Welcome to Yc arenaIt is not a better secret fighting club for the Yombinator founders, but it is a set of games that give you a mysterious feeling of what looks like you are a partner in YC.
Created by student In Berlin, YC Arena’s YC Partner Simulator The game shows you a video clip available to the audience from a company that applied to YC, along with its request. You can click “Accept” or “Rejection”, then know if you have taken the same option as YC.

It is much more difficult than it seems. YC is estimated About 1 % of the applicantsAnd at a certain stage, some luck must really draw the partner’s attention – the stadium may be the first to see a partner after the coffee break that renews its youth, or perhaps your company is the last video clip in the list, and everyone is tired.
“Many founders continued to build incredibly successful companies after that,” says a note at the beginning of the game. “Rejection does not mean anything – even the most successful founders who have been rejected several times.”
YC Arena has other games that require you to match the company’s name with its logo, or guess the year in which YC has described (Spoiler Alert: There is a lot of artificial intelligence in recent years). But the YC Partner simulation game is the most interesting because it makes us face our decision -making processes.
As a technical journalist, I thought I would be good in simulating YC Partner. I may not be an investor, but I know what is like searching in a box full of startups and select any of them Battlefield 200 Expo With the task of identifying and writing companies for the interview. But this game is difficult. After all, we are working within different criteria, because the voters ’merit in the company is not directly related to its ability to make a profit.
(For example: When I write this, there is an Amnesty International pet sitting in my bosom that I plan to review. Fourby Majeed sells for $ 430? no. Do I expect an article about my life with a pet of artificial intelligence interesting to readers? Yes.)
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If anything, the game shows the extent of my own process. But after I read the co -founder of YC Paul Graham Application guideI started to guess becoming more accurate.
“You should be exceptionally clear and summarized,” Graham wrote. “All you have to say is, give us the right to the first sentence, with the simplest possible conditions.” (For the record, this advice also applies to sending an email to journalists.)
I played the game again, but this time, I paid less attention to what the company was advising and more attention to the speed of their transfer of what their company is doing. Of course, I do not recommend this strategy to evaluate a start -up company in real life (you must care about what the company does!), But for the purposes of the game, I ended up choosing the company’s fate more accurately.
Perhaps this is not a coincidence. When the founder of Openai and CEO of SAM Altman was the head of YC, he noticed in an interview that the incubator only spent 10 minutes Review the request of each company to make a decision.
“It turns out that within 10 minutes, if the only question you are trying to answer is,” Does this person have the ability to be the next Mark Zuckerberg? Altman said in 2016: “You cannot answer this question in 10 minutes.” It is not 100 percent accurate, but good enough because our business model works. “
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