How to not get rejected from YC's Early AI interview batch

Reflections on applying to YCS23

Disclaimer: all views expressed in this post are my own.

Hi, my name’s John and I’m the CEO and cofounder of RadiantAi.health, a pre-seed multimodal generative AI startup in the healthcare space. Recently, we were rejected from the earlyAI interview stage. Here are 3 points me and my team took away from the experience:

1. First and foremost, YC likes to invest in companies that seem similar to other companies they have invested in before. YC is not a magical startup incubator that selects the best or most world changing ideas. No, YC is a business (in fact, one could call it a PE fund, but that’s for another time), and their business has core competencies. YC’s core competency is in scaling B2B (and sometimes B2C) SaaS companies that require investment and guidance to grow immediate revenue streams, with specific and achievable plans to profitability.

2. While it may seem like YC invests in a diversity of companies across <healthcare, banking, travel>, it is an “Airbnb for X” type of diversity. You are allowed (and encouraged) to make X as diverse as possible, but if you are not building a product that is fundamentally like an Airbnb (or alternatively, a dev tools startup), then YC will not be interested in you. For instance, if you are pitching a research lab without a specific plan to profitability (e.g. Mistral AI), then YC is not for you.

3. As a result, most YC companies look the same. While I won’t name specific companies in any of the batches, YC companies will generally:

   1. offer some sort of platform to connect two or more parties together, usually in the guise of a desktop-browser product

   2. utilize some form of AI to automate some “buy-now” pain point

   3. have low capital and infrastructure costs, with low marginal variable costs

   4. build off strong network effects for growth, with a clear path to immediate and growing revenue milestones achievable within 2-3 years

This post may come across as anti-YC, but it is far from it. YC is a good accelerator if your company neatly fits in one of the boxes. Their track record with Dropbox, Stripe, Airbnb speaks for itself. But if your startup is rejected, just remember that YC is one of many startup accelerators out there, and that depending on your space, your startup would be a better match for a different accelerator.

happy building