My YC S21 Interview Experience and Insights with Shipmates
A good number of you have asked to share my experience about what it was like to interview at YC. It was only a 10 minute interview but we prepared for it like a college application. We didn’t get in but every time I experience something unlucky I seem to hit publish.
It’s also 5AM at my time of writing and editing and I think I’ve managed to dump all my fresh thoughts into this. Grab some coffee while you’re reading this.
For the record this is Shipmates second time applying to Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that’s funded the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, and Twitch. We tried in the Winter 2020 batch but that was a time when Shipmates was just a couple of months old and really we only decided to try it out last minute to see if we could get in or not.
Writing the application took great effort on our end the second time round. I can say it’s much better to apply when you’re not doing it last minute and I recommend you run it by your peers or YC alumni if you can. For us, there was something a bit magical by the time we finished submitting the application. The air around us felt different too somehow and we felt good about it.
Applying to YC is like moving from using a handheld mirror to view yourself to a full-length mirror. While both mirrors show you what you’re like, a handheld mirror only shows you a small part of what you look like at any given point in time. The process of applying into YC is like looking at you and your business at a full-length mirror where you see everything and you can’t hide the parts that you don’t like or haven’t worked on yet. If you’ve ever submitted the application, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.
We submitted our application a few minutes past the deadline on March 19. Unfortunately doing this cost us as we ended up being in the later stages of review.
On April 30 we got an email saying that we passed the application phase and were now ready for an interview with a few YC partners. We scheduled a May 7 1AM interview.
The process of preparing for the interview taught us that you need to have rapid and random access to ALL the important facts of your business. Paul Graham has written tons of material into what makes a great startup and what they look for when they interview: Startup = Growth and Billionaires Build, so I won’t speak much into that. (If you’re a founder, read those articles. I cannot emphasise them enough especially if you’re applying.) But the types of questions they prep you with are:
What problem are you trying to solve?
How big is the problem?
Why are you the best person to solve this?
How far along are you?
What % of the market are you trying to focus on? (This jammed us for like two minutes in the interview cause we didn’t know this off-hand! 😬)
In my humble opinion and sample size of one, interviewing with YC is a different beast compared to pitching to regular VCs. They’ve built a Unicorn finding machine that only takes in two batches a year and all they need to know is a few questions about you and a ten minute interview and then from there they decide if you’re in or not. It’s freaking impressive and their $300B+ track record is proof of that.
One of the questions you do have to prepare for is “why YC?” If you did your homework, they actually spell out the answer for you: they have the best network of founders, they’re operator-led (world class operators), and they have deep experience in leading you to becoming a great company. All of this despite their take at 7% for $125k.
Why you shouldn’t apply to YC:
Don’t do it for the clout, they will smell that from a mile away.
Don’t do it if your business only has potential to be a $100M company or less. I saw a few rejection emails from others because of this.
Preparing
Even before we started interviewing, I already made a shortlist of people I would contact for mock interviews in the event we got the call up. They do tell you explicitly not to prepare for mock interviews. That’s mainly because mocking creates a bubble for you where you think people will only ask the basic questions but in reality your mock will go sideways, backwards, and all over the place in a span of 10 minutes. Just do a few mock interviews to get into the habit of answering clearly and concisely and trying to share as many facts as you can about your business.
That’s what it is really, they’re going to be asking you about the current state of your business. It’s all facts. If you find yourself guessing what your burn rate is or what your distribution strategy is, I’m afraid to tell you that the YC interview is not the place to figure that out. It will cost you your opportunity. Do your homework.
The best advice they give out to prepare for your YC application is to work on your company. Work on finding out if you’re solving the right problem, if you have the correct team, if you’re in the right market, etc.
I told my wife Kar about how preparing for the interview, in a span of 7 days, made me feel like I grew about 2 inches taller because of the experience and it’s been great thus far. I do highly recommend it.
Interview
Kar was right next to me during the interview and she said she thought that the 10 minute interview took forever. On the other hand, Josh and I felt like the interview went by REALLY fast. They did a good job of making 10 minutes feel like 30 seconds.
They asked about what we were working on, who we were, what problem were we trying to solve, how big is the market, how big of the market could you capture, and way more questions about Shipmates.
They’re really just trying to do their best to get to know you in such a small amount of time so the biggest advice we got was to be short and concise in our answers. This signals that you know what you’re talking about and you give them the opportunity to ask more or skip to other parts of your business.
Josh and I did come out of that interview a little hard on ourselves for getting jammed a few times but in hindsight we just didn’t prepare properly for that question. And ultimately our rejection wasn’t based too much on that part but on something else entirely. (They email you with some personal feedback afterwards which is great.)
Post Interview
I ended up hopping on a call with another startup after the interview and saw what they were working on. In my post-YC interview lens it became very clear to me that what they were working on had lots of holes in their strategy. They tried to solve a rather obvious problem, they came up with a sort of ingenious method to solve it, unfortunately in the process of building it I could see how their solution DIDN’T solve the problem at all.
It would be hypocritical of me to talk about another startup and hand wave what Shipmates had going on for it.
In a nutshell what I think we have right is that the problem we’re solving is really valid, we have a relevant background to solve it, and we have an eye for what the solution could be cause we’ve been at the drawing board for way more times you could imagine. Fun fact: at the time when Josh and I incepted the idea, that weekend we ended up coming with over 30 different iterations of the product.
What we don’t have is traction, we don’t have the right team yet to execute at the pace that we want, we’re still knee deep in finding out what our users really want, and we’re a little too worn down by the journey. Startups really do age you haha.
I believe PG wrote it best, a startup will shrink all the experiences you could ever have running a business into a shorter timespan of 5-10 years. However the experiences you encounter will also be 5x or 10x more intense and you have to be ready for that.
Preparing for the interviews has also given me the opportunity to speak with some of the brightest minds out there and I have so many of you to thank. If we mock interviewed with you, I just want to say from the bottom of my heart thank you for doing this and spending time with us in your busy schedules. In time we hope to be able to pay it forward too. And to the Philippine startup community, thank you guys for all the love and support you’ve shown these past few days.
It’s crazy that we as a community are all hungry for a win and I’m sorry we didn’t quite make it. Yet. But here’s hoping one or two of you get inspired by this and make a run for it. Know that I’ll be here for you and that there are a great many others too ready to help!
I would like to thank my co-founder and the best teammate anyone could ask for, Josh, for going through all this with me. When I told Josh we applied I said on the off chance the we get to the next phase, let’s go HAM on it. And we did. I would like to thank too Victor, Luis, Francis, Aldrich, Mika, Rajiv, Ray, Francis T., and Mike for helping us prepare, I know you were all busy but you decided to carve out time for us and I hope to repay you guys by paying it forward to others. And last but not least, I would love to thank my wife, Karina, for being there and supporting me in all the highs and lows. ❤️
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That’s all there is to say and thanks for reading!
Thank you! 🙏
Very awesome experience! Thank you for sharing this. We're also in a competition right now and the experience is similar, not at the level of YC, obviously but the same set of questions. More power to you and your company, even better things are in store in the future for sure!