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by withdavidli 4430 days ago
Care to explain why? I thought it was a pretty concise explaination.

Do you have personal experience with YC interviews and know that they would for a certain reason?

1 comments

I think they'd interrupt almost exactly at "Is everyone clear..." with "who uses it now?" or "what stack?" or "have you built this already?"

Some other key questions you'd need an answer for, either in some kind of prepared way or in response to a question, are:

1) Why do you want to work on this (this is a great opportunity to talk about personal experience, showing the depth your technical skill and market knowledge indirectly

2) Who else does this today, how to do people do it now ("wipe laptop, spend a few hours setting it up" is one way; a lot of people have nice VMs already pre-populated for this and shared within a company, either local or VDI)

3) Any special risks, regulatory issues, etc. (e.g. if you're a medical startup you should know about HIPAA at least in sufficient detail to talk about it)

4) How do you get people to use it (namedropping current users is good, but your understanding of the market and how it's sold would be good to show)

5) (more key for non-YC investors) general market numbers. The top-down analysis is usually bullshit ('we need 1% of a 10b market..."), but being able to do bottom-up and based on comparables is good for a lot of things.

In a 10 minute interview with YC, or a meeting with a consulting client, you don't know what they're going to care the most about. You want to make sure you hit your key points, but also can address their likely concerns in depth -- if you hit your points in 5 minutes and they spend 5 minutes drilling into the sales model, it's good to be able to talk about the sales model for 5 minutes, even if your original plan was to only talk about the sales model for 2 minutes.