"We didn't think we were what YC was looking for..."
I'm so glad you took the time to apply! Your idea was slightly different back then, but I remember how impressive you were during the YC interview. As you said in your application:
Among the members of the founding team we have domain
expertise in recruiting; in content creation and promotion;
and in directly engaging with women ages 20-35. What's
more, we've been working in this specific field (job
opportunities and career advice for professional women)
for the last year, and the response from women has been
unbelievable. Our user testimonials sometimes verge on
the fanatical.
We could tell when we met you that you really understood the business you were in. You were exactly what YC looks for.
Thanks so much Jessica- we're so glad we did. YC was an unbelievably valuable experience. To the commenter below who asked how YC changed us & our company, there's not much that's more useful to an early, growing company than getting to spend time with people like Jessica & PG, and having their regular/honest feedback on what's working (and what's not). I'll try to write more about that here later.
Ms. Minshew, would you mind answering the question that how specifically targeting women for jobs is not sexist in itself? What if you could find perfect male candidate for a particular position than women applicants ? Do you think its fair to pass on such opportunity for male candidate because he is male ?
Don't want to sound like a downer, but I'd also love to see applications where the founders weren't your typical white MIT, Harvard, Yale graduates/PhDs who worked at McKinsey GoogleBookSoft.
White, male, southeastern state school, to quote a VC "literally no fucking pedigree", no engineering backgrounds... we just participated in demo day. YC has been incredible for us and the partners have been amazing to work with.
Hustlers. Recruited PhDs & MSs with great experience/ backgrounds and empowered our team (hire smarter than yourself). Build a product that makes sense and people are demanding you take their money for... we are not perfectly outside the norm, but I would assume we're pretty unusual (at least in education/ experience/ skillset). You can email me any questions re YC.
The number of people who are smart and also go to those schools and get hired by those companies is a small number compared to the population of "smart people" at large.
A bias toward people coming from those places indicates that the same old fashioned "good ol' boys" style network is a much bigger factor in "success" than intelligence or any other measure of capability.
The frequent defense is that "schooling doesn't matter much," but the halo effect of the Ivies always seems to magically help differentiate. It's a damn shame; tech becomes incredibly less interesting the more it slides into the realm of who you are (as opposed to what you can do).
But, hey, there's lots of money flowing, so that's cool, right? We can all sit around and grasp at success for the rest of our days!
(This is not an indictment of Muse; they sound like they know what they're doing.)
I think the issue here is more that our society in general selects these people for "success" more than those "without pedigree" by virtue of various complicated socioeconomic conditions. I don't think it's an active (or even "unconscious", if you'll permit the flawed adjective in describing a group of people) bias that YC has against any one group or another.
The simple fact is that it's easier for persons with these backgrounds to be less conservative in their entrepreneurial endeavors than for, say, the guy who struggled through a B.S. or B.A. program and who came from poverty. That sort of conditioning lasts for life almost every time. As a result, the population of people who are likely to put together a truly acceptable YC application are more likely to be found in the "pedigreed" group. It's a flaw in society at large, not necessarily with YC itself.
The mistake is to regard YC/SV as disruptive. It isn't; it's about generating excess returns for a bunch of previously successful people. They have zero interest in fixing a broken status quo as long as they can continue to benefit.
> Just like the grade inflation in those good ole ivy leagues.
I only heard about this recently. The practice is abhorrent and further reinforces the entitlement complexes of some people.
I think if YC's mission were to reach out to people who aren't traditionally thought of as "entrepreneurial", but had a bias toward the "pedigreed" people then I could agree. I'm not sure that's the case (in either respect--I haven't actually seen data regarding the provenance of the people who comprise the companies YC has accepted).
Your thinking on this is factually incorrect. If you're middle class or worse, and have the smarts, you can basically go to any of the top Ivies for free these days.
I had a pretty good shot of getting into an Ivy League school 10 years ago(4.0 and highest SAT score in the county), but I didn't apply because I thought my parents couldn't afford it.
That doesnt change the overwhelming competitive advantage rich families have when it comes to prestige schools.
Many wealthy families sink tens of thousands of dollars into preparing their child for university admissions - an advantage only the most brilliant middle class students can overcome.
Even then you have to ask yourself what it means to attend a prestige school. Are the students honestly getting a better education? It's not like they use a special set of books reserved for prestige schools only, and I have a hard time believing slave-labor TAs teaching skills would be any different at such schools.
I'm not sure about how true this is in the US, but it's definitely much less true for international students, a group that YC doesn't want to leave out.
Those companies can be fantastic environments to grow and learn. Not everyone knows at 21 that they want to be an entrepreneur, much less has a great idea that they want to pursue.
Muse uses technology to tackle very traditional industry-type problems - career planning and recruiting. A team with a combined 5-10 years at McKinsey and the exposure to an international network of thousands of very smart and career-driven people (plus lots of client companies) is exactly who you would want for this kind of company.
Yahoo and Google were started by PhD students. AirBnB by designers. Marissa Mayer planed to start with McKinsey, Sheryl Sandberg actually worked there (and in politics). Peter Thiel was a lawyer and derivatives trader. Marc Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle.
Why all the hate for people who have not dropped out of college / have worked in another industry? Clearly great entrepreneurs come from all sorts of backgrounds.
I wouldn't say they're risk averse. This is the second company they've started and they're 25.
Bonus: Educated at top-level schools and companies.
This is one of the best YC applications I've seen. Smart people working on a huge opportunity that they understand and have some traction in. Numbers and initial strategy suggest they've done their homework and can succeed.
I suppose you could substitute "risk-takers" for "scrappy" since risk-taking is inherent in starting a company. I would say that scrappy is more indicative of someone who is entrepreneurial without necessarily relying on a strong background or network already available to them (since the use of risk-takers has received some backlash from some commenters).
Take it easy people. If what people get after publishing their applications is divertory criticism, it would discourage others from doing same.
Today is the deadline for YC. The idea is to give applicants final ideas to help in their application. That's what this thread should be about.
Ladies, thanks for publishing.
If there are international applicants that have been successful, please share. If you are ok sharing privately, I'd really appreciate it. My email is on my profile.
Huh, their careers page has several "jobs" available for people to write articles for them... unpaid. You know, the old "it's good exposure" bait for people who don't know any better.
Hi Asparagirl, there are 4-5x the number of people who ask to write for us compared to the number who ultimately get to, so clearly there's some value there :)
The reality is that most of our writers are also mentors to other people, and they really enjoy it. Writing for The Muse is their way of scaling that mentorship to a broader audience.
I share the sentiment of the parent in that the illusion of value could be much larger than the actual value.
Ultimately the work these people do is more valuable for themuse than for themselves, and even if there are a lot of people willing to do it, it does not mean it is ethical to let them do it for free.
I think the argument against unpaid internships is not so much that they don't provide value, but that they're only open to people who can afford to do an unpaid internship.
I'm in agreement with you on that - we pay all of our interns at The Muse. The posting referred to above is a way of recruiting people who are interested in contributing 1-4 mentoring posts per month, so very low commitment nights-and-weekends type thing.
The biggest thing that stuck out to me was how long some of your answers were. Everyone seems to always point to Drew's application with all of the short concise answers but it looks like thats not the only way to put together a winning app!
Since today's topic on HN is usability testing. I'm a bit confused by the connection between the goal stated on the YC application and thedailymuse.com. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anywhere that says this is a resource for women or "non-traditional candidates". How are you targeting this demographic without being discriminatory in your job applications?
When we applied to YC in 2011, we originally focused on professional women as that is where we saw the biggest need for our content, although 90% of our content was not gender-specific. Very quickly we watched our demographic grow to be 30+% men, and we made the decision to broaden our focus, while continuing to focus on our core: careers. One reason we made that decision is because one of the things we originally wanted to combat was women not feeling welcome in the workplace, so the idea of men not feeling welcome on The Muse (since they were actively using it "in secret" as they said) didn't feel in line with our principles.
Out of curiosity, if the founders are reading this thread, how did YC help you to improve your company? Specifically, did they help you in any way that you couldn't have done without them?
We've actually seen 30% UV growth from Jan to March - some of that growth has been search given, though there are other channels driving it as well. In Jan we merged thedailymuse.com into themuse.com (under http://themuse.com/advice) so all of our products would live in one place
I'm so glad you took the time to apply! Your idea was slightly different back then, but I remember how impressive you were during the YC interview. As you said in your application:
We could tell when we met you that you really understood the business you were in. You were exactly what YC looks for.