How to Ace your YC Interview

The Key Steps to Ace your Interview

Step 1: Understand the Purpose

The YC group partner(s) who are interviewing you have already read your YC application, and they think there's something good there. They like the team, the product, the traction, something. And, they see the gaps and blindspots you probably haven't. The purpose of the interview is two-fold:

1. Understand how you think and communicate verbally. Good founders are good communicators.

2. See how you respond to their tough questions. Have you also thought about the gaps? Do you take their feedback?

And, it's also an opportunity to sense momentum. Depending on the timeline, there may have been 2-6 weeks between your application and interview. How much have you accomplished, and how much has the company evolved in that time?

Read the official YC interview advice, and watch the embedded video from Dalton.

Step 2: Understand the Structure

While every YC group partner has the liberty to structure the interview however they'd like, it generally follows the same pattern. Because they're trying to gather data, and the interview is only 10 minutes long, you should be prepared to be interrupted.

Garry Tan's Interview Framework:

1. What is it?

   • What it is, who is it for, how does it work? (first few mins, plain English, brief & simple, explain what they might not know about your industry)

2. Is it good? Are you the right people to do it?

   • How do you solve the problem and is your solution good? Talk about alts, competition, what people are doing right now? Stories about your customers, price point, segments in your customers & willingness to pay

3. How big can it be?

   • Impact, how bit it can get, if you're starting with a smaller niche solution → how will you expand to a larger market

Another Example Breakdown of an Interview:

1. 2-3 min what are you building

2. 2-3 min customer pain, is this big problem, do customers need it, market segment.

3. Dive into one point. Tend to fixate on one thing deeply. 3 minutes back and forth there. If they’re friendly, keep that convo going, if not friendly, answer quickly and move on to another partner. Only one partner needs ot make an investment

4. Demo day goal - they are imagining the demo day slide for seed investors. “Hey here’s what we will have on demo day slide” - product we like, 10 design customers, etc. “We’re in pilot phase with 1 fortune 500 company.” etc.

Step 3: Prepare the Content

Assuming you have more than one founder (and you probably do, YC biases heavily against solo founders), you'll need to allocate who is answering which types of questions. Generally you'll have one founder answer go to market / business questions, and the other answering technical / product questions. If you follow this typical CEO/CTO split, it makes sense looking forward - the CEO will be primarily focused on selling during YC, while the CTO will be focused on building.

The advice we were given when preparing, is not to prepare answers to any specific questions, since you won't know exactly what they might ask. Instead, prepare to talk about every aspect of the business, and have 3-5 key takeaways you'd like them to walk away with. Especially study the gaps of your business, or where you think you might be falling short relative to other YC companies.

Step 4: Practice

Ask other YC founders to do interview prep with you. I've done countless interview prep sessions with founders from later batches after ours. While a YC founder might not match the full energy or depth of a group partner, they will definitely be able to run you through the rigor, so you don't feel as cold going in.

What We Prepared for our YC Interview

To help you prepare, I'll give you our prep material for our S24 interview (to go with our YC application).

3-5 Main Points we want them to take away

• Security reviews and security automation are both broken. Scale up your security team. Software is growing faster than security, there’s a labor gap and it’s only getting bigger. AI gives us the power we never had before

• Team strength. both technical, both from this space (AI + Security + Privacy + Software), strong connections across security & privacy industry, and have experience building customer-centric products.

  • Personal experience at Amazon!

• We prioritize customer conversations, had 50+ in <3 months

What is your company working on?

Building an AI-powered tool to help security engineers perform software security reviews better and faster - for both internal and 3P software.

By demo day?

Working MVP, 10 design partners, 2 paying customers (or deals are almost done) and at least one of the design partners is Fortune 500

How will we differentiate? (assuming a question of how we are different from Vanta)

• Our value prop is making sure your company is secure. Focused on security & privacy posture, in-depth, with total coverage. Compliance (like SOC2) is a by-product.

• One solution for internal software review (AppSec) and vendor reviews (both buy & sell side) instead of segmented offerings

• Scale up your security team. Help you write your policies, understand best practices (explainability), help you create security training,

• Continued strong relationship to keep security around and growing.

How have you improved your startup from application time (April 22) to interview time (May 7)?

• Additional prospective customer / industry advisor conversations: 8

• Wrote a formal 1 pager pitch / starting to network for angel / preseed investors

• Narrowing down our MVP / qualifying pipeline: we categorized potential customers by their MVP ask:

  • Finding the highest risk areas to dive deep on first (consultants)

  • Finding where a policy is implemented across code base

  • Answering security questionnaires (as the seller)

  • Performing internal software security reviews

  • Performing 3P vendor reviews

• Also still trying to figure out which of these leads would be most likely to actually purchase and for what amount → current thinking is MVP should be built for the company that is most ready to purchase and where purchasing is easiest