Founder’s Guide to the Y Combinator Interview
I applied for the last YC batch and got rejected. The interview was itself was completely outside of all the expectations that I had. I had done a bunch of preparation work doing practice interviews with YC alums as well as friends. Some of them asked the standard YC interview questions while others went off on tangents, but I felt I had really strong and clear answers to most of the questions they were likely to ask.<p>Unfortunately when I got into the interview, by the time they had asked the third question it was clear they had completely misinterpreted what I was doing. I knew in less than a minute into the interview that there was no chance I would be accepted. What I should have done was try to stop the interview and completely reframe what I was doing in a different context so they could more clearly understand. However, the 10 minutes goes by so quickly. The interview started and ended before I came to that realization (I did however try to interject at the last 30 seconds with some key points, but by that point it was too little too late).<p>I believe my situation was an exception to what normally happens given the nature of my company, but it was really disappointing to feel like I never got the chance to explain the unique insights I had into the space, how the company was managing such insane growth, and the vision for the future.