to not over-learn from our own failures.

And to be clear, I've invested in plenty of startups with similar models. But I understand your perception of how things went.

> In fact, we all take super-extra precaution to not over-learn from our own failures.

I'm curious to hear more. How do you go about this?

I don't like the phrase too much but short answer is intellectual honesty. For example, understanding what went wrong that was probably because of your decisions versus the market, customers, external forces, etc.

There are far too many examples of founders succeeding with an idea after many people before them failed with same idea. I think any good investor is cognizant of this.

In my interview with her for my B2B startup, she said (paraphrasing) "I never had this problem when running Homejoy, so why would others? I don't get it." Years later, our problem space continues growing like crazy.

That’s just what happens when worthwhile initiatives get too big and bloated. I’m sure there was a sweet spot YC was in years ago but I guess it’s no longer that.

I understand there's probably a desire to stay at least pseudo-anonymous, given that your account was created 42 minutes ago as of this posting, but I'd like to hear more of this story. Feel free to post here or contact me directly via the info in my profile.

Jumping on this because I love underdog stories.

What did the co. look like a year before YC application and a year after?

YC existed to monetize the reputation Paul Graham earned by writing two very good Lisp books.

YC today: no Paul Graham, and too many right-wingers.

While seemingly harsh criticism, I think you may be right. YC of the old (PG, Jessica, etc) was much more selective and smaller inner circle. However, even when PG was at the helm he said they passed on many insanely lucrative opportunities.

Picking startups is hard, like picking stocks. You aren’t gonna pick every winner, but frankly 2M in ARR after two years is not exactly a home-run for YC. So, perhaps them passing was the right call for YC.

Congrats though, sounds like you’ve built something useful and you can be proud of that. Plus, taking VC money ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you can bootstrap to get to a level that pay’s yourself $200-300k a year, that’s a win.

> frankly 2M in ARR after two years is not exactly a home-run for YC

It's been awhile since I looked at this deeply, but I thought the path of a good startup is to raise a seed with an 18 month runway, grow to 1m ARR, and then raise a series A. Assuming that's true, growing to 2m ARR in 2 years is in the ballpark.

$2M ARR is such a small part of the story though. You really have to look at things like cost of acquisition, churn, gross profit, along with understanding the market itself. Certain markets can be easy to create quick ARR either through enormous CAC spends and/or large amounts of churn, all of which means poor long term growth potential.