Hacker News Reader

Comment by freax | Hacker News Reader

> Last year when they made offers to groups that had also been invited to interviews with us, they tried to pressure them into accepting before they'd heard from us. I assume they'll do that again. That makes me mad, I admit. It seems such a nasty thing to do to a group of young founders.

Wait a minute, aren't you the guy who gives them 5 minutes to accept once you make your offer?

If they did their interviews/acceptance AFTER you, it would be the same situation with YOU pressuring founders before they'd heard back from anyone else!

Pot. Kettle. If you really care about the founders then you all need to get your schedules together so founders have the option of choosing from multiple offers. Leave the window open longer. It's pretty easy. Give them the forms and have them mail them back once they decide. Like college acceptance; this is a solved problem.

View on HN

If they did their interviews/acceptance AFTER you, it would be the same situation with YOU pressuring founders before they'd heard back from anyone else!

Sure. And if we stole their wallets we'd be robbers. But we don't, do we?

I'm going to propose to all the clones that in future we all have a common date for startups to make decisions by. But since we currently decide last, we're not pressuring anyone.

alphalab decides after YC. http://www.iwalphalab.org/survey_overview.aspx (look in the sidebar)

I would be surprised if that was the reason for the timing of the decisions, I suspect it was just convenient for them. AlphaLab is going after a decidedly different market than YC: people that live in Pittsburgh. AlphaLab is also consciously an incubator and not something that failed at copying YC and accidentally turned into an incubator.

> But since we currently decide last, we're not pressuring anyone.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible, eh?

And then there's the "accept immediately or you failed an IQ test" attitude. If you have a common date with the others then that's got to change.

I've never applied to YC, so maybe I'm not qualified to comment, but I'm not sure your remark fairly characterizes what's going on. It seems to me that if YC gets hundreds and hundreds of applications, and if most founders who are accepted say yes, and if people know the situation going in to the interview (which they clearly do), then it's just not worth YC's time to futz around dealing with the few people who can't decide immediately.

Now, if YC and all their clones could agree to a similar cycle, so that founders could pick between different offers, then I would say that YC were the bad guys. But that's not the case (yet).

> and if people know the situation going in to the interview (which they clearly do)

You do the interview. Then you get a phone call with a percentage mentioned and no negotiation allowed. You say yes or they claim you "failed an IQ test". 5 minutes to decide.

> then it's just not worth YC's time

Yeah, not when you do this stuff in bulk, assembly-line style, with most companies fizzling out if they don't fund them (so very little risk of "being proven wrong").

I'll give you that "failed an IQ test" seems a bit harsh. But when did all this occur? 2005, or later? If later, there's been so much written on the web about this that it seems amazing to me that you would have been shocked by the offer.

To the second point, I agree with you that an assembly line style makes individual negotiations impossible. But I'd say two things: (a) that's a feature, not a bug, and (b) if you're a young founder with no track record, exactly what are your other options?

I think the point of the 5 minute thing is that you know going in what the terms will be if you are accepted, so you have plenty of time to think about it beforehand. Furthermore, YC has a good reputation so you can be sure that you're not going to get screwed over by verbally agreeing to an ambiguous deal.

Maybe someone should do a startup to auction off potential startups to potential seed-angel-incubator-YC-clones;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com