<story><title>From YC Rejection to 10,000 Users in 1 Month (with stats)</title><url>http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/03/from-yc-rejection-to-10000-users-in-1-month/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Believe it or not I like this being the top story.  We know there are lots of bugs in our process and we want to hear the bug reports.&lt;p&gt;I went back to look at the application.  It fell immediately below the threshold for invitation to interviews.  I.e. if even one of us had given them a grade one step better, they would have made it to interviews.&lt;p&gt;When we make mistakes, it&apos;s usually in this phase.  Most of the time when we screw up it&apos;s by not inviting a group to interviews, rather than by interviewing them and turning them down.  So this startup is exactly where a mistake would be most likely to occur: in the applications that fell just short of the cutoff for interviews.&lt;p&gt;The good news is, we&apos;d already decided to fix this problem.  We&apos;re going to do 3 interview tracks for s2012, which will let us interview 270 groups instead of the 180 we did last time.&lt;p&gt;If we&apos;d done that last time, we would have interviewed these guys.  But last batch was the first time we did parallel interview tracks at all, and we needed to test whether it worked for 2 before we went to 3.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bambax</author><text>I don&apos;t know if I&apos;m going to be able to express what I feel but I&apos;ll try.&lt;p&gt;YC &quot;bugs&quot; are&lt;p&gt;- startups that are accepted and fail&lt;p&gt;- startups that are rejected and fail, &lt;i&gt;but would have thrived had they been accepted&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Of course this last kind of bug is extremely difficult to track down.)&lt;p&gt;But if a startup makes a killing after being rejected by YC it means they didn&apos;t need you.&lt;p&gt;If you consider this a bug, there&apos;s some kind of moral problem because it means YC is trying to siphon every promising team in order to maximize YC&apos;s success, independently of who YC is likely to help more.&lt;p&gt;You&apos;re not just betting on horses, you&apos;re also training them: it seems what you should want to maximize is YC&apos;s impact...?</text></comment>
<story><title>From YC Rejection to 10,000 Users in 1 Month (with stats)</title><url>http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/03/from-yc-rejection-to-10000-users-in-1-month/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Believe it or not I like this being the top story.  We know there are lots of bugs in our process and we want to hear the bug reports.&lt;p&gt;I went back to look at the application.  It fell immediately below the threshold for invitation to interviews.  I.e. if even one of us had given them a grade one step better, they would have made it to interviews.&lt;p&gt;When we make mistakes, it&apos;s usually in this phase.  Most of the time when we screw up it&apos;s by not inviting a group to interviews, rather than by interviewing them and turning them down.  So this startup is exactly where a mistake would be most likely to occur: in the applications that fell just short of the cutoff for interviews.&lt;p&gt;The good news is, we&apos;d already decided to fix this problem.  We&apos;re going to do 3 interview tracks for s2012, which will let us interview 270 groups instead of the 180 we did last time.&lt;p&gt;If we&apos;d done that last time, we would have interviewed these guys.  But last batch was the first time we did parallel interview tracks at all, and we needed to test whether it worked for 2 before we went to 3.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AdamFernandez</author><text>I don&apos;t think much explanation is necessary.  YC is never going to catch every potentially successful startup.  The process can be refined, but you will never recognize all of them.  Averages being what they are, I think YC has done very well.  The Codiqa team showed tenacity, and when YC didn&apos;t work out for them, they found another route.  They are a great example for other startups.  None of this should  put YC in a negative light.</text></comment>