People (some people) deal very poorly with far future deadlines, where "far" ranges from "after this conversation is over" to "months from now." Middle class Americans are typically trained to be a little better at this than humans are born to, but at the end of the day you're running Well-Educated Professional 2011 on hardware designed to be minimally capable of executing SimianOS.
There's also a spectrum of, shall we say, commitment to one's application which is orthogonal to quality of the application. If I were to ever apply, that would be a Certified Big Deal for me personally, but for someone running a successful business, speaking to investors, and in the middle of hiring engineer #3, this might be just one more thing on the ToDo list. That doesn't necessarily make my business a better fit for YC than her's.
Actually, I'd bet that if there's one biggest thing that stands between me and pg giving me a big check it's my ability to set goals and meet them in a timely fashion.
Actually a surprising number of the best startups we've funded applied on a whim at the last minute. IIRC David Rusenko of Weebly applied in the last half hour without even having had time to tell his cofounders that he was.
I submitted my application a while ago, but I've updated it a few times to clarify things better as well updating it to reflect changes. What are the odds that the people reading it are going to have read one of the old versions or one of the better and newer versions? Thanks a ton.
Any version over about 3 days old would probably not have been graded. (We skim early applications, but we rarely vote on them.) Anything since then could have been.
We always get about half the applications on the last day. It's not necessarily a sign of procrastination. A lot of these people have been working on their applications; they just haven't submitted them yet.
This is definitely the case for us. We started the application process earlier but have not submitted until the last hour. We've been updating answer by answer.
That's interesting. I wonder what the trade off is between submitting a possibly imperfect application early, vs. a polished-as-possble entry on the last day.
It depends on who submitted it. We submitted early, but have made small revisions every day, aside from two large revisions in the last day or two. I guess we were not too worried about it. If it's going to work, it's going to work.
