Welcome to YC Arena. This is a game suite that gives you a vague sense of what it's like to be a partner in YC, rather than a top secret fight club for the founders of Y Combinator.
YC Partner Simulator Game for YC Arena, created by students in Berlin, is released along with the year of the year with published pitch videos from companies that applied to YC. Click Accept or Reject, then check if you made the same selection as YC.
Image credit: Ycarena
It's much more difficult than it looks. It is estimated that YC will accept around 1% of applicants, and at a certain point, you need luck to actually capture your partner's eyes. Perhaps your pitch is the first your partner has seen after a very rejuvenating coffee break.
“Many rejected founders have since continued to build highly successful companies,” reads a note at the start of the game. “Rejection means nothing. Even the most successful founders have been rejected multiple times.”
YC Arena has other games that match the company's name with the logo or guess the year the company did YC based on that description (spoiler alert: there are more AI in recent years). However, the YC Partner Simulator game is the most interesting as it stands up to our own decision-making process.
As a high-tech journalist, I thought I was quite good at YC Partner Simulators. I may not be an investor, but I sift through my inbox full of startup pitches and know which one would pick my curiosity. I walked the floor of TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield 200 Expo, on the task of identifying interviews and writing to businesses. But this game is difficult. After all, we're working within different parameters. This is because corporate reporting is not directly linked to the possibility of making a profit.
(Example: When I'm writing this, an AI pet I'm planning on reviewing is sitting on my lap. Does Casio spend money on changing profits from the investment needed to create a glorious Furby that will be retailed for $430? No.
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If anything, the game shows how subjective these processes are. However, after reading the application guide of YC co-founder Paul Graham, my guess began to become more accurate.
“You have to be very clear and concise,” Graham wrote. “Whatever you have to say, give it to us in the first sentence, in the simplest possible condition.” (For the sake of the record, this advice also applies to emailing journalists.)
I played the game again, but this time I paid much attention to what the company was pitching and more attention to how quickly they could tell what their company was doing. Of course, I would not recommend this strategy to evaluate startups in real life (hot take: you should care what the company does!), but for the purposes of the game, I ended up choosing the company's fate more accurately.
This is probably not a coincidence. When Sam Altman, founder and CEO of Openai, was the president of YC, he said in an interview that incubators spent just 10 minutes reviewing each company's applications and making decisions.
“In 10 minutes, the only question you're trying to answer is, “Is this person likely to become the next Mark Zuckerberg?” … You can answer that question in 10 minutes,” Altman said in 2016.