{"id":181100,"date":"2025-10-06T02:49:27","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T02:49:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/181100\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T02:49:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T02:49:27","slug":"can-you-think-like-a-yc-partner-this-game-will-help-you-find-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/181100\/","title":{"rendered":"Can you think like a YC partner? This game will help you find out"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to YC Arena<\/a>, which is not a top secret fight club for Y Combinator founders but rather a suite of games that give you a vague sense of what it\u2019s like to be a partner at YC.<\/p>\n

Created by a student<\/a> in Berlin, YC Arena\u2019s YC Partner Simulator<\/a> game shows you a publicly available pitch video from a company that applied to YC, along with the year of their application. You click \u201caccept\u201d or \u201creject,\u201d and then find out if you made the same choice as YC.<\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:YCArena<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a lot harder than it looks. YC is estimated to accept around 1% of applicants<\/a>, and at a certain point, some luck is required to really capture a partner\u2019s eye \u2014 maybe your pitch is the first that a partner watched after a very rejuvenating coffee break, or maybe your company is the last video on the list and everyone\u2019s tired.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany rejected founders went on to build incredibly successful companies afterwards,\u201d reads a note at the start of the game. \u201cRejection means nothing \u2014 even the most successful founders got rejected multiple times.\u201d<\/p>\n

YC Arena has other games that ask you to match a company name to its logo, or guess what year a company did YC based on its description (spoiler alert: There\u2019s a lot more AI in recent years). But the YC Partner Simulator game is the most interesting since it makes us confront our own decision-making processes.<\/p>\n

As a tech journalist, I thought I would be pretty good at the YC Partner Simulator. I may not be an investor, but I know what it\u2019s like to sift through an inbox full of startup pitches and choose which ones pique my curiosity \u2014 I\u2019ve walked the floor of TechCrunch Disrupt\u2019s Startup Battlefield 200 Expo<\/a> with the task of identifying companies to interview and write about. But this game is hard. After all, we\u2019re working within different parameters, since the newsworthiness of a company is not directly tied to its potential to turn a profit.<\/p>\n

(For example: As I write this, there\u2019s an AI pet sitting in my lap that I\u2019m planning to review. Would I put money on the bet that Casio will turn a profit off the investment it takes to create a glorified Furby that retails for $430<\/a>? No. Do I expect that an article about my life with an AI pet will be interesting to readers? Yes.)<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

If anything, the game shows just how subjective these processes can be. But after I read YC co-founder Paul Graham\u2019s application guide<\/a>, my guesses started to get more accurate.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to be exceptionally clear and concise,\u201d Graham wrote. \u201cWhatever you have to say, give it to us right in the first sentence, in the simplest possible terms.\u201d (For the record, this advice also applies to emailing journalists.) <\/p>\n

I played the game again, but this time, I paid less attention to what the company was pitching and more attention to how quickly they could convey what their company does. Of course, I wouldn\u2019t recommend this strategy for evaluating a startup in real life (hot take: you should care what a company does!), but for the purposes of the game, I ended up choosing a company\u2019s fate more accurately.<\/p>\n

This probably isn\u2019t a coincidence. When OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman was president of YC, he remarked in an interview that the incubator spent just 10 minutes<\/a> reviewing each company\u2019s application to make a decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt turns out that in 10 minutes, if the only question you\u2019re trying to answer is, \u2018Does this person have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg?\u2019\u00a0\u2026 You can answer that question in 10 minutes,\u201d Altman said in 2016. \u201cNot with 100 percent accuracy, obviously, but good enough that our business model works.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to YC Arena, which is not a top secret fight club for Y Combinator founders but rather…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[84,4203,56,54,55,5184],"class_list":{"0":"post-181100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom","13":"tag-y-combinator"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}