I was very thrown off by the YC interview during Summer 07. The unfortunate side effect of the 10 minutes is you end up answering YC questions the whole time and not only delivering your vision for the application. So the whole interview either becomes a test of how well you can perform interview acrobatics or how close YC's questions and first impressions are to what you want to tell them.
>how close YC's questions and first impressions are to what you want to tell them.
This really upset me at the time... We spent a lot of time answering the question "We're going to compare you to yahoo.com" and were rejected because they didn't see how we solved the essential design problem of our product.
Yeah we never really had a chance to explain how we planned to solve the problem. They just compared us to Yahoo, yet we were completely different than yahoo or anything yahoo was trying to do. They seemed to think that we were just doing another portal with a more user friendly interface, and said that why would anyone switch from yahoo to us. It's unfortunate that we couldn't explain the real vision.
