Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that each founder has built or achieved.

Build a one man AWS consulting company with fortune 50 clients and a standard rate of $320/hour. Shut down said company while I was fully booked and profitable to work full time on Dendron.

kvogt: Built various devices that were the first ever to crack certain kinds of high‑security safes. One can even open the "unbeatable" X‑09 lock currently in use on DoD safes. This is one of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69g_ieT3Wes jebagu: I helped to build a self‑driving car. My team finished alongside Stanford and Carnegie Mellon to finish the 2007 Grand Challenge: http://www.graymatterinc.com/. Networked my way into Founder's Fund F50, reportedly the most exclusive tech conference ever.

CanadaKaz designed Canada’s Startup Visa. Paul Graham once blogged that this policy was “the single biggest thing the government could do to increase the number of startups in the country.” Many people agreed and for nearly a decade people had tried to make it happen. CanadaKaz became interested in the file in early 2012. Less than a year later, it was the law of the land. (https://twitter.com/kenneyjason/status/336716401819652096 <- proof) (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/335632601618452484 <- Paul Graham liking CanadaKaz’s marketing campaign) DannySu wrote an app during spare time that got over 150,000 downloads and later bundled with all Huawei C8300 phones http://dannysu.com/2011/03/27/home-screen-customizer-found-on-microsoft-china/ GFlarity led the development of a system capable of simulating 20,000+ active electronic traders trading simultaneously on an electronic trading platform.

Chris Finneral - Led the design team for a 1,500 person Cambridge Ball. Themed Wizard of Oz, it contained a 500m long yellow brick road and a dilapidated Dorothee's house that people entered through and a giant 6 meter fireplace, amidst fairground rides, music stages, bars and food. David Mack - Parallel to work I am a theatre designer ‐ I've been Technical Director of England's oldest University playhouse, designed and worked internationally (America, Europe and Japan) and in some of England's most prestigious venues (Divinity Schools Oxford, V&A museum, Christie's Auction house, Windsor Castle, Great St Mary's Cambridge)

Nancy: trader who ran the Fixed Income Quantitative Strategies team at GETCO (GETCO grew from 100 to 500 people to become the premiere algorithmic trading company); world class expert in Fixed Income trading and exchanges. Jeremy: owned IndexedDB (the emerging w3c standard for storing data in a browser) within Chrome; edited the spec, worked closely with Mozilla and Microsoft on the design, and wrote most of the initial implementation in Chrome/WebKit; simultaneously started the London Chrome team.

ZT reorganized child welfare investigations in New York City. He got tons and tons of data, wrote R code to analyze it, set up ethnographic research conducted by his team, etc. He sniffed out details, wrote a report, and then helped implement the changes to a staff of 2000, and a budget in the tens of millions. Dan built Giftly, particular the proprietary stored value product, from a regulatory, legal, risk, etc, perspective.

Travis (beambot): During my PhD I designed, constructed, and/or programmed three human-scale mobile robots (EL-E, Cody, and the PR-2) and was an early contributor to the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS). I pulled off an autonomous, sensor-driven robot demo on live TV (CNN) -- a rare (and gutsy!) move in the robotics world. Fei (bebefuzz): According to power industry veterans, I was the youngest ever regional sales director in the power automation industry -- doubly impressive as a woman (rare!) in a male-dominated industry. David (dmohs): I am passionate about writing software that makes its users' lives better. At Sandia National Laboratories, I took over an ailing project to help counterintelligence personnel protect classified information. Working closely with these users, I built a new version of the existing application from scratch which was much more responsive and easier to use than anything they had seen previously. At the end of the project, the users were happier, more productive, and had become advocates for good software design.

I created the most popular online Skillshare class ever (with over 5,000 students), manufactured and sold my own brain supplement (currently generating $6,000 in revenue per month), and managed to do both while living in NYC on less than $30,000 per year.

In 2010 KMinshew worked on the national strategic plan for the introduction of the HPV Vaccine for the Government of Rwanda, including the development of a comprehensive plan for cervical cancer screening and treatment. As part of her role, she supported negotiations between the Rwandan Ministry of Health and Merck that led to a quadrupling in the amount of vaccine donated by Merck, from 500,000 doses to 2 million, and the introduction of the vaccine to Rwanda in April 2011 as the first sub-Saharan African country to offer it via the public health system. After millions of Americans lost their retirement savings in the 2008 economic downturn, ACavoulacos created the first holistic model that computed by age and income group ­ how far from retirement security each demographic segment would be on the day they retired. With that complete picture into our (dire) future, she was able to model the effects of 10 potential laws being considered by a lobby in DC, to ensure that bills presented to lawmakers would in fact have the positive impact on our country that they hoped. The best of those are currently making it through Congress. Under MMcCreery's leadership, our previous start­up PYP Media was named a Forbes' Top Website for Women and lauded for the sharp content and avid following it had earned. She was also the former Executive Editorial Editor of the Harvard Crimson.

After 7 months I went from knowing nothing about web development (started using php on GoDaddy) to building sites on a Python/Nginx/Linux stack and learning enough sysadmin skills to manage our own ec2 instances, and being offered year-long salaried positions as a developer. Over those 7 months I've helped build and manage sites that have totaled over 200K users and utilized several API's (Facebook, Twitter, Twilio, LinkedIn, Mailgun, Amazon, iTunes, and Yipit - which I built my own wrapper for and open sourced). Bonus: I also got into Wharton after a suspension for selling weed sophomore year. \n\n At 17, worked my way into a full-time paid position at Zillow where I was in charge of developing their successful marketing and social strategy through blogs/FB/Twitter/etc as well as assembling a team to start a 500+ person technology education conference for real estate agents in Seattle, garnering 20+ sponsorship deals and kickstarting similar events in the region.

Ashu: - At 16, developed an iPhone game, Helicopter (downloaded 50k times at 99c). - At 18, founded first company, DesaiData, and developed a fully functional prototype bluetooth gamepad for iOS devices. Jeremy: - At 18 founded Manifold Studios, recruited a team, raised money, and directed team towards launch of WarSquared which has been featured on the App Store. - At 19, dropped out of school (along with Ashu) to work on new game Realms at War and hired 3 full time team members.

Ethan was admitted to CS PhD programs at Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT for research on automatic software development (e.g. automatically finding bugs, fixing bugs, generating test suites). Muzzammil is a member of the core development team for GuardRails, a secure web application framework, which will be published at USENIX 2011 and presented at RubyNation. He is also the founder of Wahoobooks, a site where U.Va. students can list used textbooks.

While running the web department for a small daily newspaper, lloydarmbrust grew page-view traffic by 850% and revenue by 400%--during that process he built a web presence that won several national awards and accomplished goals that he was told would never work at a small-town newspaper. Nine months after starting his first job, jnovek had to ask his boss for a new set of responsibilities because he had replaced his entire daily routine with a collection of cron jobs and shell scripts.

Suhail participated in OpenSocial while it was bleeding edge, developed an application that got over 1 MM installs, and an opensource javascript framework used by recognized application companies such as Serious Business w/ over 300+ downloads. Tim scored in the top 1% for the PSAT/SAT and became a National Merit Scholar. ASU offered him a full scholarship, and he followed the money.

Drew - Programming since age 5; startups since age 14; 1600 on SAT; started profitable online SAT prep company in college (accoladeprep.com). For fun last summer reverse engineered the software on a number of poker sites and wrote a real-money playing poker bot (it was about break-even; see screenshot url later in the app.)

Pay particular attention to the question asking which impressive things you’ve built/achieved. it’s the first question on the application i look at.

We mentioned specific and verifiable achievements, the substance of which implied that we are determined people. You should try to avoid generalities.

Come off as intelligent, capable, impressive in some manner. Bonus points if your impressive thing isn’t the startup but shows off your uniquely advantageous characteristics. E.g. Eastern region manager of the largest personal appliance repair shop chain in the world, Ralph’s, at only 25 years old.

To me this is the most important question on the application. It’s deliberately open-ended; there’s no one type of answer we’re looking for. It could be that you did really well in school, or that you wrote a highly-regarded piece of software, or that you paid your own way through college after leaving home at 16. It’s not the type of achievement that matters so much as the magnitude. Succeeding in a startup is, in the most literal sense, extraordinary, so we’re looking for people able to do extraordinary things.

Realize the question asking about the most impressive things you’ve built or achieved is one of (possibly the) most important question on the form. Don’t answer with “This startup”, “I haven’t achieved anything impressive yet” or use it as an opportunity to show your sense of humour. We’re not looking for resume credentials here, examples of where you were determined to do something and stuck with it — regardless of the outcome — are impressive to us (since so much of what we’re looking for in founders is determination).

When answering the question about the most impressive thing you’ve achieved, it’s not necessary to “focus on things that can be useful in a startup.” In fact that’s a common mistake. If you won an Olympic gold medal and can also write hello world in Ruby, we want to hear about the former, not the latter.