YC Fellowship rejection letter

29 points by useflyer 10 years ago | 26 comments

Thank you for applying for Y Combinator Fellowship. However, your startup was not selected for an interview. We thought your application was very promising -- out of over 6,500 applications, yours made it to the final 300.

Since there is a limit on the number of startups we can accept for this beta test of the Fellowship, we had to turn away a huge amount of promising groups. Hopefully in the future, we can expand the Fellowship and fund even more companies this way.

Unfortunately beyond that, we can't give you individual feedback about your application. This page explains why: http://ycombinator.com/whynot/

That said, we sincerely hope you'll apply to YC's winter batch. Applications for that are scheduled to open the week of August 24th.

jlitalien 10 years ago |

Thank you for applying for Y Combinator Fellowship. We’re sorry to say that your startup was not selected for an interview. We read through more than 6,500 applications, and since there's a limit on the number of startups we can interview, we had to turn away a huge number of promising groups.

Unfortunately we can't give you individual feedback about your application. This page explains why: http://ycombinator.com/whynot/

We sincerely hope this won't stop you from pursuing your startup. We're not yet sure if we'll continue to do YC Fellowship past this pilot program, but we definitely welcome and encourage you to apply to YC in the future. Having applied to YC Fellowship will in no way count against you, and a surprisingly large number of companies are funded after applying to YC programs more than once.

We're trying to get better at this, but it's certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.

irinaba 10 years ago |

Thats cool! so, the normal rejection letter means that we didn't make it into top 300 and that we are not potential YC’s Winter 2016 batch. It's really such a pity that there is no real feedback that could help to improve pitch/business model ...!

DanBC 10 years ago | |

Have you done a ShowHN / AskHN? I'm not sure how good the feedback is, but it seems rigorous in the showHN threads.

irinaba 10 years ago | | |

Thanks Dan! Thats a good idea. I will do that!

natmaster 10 years ago |

Guys, a really important thing I noticed here, and please tell me if this is consistent with what you did: Applying late is bad for YC, especially in this fellowship case.

I got this rejection letter, and there was no evidence my application was even looked at. I didn't apply literally at the last minute, but I submitted the last day.

I had applied for summer YC batch before, and there I got people thoroughly exploring my demo, watching my app videos, and even looking at my linkedin profile. This time I got 0 hits across all mediums. Not even the video.

Please share if you had similar or difference experience as I think we will all benefit from this knowledge.

willholloway 10 years ago | |

I submitted my application at literally the last minute, and made some big changes at the very end, that resulted in two typos, one being the youtoube video link.

I was majorly bummed when I saw the video link was broken, and that I couldn't make any more edits.

I found a way to get an edit through anyhow, via the embed.ly cached image Submittable uses. By changing the main image on my product demo URL. I emailed the fellowship address and Sam Altman, and was put in touch with the CEO of Submittable, who thanked me for bringing it to his attention.

I was pretty proud of myself for finding a way to route around the damage, and 'hack' the YC application. I looked at it as my own Kobayashi Maru. There was no way to win with stupid typos, but by getting the edit through anyway I was changing the rules of the game, and competing on different terrain where I would stand out.

That's the way I looked at it, and now I'm even more motivated to succeed because I think YC lost out by not choosing me, and I want to prove that :)

I didn't get into YC but I had a lot of fun applying.

snake117 10 years ago | |

I believe this too. I wasn't expecting for there to be so many applicants, given that the application was open for only one week; I certainly learned my lesson. I read on another article that they only accepted 20 teams out of the 6500 pool. I can only imagine that they came across these teams early on and didn't pay a lot of attention to the rest of the pool, especially one's like mine where, now that I look back on it, my application was not ready for submission. When I read what I wrote, I used way to many "weasel words", as PG would say, and didn't state clearly anything in my application.

So to anyone reading this, if you apply to YC, make sure you do these two things: 1) Have a clear, well-written application that states your idea and your background clearly. 2) Start your application early and submit it early. This is one of those things that can only help you.

mattkrisiloff 10 years ago | | |

We did read every single submission. That doesn't mean we watched every demo / intro video (even for some invited to interviews), but we read everything.

I hope you'll still consider applying again in the future.

michaelZejoop 10 years ago | |

Regarding the video, on top of submitting on last day, I realized after about a week, with zero views, that I had mistakenly marked my video 'private' instead of 'unlisted'. In somewhat of a panic I [1] fixed the mistake and [2] contacted YCFellowship hoping it would help. I got a response, to the effect that they don't necessarily look at all videos and that should be taken as neither a good or bad sign.

After that, stats showed that there were 6 views, at least 4 of which could likely be attributed to the review team. The other 2 where from Finland and Israel.

My letter was the basic rejection; it was not either the 'top 300' or the 'more suited for a full session' type.

sydneyliu 10 years ago | |

I believe YC read applications as they came in for the fellowship (just as they say they do for most batches). This means that they likely spent a bit more time on the earliest applications since I imagine the flood came in on the last day. That being said, 6.5k applications to read split between likely not THAT many people, even though founders did help, is a lot of applications. The applications likely got more read time than the average resume does for a job application and the readers likely had to read more than most recruiters do so props to them!

tima101 10 years ago | |

I got 2-3 clicks on video, average duration: 1 sec =) And 2 clicks on demo, average duration: 0 sec. I guess decision was made based on application. Submitted early, on the 2d day.

jacques_chester 10 years ago | |

With 6,000 applications, the majority are just going to be skimmed. They're not superhumans.

jrbaldwin 10 years ago |

Thank you for applying for the Y Combinator Fellowship. We’re sorry to say that your startup was not selected for an interview. We think your startup would be more appropriate for YC’s Winter 2016 batch, and we encourage you to apply.

The startups we have invited to YC Fellowship interviews are primarily founders in the idea or prototype stage, and most are first-time founders who haven’t previously raised funding. We're asking almost all companies that are further along or with more experienced founders to apply to YC winter batch.

Applications open the week of August 24th at apply.ycombinator.com. We sincerely hope you will apply!

almeidamarcell 10 years ago | |

We received the same. Do you think they are being honest with this one? Maybe we have a chance for the Winter batch.

jrbaldwin 10 years ago | | |

We hope so, we'll reapply for Winter. Good luck to you!

acirinelli 10 years ago |

Made it to the top 300 (5%), so I'm satisfied with that. I think I'll improve my application and apply to the winter batch.

kom107 10 years ago | |

How do you know? I don't mean to be rude but I'm just curious as someone who applied and was rejected.

My team and I are planning on continuing on. Good luck to everyone else who is in the same boat!

rachellaw 10 years ago | | |

Sam A. said that they received around +6500~ applications, so being in the top 300 would make you in the 5%

https://twitter.com/sama/status/626523690533027840

GiusCo 10 years ago | |

Same here but winter batch is too steep for an idea.

jtouri 10 years ago |

That's something! And I truly believe they don't just say these things, they know that people can turn their startups around, so hopefully it will be a more attractive application the next time you apply.

kvatthro 10 years ago |

looking at some applications that got into YC (not fellowship though), it seems biggest 'mistakes' are 1 - wasting even one word not sharing more, enthusiasm hurts you in this case; 2 - technical founders, 3 - team of COfounders. I believe you can pass with one of those 3 'rules', but just the one. Nevertheless, I'll love to help them learn from their mistakes.

jacques_chester 10 years ago |

And to think, the odds were still thousands of times better than a regular lottery.

omnivore 10 years ago |

So it begins...