Welcome to YC Area, which isn’t a high secret struggle membership for Y Combinator founders however moderately a set of video games that provide you with a imprecise sense of what it’s wish to be a accomplice at YC.
Created by a pupil in Berlin, YC Area’s YC Accomplice Simulator sport reveals you a publicly accessible pitch video from an organization that utilized to YC, together with the 12 months of their utility. You click on “settle for” or “reject,” after which discover out if you happen to made the identical alternative as YC.
It’s so much tougher than it appears to be like. YC is estimated to just accept round 1% of candidates, and at a sure level, some luck is required to essentially seize a accomplice’s eye — perhaps your pitch is the primary {that a} accomplice watched after a really rejuvenating espresso break, or perhaps your organization is the final video on the record and everybody’s drained.
“Many rejected founders went on to construct extremely profitable firms afterwards,” reads a be aware at the beginning of the sport. “Rejection means nothing — even essentially the most profitable founders obtained rejected a number of occasions.”
YC Area has different video games that ask you to match an organization identify to its emblem, or guess what 12 months an organization did YC based mostly on its description (spoiler alert: There’s much more AI lately). However the YC Accomplice Simulator sport is essentially the most fascinating because it makes us confront our personal decision-making processes.
As a tech journalist, I assumed I’d be fairly good on the YC Accomplice Simulator. I might not be an investor, however I do know what it’s wish to sift by means of an inbox stuffed with startup pitches and select which of them pique my curiosity — I’ve walked the ground of TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 200 Expo with the duty of figuring out firms to interview and write about. However this sport is tough. In any case, we’re working inside completely different parameters, because the newsworthiness of an organization isn’t straight tied to its potential to show a revenue.
(For instance: As I write this, there’s an AI pet sitting in my lap that I’m planning to evaluation. Would I put cash on the wager that Casio will flip a revenue off the funding it takes to create a glorified Furby that retails for $430? No. Do I anticipate that an article about my life with an AI pet shall be fascinating to readers? Sure.)
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If something, the sport reveals simply how subjective these processes may be. However after I learn YC co-founder Paul Graham’s utility information, my guesses began to get extra correct.
“You need to be exceptionally clear and concise,” Graham wrote. “No matter you must say, give it to us proper within the first sentence, within the easiest attainable phrases.” (For the report, this recommendation additionally applies to emailing journalists.)
I performed the sport once more, however this time, I paid much less consideration to what the corporate was pitching and extra consideration to how rapidly they may convey what their firm does. After all, I wouldn’t advocate this technique for evaluating a startup in actual life (scorching take: it’s best to care what an organization does!), however for the needs of the sport, I ended up selecting an organization’s destiny extra precisely.
This in all probability isn’t a coincidence. When OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman was president of YC, he remarked in an interview that the incubator spent simply 10 minutes reviewing every firm’s utility to decide.
“It seems that in 10 minutes, if the one query you’re attempting to reply is, ‘Does this individual have the potential to be the following Mark Zuckerberg?’ … You’ll be able to reply that query in 10 minutes,” Altman stated in 2016. “Not with one hundred pc accuracy, clearly, however adequate that our enterprise mannequin works.”
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