Right, you want him to give you more signals about what they are looking for so you can tell them what you think they want to hear - that's the wrong approach. You should instead focus on being awesome and hope that YC recognizes how awesome you are.
The perfect application may look identical to the perfectly gamed application - but the intent is different. And it's a bit naive to think YC isn't really, really good at sniffing out that intent.
> And it's a bit naive to think YC isn't really, really good at sniffing out that intent.
At this point, YC probably has a useful amount of data. I wonder if he's thrown a Bayesian filter at it? One of the things PG noted in his "A Plan for Spam" essay, is that his Bayes filter flagged indicators that he never would have thought of. I wonder what kind of data someone could get from a corpus consisting of YC's data, plus web searches on the applicants?
The perfect application may look identical to the perfectly gamed application - but the intent is different. And it's a bit naive to think YC isn't really, really good at sniffing out that intent.