> Shout out to Syrus Akbury (W19), Ian Tien (S12), and Taariq Lewis (S15) for encouraging me to apply and helping me with my application way back when :)
But seriously, thank you so much Syrus! I was thinking about you 3 the whole time while I wrote the post, hoping it would help someone else like how you helped me!
Given that you helped on it, what do you think made it stand out? From just reading through it, to me personally it doesn’t sound super in-depth or convincing, but I’d like to learn what I’m missing.
When I asked some of my partners what it was about me/my application that got us in, this is what I heard:
1. We had revenue, meaning we weren't afraid to charge. Many first founders are afraid of charging, and there is step-wise more validation having $100/month than $0.
2. We had a product that my partners could actually download and use.
3. "You seemed young and hungry. And I like young and hungry." - Michael Seibel
Unfortunately, I don't have the video of how our actual interview went. I think that would've been very informative too.
Following on, how did your interview go and what do you think made you stand out there? (or if you write a blog post on that separately I’d be very interested)
1) He asked something about if I was going to find a co-founder or not. I think I said that we started getting traction pretty fast without one and I wasn't going to wait for a co-founder to appear -- cofounders are not something to force. I think this is how he observed that I was "young and hungry."
2) He asked about why I thought open-source was a key differentiator. I said it wasn't, it was just good marketing, and thought you can build the best product without being open-source. I think this turned out to be true. Some arguments for open-source are that it is better for extensibility, privacy, and community. Obsidian does a great job of these 3 things, arguably the best in the networked note-taking app category, despite being closed-source.
I remember both of these questions actually causing Michael and the other partners on the call to pause and think about what I said, because it wasn't necessarily what they expected. Expected answers to these questions might be: "I'm looking for a co-founder" and "Open-source is better because X/Y/Z" given that I had marketed Athens as "open-source Roam" for the first 1 year and throughout YC.
I thought I bombed the interview because I remember being pretty shocked and speechless when they gave me a call saying I got in.
> Shout out to Syrus Akbury (W19), Ian Tien (S12), and Taariq Lewis (S15) for encouraging me to apply and helping me with my application way back when :)
But seriously, thank you so much Syrus! I was thinking about you 3 the whole time while I wrote the post, hoping it would help someone else like how you helped me!