Culture is one of those factors that is very difficult to quantify, yet incredibly important for success.
At companies with great cultures, employees are eager to show up and get things done because they genuinely care about the team and mission. That was very much my experience at early Google.
Companies with bad cultures try to motivate employees with fear and intimidation, or simply fail to motivate them at all, and everyone wastes their time playing video games or whatever. Not surprisingly, those rarely do well.
In my estimation, most startups have weak to poor culture, which is one reason why you read so many startup horror stories. My advice to anyone looking to join a startup it to pick a place where you are excited about showing up and contributing every day. I think that's a much better predictor of happiness and success than trying to follow the social media hype or hotness signals.
> Companies with bad cultures try to motivate employees with fear and intimidation, or simply fail to motivate them at all, and everyone wastes their time playing video games or whatever. Not surprisingly, those rarely do well.
This seems like it could be a chicken or the egg problem though. How do you know that good culture isn't a byproduct of success. If Google stock were tanking, how do you think the culture would look? I honestly don't know.
It would be nice to have a coffee table book of startup culture inspiration with a spread for each company with a few office pics and bullet points on what makes their culture unique and successful.
Everyone knows about Zappos and Google, but I feel like there are few enough well-known examples that every time I've ever been involved in white boarding on this at various startups we've always come up mostly empty handed.
Out of curiosity, do you think that passion alone can carry a crappy idea to success? Is it better to be (truly) passionate with a trashy idea or have a solid idea but only be motivated by financial success?
This is an excellent and inspiring post, but I'm worried people might try to use it as a model.
Neurotypical people think they can tell all sorts of things about someone's character from a short face-to-face meeting, but it turns out this is all noise; people's impressions of character obtained this way are not significantly more accurate than random chance.
Having said that, for all I know, Jessica may well be in the 0.1% of people who have extraordinary skill in this area, who really can accurately read character; if so, fair play to her, she has certainly made an immensely valuable contribution to Y Combinator.
The problem arises when other people try to emulate her and filter job applicants, business partners etc. by intuitive reading of character from a face-to-face meeting, because there is a 99.9% probability that you are not in that 0.1%. So you end up turning away good people because their hair was messy while simultaneously falling prey to glib sociopaths who know what buttons to press.
So by all means appreciate the post, and certainly appreciate Jessica herself if you have dealings with Y Combinator, but I would strongly advise against trying to copy the strategy of filtering people by intuitive reading.
I interviewed almost exactly 6 years ago, right at the inflection point between the old style intimate and the modern structure. The impact from the atmosphere and community is enormous!
Startup morale can seemingly come and go for the most arbitrary reasons, but the Tuesday dinners somehow always re-energized me into wanting to get back to work asap. It's some combination of (1) relief knowing other great founders face similar stumbling blocks, (2) excitement to try many fresh ideas overheard at dinner, and (3) fear/embarrassment that I'm not working hard or fast enough.
Even today, we still get introductions and advice from YC and when I reach out, I've never waited more than 24 hours for a response.
As far as the interview goes, I had the original, single-track 4 YC founders. I remember a bunch of questions from Paul and Trevor, but I'm only now realizing Jessica was the one subtly keeping the conversation on track. Near the end of the 20 minutes, Jessica made her one and only comment related to our idea, but it was the most insightful and for good reason. In 2009 our startup was positioned as anti-Craigslist and Jessica had recently interviewed Craig for Founders at Work!
I'm genuinely curious here: what if you happen to be frankly ugly? What if you are really awkward around people?
These characteristics don't necessarily mean you will be unable to build great products or a disruptive business. They don't mean your startup will fail. But they would almost certainly cause you to fail the character test.
Admittedly, being awkward and ugly does put your startup at a disadvantage because it will be a bit harder to recruit and a bit harder to close sales. But I am positive it is still possible to succeed if you are delivering real value. The product will speak for itself.
So aren't such character filters a bad business decision for YC? Aren't they passing on great startups by paying too much attention to things that ultimately don't impact success that much?
There are lots of successful actors, politicians, business people, sales people, etc. who are subjectively "ugly" to many. It's rarely about looks.
Social skills, on the other hand, are important but, much like physical fitness, can be learned and trained unless you have a serious disability. Someone not willing to invest in their social skills might well deserve to fail a 'character test' for that reason alone.
People with good social radar can make a good distinction between things like character and awkward/ugly. It's people who lack such radar who confuse these things.
Find yourself a partner who is great at winning people over. You can make the best product in the world and it'll be useless to you if you can't even successfully pitch it to somebody. Soft skills are just as important as technical brilliance. That just seems to be the way of the world.
You appear to have a superficial view of character. Looks and awkwardness don't equate to, neither do they correlate with, a person's character (moral qualities). The 3 can occur in any combination and a person can perceive poor character from each combination.
"Before Y Combinator, character had not traditionally been an important factor for investors. Investors have often funded people who were jerks but who seemed likely to succeed. But I couldn't do it. YC is not just an investment firm. It's like a family in that we're inviting these people into our place to have dinner every week."
This is what I would attribute the success of Y Combinator to. By focusing on founders as opposed to ideas, individual drive, demeanor, and not business models become the center.
Paul Graham on multiple occasions discusses Sam Altman as someone who can't be stopped. Here is an article[1] from Paul Graham's article titled "Five Founders," the prompt "Inc recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years." Sam Altman made it as #5 up with Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey, etc.
"I was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. But Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be."
The idea, is if people have what it takes, have the drive, the heart, and the understanding of how to treat others, they can make anything happen.
“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.” - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
I wonder how many good people never apply because of reading posts like this.
I am not saying any of this weeding out is a problem. It's not. But publicizing it will likely not scare off the competent BSers but will eliminate many good folks who are a little insecure. (I don't buy that being confident and secure is a requirement for success.)
People who apply for YC let themselves be 'judged' because that's what the interview process is all about. This post gives you more insight into this judgement process. So, I would say this post is valuable for people who will apply or intend to apply for YC.
I personally find it encouraging. I learned to speak carefully from my engineer father and the rapid-fire sounds intimidating. I like knowing YC keeps people in the room to look past that (presumably, each interviewing team has its own Jessica.)
I expected some backlash as Jessica made here "hey guess what, I'm a co-founder of YC and I was as important as anyone" tour complete with this post. Glad to see it wasn't that bad.
For those that are put off by Jessica doing this: she is not going to get credit unless she takes it. She deserves it, she's earned it, and the historical record should indicate it. Good on her for taking the FFC and this post (and a couple interviews) to set the record straight. The story of YC is the story of a female founder and it's critical the record reflect that.
Great to read more about startups from jl! Please keep posting, maybe you could split subjects across several posts next time and have more room for specific stories (if you can share them).
What are the most common types of "startup shitshows" that YC sees besides cofounder disputes? Which are unrecoverable?
Just one thing I'm curious about: How do you later find out if you had been correct? Have you tried to estimate how often you've been correct by following up on the people later on?
RE the article: awesome that you have the goal of funding good people and constantly asking yourself what's best for the founders.
It's not like YC gives them money and says "cya" and never talks to them again. They are probably forever involved in the start up until they exit, which doesn't seem to happen often.
"Culture matters for startups. For a startup to succeed, it must have a culture that reflects what it wants to achieve."
Digital Equipment Corporation had a culture. Companies like Loopt (proto-grindr), InstallMonetizer (drive-by-download enabler), and GrooveShark (copyright infringement)--all YC funded--do not.
This emphasis on "culture" and "culture fit," or any other subjective hiring or selection process for that matter, is bound to result in unintentional discrimination against those applicants who differ (racially, in gender, or some other respect) from the person or people doing the selection. The evidence continues to mount that humans are swayed by all kinds of unconscious biases, even those who sincerely believe they aren't racists, sexists, or bigots of some other stripe.
If the partners of Y Combinator really want it to be something of a meritocracy, then these sorts of practices, rather than being openly boasted of, should be abandoned in favor of more quantitative, objective filters
Note that I am not a progressive, even if the tone of this post came across as such. I just genuinely believe in meritocracy, and if evidence demonstrates that certain practices are harmful to it, then I feel obliged to speak out against them. If you sincerely want the best candidate regardless of race, gender, weight, attractiveness, or age, hiring based on something so subjective as "culture" is not the way to get them.
And this imo, is one of the reasons why JL's input has been so valuable to YC over the years. If a company's culture reflect that of it's founders personality focusing on founders who are "good" people goes a long way towards ensuring the companies YC funds act a certain way. Whether that way is good or not is up for debate but from pure anecdotal evidence I'd argue that YC startups tend to comport themselves better than others.
The difference between 'good' and 'bad' cultures is that a 'good' culture was curated so as to remove founder traits that do not increase the company's chance of success.
I think she is completely right at the importance of culture and the value of "soft" skills on building a company. But I don't know about how judgemental they are about character. All sounds very much like a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" from a roman emperor. It is binary:you are a good person or you are a bad person. All this based on the myth fully internalized by both Paul Graham and Jessica herself that she can just judge character. They don't even care to try to understand it, they just assume she has this superpower and we all shall trust it.
My point is not being a good person doesn't matter on building companies. I too firmly believe it does. A "fraternity of good people" can be very powerful. I try to keep close to myself only good people, including doing business. I also mentally veto bad people that could possibly give me good business. But I don't judge them on character so quickly and so often.
A recurrent topic here in HN is how language limit and direct thought. In english the verb "to be" is used in two situations that are very different, and you can realize that if you speak a latin language. Myself, I speak portuguese, and we use to different verbs to translate "to be". We use "ser" and "estar". "Ser" is for something more permanent. "Estar" is for something more transitory.
So when in english you say "Your friend is ugly", you can tell is you judge the people as ugly for life, I mean, he just isn't handsome, he is ugly, he must accept it. Or if you are actually meaning that he is ugly right now. He chose the wrong outfit, the wrong haircut for him or that simply he isn't as astonishing as he use to be. To mean that you must add a time stamp, like "Your friend is ugly today". So this phrasing and using of the verb "to be" in english nudge you to a very binary way of thinking. And people's character are not binary. Jessica might vet a very good person as being bad, just because in the day of the interview they were pissed that they found out that an ex has cheated all relationship and they were feeling more beligerant and raging than usual. And that was judged by Jessica's superpowers as "being bad people".
All great arguments for culture and atmosphere were lost to me because of this judgemental stand.
Given that the dataset of YC companies is starting to be somewhat sizable, I'd be incredibly curious to see if people tried to run a regression between lots of plausible variables that affect success (founder demographic variables, subject area, exact time, etc) to see if there are any non-trivial correlations.
The dataset is not quite big enough to train a very complex deep net, but even some simple linear regressions would be fascinating.
"... when people are BSing, how tough they are, if they get along, and surprisingly often, considering I only have 10 minutes to observe them, whether they're good people or not. ..."
That's a difficult task. Was it the comfort/discomfort paradigm used here? (cf: Navarro: http://www.jnforensics.com) From experience, you only really grasp the mettle of ones character in adversity.
You can ask questions and see if the response is causing a person discomfort, but that's all. The reason for discomfort could be nervousness or a host of other things. More questions need to be asked based on the observation.
"We continue to filter for character"
Who are the worst offenders? Does the adage, 'want to get an honest answer by avoiding management and ask an engineer' apply?
ah, i remember those early dinners and fancy cheese plates that weren't orange nor formed into a brick.
i've found that potential employees are getting more and more savvy about evaluating culture.
One thing we do at Sincerely to share our culture and evaluate the candidate's character is to play a board game at lunch during interview days. The candidate drops their guard, treats communication less like an interivew, and we get to see deeper into their real character. And they get to see one of the ways we like to interact with our teammates outside of shipping products.
One of the best startup articles written in the last few years. Looks like the startup ecosystem is finally finding its standards as there is now real data to back up the soft values, i.e. what's a good founder, what co-founder dynamics are the most successful (you've been friends before the startup). Would be interesting to see some sort of compendium for that, or data on the soft values. Many investors or investor groups have those for themselves, but there's no one standardised summary of all of those yet.
"but I can tell things like when people are BSing, how tough they are, if they get along, and surprisingly often, considering I only have 10 minutes to observe them, whether they're good people or not."
How do you know you have this ability and it's not just bias? I really don't mean this as snark, but increasingly more research confirms that humans far overestimate their abilities in this area. In my own case, as I've grown older I've come to realize that I'm not nearly as good a judge of character as I thought I was in my early 20s. So, again, not snark, but how do you know? Have you set up a control group?
This is a fair question, but like most things with humans, almost impossible to answer in a definitive way.
There was once an accidental control group though. Jessica missed about half of the interviews and PG, RTM, and Trevor were left to decide on their own. I would estimate that the error rate without her was about 2x-3x as high.
The other thing to remember is that we keep track of the startups that we interview, and for the ones that we accept, we end up working with them for many years. We make a point of studying our mistakes (and successes), so there is a feedback loop, and I believe that we're getting better at it every time. But of course there are about a million other variable in play, so it's very difficult to be certain about anything (which is part of what makes this business so interesting).
My job relies on me trying to establish the character of people in a quite limited time as well, and I can totally vouch for this. Human beings are notorious for overestimating their ability to 'judge character'. Myself included. There's been so many scientific studies done on this that I don't think you can make this claim anymore. Personal bias combined with past experience of similar character (or read character) influences your mental state a lot. I don't really like it when people say 'I can work out if they are good people or not', simply because it isn't true. Sorry, but evidence trumps opinions.
One of the features of the Y-Combinator context is that the interviews are designed to filter out false positives. So the process is focused on consistently selecting good character rather than correctly identifying both good and bad character. As YC often points out, plenty of good people don't get funded.
The emphasis on avoiding false positives means that errors are more easily identified: bad character stands out in the small pool of YC founders, whereas good character may be common in the pool of unselected applicants. In other words, it's more of a bloom filter than a dictionary.
With these criteria, how does anyone make any statement about their own abilities? If you went to a job interview and they asked "What is your biggest strength?" would you say "Well, humans are prone to overestimate their abilities. I couldn't answer that question without doing a double blind research study"?
Think about it: The only way that you could change your view of your own abilities is by comparing your predictions about people's character to their actual behavior over time. Jessica did the same thing, but she found that her predictions were accurate.
JL has the opportunity to make judgements about people, and then spend months or more with them as a part of YCombinator. She can say "I don't think the members of this startup will work well together" or "I don't like the looks of this guy", and then see if she was right or not. She has the opportunity to do this dozens of times per year, every year. That's how she knows.
The research shows these results for typical human beings. If you did a survey, a typical human being would be terrible at and will overestimate their ability to discriminate good startup ideas from bad ones. But PG does have this ability. Similarly, she is probably a atypical human being with an excellent 'social radar'.
"I've always been a good judge of character–even as a little kid"
"In fact my cofounders respected my opinions about character"
"I can tell things like when people are BSing, how tough they are, if they get along, .. whether they're good people or not."
"Paul, Robert and Trevor are really good at technical stuff, but it's precisely because they're so good that they often misjudged founders as people. " while "I didn't always understand the details of the questions they'd been asked"
"I just have a very intense reaction to people I think have bad characters. "
At this point my reaction is as it always is when someone belive they were born with special abilities, but the article does end on a better note:
"I now have experience dealing with literally hundreds of startups. So now when I see a problem I've usually seen the same problem ten times before."
Born ability? I would call it earned experience, while I strongly suspect she was as bad as anyone else at being a judge of character before that.
I'm sure she learns from her mistakes and tweaks her "social radar" model. Hence with more experience/interaction with founders she will be getting better at it. Given that YC has become incredibly successful, there is something right being done there and hence it may be easy for her to determine what works and what doesn't.
Let me ask you this: Why are you harshing on her explanation of her role in YC? Do you call PG out and assume he is full of shit and doesn't know what he is talking about?
She is one of four people who founded YC. YC is wildly successful. Paul Graham's writing is practically worshiped here on HN.
I am rather appalled at the reception this is getting.
I don't know her, but I will suggest that the substantial success of YC suggests she isn't just fucking self-deluded. Perhaps she isn't explaining it in a way that appeals to the data-oriented mindset of the majority of people here, but the degree to which she is being outright dismissed as utterly full of shit smacks of, among other things, sexism.
It was interesting to read how deliberately Jessica worked on the vibe and the culture. Many companies would be better places to work if their founders had done the same.
[+] [-] paul|11 years ago|reply
At companies with great cultures, employees are eager to show up and get things done because they genuinely care about the team and mission. That was very much my experience at early Google.
Companies with bad cultures try to motivate employees with fear and intimidation, or simply fail to motivate them at all, and everyone wastes their time playing video games or whatever. Not surprisingly, those rarely do well.
In my estimation, most startups have weak to poor culture, which is one reason why you read so many startup horror stories. My advice to anyone looking to join a startup it to pick a place where you are excited about showing up and contributing every day. I think that's a much better predictor of happiness and success than trying to follow the social media hype or hotness signals.
[+] [-] n72|11 years ago|reply
This seems like it could be a chicken or the egg problem though. How do you know that good culture isn't a byproduct of success. If Google stock were tanking, how do you think the culture would look? I honestly don't know.
[+] [-] Alex3917|11 years ago|reply
Everyone knows about Zappos and Google, but I feel like there are few enough well-known examples that every time I've ever been involved in white boarding on this at various startups we've always come up mostly empty handed.
[+] [-] Cakez0r|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwallace|11 years ago|reply
Neurotypical people think they can tell all sorts of things about someone's character from a short face-to-face meeting, but it turns out this is all noise; people's impressions of character obtained this way are not significantly more accurate than random chance.
Having said that, for all I know, Jessica may well be in the 0.1% of people who have extraordinary skill in this area, who really can accurately read character; if so, fair play to her, she has certainly made an immensely valuable contribution to Y Combinator.
The problem arises when other people try to emulate her and filter job applicants, business partners etc. by intuitive reading of character from a face-to-face meeting, because there is a 99.9% probability that you are not in that 0.1%. So you end up turning away good people because their hair was messy while simultaneously falling prey to glib sociopaths who know what buttons to press.
So by all means appreciate the post, and certainly appreciate Jessica herself if you have dealings with Y Combinator, but I would strongly advise against trying to copy the strategy of filtering people by intuitive reading.
[+] [-] leelin|11 years ago|reply
Startup morale can seemingly come and go for the most arbitrary reasons, but the Tuesday dinners somehow always re-energized me into wanting to get back to work asap. It's some combination of (1) relief knowing other great founders face similar stumbling blocks, (2) excitement to try many fresh ideas overheard at dinner, and (3) fear/embarrassment that I'm not working hard or fast enough.
Even today, we still get introductions and advice from YC and when I reach out, I've never waited more than 24 hours for a response.
As far as the interview goes, I had the original, single-track 4 YC founders. I remember a bunch of questions from Paul and Trevor, but I'm only now realizing Jessica was the one subtly keeping the conversation on track. Near the end of the 20 minutes, Jessica made her one and only comment related to our idea, but it was the most insightful and for good reason. In 2009 our startup was positioned as anti-Craigslist and Jessica had recently interviewed Craig for Founders at Work!
[+] [-] spcoll|11 years ago|reply
These characteristics don't necessarily mean you will be unable to build great products or a disruptive business. They don't mean your startup will fail. But they would almost certainly cause you to fail the character test.
Admittedly, being awkward and ugly does put your startup at a disadvantage because it will be a bit harder to recruit and a bit harder to close sales. But I am positive it is still possible to succeed if you are delivering real value. The product will speak for itself.
So aren't such character filters a bad business decision for YC? Aren't they passing on great startups by paying too much attention to things that ultimately don't impact success that much?
[+] [-] petercooper|11 years ago|reply
Social skills, on the other hand, are important but, much like physical fitness, can be learned and trained unless you have a serious disability. Someone not willing to invest in their social skills might well deserve to fail a 'character test' for that reason alone.
[+] [-] thom|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cakez0r|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Geekette|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettergram|11 years ago|reply
"Before Y Combinator, character had not traditionally been an important factor for investors. Investors have often funded people who were jerks but who seemed likely to succeed. But I couldn't do it. YC is not just an investment firm. It's like a family in that we're inviting these people into our place to have dinner every week."
This is what I would attribute the success of Y Combinator to. By focusing on founders as opposed to ideas, individual drive, demeanor, and not business models become the center.
Paul Graham on multiple occasions discusses Sam Altman as someone who can't be stopped. Here is an article[1] from Paul Graham's article titled "Five Founders," the prompt "Inc recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years." Sam Altman made it as #5 up with Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey, etc.
"I was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. But Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be."
The idea, is if people have what it takes, have the drive, the heart, and the understanding of how to treat others, they can make anything happen.
“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.” - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
[1] http://paulgraham.com/5founders.html
[+] [-] alecco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davemel37|11 years ago|reply
I am not saying any of this weeding out is a problem. It's not. But publicizing it will likely not scare off the competent BSers but will eliminate many good folks who are a little insecure. (I don't buy that being confident and secure is a requirement for success.)
[+] [-] staunch|11 years ago|reply
Not many would subject themselves to it, but for the fact that YC is one of the few gatekeepers in Silicon Valley who will even talk to outsiders.
[+] [-] general_failure|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1123581321|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fomite|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomasien|11 years ago|reply
For those that are put off by Jessica doing this: she is not going to get credit unless she takes it. She deserves it, she's earned it, and the historical record should indicate it. Good on her for taking the FFC and this post (and a couple interviews) to set the record straight. The story of YC is the story of a female founder and it's critical the record reflect that.
[+] [-] throwaway41597|11 years ago|reply
What are the most common types of "startup shitshows" that YC sees besides cofounder disputes? Which are unrecoverable?
[+] [-] solve|11 years ago|reply
RE the article: awesome that you have the goal of funding good people and constantly asking yourself what's best for the founders.
[+] [-] bhayden|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pickwick|11 years ago|reply
Digital Equipment Corporation had a culture. Companies like Loopt (proto-grindr), InstallMonetizer (drive-by-download enabler), and GrooveShark (copyright infringement)--all YC funded--do not.
This emphasis on "culture" and "culture fit," or any other subjective hiring or selection process for that matter, is bound to result in unintentional discrimination against those applicants who differ (racially, in gender, or some other respect) from the person or people doing the selection. The evidence continues to mount that humans are swayed by all kinds of unconscious biases, even those who sincerely believe they aren't racists, sexists, or bigots of some other stripe.
If the partners of Y Combinator really want it to be something of a meritocracy, then these sorts of practices, rather than being openly boasted of, should be abandoned in favor of more quantitative, objective filters
Note that I am not a progressive, even if the tone of this post came across as such. I just genuinely believe in meritocracy, and if evidence demonstrates that certain practices are harmful to it, then I feel obliged to speak out against them. If you sincerely want the best candidate regardless of race, gender, weight, attractiveness, or age, hiring based on something so subjective as "culture" is not the way to get them.
[+] [-] lutorm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sajid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcole2929|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrvarela56|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nichochar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soneca|11 years ago|reply
My point is not being a good person doesn't matter on building companies. I too firmly believe it does. A "fraternity of good people" can be very powerful. I try to keep close to myself only good people, including doing business. I also mentally veto bad people that could possibly give me good business. But I don't judge them on character so quickly and so often.
A recurrent topic here in HN is how language limit and direct thought. In english the verb "to be" is used in two situations that are very different, and you can realize that if you speak a latin language. Myself, I speak portuguese, and we use to different verbs to translate "to be". We use "ser" and "estar". "Ser" is for something more permanent. "Estar" is for something more transitory.
So when in english you say "Your friend is ugly", you can tell is you judge the people as ugly for life, I mean, he just isn't handsome, he is ugly, he must accept it. Or if you are actually meaning that he is ugly right now. He chose the wrong outfit, the wrong haircut for him or that simply he isn't as astonishing as he use to be. To mean that you must add a time stamp, like "Your friend is ugly today". So this phrasing and using of the verb "to be" in english nudge you to a very binary way of thinking. And people's character are not binary. Jessica might vet a very good person as being bad, just because in the day of the interview they were pissed that they found out that an ex has cheated all relationship and they were feeling more beligerant and raging than usual. And that was judged by Jessica's superpowers as "being bad people".
All great arguments for culture and atmosphere were lost to me because of this judgemental stand.
[+] [-] Fede_V|11 years ago|reply
The dataset is not quite big enough to train a very complex deep net, but even some simple linear regressions would be fascinating.
[+] [-] bootload|11 years ago|reply
That's a difficult task. Was it the comfort/discomfort paradigm used here? (cf: Navarro: http://www.jnforensics.com) From experience, you only really grasp the mettle of ones character in adversity.
You can ask questions and see if the response is causing a person discomfort, but that's all. The reason for discomfort could be nervousness or a host of other things. More questions need to be asked based on the observation.
"We continue to filter for character"
Who are the worst offenders? Does the adage, 'want to get an honest answer by avoiding management and ask an engineer' apply?
[+] [-] brezina|11 years ago|reply
i've found that potential employees are getting more and more savvy about evaluating culture.
One thing we do at Sincerely to share our culture and evaluate the candidate's character is to play a board game at lunch during interview days. The candidate drops their guard, treats communication less like an interivew, and we get to see deeper into their real character. And they get to see one of the ways we like to interact with our teammates outside of shipping products.
[+] [-] wellboy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beamatronic|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheMakeA|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] n72|11 years ago|reply
How do you know you have this ability and it's not just bias? I really don't mean this as snark, but increasingly more research confirms that humans far overestimate their abilities in this area. In my own case, as I've grown older I've come to realize that I'm not nearly as good a judge of character as I thought I was in my early 20s. So, again, not snark, but how do you know? Have you set up a control group?
[+] [-] paul|11 years ago|reply
There was once an accidental control group though. Jessica missed about half of the interviews and PG, RTM, and Trevor were left to decide on their own. I would estimate that the error rate without her was about 2x-3x as high.
The other thing to remember is that we keep track of the startups that we interview, and for the ones that we accept, we end up working with them for many years. We make a point of studying our mistakes (and successes), so there is a feedback loop, and I believe that we're getting better at it every time. But of course there are about a million other variable in play, so it's very difficult to be certain about anything (which is part of what makes this business so interesting).
[+] [-] sekasi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|11 years ago|reply
The emphasis on avoiding false positives means that errors are more easily identified: bad character stands out in the small pool of YC founders, whereas good character may be common in the pool of unselected applicants. In other words, it's more of a bloom filter than a dictionary.
[+] [-] hooande|11 years ago|reply
Think about it: The only way that you could change your view of your own abilities is by comparing your predictions about people's character to their actual behavior over time. Jessica did the same thing, but she found that her predictions were accurate.
JL has the opportunity to make judgements about people, and then spend months or more with them as a part of YCombinator. She can say "I don't think the members of this startup will work well together" or "I don't like the looks of this guy", and then see if she was right or not. She has the opportunity to do this dozens of times per year, every year. That's how she knows.
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|11 years ago|reply
Also, she gets feedback so she gets to improve.
[+] [-] belorn|11 years ago|reply
"I've always been a good judge of character–even as a little kid"
"In fact my cofounders respected my opinions about character"
"I can tell things like when people are BSing, how tough they are, if they get along, .. whether they're good people or not."
"Paul, Robert and Trevor are really good at technical stuff, but it's precisely because they're so good that they often misjudged founders as people. " while "I didn't always understand the details of the questions they'd been asked"
"I just have a very intense reaction to people I think have bad characters. "
At this point my reaction is as it always is when someone belive they were born with special abilities, but the article does end on a better note:
"I now have experience dealing with literally hundreds of startups. So now when I see a problem I've usually seen the same problem ten times before."
Born ability? I would call it earned experience, while I strongly suspect she was as bad as anyone else at being a judge of character before that.
[+] [-] myth_buster|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mz|11 years ago|reply
She is one of four people who founded YC. YC is wildly successful. Paul Graham's writing is practically worshiped here on HN.
I am rather appalled at the reception this is getting.
I don't know her, but I will suggest that the substantial success of YC suggests she isn't just fucking self-deluded. Perhaps she isn't explaining it in a way that appeals to the data-oriented mindset of the majority of people here, but the degree to which she is being outright dismissed as utterly full of shit smacks of, among other things, sexism.
[+] [-] projectileboy|11 years ago|reply