Fact-checked on 3 Nov 2026 against the public Y Combinator and Techstars interview guides listed in Sources.
TLDR
- Tracy AI Interviewer can give every founder a first call the moment they click the link, with follow-ups that depend on each answer, so partners read the recording and transcript before choosing whom to meet.
- The 16 questions come with the follow-up a partner would ask. Pick five or six (our rule of thumb, not a published rule) and keep the follow-up beside each.
A form tells you how well a founder writes about the company. It cannot ask the second question, and the second question is where the founder's story and ambition come out. This guide gives you questions for a first call with a founder, the follow-up to ask after each, and what a strong answer sounds like.
It leans on two public sources: Y Combinator's interview guide and two Techstars articles, one on the first interview and one on the application and interview process. Where a question or a follow-up comes from one of them, the table says so, and "based on" marks a Techstars question we reworded. Follow-ups without a label and the strong-answer notes are ours.
What must a first call with a founder find out?
A first call has one job: to help you decide whom to spend a longer conversation on. A Techstars managing director describes the first interview as "not a gotcha interview", and says it is trying to understand the company "well enough to write a strong investment memo". That is a useful test for your own first call. When it ends, could you write four honest lines about this team?
The two public guides agree on the ground to cover, even though the formats differ.
| Y Combinator | Techstars | |
|---|---|---|
| Format, as the guide describes it | 10-minute conversations over Zoom, with 2 to 3 partners who have read the application | First-interview advice, with answers that should mostly take under 90 seconds |
| Opening question | "What is your company working on?" | Four areas to be ready for: customer and pain, speed and execution, market size, differentiation |
| What it listens for | Users and metrics, honest discussion of obstacles, knowledge of existing products | A concrete customer, what was built and skipped, a bottoms-up market, what is hard to copy |
Both ask the founder to be specific. YC says there is no time for formal presentations, that interview preparation beyond the basics is not useful and is often counter-productive, and that the best edge is progress between the application and the interview. Techstars asks for clear, concrete answers, and its application-process article tells founders to practise their introduction and rehearse answers, so the two differ on preparation.
How to use these questions
- Pick five or six (our rule of thumb), covering the four groups below.
- Ask the opening question and wait for the full answer.
- Ask the follow-up that fits what they said, not the one on the page if the answer has already covered it.
- Write what you learned in the founder's words. Quotes beat adjectives.
- Score nothing until the call is over.
Keep the opening questions the same for every founder so you can compare. A 2022 re-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Sackett and colleagues) found structured interviews to be the top-ranked selection procedure for predicting job performance. The authors also report that most of the procedures that ranked high in earlier summaries remain high in rank, with mean validity estimates reduced by .10 to .20 points. That research is about hiring and interviews run by people, so read it as a case for structure, not as a result for founder selection. Let the follow-up be where the conversation adapts.
Questions on the problem and the customer
| Opening question | Follow-up | A strong answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| 1. What is your company working on? (YC) | Say that again as if I were outside your field. | Two or three plain sentences with one detail only someone in the field would know. |
| 2. Who is the customer, specifically, and what hurts? (based on Techstars) | Who did you talk to, and what did one of them say that surprised you? (based on Techstars) | Names a real person or segment, quotes them and says what they do today. |
| 3. How are people solving this today, and what is wrong with that? (YC, Techstars) | Why has the best of those not fixed it? | A specific limit of the current tools. "Ours is easier to use" is not an answer; YC says founders should be able to explain how. |
| 4. What have you learned since you started? (based on Techstars) | What did you change because of it? | A belief they held and dropped, with what made them drop it. |
Questions on the team
| Opening question | Follow-up | A strong answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| 5. Tell me about each member of your team and how they contribute. (based on Techstars) | How long have you worked together before this? (based on Techstars) | Concrete shared work, not just a shared job title. |
| 6. Tell us about a conflict within the team that you have resolved. (based on Techstars) | What would you do differently now? | A real disagreement, how it was settled and what each person owned in it. |
| 7. If I gave you $200K in cash to spend on hiring, who would you hire? (based on Techstars) | Why that role before the others? | Names a gap in the team honestly and has thought about the order. |
| 8. How did you decide who is the CEO? (based on Techstars) | What happens if that turns out to be the wrong call? | Calm, specific, with a decision rule and no defensiveness. |
Techstars says it wants to see "evidence of the team working well together". YC says it prefers that each founder answers at least one question, so you get to know all of them. On a call with two founders, direct a question at the quieter one.
Questions on traction and speed
| Opening question | Follow-up | A strong answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| 9. What did you build first, and what did you skip? (based on Techstars) | What changed because you shipped it fast? (based on Techstars) | A deliberate cut, and a change in what they believed after real use. |
| 10. Where do new users come from, and how fast is growth? (YC) | Which number here would you least like us to check? | Has metrics written down, gives the weak one without being pushed. YC says it may ask for verification of numbers stated in the interview. |
| 11. What is your most important KPI this week? (based on Techstars) | What will you do if it does not move? | One metric, a reason it is the right one, and a next step. |
| 12. Where are you seeing real pull? (based on Techstars) | How do you know it is pull and not your own effort? | Customers returning or asking, with an example. |
Questions on obstacles and ambition
| Opening question | Follow-up | A strong answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| 13. What is the hardest part of the business you are building? (based on Techstars) | If this were to fail, what is the most likely reason? (based on Techstars) | A candid, specific risk. YC says it is "more convinced by candid discussion of difficulties than glib dismissal of them". |
| 14. How big can this get, bottoms up? (based on Techstars) | Which assumption in that estimate worries you most? | Starts from customers and prices, not "1% of a huge market". |
| 15. What is hard to copy? (based on Techstars) | What would a better-funded team need to catch up? (based on Techstars) | A real advantage such as data, access or speed, and honesty about its limit. |
| 16. What do you want from us? (Techstars asks about the ideal outcome) | What have you done already to find out whether we can give it? | A specific ask tied to the programme, with signs they researched it. |
Question 13 is the one to protect when time is short. A founder who can describe how the company might fail, in detail, has usually thought hard about how to make it work.
What does a follow-up chain look like?
This is an example we wrote, not a transcript of a real call. It starts from question 2.
Interviewer: Who is the customer, specifically, and what hurts?
Founder: Mid-size logistics companies. Their dispatch process is manual and slow.
Interviewer: Who did you talk to at one of them?
Founder: A dispatch manager at a regional carrier. She told me they plan routes in a spreadsheet each morning and rebuild it when a driver calls in sick.
Interviewer: What does a bad morning cost them?
Founder: She guessed about two hours of the manager's time and a late delivery or two. I haven't measured it myself yet.
Interviewer: What would you need to see to believe that number?
Founder: The same morning logged for a week at three carriers. We have one pilot starting that does it.
The first answer is general. The second names a person. The fourth is the one to write down: the founder says what they have not measured and what would settle it.
Strong and weak answers side by side
Another example written by us, for question 13.
| Weak answer | Strong answer | |
|---|---|---|
| First answer | "Honestly, nothing is that hard. We have a great team." | "Getting carriers to change a habit. They have used spreadsheets for ten years." |
| After "What is the most likely reason this fails?" | "I don't see it failing." | "That the first five pilots like it and none pay. We are testing price in the second month for that reason." |
The weak founder may be just as capable. The call has not shown it, and a form never would.
How do you run this call with every founder?
Partner time limits how many founders get this call. Techstars says thousands of companies apply to it, and with an intake that large a programme cannot call everyone and has to judge the rest on the form.
Tracy AI Interviewer can run the first conversation with everyone (see what an AI interviewer is if the term is new, or AI interview software compared). It runs two-way video interviews, and each founder starts their own when they click the link: any hour, a browser with nothing to install, no calendar.
- Every applicant, not a shortlist. The first call stops being a privilege of the founders who looked best on the form.
- Follow-ups that wait. Tracy asks follow-ups on what the founder actually said and waits for the end of a thought, so a founder thinking through a hard question is not cut off.
- Your questions. Questions are generated from a description and can be edited or replaced, so the 16 above fit as written. If founders attach a CV, Tracy can read it and tailor questions to it when CV check is on.
Your partners get the recording of both sides with a transcript anchored to it by timestamp, a written assessment per question with the reasoning behind it, and integrity signals with the evidence, for a person to review. A signal is not a verdict. People are told about the recording before it starts. Tracy does not reject anyone: a person reviews the evidence and decides. That fits the first call's job: pick whom to meet. See our accelerator interview guide for the programme side, AI interviews for applications for how a programme gives every applicant a first interview, and AI interview reports for what a reviewer should expect to see.
Tracy also connects through an API and an MCP server, so a programme can create and read interviews from the tools it already uses, and enterprise teams can ask for a customised setup. AI interview cost compares published prices across tools.
When to pick a partner call instead
- When the relationship is the product. YC points out that the people in the interview "are likely the same people you'll work closely with should you be accepted". Chemistry and trust are judged across a table, by the people who will sit there.
- When the intake is small. If you see thirty founders, call all thirty yourself. The time saved by an AI first round matters when the intake is in the thousands. Our guide to screening when there are too many applicants covers the options when volume is high.
- For a founder who has not agreed to be recorded. Tracy is not for talking to someone who has not agreed to be recorded.
Tracy fits the stage before those calls: the first conversation with every applicant, so partner hours go to the founders who were worth hearing. It does not replace the call that decides.
Questions
What should you ask founders in a first call?
How long should a first founder interview be?
How do you tell a strong founder answer from a rehearsed one?
Should every founder who applies get a first call?
Can an AI interviewer ask founder interview questions?
Try it free with the questions above, or book a demo.
Sources
All sources retrieved 3 Nov 2026.
- Y Combinator, YC Interview Guide: interview format, first question, metrics, obstacles, existing products, verification of numbers.
- Techstars, How To Prepare for Your First Techstars Interview, 22 Jan 2026: four areas, answer length, not a gotcha interview.
- Techstars, Inside a Techstars Accelerator: The Application & Interview Process, 12 Jan 2026: sample questions on team, hiring, failure, market and KPIs.
- Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens, Journal of Applied Psychology, Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection, 2022: structured interviews as the top-ranked selection procedure.
- Tracy AI Interviewer, product page: two-way video interview, questions from a description or your own, CV check, follow-ups, recording notice, recording and transcript timed to it, an assessment per question, integrity signals, API and MCP.
- Tracy AI Interviewer, home page: a person reviews the evidence and decides; integrity signals with their evidence.
- Tracy AI Interviewer, pricing: API and MCP connections and a customised setup for Enterprise.
- Tracy AI Interviewer, Connect page: MCP server and API connection to the tools a team already uses.