Welcome Yc arenawhich is not a top secret club for the founders of Y Combinator, but rather a toy suite that give you an indefinite sense of what it is to be a partner in YC.
Was created by student In Berlin, YC Arena’s Simulator partner yc Your game shows you a common video available from a company applied to YC, along with the year of their application. Click “Accept” or “Discard”, and then find out if you made the same option as YC.
It is much harder than it seems. YC is estimated to accept About 1% of applicantsAnd at some point, it takes some luck to really capture a partner’s eye – maybe your stadium is the first to watch after a very refreshing coffee break, or maybe your company is the last video on the list and everyone is tired.
“Many founders rejection have continued to build incredibly successful companies after,” he reads a note at the beginning of the game. “Rejection does not mean anything – even the most successful founders have been rejected many times.”
YC Arena has other games that ask you to match the name of the company in its logo or guess which year a company has made a YC based on its description (spoiler alert: There are much more AI in recent years). But the YC Simulator game is the most interesting, as it makes us deal with our own decision -making processes.
As a technological journalist, I thought I would be good enough for YC simulator. I may not be an investor, but I know what it is like to sift through an incoming start -up stadium and choose what my curiosity is – I have walked on the floor of TechCrunch Disprring’s Startup Battlefield 200 Expo with the task of finding companies to interview and write. But this game is difficult. After all, we are working on different parameters, since the new company of a company is not directly linked to its ability to profit.
(For example: As I write this, there is a pet AI pet sitting in my arms that I plan to review. I would put money on the bet that Casio will expel profit from the investment it needs to create A glorified fortress available for $ 430; No. I expect that an article about my life with a pet AI will be interesting for readers? Yes.)
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After all, the game shows how subjective these processes are. But after I read the co -founder of YC Paul Graham’s Application driverMy speculations began to become more precise.
“You have to be extremely clear and summary,” Graham wrote. “Whatever you have to say. Give us to us right in the first sentence. With the simplest possible terms.” (For registration, this advice applies to journalists.)
I played the game again, but this time, I paid less attention to what the company was making and more attention to how fast they could convey what their company is doing. Of course, I would not recommend this strategy to evaluate a start in real life (hot take: you have to care what a company is doing!), But for the purposes of the game, I ended up choosing a company’s fate more accurately.
This is probably not a coincidence. When the founder and chief executive of Openai Sam Altman was president of YC, he observed in an interview that the Fythey had passed exactly 10 minutes review the application of each Company for a decision.
“It turns out that in 10 minutes, if the only question you are trying to answer is:” Does this person have the ability to be the next Mark Zuckerberg? “… you can answer this question in 10 minutes,” Altman said in 2016. “Not with 100 % accuracy, obviously, but quite good that our business model is working.”
