So, it turns out Paul Graham was right: the problem with going through tough times is not that they directly spell failure, but that they rob the momentum you have, which in turn leads to stalls and ultimately to failure. Within minutes of hearing about our rejection, I was so turned off by our project that I just picked up something else to work on, something I could still believe in. Call me fragile.

But let’s rewind a bit.

My partner Andres and I arrived in Silicon Valley on the evening of Friday the 25th with weighty backpacks and weightier dreams. A few weeks prior, we’d been notified of our opportunity to interview with Y Combinator, a seed capital firm that spends half of its time in Mountain View, CA and the other half in Cambridge, MA. The stake was about $15,000 in capital and three months of close supervision and mentorship in Cambridge.

The embodiment of our idea is unimportant; what counts is that we broke almost every rule in the book. And if there’s one take-away from this brief retrospective, it is this: breaking more than a few rules will get you sour looks that intimate your ultimate rejection, a rejection that arrives in a courteous but firm e-mail, because you no longer merit a phone call.

So here’s the laundry list of everything you can do to suck at YC. It’s a long one.

1) Include local news in your pitch.
2) Also include (as your alternate) an idea in which you are tangentially interested.
2a) Bonus points if it includes a solution for the suckiness of online dating.
3) Spend at least 80% of your interview waffling between talking about your erstwhile-maybe interesting alternate idea and vehemently defending your flagrantly-sucky primary idea.
4) Find a way to be invited back just before lunch on the next day of interviews, by temporarily exciting yourself just enough to make wild promises about solving world hunger, er, online dating (priceless PG quote: “What has greater social impact than online dating?!”).
4a) Bonus points if you’re too dense to realize this is a chance to redeem yourself for your primary (i.e., crappy) idea.
5) Immediately convince yourself that your alternate idea is the one that’s crappy (hint: it is too).
6) Spend the rest of the day and the next morning trying to figure out how to respond to the hostility toward your original idea, the one that’s so blindingly awesome.
6a) Bonus points for hacking together an Ajaxy demo that shows little more than your month-old mockups.
6b) Double bonus for spending 90% of your time slicing the mockup into CSS+XHTML instead of actually working on functionality.
7) Attempt to steamroll your half-baked demo and second-(make that third-) guessed original idea to the glassy and incredulous stares in the room.
8 ) Let your stress go and spend a day in Chinatown and at the Golden Gate Bridge (No, wait. On second thought, that was the right thing to do).
9) Wait by the phone thinking someone still cares.
10) Check your e-mail for the inevitable e-mail explaining why you rock as an individual but really suck at taking suggestions.
11) Cry into pillow. Wake up bleary-eyed with no greater appreciation for life as you read the Twitter feeds of the victorious.
12) Write sad diatribe to submit to the community for ridicule.

TODO: Five months from now, rinse and repeat.