Considering the context I have to vehemently disagree.

Steve's really well known in the UK tech scene. He's a regular attendee & speaker at the Hacker News London meet-ups. Acceptance into the YC program would have vindicated his ambitions.

YC is seen as almost mythical in this part of the world as it's a huge ask to move to the opposite side of the world to go through a program to gain funding when there are an insane number of VC's & angel investors in the UK. YC is essentially 'Tech Hollywood' as far as most UK hackers are concerned. You can make yourself a household name as an Actor based in the UK but most Actors would jump at the chance to make it in Hollywood. The appeal of YC is a microcosm of that analogy.

EDIT: I appreciate CaveTech is referring to the zap.com situation but the entire trip was a guy doing everything humanly possible to make his dream a reality. I stand by my point.

To what do you vehemently disagree? That it is a slim chance of securing the domain name? If so, why does the rest of your comment discuss how important YC is to UK programmers?

Your hypothesis seems to be that if only you had answered the one question right, then PG would have seen the beauty in your plan and let you in. But you followed up immediately with the answer. And then you sent them a link to an implemented feature, which they didn't bother to click on. Why would they ignore both followups if that was the one thing that kept out someone they otherwise saw as a promising candidate?

It would seem to me that the more plausible hypothesis is that PG still believes exactly what he told you: you haven't figured enough of the idea yet. And therefore, that it really wasn't about that particular question. I suspect you're fixating on that because it was the problem that you could see, and because it was a strong emotional experience.

When I've rejected job-seekers after interviews, it was never about them failing a particular question. It was about a pattern in the interview, generally a Dunning-Kruger failure in some key area. I think it speaks well of people when they follow up with, "Oh, I totally blanked on X, here's the correct answer." But that never makes a difference, because never blanking out for a moment is not one of the characteristics I'm hiring for, and the conscientiousness displayed in the followup was also visible in the interview.

Inspired, I hacked out the feature that was the answer to the flunked question and used it on the partners.

If it was such an easy feature to add and so important that you had several strong answers to the issue that required the feature, why wasn't it already part of your product?

edit: If the feature was already present in your product, it would have been almost impossible to have gone blank.

The constant gripe of U.K. based talent is that nothing ever gets funded there. At least not at the rate or the fluidity with which it does in the valley. Besides this maverick ex-con of an angel, Xavier Niel, who claims to have invested in some 700 startups to the tune of almost $150,000 a pop, who are these angels and VCs you talk about?

I love the conservative objections here. Stunts like this only work if most people aren't willing to try (EDIT - thanks).

EDIT: Outlandish stunts are the best way to improve your hustling abilities. If you have the time and money to try it, you win either way.

One thing I can tell you is that we frequently get approached by people who have some kind of an idea that someone is going to let go of an asset because somebody really wants it and tells a good story. That approach is actually quite common. And anyone who owns even 1 good domain has almost for sure been approached by someone with a story about why they need the domain but don't have any money to spend.

Even though the owner of this domain isn't in the domain business they still have some idea of the value. They aren't just going to let the domain go because some guy shows up from London. In fact, how do they even know that's the truth? That he flew in from overseas just to do this transaction? And not for some other reason? This is not "Bud Fox" in "Wall Street".

I'm currently working on a deal trying to purchase a domain for someone which is owned by a non-profit Fortune 500 company. They don't need the money even though the amount the person is willing to pay ($50,000) is a good number for this domain.

The approach that I will try after being turned down by the usual suspects at the company is to simply work my way up to the board of directors at some point and perhaps make a case that as a non-profit the $50,000 can do some good and the domain isn't being used bla bla bla.

Find an angle that matters. (Note same angle probably wouldn't work with a for profit but it's worth a try with a non-profit ..)

I'm surprised that calculating risk before investing large amounts of time and money now qualifies as 'conservative'. If that's a common attitude in SV these days, the bubble may be worse than I thought...

The OP made a point of saying how he thought he had a good story to tell YC. The fact is something like this could backfire and show how naive you are and be easily viewed as stupid.

From what I read, it was the hedge fund not the billionaire that had the domain.

if that's the case, then the problem is that the fund is carrying the domain on their books for some value, say $100,000.

If they give it away for "free/cheap" then they report a loss of $100,000 to not only their investors but also themselves, presumably they are invested in their own fund:)

no one is going to let someone else at the fund just give away $100,000 of gains.

Remember the money isn't just the owners, it belongs to the limited partners, ie the people who put money into the fund.

Are we still talking about the same thing here?

> or buy the asset personally and then invest it personally.

Yes he could obviously do this, but he can't just give part of hte funds assets away, which is what I was clarifying.

If a few days and a few thousand pounds isn't worth much to him then I understand but if resources are scarce, using them on long shots that might not even pay that much over the alternatives is not good business.

edit: punctuation, grammar

And given that Paul Graham turned Stevie Graham down for not having thought things through, rather than for lack of a good domain name, then I'd say the time and money was wasted. With those resources he could have conducted 20 user tests against prototypes. If PG was wrong about his concern about the business model, Stevie Graham would have had real evidence from real users. And, if as is more likely, PG was right, then Stevie Graham would have discovered the problem before he was pitching somebody so important to the future of his company.

They got widespread mockery and bad press coverage for that, and no longer use the domain.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapata_Corporation

A domain name won't make or break your business. But all that time and energy spent on this problem could probably have been spent better on something else.

I get the point, but why the snark? Why be so dismissive? Especially since this "stunt" didn't work. (Yet?)

I know my comments haven't been full of praise but I enjoyed your post and it seems you have the personality that is needed for success.

His quote, via Gigaom: "We joke around the office that the worst is the fetish for failure. You want to preserve the good of the idea when it comes to pivoting, but you don’t want people to be intentionally encouraged to fail. Maybe it’s time to add a bit more stigma."

If that happened to me, I'd be too embarrassed to repeat that story even to a group of close friends, let alone tout it as my proudest "life hack".

I wouldn't. I think it shows exactly what he is trying to show: a tremendous amount of "hustle", indomitable fortitude, drive and passion... sometimes if you really want to make something happen, you have to take some chances and go a little over the top. And more importantly, it shows that this is a guy who doesn't just sit around and wait for things to come to him; he takes action and makes (or at least attempts to make) things happen.

I have no idea who this guy is but if I could buy stock in his future right now, I would. I can't say the same for anybody who reads this and thinks he's foolish.

I admire this guy's persistence, but not his incredible arrogance ("swaggadocio", "sound my huge balls made as I sauntered"), his poor risk/reward assessment, or his lack of lateral thinking skills.

His behavior only makes sense if having name "zap" is the riskiest thing in his current business plan. If everything hinges on him having a specific fancy domain name, then I doubt he'll be delivering sufficient customer value to his users to build a real business. And if that wasn't the riskiest thing, then he's just wasted a lot of time and money in a poorly planned exercise to get something that was a shiny distraction.

That sort of behavior is a great example of why solo founders are dangerous. Startups are endlessly distracting, and a good partner can keep you from taking off like a missile at something that, in the end, isn't core to what you're up to.

"Learning to embrace failure" is not an excuse to avoid basic cost analysis.

- best comment in the thread so far

IMO the story shows great hustle but poor prioritization. Domains don't matter that much. One of YC's most successful graduates is airbnb after all. That domain is basically nonsense, but the product is so good, now it's their own special nonsense.