Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Smaller class new failure filter works for Y combinators Paul Graham

Smaller class, new 'failure filter' works for Y Combinator's Paul Graham



Paul Graham
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Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham says the startup accelerator program's smaller class size and new "failure filter" admissions standard worked with the winter class of 46 companies that just graduated at Demo Day this week.
Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal
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There was a higher proportion of VCs to startups at Y Combinator's Demo Day on Tuesday, which put a smile on the faces of nearly everybody involved.
That was particularly true of YC co-founder Paul Graham who looked visibly more relaxed at the end of the day after the main hall at the Computer History Museum cleared out and he provided a post-mortem on changes made for the winter class.
"It was a lot easier with 46 startups than 84," he told me, laughing. "Especially since we have more people working with fewer startups. It was a piece of cake by comparison."
The prestigious Mountain View accelerator program both slashed its class size and applied a new filter to decide who got in. Instead of just focusing on predictors for success, Graham and the YC team looked for predictors of failure.
Graham said he won't publicly share all of those negative markers "because some of them are predictors that if they got out people would start to be able to fake."
"But I’ll tell you one," he confided. "We found that not many of the most successful startups that we have funded had founders with strong foreign accents, or CEOs with strong foreign accents."
The successful founder or CEO might still be from outside the U.S. but the most successful had mastered the idioms of American English, he said.
"I’m not sure why that predictor works but it was very clear from the data," Graham said. "We wouldn’t reject someone simply because the CEO had a strong foreign accent. But if there were a whole bunch of other factors and that was one of them, it might be the thing that threw them over the brink and we would say no."
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Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.

Related links:

Mountain View, Venture capital, Startups, Entrepreneurs

Industries:

Technology, Travel

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