Welcome to YC Arena, which is not a top secret fight club for Y Combinator founders, but a suite of games that give you a vague sense of what it is like to be a partner at YC.
Created by a student in Berlin, YC Arena’s YC Partner Simulator game shows you a publicly available pitch video from a company that applied to YC, along with the year of their application. You click accept or reject, and then find out if you made the same choice as YC.
It is a lot harder than it looks. YC is estimated to accept around one percent of applicants, and at a certain point, some luck is required to really capture a partner’s eye. 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 is tired.
A note at the start of the game reads that many rejected founders went on to build incredibly successful companies afterwards. It states that rejection means nothing, and that even the most successful founders got rejected multiple times.
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. There is 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.
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 is like to sift through an inbox full of startup pitches and choose which ones pique my curiosity. I have walked the floor of a tech exposition with the task of identifying companies to interview and write about. But this game is hard. After all, we are working within different parameters, since the newsworthiness of a company is not directly tied to its potential to turn a profit.
For example, as I write this, there is an AI pet sitting in my lap that I am planning to review. Would I put money on the bet that the company will turn a profit off of the investment it takes to create a glorified toy that retails for a high price? No. Do I expect that an article about my life with an AI pet will be interesting to readers? Yes.
If anything, the game shows just how subjective these processes can be. But after I read YC co-founder Paul Graham’s application guide, my guesses started to get more accurate. He wrote that you have to be exceptionally clear and concise. Whatever you have to say, give it to us right in the first sentence, in the simplest possible terms. For the record, this advice also applies to emailing journalists.
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 would not recommend this strategy for evaluating a startup in real life. You should care what a company does. But for the purposes of the game, I ended up choosing a company’s fate more accurately.
This probably is not a coincidence. When OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman was president of YC, he remarked in an interview that the incubator spent just ten minutes reviewing each company’s application to make a decision. He said that in ten minutes, if the only question you are trying to answer is whether this person has the potential to be the next great founder, you can answer that question. Not with one hundred percent accuracy, obviously, but good enough that their business model works.