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Y Combinator success secrets: Be young, speak clearly, look like The Zuck
- Cromwell Schubarth
- Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal
- Email | Twitter | Google+
Paul Graham keeps revealing the
"negative predictors of failure" he uses to screen Y Combinator prospects even though he says he wants
to keep them secret.
The latest came in a long profile about the "Harvard of startup accelerators"
this week in the New York Times.After the last Demo Day, he told me about screening out people who can't speak English clearly and understandably. But who knew until now he had a thing for people who look like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg?
"I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg," Graham told the Times. "There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: 'How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!' "
A bias towards youth is an obvious one to anybody who has attended a Y Combinator Demo Day, the semi-annual graduate pitch to investors and the press.
"The cutoff in investors' heads is 32," Graham told the Times. "After 32, they start to be a little skeptical."
Another negative screen is how long it takes the YC crew to decide on whether to admit and invest in a startup candidate.
"When you have to talk yourself into something, it's a bad sign — that's true also of relationships, hiring and so many other parts of life."
Graham told me that he is afraid that if he says too much about his indicators of failure that YC applicants will use them to game his admission system.
But maybe now there will be a rush of young entrepreneurs visiting plastic surgeons, thinking they need to look like Mark to make their mark.
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Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.
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