Sam Altman explains what Y Combinator looks for in a 10-minute interview: intelligence shows fast, determination is hardest to spot but matters most, and the founders need clarity about their vision. YC has rarely missed billion-dollar founders, though scaling may have changed that.
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So one of the things about YC that people may not know is that we make our decisions in 10 minutes because of the scale at which we're trying to operate and the number of companies we try to see every year. And at first glance you would say there's no way to make better than random decisions in 10 minutes. And then you think about it a little more and you say, okay, you can do better than random, but not that well. And that's what I would have said. But it turns out that, that in 10 minutes, if the only question you're trying to answer is does this person have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg? Not Are they definitely going to be? Not should we put millions of dollars into this? But does this person have some seed of what it takes to be the next Mark Zuckerberg? You can answer that question in 10 minutes. Not with 100% accuracy, obviously, but good enough that our business model works. And what we're looking for, the obvious thing is intelligence. That's really easy. You can tell that really quickly, much less than 10 minutes. Usually the hardest trait that we're looking for is determination. When we're really wrong one way or the other on a founder, it's because we were miscalibrated on how determined that founder seemed. And then there are a few other topics in the middle that we look at. Clarity of vision, communication skills, sort of non obvious brilliance of the idea we look at very hard. These are ones that you can't always be right on, but you can usually get quite a lot of data. And unlike determination, they're not quite as difficult to figure out, but not as easy as intelligence. And one of the surprising things about YC is that not only is it possible to figure this out, but you can train new YC partners to figure this out in a year or two years. So it is not an incredibly difficult skill. Which means that think how much better the world could get in general at identifying talent.
Well, the amazing thing, at least last time you shared data with us, which is you haven't actually missed anybody. Like there's not a single person who's applied that's created a billion dollar company in 10 years that you'd rejected.
I'm sure at this point we've already rejected the person that will go on to create that just because we've scaled up so much. But we have not missed a lot, thankfully.
