Welcome to YC Arena, 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’s 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’s a lot harder than it looks. YC is estimated to accept around 1% 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’s tired.
“Many rejected founders went on to build incredibly successful companies afterwards,” reads a note at the start of the game. “Rejection means nothing — 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 (spoiler alert: There’s 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’s like to sift through an inbox full of startup pitches and choose which ones pique my curiosity — I’ve walked the floor of TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 200 Expo with the task of identifying companies to interview and write about. But this game is hard. After all, we’re 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’s an AI pet sitting in my lap that I’m 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? No. Do I expect that an article about my life with an AI pet will be interesting to readers? Yes.)
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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.
“You have to be exceptionally clear and concise,” Graham wrote. “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 wouldn’t 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’s fate more accurately.
This probably isn’t 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 reviewing each company’s application to make a decision.
“It turns out 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?’ … You can answer that question in 10 minutes,” Altman said in 2016. “Not with 100 percent accuracy, obviously, but good enough that our business model works.”
