We were accepted for an interview (Not accepted to the class yet). I'm 41 and my co-founder (who doesn't looks quite as young as I am) is 47. To be honest, I fully expected a rejection for this very reason so I'm pleasantly surprised which is actually pretty consistent with the YC brand.
To make a fair assessment you also need to look at the distribution of applicants. If 15% of applicants are female, then your null hypothesis is that 15% of founders will be female.
- Worked at and or working at Apple, Facebook, Google or similar companies
- Ran a successful KickStarter
- Went to an ivy league school
As for us.. I am 39 and this is my second start-up. My co-founder is 21. Our first start-up idea (was a novel idea at the time) has since gone onto being worked on/copied by dozens, including one now with millions of users. We were not technical when we started our first start-up, but did receive a fair amount of attention for the concept.
Overall, I don't think that matters due to the competition you face in applying for YC. I would assume many who are interviewed & accepted can check off a few of those questions I asked above. Though maybe not?
Not sure we will apply again since we applied in April of 2013. Though when we applied in 2013 & got rejected we soon were invited to demo our technology to an entity in the valley. That is an interesting story in itself. Maybe that will happen again :-)
Well we were not lucky this time, I wish you better luck!
Revenue: I wish. We're in a highly regulated environment and we didn't raise enough money to get a broker dealer license so we had to defer revenue because we couldn't afford it as well as the legal and compliance costs.
Traffic/Traction. Wow, Two different things. We're an investment marketplace for agriculture and agtech (http://agfunder.com). Listed companies have raised $10.5M since Feb2014, we have another $2M in live deals, and about $12M in deal flow coming on in the next 4 weeks. So in that respect traction is huge, this is not being funded by thousands of investors but by VCs in Silicon Valley family or in Russia, offices, strategics. In our case the LTV of a customer is in the hundreds of thousands so we don't need traffic in the millions. We average about 5,000 uniques per month, and we have about a 1% conversion rate, of which 0.25% are investors.
Sold previous startups: No. I wish. I wouldn't be living off my credit card right now.
Apple/Facebook/Google: No.
KickStarter: No, family then advisories, and then friends of friends got us this far but it has been very very painful and it seemed like just when we were on deaths door (Maxed credit cards, zero sleep for 2 weeks) that we had a stay of execution.
Ivy: Yes. I have a PhD from Yale and have published in Nature, Harvard Business Review, and most recently TechCrunch so I had a lot of social proof to work with (That said I have ADD and dyslexia and I didn't graduate from high school so don't let a poor start hold you back). I'm sure this played in, but it is possible to build up your CV. I think YC (and frankly everyone else) wants to know that you are someone who is capable of doing something extraordinary. You need to give them data points. Start with some baby steps and leverage your way into something bigger. I submitted several articles to TC before one was accepted.
We're an investment marketplace for agriculture and agtech. On the face of it, this sounds totally dull in the world of SnapChat and Secret. Our job is to make sure that your grandchildren have food to eat by 2050 when we we need to feed 10 billion people. I started the company because I was working for a company in west africa before this. We failed to marshal enough capital to grow our business beyond the pilot stage and because of that 1,500 subsistence level farmers lost their only source of income.
Great idea. You're the 3rd company in the food / agricultural space that got in for interviews this batch. Two others posted here, one which makes analytics for fish farms, and another for cattle farmers.
- Over 35
- Female
- African American
Edit: My post here is to gauge if the needle of progress in our industry is moving forward in the terms of race, age and sex.