apply early</a>.</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1104462","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2020-08-31T03:02:23.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T10:52:32.000-07:00","published_at":"2020-08-31T03:02:23.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a2","name":"Kat Mañalac","slug":"kat-manalac","profile_image":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c15939b217561ebda4c129bfea5f65f3?s=512&d=mm&r=g","cover_image":null,"bio":"Kat is the Managing Outreach Officer at YC. She was Chief of Staff to Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of reddit, before joining YC as its Director of Outreach. Prior to that, Kat was at WIRED Magazine.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/kat-manalac/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7117d","name":"Admissions","slug":"admissions","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/admissions/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710a2","name":"Kat Mañalac","slug":"kat-manalac","profile_image":"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c15939b217561ebda4c129bfea5f65f3?s=512&d=mm&r=g","cover_image":null,"bio":"Kat is the Managing Outreach Officer at YC. She was Chief of Staff to Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of reddit, before joining YC as its Director of Outreach. Prior to that, Kat was at WIRED Magazine.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/kat-manalac/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7117d","name":"Admissions","slug":"admissions","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/admissions/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/apply-early-for-yc-w21/","excerpt":"The deadline to apply for YC Winter 2021 is Wednesday, September 23 at 8pm PT.\n\nWe created a deadline because deadlines are good motivational mechanisms for\nfinishing tasks. Unsurprisingly, about eighty percent of all YC applications are\nsubmitted the week before the deadline.\n\nBut we’ve sometimes seen companies not apply to YC because they don’t want to\nwait until our regular interview cycle (October and November for the Winter 2021\nbatch) to raise money. What many people don’t know is that YC ","reading_time":0,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},"mentions":[],"related_posts":[{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71bf3","uuid":"7ddcb3be-cc18-4261-b178-945b0eb1fd85","title":"Inside YC: The Admissions Team","slug":"inside-yc-the-admissions-team","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>Twice a year, YC accepts <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://ycombinator.com/apply/">applications from startups around the world. The Admissions Team is responsible for designing that process and reviewing the tens of thousands of applications we receive each year.</p>\n<p>How do we review that many applications? Mostly, it’s lots of people reading lots of applications! There’s no secret machine learning model that can find companies with great potential. Instead, we build lots of custom software to help our team work efficiently. Our app reading software allows us to quickly read applications, send messages to founders if we have any questions, and decide which teams we want to interview.</p>\n<h2>History of the Admissions Team</h2>\n<p>When YC first started, the admissions process was pretty manual. YC’s 4 founders printed out the applications, wrote comments in the margin, and passed them around the room. As the batches started to grow, Paul Graham wrote the first software to accept and process applications (it was originally part of the same code that powered <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://news.ycombinator.com/">Hacker News</a>!). By 2014, YC was receiving 3,000 applications per batch, PG retired, and we moved to our current application software. Then in 2016, the Admissions Team was created and began to hire more people to review applications, analyze data, and update the application. Today, a team of 5 runs the admissions process.</p>\n<h2>What’s unique about the Admissions Team?</h2>\n<p>The Admissions Team is powered by human judgement, but it couldn’t work at YC’s scale without software. Sometimes, our problems can be solved by software (like automatic parsing of a founder’s responses), but sometimes it’s a human problem (how should we evaluate teams that haven’t launched yet?). This interaction between humans and software is always changing. Each admissions cycle brings more applications than the previous one and our system is always being pushed to the limit in unexpected ways.</p>\n<h2>What are some projects we’ve recently worked on?</h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Rewriting our software to video interview teams (instead of flying<br />\nteams to California).</li>\n<li>Building new internal tools to allow us to do interviews more often<br />\n(like the <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/early-deadline-for-yc-winter-2022//">early interviews</a> we’ve been running this year).</li>\n<li>Reviewing applications we didn’t fund but that raised money from<br />\nother investors, to learn how to improve our application reading and<br />\ninterview process.</li>\n<li>Analyzing YC application data — for example, we looked at whether<br />\nrepeat applications hurt a team’s chances of being funded. (It turns<br />\nout they don’t! Teams that re-apply and have made progress since<br />\ntheir first app are much more likely to get into YC.)</li>\n<li>Working with the Outreach and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.startupschool.org//">Startup School</a> teams to get more teams<br />\napplying to YC.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>The thing I love about the Admissions Team is that we have a lot of autonomy to experiment and change our process. It’s also incredibly exciting to read all of these ideas which may someday change the world. If you’re interested in joining our team, we’re hiring <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/careers?ashby_jid=ef00c8d1-76e7-4cc3-82fe-7cc3e4679652\%22>Software Engineers</a> to improve our software and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/careers?ashby_jid=c8a4c1c8-9410-479f-86e7-cb2c1ca35e32\%22>Admissions Associates</a> to read applications.</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1104891","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/BlogTwitter-Image-Template-2.png","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2021-08-19T02:00:13.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-06-24T15:16:36.000-07:00","published_at":"2021-08-19T02:00:13.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Twice a year, YC accepts applications from startups around the world. 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If they pay you in this tough environment, it's a stronger signal. There’s a higher likelihood you’re building something they really want.</p><p>And though our <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/">new standard deal</a> of $500,000 gives you some slack, you will likely have to develop very smart habits around spending because fundraising is harder. Learning how to <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html/">stay alive</a> is arguably the most important skill you can have as a founder.</p><p>I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the top YC companies, Airbnb and Stripe, were started in the depths of the last recession (2009).* They learned how important it is to build something people want and not assume investors will be there to save them early on.</p><p>None of this is new. It’s common knowledge, especially in the tech community, that many successful startups were created during recessions (just search “startups + recession” and you’ll find a bunch of articles), which may be one reason we’ve seen high numbers of applications from founders leaving their big tech company jobs, especially in the last couple of months.</p><p>If running a startup is like commanding an army, then YC is elite basic training. You’ll learn how to navigate the challenges (or realize you’re not up for it) when your company is small and with the support of advisors and YC batchmates. You’ll build a solid foundation of learning how to build something people want and staying alive. </p><p>The YC training prepares you by default for succeeding through recessions. And it’s easier to internalize that training today when the macroenvironment supports it. The alternative is learning it on the battlefield when the stakes are way higher — when you’ve already raised money and have employees who depend on you. </p><p>As YC founder Paul Graham <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html/">wrote, “Bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup.” If you’re interested in starting a startup, we’re entering a counterintuitively good time to do it. It won’t be easy, but if you get through the early days, you’ll be better prepared than most. And if the challenge excites you, you probably have the right personality for it.</p><p>*Their products were also tailored to a cost-sensitive environment. 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The deadline to apply for YC Winter 2021 is Wednesday, September 23 at 8pm PT.
We created a deadline because deadlines are good motivational mechanisms for finishing tasks. Unsurprisingly, about eighty percent of all YC applications are submitted the week before the deadline.
But we’ve sometimes seen companies not apply to YC because they don’t want to wait until our regular interview cycle (October and November for the Winter 2021 batch) to raise money. What many people don’t know is that YC reviews applications and interviews startups all year round. We just interviewed and accepted three startups last week.
We can’t guarantee anything, but if you’re interested in the possibility of interviewing early, apply early.
Kat is the Managing Outreach Officer at YC. She was Chief of Staff to Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of reddit, before joining YC as its Director of Outreach. Prior to that, Kat was at WIRED Magazine.