Coding, Video Challenge and Interview Tips

Our admission process at SV.CO is in three stages. When we open up admissions for a batch, the first stage is when founders form teams and apply (Stage 1). Then we issue two tasks for teams to perform and a strict deadline for them to execute these tasks (Stage 2). Selected teams from this stage advance to a personal interview stage (Stage 3) where major SV.CO Faculty have a half-hour personal interview with them.

We’ve now gone through two batches of admission and we’d like to put out some tips & pointers to help candidates during each stage.

Stage 1: Forming the Team

Our ideal founding team at SV.CO has a mix of Hackers and Hustlers. We’re aware that the popular interpretations of both these words have negative connotations. i.e., a Hacker is most commonly somebody who breaks into computer systems for fun and profit. A Hustler is a glib talker, somebody who takes people for a ride. These stereotypes are NOT what we mean when we talk about these terms.

We use the term Hacker the way ESR used it a long time ago, a person who believes in solving fun problems & not reinventing wheels. A Hustler is somebody who can get things done, with the drive and the panache to get all the resources a startup team needs to succeed.

In an ideal team, there should be a mix of both qualities in founders. A common misconception people make when they hear our two kinds of founders is that they assume it’s the Hackers who code and it’s the Hustlers who, well, do not. Paul Graham once had an interesting answer to a commonly-asked question (paraphrased):

“If I’m not a technical founder, what do I do?”
“Well I suppose you get coffee for the ones who code.”

While glib and perhaps a little demeaning, it’s a sad reality of all technology startups that everybody should be a “technical founder”. Perhaps once a startup grows, you give up coding & focus on “running the business”, but — ideally — in our founding team, everybody should be an engineer willing to roll up their sleeves and code when the situation demands it.

In fact, we have a term for our ideal founder: we call them Articulate Engineers, i.e. people who can work technology and communicate its importance and advantages to everybody. We think it’s these kinds of founders who will do well in our program.

We also have five roles that must be filled by founders: Design, Engineering, Governance, Marketing & Sales, and Product. Founders are free to choose one or more of these roles, but they should adopt an “inch wide mile deep” philosophy when picking roles: i.e. learn about the field extensively and focus.

Now, a note about programming & communication skills. We have a six month program and we simply cannot teach how to become a good programmer or how to become good speakers in that timeframe. What we do is provide you tools to improve your skills by building real-world products.

To test for programming ability and communication skills, we have a Coding and Video Challenge.

Stage 2: Coding & Video Challenge

Both the coding and video challenges are given together and they are meant to be completed as a team. The coding challenge is always to build a real-world solution to a problem. The video challenge is to develop a pitching presentation video with an audio (& an optional video) narrative.

We evaluate the coding challenge on five criteria:

• Code Quality: how well-written and readable the code produced is, and how well-tested the critical paths in the code are.
• Technology Choices: how programming languages, libraries and tools were chosen and how tradeoffs inherent in those choices were handled.
• UI/UX: The user-experience and visual design of the code output. Yes, even if it’s a command-line program you submit.
• Correctness & Efficiency: An evaluation of whether the program generates correct output, and how fast and efficient the code is.

All of these criteria have equal weightage. In addition, we do test a lot of slightly subtler things:

• Because code submission is via Github/Bitbucket, we test candidates familiarity with VCS, and especially if they have used these services before to contribute to other repositories in some fashion.
• We test how much care was taken in producing the code by reading commit history.
• We test collaborative edits by different founders in the team, again by looking at commit history.

The video challenge is evaluated with four criteria:

• Legibility: how well the video text is readable and how much of the audio can be understood. We also rate both written and spoken English skills here.
• Completeness: how complete the presentation outline is when compared to our guidelines on preparing a deck.
• Creativity: a judgement of the methods Founders have chosen to present the information required.
• Competitor Comparisons: a detailed analysis of competitor comparison, especially in the depth of number of competitors identified and an analysis of how the founder-described product is different and better.

Just like the coding challenge, there are some implicit evaluations made:

• Presentation: we evaluate the presentation you’ve made to build the video.
• Ability to follow Instructions: Our instructions are very precise, but they are also slightly complex. We test founders’ ability to read and comprehend instructions and follow them well. In fact, one error is so common that we’d like to point it out: we do not ask for a screencast of the app that you made in the Coding Challenge. Please read the instructions again.
• Presentability of the Founders: Some founders choose to appear in the video they’ve made. This is optional, but if you do, and you are dressed well and you speak confidently, it’s a big bonus.
• Getting things Done: Building a professional-looking video that sensibly presents dense information in two weeks is not easy. We test how polished the video is as an indicator that the team can get things done in a crunch.

Teams are judged on a scale from Good to Wow in each of the criteria and a simple sum of the scores is taken to rank them in these challenges. The top teams move on to the next stage.

Stage 3: Personal Interview round

Stage 3 is when we make sure we weed out founding teams who wouldn’t succeed in our program. This personal interview round is an informal half-hour session where major SV.CO Faculty interviews your team. Our interviews are face-to-face sessions and when we say informal, we really mean it. Founders usually come to our sessions calling us “Sir” & sitting very stiffly but the right ones leave laughing and enjoying the process.

At the interview round, we’re trying to be sure that you’ll succeed in our six month program, and also getting a feeler if you are the sort of team we can support for a whole five years. There’s a few things that we look for that when not present show up as red flags:

• Honesty & Integrity: Whatever happens, please do not bluff your way through a question. This includes things like disassembling an existing app and showing off the source code to it as your own, or outright lying about personal or team achievements in college. Frankly, we’re not even sure why young founders try: it’s the easiest kind of red flag to make out. Also: if you don’t the answer to a question, say “I don’t know”. That’s completely OK.
• Hustling in College: We think some hustlers are born, not made. If your team is made up of people who haven’t done anything interesting in college, it’s a red flag for us. We look for: people who’ve made money in college, people who work at NGOs while in college, founders who have started other ventures while in college, students who contribute substantially to organisations within college like their Career Guidance and Placement Units, or even people who are “well known” in their college circle for their particular skill.
• Passion: This is again something that is hard to test for in Stage 2, but which becomes obvious in person. We’re not looking for low-energy founders. People who are passionate about what they do, and why they want to do it make a great fit. A great founding team should add to the energy in a room, not take away from it.
• Common Sense: Use simple common sense to figure out a possible answer to questions. We rate good common sense very highly.
• Team Chemistry: If you have to survive as a founding team and make it big, you need to have great team chemistry. This usually becomes obvious during the course of an interview, where team members answer questions meant for each other, they prompt each other for answers, and generally make fun of each other. This is also obvious in the way they solve difficult questions like share allocation patterns and selecting a leader from the team.
• Startup General Knowledge: If you want to be a founder, it makes sense to know answers to simple questions like “Who were the founders of Infosys?” or “What is the latest feature Flipkart just released?”. This also shows the extent of your interest in the field.

Once team interviews are over, we usually announce results within 2 weeks. Due to the volume of applications we receive, we are not able to provide feedback to founders who do not advance to the Personal Interview stage. For founders who do, we try our best to provide personal feedback.

Thanks for reading through this (pretty long) post. A question that we get asked often at this stage is: How do we as founders prepare for the SV.CO Admission process?

We have some very broad tips here:

1. Form a great team. Read what we wrote about Stage 1 above. Identify a founder within the team who’ll serve as the team leader. There might be Engineering-heavy products or Marketing-heavy products. Figure out what kind of products you want to build and change your team composition to suit.
2. Develop your Engineering and Communication skills. Again: we are not running a program where we can teach you either. There’s a lot of resources out there to learn both. Like any skill, both can be gained by practice.
3. Read, understand and apply lessons in Sam Altman’s Startup Playbook.
4. Follow Startup blogs & websites like TechCrunch and ProductHunt. Having a good awareness of the startup world is a plus.
5. Practice Makes Perfect. Execute a run-through our whole admission process yourself. At Stage 3, get as interviewers your college faculty or your other co-founders. It’s great practice.

Good luck, and we hope we’ll soon have you on board!