August 20,2024

last update: 2024-11-19

YC is looking for evidence that you are clever. The ability to think out of the box and manipulate large systems to your advantage are critical to gaining an edge on the market when you have no capital advantage (which is usually the case with startups) https://medium.com/@zan2434/y-combinator-applicant-advice-289c58a2ca89

Paul Graham (Co-Founder & Partner at Y Combinator) Source How you hacked some real-world system to your advantage is not a super important question. Probably not even in the top 10. I don’t know about the other YC partners, but the two most important questions to me are what you’ve done in the past that’s impressive, and why you chose the idea you’re working on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693870

Sam Altman (CEO at OpenAI, Former president of YCombinator) Source When I was running my startup, we got catastrophic news that the first big customer in the space (Boost Mobile) was signing a deal with a competitor instead of with us. This would have killed us. The competitor was a much larger and better funded company that had been around for years. I was a 20 year old CEO. Most big companies do not like to make risky decisions, so this was not entirely surprising. We got this news at about 11 pm. The next morning at 6 am, I was on a flight to Orange County. I sat in the lobby until the guy responsible for the deal on their side walked in. He was polite but said the decision was made. I convince him to look at our demo (in the past few days, we’d done some research to figure out exactly what features he really cared about). As soon as he saw it I knew we had a chance. Ended up hanging around for about two weeks. Eventually, the other company overplayed their hand and we got the deal, and then the deals with every other major US telecom company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238839

Zain Shah (Data Scientist at Opendoor, YC alum) Source They’re looking for evidence that you are clever. The ability to think out of the box and manipulate large systems to your advantage are critical to gaining an edge on the market when you have no capital advantage (which is usually the case with startups). https://medium.com/@zan2434/y-combinator-applicant-advice-289c58a2ca89

Harry Zhang (Co-Founder at Lob, YC alum) Source I believe the key to this question is demonstrating with a concrete example how you demonstrated the ability to be relentlessly resourceful and overcome an obstacle by thinking outside the box. As an example, in our application, I specifically discussed how I overcame terrible customer support lines (ie. cable companies) by carpet-bombing executives w/ strongly worded but polite emails using contact information I hunted off the internet until they couldn’t ignore me and sent an executive support member to solve my problem.

https://medium.com/@harryzhang/advice-on-yc-application-947e234fd74f

Lloyd Armbrust

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status: ✅ Successful

batch: W10

Our very first customer wanted a contract. This customer is notoriously picky aboutcontract terms, and a bolierplate off the internet wouldn’t work. We had just spent about$3k on the incorporation process, and didn’t want to drop another $2k on additional lawyerfees. Instead, I spent twelve hours scouring the web for example web-service agreements,random contracts, and a few forms purchased from Legal Zoom. It turns out that lawyersuse code just like hackers – it felt a bit like learning PHP. Being an English major at heart,it was actually pretty fun.At the end I had a 15-page contract. I paid the lawyer $300 to look it over, hesaid: “Nice. Well written. Where’d you get it?

James Steinberg

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status:

Praful – For my last company (Amp Idea), I found a free way to sign 350 cab drivers out of 1800 total cabs (2nd largest marketshare). The other players paid exorbitant rates to set up operations at repair shops for their market share. We simply had a cabby sneak us into the Airport Holding Area (AHA) everyday (non-cabbies are banned). It was declared an unfair advantage and the city temporarily allowed companies to pitch at the AHA which we had won by then.

Shawn – parking is troublesome, so I acquired a free permit from a department (Professional Science Masters) and used it to frequent a new on-campus Makerspace. I did so by requesting it for in-person consulting, and utilized the permit’s expanded access to visit the space. The department even gave a warm introduction to the Makerspace.

James – I got the highest rewards no-fee credit card (according to http://www.nerdwallet.com/) despite having $0 of income this year. I was instantly rejected by their application online and over the phone with a representative. However, I scoured the internet looking for the contact info of the executive board and eventually found the email of the CEO. I emailed him my case explaining I have never missed a payment on any credit card ever and quickly got approved.

Zac Townsend

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status: ✅ S13

When I started in Newark, I didn’t have a computer or an email, and City Hall didn’t have wireless. So I tracked down one of the wireless networks I could find - owned by a bails bondsman close to the court, and negotiated with them for their wireless password.

I once spent hours looking at floorplans and historic housing lottery data so that my roommate and I could pick a HUGE double with our own bathroom despite having a terrible pick at Brown.

Flytenow

source status: ✅ S14

In my freshman year of school at Northeastern University, I watched a YouTube video featuring Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital giving a lecture at the Harvard Innovation Lab about the Boston Startup Community. He said to the audience, “You’d have to be an idiot to not be going over to MIT and getting involved in the innovation going on there,” and I thought that I’d be an idiot as well to not be getting involved across the river at both MIT and Harvard. I immediately joined the Innovation Lab’s mailing list and scoured Google to discover some of their prominent entrepreneurial clubs and events. I took the 30 minute bike over there about three times a week to go to iLab classes or HackHarvard club meetings. At those meetings I was able to network with entrepreneurs there and learn about other clubs and organizations where I got on those mailing lists as well. Essentially, I attended Harvard only events and got to meet and hear from Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Jack Dorsey, Ladar Levinson, Richard Stallman, Guy Steele, and other notable founders and tech entrepreneurs. These were events that I never would have known about had I not ventured off across the river and simply walked into events where they assumed I was a Harvard student.

Lolipuff

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status: ✅ W13

Travis (beambot): I got 5 professors to sign off on my dissertation. Seriously, it was the most difficult part of a PhD. It took 6 months just to get them in a room together.

Fei (bebefuzz): In grade school, I made money by selling rosewater and chives door to door, and (redacted, sorry).

David (dmohs): In high school, I received a ticket for not stopping at a stop sign before the intersection. I took pictures from various distances and proved to the judge, mathematically, that it would have been impossible to stop earlier than I did. The ticket was thrown out.

Namanh

status: Story is from

source

With 37 years behind me it’s difficult to pinpoint the most successful hacking of non-computer system since it seems hacking is something we do everyday through out our lives, it is as common as eating. We hack our parents for more allowance, hack to find ways to stay up past curfew to play video games, hack to go out with friends.

My tale is a criminal story probably not best shared publicly but I’ll recount the story since my involvement has long since been forgotten. Have you ever heard of a movie called “Better Luck Tomorrow”? It was loosely based on real facts of which I was actually a small part of well before the start of the movie’s story. It was about kids who stole computer equipment from retail stores leading to a murder, but they didn’t quite explain the details of how we did it which I will do here. A hacker’s brain always looks for loop holes, finding ways to do things better, faster, easier. I had some friends from Sunny Hills High School and we were all computer hackers and phreakers back in the 90’s. We would run BBS that distributed software and games to other people, it was very private since we were the source for most couriers and it was called Private Society. BBSs in those days worked on a barter system, the more you can upload the more credits you would get to download and we needed faster hardware, particularly USR 14400 HST Courier Modems but we couldn’t afford it.

It was by chance that one day while returning some computer items to a computer that we noticed that if you came in with a receipt and didn’t return anything or changed your mind, people didn’t asked to check your receipt on the way out. So what we used to do was go into the computer stores and buy everything we needed. Then we would come back into the store with the receipts, collect all the same items and walk over to the service desk as if we were going to ask them some questions. We would wait for the security to change shifts and the new guy would assume we have been waiting at customer service with all of our items all along. Then we would just non-chelantly walk out the front door with the second batch of the same items. Then someone completely different from our group would go back with the same items and return it, netting us everything we wanted at no cost.

The story didn’t turn out so good in reality. Stewart Tay was among one of our friends and I had long since stopped hanging out with them but he continued to do this for a while. Stewart was one of those guys that already had it all, he was rich and charismatic and seemed to do this just for sport. He had been so deeply involved that when he began to back out from the group they feared he would rat them out and murdered him.

It was a pretty awful story and made all the news and they dubbed it the Honor Roll murder. I remember my father cutting out news stories and placing them in my room to remind me never to make that mistake and to choose my friends and life decisions wisely.

apptimize.com

source status: ✅ S13

Nancy wanted to work in the Middle East but there wasn’t a culture of internships. Nancy discovered if she didn’t mention she was just a sophomore she could interview as a consultant (and get a company car and phone). She was the first student ever hired for Mercury’s R&D office in Israel (a load testing company acquired by HP).

At Google, Jeremy became an expert in free travel. After getting on shortlists for university recruiting, he positioned himself as a datacenter expert and visited many across America. After targeting developer relations, Jeremy got on the shortlist for places like Moscow, Berlin, Manila, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, giving talks, meeting partners, and exploring- all for free.

Relationship Hero

source status: ✅ S17

Liron Shapira – In 2012, when my company Quixey was struggling to find great engineers to hire, I spotted an arbitrage opportunity: Recruitment costs per engineer were upwards of $20k, yet $100 is a lot of money to a college student. Ergo, we could afford to pay 200 college students $100 if it yielded us 1 great full-time engineering hire. This led me to invent the Quixey Challenge, a tough 1-minute online coding challenge that anyone could play which instantly paid out $100 to winners, and then asked if they might be interested in applying to Quixey. We ran it a few times, usually hitting the front page of HN. For a total of $70k, we were able to hire 7 great engineers plus build excitement for our engineering brand.

Lior Gotesman – I graduated college in the middle of the market crash in 2009 with an Economics degree. Finding a career-building job felt like an insurmountable task. For the first time, the college-to-career system that’s been ingrained in my mind since elementary school seemed fundamentally broken. Going against conventional wisdom, I decided to pursue a programming career without any formal education. Since this was before coding bootcamps existed, I studied it all on my own and with Liron’s guidance. Last year, I was promoted to Senior Software Developer at Full Circle Insights. I hacked the career system that relied on having a formal education by teaching myself how to program and ignoring the part of job descriptions that say a computer science degree is required.

SketchDeck

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status: ✅ W14

I’ve been on holiday most weeks this summer, thanks to micro‐adventures. A micro‐adventure is an adventure between 6pm and 9am. Head out of work, grab friends and jump on a train, in one hour reach wilderness. Hike, make a fire, cook, watch the stars in your bivi as you fall asleep beside the glowing embers. Arrive at work on time next morning. You’re a tiny bit disheveled, but are relaxed, triumphant and feel you’ve just had a whole weekend.

Kash

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status: ✅ S14

In 2011, I used math to help end the decades-long political disadvantage that my party had among immigrants to Canada. (To use an American comparison, imagine if the majority of the African American community voted for the next Republican candidate for President.) My party had lost 10 out 13 elections since the 60’s because we kept losing the votes of immigrants. In 2011, we reversed that trend, won the immigrant vote, and handed our opposition their biggest defeat in history.

Cruise

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status: ✅ W14

Due to a weird California law, I couldn’t apply for a real estate license since I dropped out of MIT and hadn’t earned a college degree. I was told I’d need to earn my degree or spend two years as an apprentice. Neither of those options worked for me since I was busy with Justin.tv. So, I found a way to get a brand new Bachelor’s degree by spending just four weeks on actual coursework. I now hold a degree in Information Technology (basically just how to install Windows). The loophole was to use a competency‑based online university (take the test, pass the class, repeat) rather than a semester‑based university. Amusing side note: I am both an MIT dropout and a college graduate.

One Month

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status: ✅ S14

In February I spent a month in Buenos Aires working on a book about growth hacking. I was afraid about starting with a blank slate. So the day before I left, I organized a 3-hour lecture and promised anyone who attended a free copy of my book when it was done. I recorded the session and paid someone on Elance to transcribe the audio into text ($200). The day I arrived in Buenos Aires I opened my email to find a 140-page transcription of my talk. It was beautifully formatted, with “Um"s and “Uh"s removed. Over the course of the month I extended the content to create a 250-page manuscript. Wiley emailed me out of the blue because they’re looking for authors to write a book about growth hacking (my name shows up on the first page of Google search results) and I’m in talks with Wiley and a few literary agents, though I’m strongly considering self-publishing instead.

Standard Treasury

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status: ✅ S13

When I started in Newark, I didn’t have a computer or an email, and City Hall didn’t have wireless. So I tracked down one of the wireless networks I could find - owned by a bails bondsman close to the court, and negotiated with them for their wireless password. I once spent hours looking at floorplans and historic housing lottery data so that my roommate and I could pick a HUGE double with our own bathroom despite having a terrible pick at Brown.

MakeSchool

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status: ✅ W12

My iPhone’s lock button was broken, so the screen would never turn off and the resulting poor battery life made the phone useless. I wrote a simple app that activated the proximity sensor, so when I slipped the phone in my pocket the screen went black. This software fix to a hardware problem restored the phone’s battery life and saved me $600.

FamilyLeaf

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status: ✅ W12

We used a comedy twitter account to get meetings with tech superstars who wouldn’t have returned our emails. In the week before our YC interview, we started @YC_Y_U_NO as a joke with the tech community and ended up featured on TechCrunch – and more importantly (coupled with serendipitously meeting Fred Wilson at the airport, who tweeted out Readstream) used cold DM’s to build relationships with brilliant startup people, angel investors, and VCs (along with more than a few YC alums/Garry and Harj).

The Muse

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status: ✅ W12

I spent 77 days traveling around the world and only paid for a hotel room once; instead I stayed with friends from the year I spent living abroad, former colleagues from my time working at the UN, families I met en route, and a few shared hostel dorms when the first 3 options fell through. I spent time in Oman, China, and Ecuador as well as France, Australia and Sweden, and a lot of places in between. In Belize, I once managed to talk my way onto a plane that departed 12 minutes after I arrived at the airport. Traveling light and cheaply is all about hacking systems, finding work­arounds, turning strangers into allies and not giving up no matter how zany things get. I freaking love that stuff.

Proxino

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status: ✅ S11

A Computer Science degree from U.Va. typically requires that you complete many courses within a variety of unrelated disciplines. Most of our peers must take classes in Physics, Chemistry, and a “fake” humanities listing called Science, Technology and Society. We escaped such requirements through a little-known option to pursue a BA in Computer Science, in place of the Engineering School’s BS. With this degree, we completed the core CS curriculum and any other classes that caught our interest, but we avoided the rigidly defined ABET requirements of the Engineering school. This left us more time to pursue research and hack on web applications.

ownlocal

source

status: ✅ W10

Our very first customer wanted a contract. This customer is notoriously picky about contract terms, and a bolierplate off the internet wouldn’t work. We had just spent about$3k on the incorporation process, and didn’t want to drop another $2k on additional lawyer fees. Instead, I spent twelve hours scouring the web for example web-service agreements, random contracts, and a few forms purchased from Legal Zoom. It turns out that lawyers use code just like hackers – it felt a bit like learning PHP. Being an English major at heart, it was actually pretty fun. At the end I had a 15-page contract. I paid the lawyer $300 to look it over, he said: “Nice. Well written. Where’d you get it?”

mixpanel

source

status: ✅ S09

Last summer I managed to get an internship at Slide, but a month after accepting their offer I decided I wanted more hourly pay. Before I even started at Slide, I was able to convince the recruiter that I had numerous offers still outstanding from companies like RockYou and Zynga and had in-depth OpenSocial experience that was deserving of a $10/hr raise. Luckily, she was able to get it and pay was very good that summer.

Viktor Kyosev

source

status: ❌

A few years ago, I was running a startup and, at the same time, entered my final semester of my Master’s degree. At the time, I lived and studied in Denmark.

My startup was not doing great, and the Danish market did not resonate with our product, so I researched relevant accelerators and found one in Malaysia that seemed like a good fit (accelerators, as the name suggests, are organizations designed to help startups accelerate their growth).

Back then, I was bootstrapping my business and could not afford to relocate to Asia overnight. So I picked a topic for my master thesis that 1) required me to move to Asia to conduct a field research 2) aligned with my startup interest, which in turn helped me to plug myself in the local entrepreneurship eco-system (I wrote a paper on vertical vs. horizontal innovation in Asia vs. Europe from a startup perspective). Once the topic was approved, I applied for a scholarship from my university to cover research-related expenses.

In two weeks, I received approval and a grant that covered my flight to Asia and accommodation for a few weeks. The scholarship sustained me during the beginning of my journey; then, the accelerator covered the rest of my expenses. At the same time, my startup gained some traction and received an offer for investment.

In 4 months, I was able to 1) relocate to another continent, 2) accelerate my startup’s traction, and receive an investment offer 3) complete my Master’s thesis and receive the highest grade for my paper for contributions to startup related research.

All that on a very low budget, supported mainly by my university. My trip took me from Denmark to Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Bali, Indonesia.

In fact, thanks to that hack, I am now based in Southeast Asia, running Greenhouse

Learn Venue

status: ❌ S18

Saurabh

Early in 2016, I participated in an event called Startup Weekend. The rules were: participants had to pitch their ideas and they were put to vote. The ideas/people that received the most votes had to form a team with the other participants and work on it.

I pitched my idea but it didn’t make it through the voting stage. I went to the organizers and told them that I want to work on my idea but they just reiterated the rules to me. I persisted and finally, the organizers challenged me that if I can make a team of at least 4 I can work on it.

I took the challenge and started approaching the participants, cajoled them, and successfully built a team of 6 – which was the largest. We became the runners-up of the event and won $500 as well.

Nishchal I conducted several workshops during my undergraduate years and faced a trivial problem; we needed separate permission from the higher authorities to conduct them and each permission was valid for 2 months only.

Once I needed the permission for a whole year. I figured out a gap between how the higher and lower levels of management operated in my college: once approved at a higher level, the lower management never questions it. I intentionally wrote the permission letter highlighting the starting date of the workshop on the first page and added a paragraph on the second page stating the requirement for the whole year. Generally, the higher authorities are short on time and skim the first page and take decisions accordingly.

My permission application got approved by the higher management. I went to the lower management and highlighted the part of the requirement for the whole year. They approved it without questioning the duration.

Thinksy

source status

When [company I work at] was acquired by [another company] they weren’t giving raises. I used this as a case to negotiate Fridays off. I did this by taking Fridays off with PTO for 1 quarter and created graphs comparing my work to others at my level to prove I was executing as much or more than my peers. This allowed me to get Fridays off indefinitely approved by my manager and HR without a pay decrease.

Craig Cannon

one for a while and I think that the silly world record actually might be the best one because it had like the largest outcome so basically what happened was there was this trend in cycling whatever I did is like four years ago where people were climbing the height of Everest on their bike and they called it Everesting and I was like I could probably do that meanwhile I’m not I mean I’m heavier now than I was then but even then I was like 170 pounds which in cycling is like heavy like you are you’re the fattest cyclist if you’re 170 guys who win are like 135 140 and they’re taller than me so they’re stronger than hate they all look very tall and skinny they look like skeleton so like you you’re looking at probably like five eleven hundred and seven 137 pounds something like that and they’re stronger than me yeah and so I’m like 170 pounds and yeah not not that so basically what I did was I did that Everesting thing. and so then I created a spreadsheet of all the hills in the East Bay where I could like maximize how much elevation I could get in like the shortest distance while also being like close to a bathroom close also like not having enough trout or not having too much traffic like something that my friends could get to so they could like help me out and yeah through that spreadsheet I like unlock this place that just

Other interesting discourse in the internet for the same question

https://beta.cent.co/cameron/+6nq96m