from Hacker News

How to plan for Y Combinator interview

by toomasr on 7/2/12, 11:44 AM with 11 comments

• by iconfinder on 7/2/12, 12:01 PM

  We got rejected as well after travelling all the way from Denmark. We landed saturday afternoon and got to the interview sunday morning and took the plane home sunday afternoon. We didn't even reach a point where we had jetlag.

  I think one of the reasons we got rejected was our response to some of Paul Graham's suggestions. One of them was to expand the concept to include game characters (Iconfinder is currently an icon search engine). We didn't respond to his idea in a positive way but instead defended icons as a large enough niche to build a initial service people would pay for.

• by jonpaul on 7/2/12, 5:22 PM

  I'm interested to know more about why PG thinks that people typically don't pay for software tools? Do others feel this way? In my own experience, if a software tool saves me time, I have no problem paying for it. I've seen this in others. I realize that my observational sample is quite limited, but what do you think?

• by rdl on 7/2/12, 11:58 AM

  Generally ill-advised to mention meetings with specific VCs and angels ("Facebook was truly interesting and led to three new meetings. Next four days went like a breeze - in total we had 15 meetings - with blue chip VCs ([...]) who have presumably passed (otherwise I assume you'd have announced them as investors).

  Saying "met with top-tier VCs and angels" is usually good enough, without the downside.