How to Apply to Y Combinator

Re:How to Apply to Y Combinator by cperciva on Monday July 20, 2009 @05:08PM (#715205)

It might be worth discussing the "are any of these the case" (sole founder, keeping an existing job, can't move, etc.) question a bit -- the form says that these are not automatically disqualifying, but if you can give an example in each case of when they would or would not be disqualifying (and thus give people some idea of where the grey area is) it would probably help some people.

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Re:How to Apply to Y Combinator by pg on Monday July 20, 2009 @11:14PM (#715654)

The point of this question is just to alert us to go back and check the application for problems. Before we added it, we often used to miss these things.

Here's how the question is used in practice. We vote on applications without necessarily checking it. Then at the end when we have a ranked list, we go back and check to see whether any of the top ranked ones have any signs of breakage. (That's when we check the answer to this question.) If they do we dig deeper, maybe asking the founders questions. What we decide depends on that digging.

So it's not as if we have some kind of rule that if a startup answers this question yes, 30% gets subtracted from their score, or anything like that. This question acts more as a warning light.

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Re:How to Apply to Y Combinator by cperciva on Monday July 20, 2009 @11:58PM (#715701)

Here's how the question is used in practice...

Well, yes. I more or less understood all of that based on comments you've made in the past and what happened last time I submitted a "I can't move to the bay area" application -- my point was that it might be a useful thing to explain in your essay.

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