[newjersey]

Oh wow. I wish they said that the bar was so low. I would like to apply as well if that's the case.

Edit: I still think the idea of Dropbox is pretty stupid and I wouldn't have given Drew Houston a penny if I was an investor. But I never thought the average application would be so far worse if Dropbox got funded and succeeded.

[dang]

It's been a few years since I've reviewed applications, but yes, you should apply. Put it this way: if you simply (a) answer all the questions (b) coherently, you're well ahead.

[argonaut]

You're making the mistake of judging the idea too much and forgetting that Drew Houston went to MIT, and had worked as a tech lead at a company. That already puts him in the top 10% of applicants, regardless of his idea.

[newjersey]

I guess so. I, on the other hand went to a state school and my work experience is working on fairly straightforward line of business applications. I am not so much criticizing Dropbox as much as I'm making fun of my own lack of vision.

[beachstartup]

when in doubt, ask for what you want. that's what all the unqualified people are doing, so you might as well do it too.

the most uncommon and valuable skill in the world is for a smart person to willingly put themselves in a position where they could easily fail, or be ridiculed. dumb people do this all the time. this is an advantage to being dumb. you have no ego to lose. nor much of anything else.

that is the cross-section of intelligence and success. just look in the mirror for an example.

and for what it's worth, if you think dropbox is a tepid idea, just consider slack. enterprise irc with history and attachments. worth billions. there's more to it than just a cool idea. the example i always use is: i've got a great idea. let's build a time machine. it'll be great!

[beachstartup]

well, hold on, i don't speak for yc, i was just going off of my own hiring experiences and perhaps extrapolating a bit creatively.

but i can read a lot into sama's "not very good" understatement. for a yc (or vc) partner to say that in an actual post is pretty telling.

and of course, my statement about grammar is grammatically wrong. not much changes on forum banter through the decades, does it?

[orionblastar]

A lot of the not very good companies don't have a business plan, aren't organized very well, have issues, are in it for the money but lack experience and skills. They need a lot of help just to get better and I guess they don't have what it takes to get funded.

You don't want to fund a company that doesn't know what they are doing and needs a lot of help to get to that level where they do get funded.

But that is a startup opportunity to help these awful companies get better so they can get funded and then pay the mentors money for the training.

I'm sure they get coffee shops and pizza places apply as well that don't qualify but want to do some sort of cybercafe in their store.

[cookiecaper]

This is a phenomenon referred to by various terms, including the Dunning-Kruger Effect and several colloquialisms (like "you don't know what you don't know").

The short version is that there is an inverse relationship between actual and perceived skill. In general, the better someone is at something, the less they rate themselves relative to their peers.

This is a big problem when recruiting people for skilled positions. The best applicants assume that they won't be good enough and don't apply. The newest applicants have no reservations about applying and assume that they are qualified for anything, kind of like someone who graduates with a BS in CompSci and thinks it means he knows everything about being a professional programmer before he's even ever held a real programming position.

Joel Spolsky discusses this too! I can't seem to find the post right now, though. The gist is that he was encouraging good developers to apply to Fog Creek, because he noticed that a lot of developers he would have liked to hire were intimidated about applying there, as he had previously discussed things like dismissing non-amazing candidates, how rare it is for good people to be on the market, and the extensive perks his company extended to its developers (like an office with a door that shuts). The good people read these posts and automatically filtered themselves out, no doubt comparing against their idealized version of what they'd like themselves to be, emphasizing the gaps and flaws that they know are in their resume, instead of the reality of the applicant field, the competence of which most good people grossly overestimate.

There's another cheesy colloquialism that I think encompasses this well: "you're comparing your behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel". We use ourselves as the reference point for understanding others, but the intimacy we have with our own thoughts and failings can cause us to forget that they're not as big as they seem. We should be cautious before allowing ourselves to be intimidated by others, bearing in mind that we only see a small snippet of the picture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

[wingerlang]

What's such a bad idea about Dropbox? A single folder that automatically syncs your files across devices.

Even for less technical people it makes sense and it is easily explained. Put the files in this folder and they are safe.