How I botched a YC Interview in 1 Question
There I was, inside YC headquarters in Mountain View, California.
My founders and I are humming along and thumping our chests to our own rendition of Matthew McConaughey’s scene from Wolf of Wall Street while we wait to be called up.
I thought to myself the advice given by every YC founder I’d interviewed along the way.
“You know your users best. Don’t be defensive. Tell them why you’re going to be worth x billion.”
Right, that’s my frame.
We hear our company get called. We make our way towards the door, and on the other side of that door were 4 YC partners ready to grill us for 10 minutes.
It all started so innocently. A weekend hack-a-thon with a group of friends for a cool idea we had: Face ID for condo buildings. We noticed YC had an application deadline, so we thought might as well. Three weeks later, we get an email asking us to fly to California for an interview. I initially thought it was a joke. When it set in, my founders and I became very fierce. It quickly became the most intense 4 week period of my 23 year existence. It felt like we jumped off a cliff and were building an airplane on the way down.
Just before we entered the interview room, we all took a deep breath. We took every piece of advice any founder was willing to give us, and put it all together for this moment.
We knew our company inside out. We knew our market inside out. We knew why the competitors were failing, and why we would win where they couldn’t. We had evidence of cultural buy in and the market timing was impeccable. We interviewed hundreds of property managers, apartment dwellers, office employees, and managers. We pivoted our target market from apartments to offices with our learnings. We secured pilots with big names that gave us validation. We became experts at commercial security systems.
My founders and I executed the interview almost perfectly. It was truly a joy to give them explanations for every question they had. We had the answers for every one of their questions… except one.
One question that no matter how many mock interviews I did, would ultimately undo me at the seams. In a sea of contradictory advice, I chose the wrong side.
The question was
“So say something happens that shows you this idea is not feasible. Do you have any other ideas?”
In the moment, I thought to myself, ah yes, a test of conviction. We’re a young new team and we just started on this idea. They want to see if we’re really ready to go all in on this idea.
In training for YC, I practiced conviction like a virtue. In my mind, there was no possible world where we wouldn’t execute on this idea. We were not going to back down, no matter what.
And that’s what my answer was. I calmly replied,
“We don’t see a universe where this isn’t the future. The prototype exists, the users feel the problem intensely, and for the reasons I’ve mentioned before, we’re going to out do the competition.”
I didn’t even answer the question at hand. We had tonnes of other ideas! But to show them that we’re considering other ideas at this early stage? I wasn’t going to risk it.
This is the precise moment where I failed. The right answer, and the right mindset, would have been
“Of course we have ideas. We’ll recognise if things aren’t going to proceed as planned and we’ll pivot if necessary to any one of our other brilliant ideas x, y, and z.”
My response showed YC that we were going about things with too much conviction, we would only listen to confirmation bias, we wouldn’t be able to see when to stop, and that would make us fundamentally un-coachable.
As soon as I answered, I realised almost immediately from the looks on the partners’ faces the mistake I had made. But it was too late. I wasn’t going to retract those words. The show must go on. Hopefully, they’d somehow infer from how we’d already pivoted twice that we do indeed go about things as scientifically as we can. But my response truly put any prospect of that out the door, even after we had an otherwise killer interview.
I was so caught up with trying to say the right thing, that I forgot the most quintessential piece of advice, “Just be yourself”.
When we flew back to Toronto, we tried to convert our pilots to paid, and to sell our system to over 300 businesses. The only ones that would bite were massive and needed security certifications through the roof. We could have gone ahead and sold an expensive system to this small market, but ultimately, we shelved the idea due to the limited prospect for exponential growth. We found out firsthand what being a hair on fire problem really meant.
Would I go back to that moment and do things differently? Of course. But to be honest, that failure was necessary. Getting YC would have been further false positive signals and we were already taking all the ones we were getting.
Without even going to YC, the interview process itself, mock interviewing with YC founders, and pushing our team to do everything in our power to prove we had a valid business was an invaluable experience. It’s helped shape the founder I am today. I’d recommend it.
But even more so, I’d highly recommend having an amazing team of founders to embark on the journey with. Their fierceness gave me energy I didn’t know I possessed. They put my chin up even when I beat myself down for answering that question poorly. They are the reason we accomplished as much as we did in those few weeks time.
I can’t wait for our next hack-a-thon to do it all again 😉
📝 Save this story in Journal.
👩💻 Wake up every Sunday morning to the week’s most noteworthy stories in Tech waiting in your inbox. Read the Noteworthy in Tech newsletter.
