Here is my writeup about this experience. It has two parts in it. The first part was written right after
the interview. We were sitting in Mountain Views station and wanted to
brain dump what we feel like at that moment. The second part is written
after we got an email from PG, knowing that we were rejected.

First part

============

I was expecting more intense heated conversation with lots of cut-off.
But it wasn't. Besides PG and Trevor, the others were pretty relaxed.
80% questions coming from PG. I had the bipolar feeling in the middle of
the interview that either they've decided we're in or we've already
screwed the whole thing up.

We were expecting they asked about how we differ from pinboard.in or
twitter or any other competitors we're having in mind since that was
what came up in a prep phone call. But instead one question that
has been brought up was how is trunk.ly different from delicious?

Looking back, I think we could do a better job delivering why we're
better than delicious. I got side-tracked explaining why implicit was
important and when I tried to explain why search can do a better job
than tagging. Why remembering which tag you were using was such a big
headache and content discovery by related tags didn't really work, ...
I was cut off without being able to finish.

It's quite useful to see that how these group of people think of
delicious. Delicious has done such a fantastic job associating itself with
the problem "find my links" that the "tagging" concept has become the
"only" solution to the problem. I believe we're a
better solution for the same problem, but a different one. We shouldn't
spend time talking about how "implicit" we want to be, not that it's not
important, but that the key message should be "tagging is dying. search
will replace it. " It was a bit sad to hear the "how you're different
from delicious" from Trevor at the end of it, meaning we haven't
"get the idea through".

A couple of highlights are 1) the growth chart; 2) user testimonial;
3) demo using YC alumni for topics the group are interested in.

Tim has done a fantastic job charting out the growth chart, monthly
growth which is showing a clear increase and the retention rate, which
is pretty stable at 30%. Those three pieces of papers were passed and
looked at by everyone in the meeting. PG even stood up, holding the
paper up. Tim said there was someone videoing the whole thing but I
didn't notice that.

We were asked what our users thought of us. Tim handed out the print-out
with twitter messages about trunk.ly on it. PG took that paper and had a
quick read, which was good. While Tim was talking, I notice Robert was
looking at the other page of testimonials. Not sure whether he wanted to
read it or he was just bored. We also talked about 3% of our users uses
the API and roughly 10 developers are writing software using our API.
Tim saw some spark in someone's eyes by then.

At roughly 3 minutes into the interview. PG raised the question, "what
does social mean". I can feel the word became too fuzzy and abstract for
him. So I proposed we gave a demo of the site. Tim has created a YCDemo
account on trunk.ly, following all YC alumnis so that any search using
"from:friends" are going to show interesting links the alumni were
talking about. We showed anybots, smtp and founders at work. I wasn't
quite sure how it goes by watching the facial expressions. However, the
question about "what do you mean by social" never came up again. I feel
really grateful that Tim spent so much time preparing a demo. It was
just hard to describe something in word.

Thinking back, now I can see that they were trying to figure out what's
special about your service? PG and Harj have already heard about Rand
Fishkin from SEOMoz is a big evanglist. So at one stage PG raised the
question why Rand likes this so much. Tim's question was great: Rand is
the link guy and he has many moments when he needs to recall a link.
So I think it's a sure thing that we definitely describe the need right.
Both PG and Trevor said they have the same needs.

At the very end of it, PG raised the question "what's your business
model? why can't you guys just like pinboard.in, charge for usage?".
I explained the benefit of why having network effect is crucial if we
want to move on with the "social search" direction: "10M users will
surely make the search result a lot different/better. " But PG's answer
was: "Once you got 10M users, you don't need to worry about business
model anymore.

Second part

===============

Around 7:15, Tim and I came back from supermarket. There was one email
from PG waiting for us. Hope it's ok for me to paste the email here.

<quote>
I'm sorry to say we decided not to fund you guys. It was a difficult
choice because you seem like smart guys and we were impressed with
the progress you'd made so far. Ultimately what deterred us was
that we just couldn't figure out a way to make money from it-- at
least on the scale a startup requires.
</quote>

We have high respect to YC people. So my first reaction when we
saw this email was "Let's focus on getting some basic numbers worked
out. It's at least a good way to remind us besides user acquisition, we
want to get the business model sorted out. " Having said that, I am
still not sure on whether the decision was "made" on what understanding
of the service. Would it be because delicious has no business model and
we failed to figure one out? Would the result be different if we get the
message across? Or maybe the message did get delivered?

That's it. Sad we didn't get in but it's just another bump we need to get
over.