When YC actually interviews you, after the deadline
Founders waiting on a Y Combinator decision mostly want to know one thing: when does the email come, and is silence bad news? This plots every interview invite and completed interview that founders reported publicly on Reddit, across all nine batches since YC moved to four batches a year. Day 0 is the application deadline.
⚠ Read this first — unofficial, unverified data
This is not official Y Combinator data and has no connection to YC. Every point is a stranger's self-report on Reddit, taken at face value. Nobody's identity, application, or outcome was verified — and at least one claim here was called fake by other users. Treat it as anecdote at scale, not as a dataset.
It also can't tell you your odds. People who get invites post about it far more than people who don't, so this shows when invites tend to land, never how likely one is. Moderators delete interview announcements and YC asks founders not to share, so the real number of invites is much higher than what's plotted. Use it for rough expectations, not for planning — and never read silence as a rejection.
Median inviteDay +8142 invites across the 8 completed batches, spanning day −26 to +31.
Median interviewDay +11126 interviews, spanning day 0 to +33. Usually 2–4 days after the invite.
Invites before the deadline9 of 151Rolling review does fire early — the earliest was 26 days before the deadline.
Inviting to the wire6 of 8 batchesA final wave lands within 3 days of YC's own “hear back by” date.
Interview invite received Interview actually held Second-hand report YC's “hear back by” date Hasn't happened yet
View all 293 reports as a table
Batch
Event
Day
Date
What was posted
How to read this, and how it was made
What a dot means
Each dot is one founder's post. It sits on the day the event happened — not the day it was posted. When someone wrote “we just finished ours 4h back” at 2 a.m., or “interview invite for 20th Nov”, or “interviewed 12 hours back”, that wording was resolved to a calendar date. Blue dots are invites arriving; orange dots are interviews taking place. Hollow dots are second-hand (“my friend got one”). The short vertical bar in each lane is the date YC told that batch it would hear back by.
Where the data came from
The nine official batch megathreads on r/ycombinator, pulled from a public Reddit archive: 12,811 comments, versus the ~3,600 the live site shows before it collapses reply chains. Nine AI agents each read one thread end to end and extracted every credible report, which is why short but decisive lines like “Anyone still hasn't heard back from yesterday's interview?” are included — a keyword search would miss them.
What was deliberately left out
Reports about a different batch (“last time I got an interview”)
Other accelerators — PearX, Afore, Techstars, Antler and Speedrun invites were all discarded
Interview simulators and practice tools, which are widely discussed in these threads
Questions, speculation and hope (“anyone got one yet?”, “now I just need the invite”)
What it suggests
Invites start fast and never stop. The bulk lands in the first two weeks, but in six of eight completed batches a fresh wave arrived within three days of YC's own reply deadline. An empty inbox at day +20 has repeatedly turned into an invite.
Notice is short. Invite to interview is typically 2–4 days, sometimes hours — one founder got the invite at 9 a.m. Sunday and interviewed Monday afternoon.
Rolling review is real. Nine invites landed before the deadline, the earliest 26 days early.
Decisions come fast. Many founders reported an answer the same evening as the interview; several described a second call days later.
Known limits
Self-reported and unverified; a few entries were disputed as fake by other users
Heavily under-counted — deleted announcements are a recurring theme in every thread
Day-level accuracy only; timestamps are UTC and some dates are estimates from vague phrasing (“last week”)
Fall 2026 is still in progress, so its later days are empty simply because they haven't happened. It is excluded from the medians above.