Alexandre Souza

Garry Tan reveals why Y Combinator decides in just 10 minutes whether or not to fund a founder "The wild thing about Y Combinator is that we get 80,000, maybe 90,000 applications a year now for about 800 spots. So it is less than a 1% acceptance rate. Maybe 8 to 10% of those people would get an interview, sometimes less now." "And the wild thing is we actually spend only 10 minutes with them for that final stage." "Paul Graham, the founder of YC, figured out that you didn't need half an hour, you don't need an hour. And then you could probably actually do it in about 5 minutes, but 5 minutes feels rude. So that's how YC ended up at 10 minutes." "It sounds almost too simple, but 10 minutes is a wonderful constraint. Like how 140 characters for Twitter way back in the day was a wonderful constraint. If you can say something very simply that hits us, here's a user, here's a real person who has a problem, and here's how the technology that we build actually solves that. We just want to know what it is and why it's awesome." "And then if we have a little bit of extra time, we want to know why that founder is the person to go and build that thing. And you can do all of that in 10 minutes. And it's an up-down decision." "Something like 10% to 15% of all self-made billionaires as of now, aged 50 and under, are YC alums." Walter Isaacson: "Let's say Elon Musk, he walked in and you had 10 minutes with him. What do you think the percentage chance is that you would actually fund him?" Garry Tan: "100%. In current form, 100%. I had a managing partner meeting the other day, and that's actually one of the example questions we ask ourselves to figure out whether we're on the right track." "By definition, if YC is operating properly, if an Elon or a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs or a Drew Houston from Dropbox, a Brian Chesky from Airbnb, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, Tony Xu from Door Dash... if someone like that walks into our office, can we say yes to them in 10 minutes? And if that answer is no, actually I'd have to rewrite everything. We'd have to retool everything. That is almost the only question that really matters when it comes to whether YC is doing well or not."