Published on December 28, 2024

Demystifying the YC Interview

The Y Combinator (YC) interview is one of the most pivotal moments for any startup founder looking to get into the most prestigious accelerator in the world.

YC provides $500,000 in seed funding to each company it accepts into its program:

• Post-money SAFE: $125,000 in exchange for 7% equity
• Uncapped SAFE with MFN: $375,000 with a "most favored nation" provision.

Legendary companies that’ve been accepted to YC include Airbnb, Instacart, Stripe, Coinbase, Dropbox, and ScaleAI.

If you do well on the interview, you may just join their ranks.

This post is here to demystify the process. YC’s questions aren’t random; each one is carefully crafted to dig into a specific aspect of your startup. From understanding your users to proving your market potential, every question is an opportunity to showcase your insight, resilience, and vision.

We’ve crowdsourced the most common YC questions to help you prepare.

Even if you are are not preparing for the Y Combinator interview, these are good questions to ask yourself on your founder journey.

Structure:

• Time: 10 minutes
• Answer quickly and concisely
• Get straight to the point
• Match the tempo of the YC partners interviewing you
• Clearly explain what you are building, who are you building it for, and how you are going to make money

Now let’s dive into the questions:

1. What do you understand that others don't?
2. Why will you succeed?
3. How big an opportunity is there?
4. What problems/hurdles are you anticipating?
5. Who would use your product?
6. How much does customer acquisition cost?
7. How will you make money?
8. How much money could you make per year?
9. How many users do you have?
10. What is your user growth rate?
11. How many users are paying?
12. How are you meeting customers?
13. How are you understanding customer needs?
14. How will you get users?
15. Who would you hire or how would you add to your team?
16. So what are you working on?
17. Do you have a demo?
18. Where is the rocket science here?
19. How does your product work in more detail?
20. How is your product different?
21. What are you going to do next?
22. What's new about what you make?
23. What, exactly, makes you different from existing options?
24. Who needs what you're making?
25. How do you know customers need what you're making?
26. Why isn't someone already doing this?
27. What obstacles will you face and how will you overcome them?
28. How will customers and/or users find out about you?
29. What resistance will they have to trying you and how will you overcome it?
30. What are the key things about your field that outsiders don't understand?
31. What part of your project are you going to build first?
32. Who is going to be your first paying customer?
33. If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
34. Why did you choose this idea?
35. What have you learned so far from working on your product?
36. Six months from now, what's going to be your biggest problem?
37. Where do new users come from?
38. What is your growth like?
39. What's the conversion rate?
40. What makes new users try you?
41. Why do the reluctant users hold back?
42. What are the top things users want?
43. What has surprised you about user behavior?
44. What's an impressive thing you have done?
45. What do you understand about your users?
46. Why did you pick this idea to work on?
47. What domain expertise do you have?
48. Who are your competitors?
49. Who might become competitors?
50. Someone just showed us an idea like this right before you guys. I don't like it. What else do you have?
51. What competition do you fear most?
52. What is your distribution strategy?
53. How did your team meet?
54. Why did your team get together?
55. Who in your team does what?
56. Who is "the boss"?
57. What will you do if we don't fund you?
58. Would you relocate to Silicon Valley?
59. How do we know your team will stick together?
60. What else have you created together?
61. Are you open to changing your idea?
62. What systems have you hacked?
63. Tell us about a tough problem you solved?
64. In what ways are you resourceful?
65. Will you reincorporate as a US company?
66. Will your team stick at this?
67. Tell us something surprising you have done?
68. What's the funniest thing that has happened to you?
69. What's the worst thing that has happened?
70. What's the biggest mistake you have made?
71. What is your burn rate?
72. How long can you go before funding?
73. What is the next step with the product evolution?
74. Have you raised funding?
75. Who would be your next hire?