Most regular blog visitors won’t have any idea what I mean when I mention YC Interview, Y Combinator, or any of the relevant advisors and partners. That’s fine. Before we entered the real estate world, we were software engineers, now more commonly called hackers. We were nerdy programmers who spent our years doing number crunching and math relevant to financial weapons of mass destruction. We thought it was all quite fascinating and thought provoking. It also more than paid the bills!
Now we have entered two very different lives. The first, the world of Manhattan real estate, is a huge mystery to almost everyone. Why does every industry veteran say that Manhattan is just “too different” to conform to real estate models in the rest of the nation? After five years in real estate, half spent in Manhattan, I’ve discovered several of the unique stumbling blocks.
We also plunged straight into the world of technical entrepreneurship, where we have been humbled for months at discovering how much we didn’t know about the startup side of hacking. We needed an effective way to fully immerse ourselves into the founder lifestyle to make up for our gaps in knowledge. Among many other great reasons, this was why we decided to participate in YC. It directly helped us start RentHop, which lets renters search for no-fee apartments.
I’ve written a quick, CSS-less brain dump of advice and thoughts on interviewing with YC.
