Ask PG/YC: How verbose can the YC app be?

is each answer less than 120 words?

If your answers are less than 120 words that's fine.

If you're starting a company, and you can't explain it in that amount of space, you either need to try harder or you really need to consider refining your ideas.

The reason the elevator pitch is such a highly stressed aspect of start-up marketing is because investors have notoriously low attention spans from listening to pitches all day, every day.

A solid pitch that is concise at least lets them decide if they have any interest at all before going into the deeper details.

The Human Genome project can be explained in less than 120 words. I have a gut-feeling that that you aren't talking about decoding DNA.

Don't count 120 characters and stop typing. Look at it from the perspective of YC - they read a lot of applications. Get to the point and realize they won't hang onto every word (or sentence, even) you write.

pg has a deeply felt longing for brevity. Our application, which did get us to the interview, was long, as I tend to chatter on quite a bit more than strictly necessary--I feel the engineers compulsion to cover all of the caveats and interesting (to me) details--but I don't think that helped our case. You should fight the urge to chatter on.

Think about the following questions:

What are you going to build?

Why should we believe you are willing and able to build it?

Everything else is fluff...so, for every sentence you write, think, "Does this answer one of those two questions?" If not, cut it. That's pretty much what all of the questions on the application are about--they just want to hear it from multiple angles.

articulating your idea concisely (under the 120 word limit or whatever) and getting to the point quickly will be useful for yc and beyond (other investors or whomever else you need to sell.)

make it easy to parse what you're doing and why it's valuable. part of that is being focused, and brief.

I think you're fine as long as you have an average of less than 120 words. If some questions are more pertinent to your product, then you can answer longer, just try and be a little shorter on other questions.

After my first visit with a VC last week, and inline with a lot of the advice already given, the point the gentleman stressed was having a concise and tight pitch/overview document.

The verbose application/business plan can wait until the VC is actually interested in your company and requests a more detailed plan. (not to say that you should wait until the last minute to draft your BP though)

Since the application is submitted on the web, they might be reading it on the web. Ruthlessly cut text. Some tips here:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intro-text.html