How Does Y Combinator Vet a Founder in 10 Minutes?

Garry Tan says Y Combinator vets a founder in a 10-minute interview that ends in an up-or-down decision. The firm now gets 80, maybe 90,000 applications a year for about 800 spots, an acceptance rate under 1 percent. Maybe 8 to 10 percent of applicants get an interview, sometimes less. Paul Graham figured out that a half hour or an hour was unnecessary. Five minutes would probably do, and five minutes feels rude, so the interview stayed at 10 minutes.

The limit works like the old 140-character cap on Twitter. In the window, Tan wants a real person, a problem, and a plain account of how the technology solves it, plus why the idea is worth building. If a little time is left, he wants to know why that founder is the one to build it.

The test he uses on the process is whether Y Combinator could say yes in those 10 minutes to someone like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Drew Houston, Brian Chesky, or Brian Armstrong walking in before the success was obvious. If the answer were no, he would have to rewrite the system. He calls this almost the only question that matters for whether Y Combinator is doing well.