you are welcome YC ArenaWhich is not a top secret battle club for Y Combinator founders, but a suit of sports that gives you a vague understanding that it likes to be a partner in the YC.
created by a student In Berlin, YC Arena YC Partner Simulator The game shows you a publicly available pitch video from a company that applies to YC, as well as with the year of their application. You click on “Accept” or “Details”, and then find out if you have made the same option as YC.
It is very difficult to look. YC is expected to accept About 1% applicantAnd at a certain point, some fate is really necessary to capture a partner’s eye – maybe your pitch is the first that a partner saw a very rejuvenating coffee break, or maybe there is a final video on your company list and everyone is tired.
“Many rejected founders later built incredibly successful companies,” read a note at the beginning of the game. “Rejection means nothing – even the most successful founders were rejected several times.”
The YC Arena has other games that ask you to match its logo in the name of the company, or guess what year a company has done to YC based on its details (Spoiler Alert: There is too much AI in recent years). But the YC Partner Simulator game is the most interesting because it faces us the processes of making our decisions.
As a technical journalist, I felt that I would be great in the YC Partner Simulator. I may not be an investor, but I know what it is through an inbox filled with startup pitches and to choose which is my curiosity – I have stepped on the floor of the Techcrunch Disrupt’s Startup Batalfield 200 Expo, with companies to identify companies to interview and write. But this game is difficult. After all, we are working within various parameters, as a company’s renovation is not bound by its ability to turn on the profit directly.
(For example: As I wrote this, I have an AI pet sitting in my lap that I am planning to review. Will I invest on the condition that Casio will stop a profit to make investment. A luxurious furby that retails for $ 430Do I hope an article about my life with AI pet will be interesting for readers? Yes.)
Techcrunch event
San francisco
,
27-29 October, 2025
If anything, the game shows how subjective these processes can be. But when I read YC co-founder Paul Graham application GuideMy guesses started getting more accurate.
Graham wrote, “You have to be exceptionally clear and brief.” “Whatever you have to say, give us the right, simplest possible words in the first sentence.” (For records, this advice also applies to email journalists.)
I played the game again, but this time, I paid less attention to what the company was pitching and pay more attention to how soon they can tell what their company does. Of course, I would not recommend this strategy to evaluate a startup in real life (Hot Tech: You care about what a company does!) But for the purposes of the game, for the purposes of the game, I finished choosing the fate of a company more accurately.
This is probably not a coincidence. When OpenEAI founder and CEO Sam Altman was the President of YC, he commented in an interview that the incubator bus spent the bus 10 minutes Reviewing each company’s application to make decisions.
“It turns out that in 10 minutes, if you are trying to answer only one question, ‘Does this person have the ability to be the next mark Zuckerberg?” … You can answer that question in 10 minutes, “Altman said in 2016.” 100 percent not with accuracy, obviously, but quite good that our business model works. ,
