jungziege

We've been preparing for our YC interview pretty solidly for the past couple weeks now. And during our research (talking to alums, digging up old HN posts, reading PGs essays) we found about 34 different questions that you basically need to have the answer to. This list has been a great way for us to prepare, and organize our thoughts, so we figured we'd pass it along to the HN community. For those of you who are also interviewing this weekend, good luck!

There may be repeats in here. And maybe a few variations on the same thing.

(1) How do you know that people want what you’re building? (2) Are you sure people want this? (3) How do they solve the problem now? (4) What are all known existing solutions and what is wrong with them specifically? (5) Why isn’t someone doing this already? (6) What’s different about what you’re doing? (7) What is current IP in your field? (8) How to displace existing competitors? (9) What are some key things that your competitors don’t understand? (10) What resistance will you have? How will you overcome that? (11) Six months from now what is your biggest problem? (12) Is what you are doing viable? Why? (13) Is your market large enough? (14) Is your market capable of sustaining a new entrant? (15) Where can you expand into? (16) Why should people give a shit? (17) What are you going to build first? (18) What do you have? How does it work? (19) Have you engaged customers/users? How? (20) How will you get customers/users? (21) What do customers want? (22) Who is your first customer? (23) Why are you the right team? (24) Why do you need all of the people on your team? (25) Why are you doing this? (26) Why will you succeed? (27) How are you going to do this? (28) How will you approach trouble spots? (29) What are your known obstacles? (30) How will you find answers to questions you don’t know? (31) What do you not know yet? (32) What have you learned so far from working on your project? (33) How do you traverse in the idea space? (34) What are your other idea’s?

I got a ticket for Google IO this year, but now that they're offering most of the talks online I'm considering selling it. I don't really care about the Google swag they typically hand out, and I don't really have enough web/android dev experience anyways (I do mostly iOS and ML). Is the atmosphere and networking at Google IO enough to warrant going? Are there other benefits besides just the conference talks? Can anyone who's been before talk about the experience?