Written by Daivik Goel, CEO & Co-Founder of Shor (YC S25). Shor is international payroll made for founders. If you are a founder hiring contractors or employees internationally, let's chat.
Everything in this guide is my personal opinion based on my own experience applying to and going through YC. These are my own ideas and observations, not influenced and independent of any partners and staff within YC today. This guide may be continually updated.
Like many of you, I held a dream of getting into YC for a long time. As a kid growing up in Canada, Paul Graham's essays connected me to the world of startups and fed my fascination with this wonderful, weird place called Silicon Valley. They gave me real conviction that building companies was exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I'm blessed to say I had the opportunity to do that.
That said, I spent a long time looking at YC the wrong way. I saw it as the ticket to living out that dream and eventually realized you can and should choose that path either way. Twisting your business to fit what investors want is a losing game. Learning to communicate what you're actually doing well to them isn't. Most of this guide is about the second one. If you have a dream, live it out regardless of whether some investor believes in you.
So why does this guide exist? Because every application cycle, people reach out asking for the same advice. Rather than rehashing it every time, I figured I'd spell it out here once.
One thing to set expectations. This is not a step-by-step guide for the YC application. There are plenty of those. This is what I'd actually tell a friend over coffee. What I learned across my experiences, what I think the partners are really looking for, and why the founders who try to game it usually don't get in. With that said, I hope this is helpful.
Deciding to do a startup should be the easiest hard decision a founder ever makes. If getting into YC is the difference between you or your cofounder deciding to do one, just save yourselves years of pain and heartbreak and don't. I know that sounds mean, but this shit is constant nails on a chalkboard, with an unexplainable drive to make things work veiling a slow dance into madness.
The $500K you get from YC won't change that. I know it seems like it will, but trust me, you are far better off working at Big Tech, earning a great salary, and getting a great vest. You'll earn far more than that guaranteed and likely have a far happier life.
But if despite all that you still want to do a startup, do one either way. YC isn't going to magically teach you how. You'll only learn by doing. Treat YC for what it is, an accelerator, not a trigger to start, the way most people do. If you are smart enough to get a big tech job and brave enough to do a startup, even if all this stuff goes sideways, I can almost guarantee you will have a great life even if you bootstrap your way through your savings (speaking from personal experience), and will learn a shit ton in the process.
Getting rejected from YC tells you almost nothing about whether your company will work. YC takes less than 1% of applicants. Plenty of billion dollar companies were rejected, applied again, or never applied at all. If you don't get into YC, do not take this as a sign that your idea or company is not worth working on. Let customers, the market, and your own personal conviction decide that.
On that note, getting into YC also doesn't tell you if your company will work. All it means is that you successfully convinced a partner there's a 5% chance of you figuring it out. That math doesn't magically change the moment you get in.
There is a cottage industry of YC application advice out there. This guide is part of it. Read it once, take what's useful, and close the tabs. The single biggest pattern I see in first-time applicants is over-optimization, where founders end up writing answers that sound like a YC application instead of sounding like themselves.
I have applied 4 times to YC. The first three times were the most beautiful, optimized applications I could've made. And I never even got an interview. My last application was started an hour before the deadline and submitted with a minute to spare. And guess which one we got the interview for. I'll get into why I think this was the case in the next part, but to this point, this isn't necessarily a process you can or should game, and reading guides like this a bunch of times won't necessarily change that.