We've been doing pretty much the same things since we started in 2005: we've never given specific feedback about rejections at the application stage (it wasn't going to scale even when we only got a few hundred applications). We funded 8 startups in our first batch, which was roughly 2-3% of the total applications.
We definitely fund people who have no connection to folks we already know, or Silicon Valley for that matter. And we also fund startups who are at the idea stage and have no traction (though traction does help).
I'm very sorry we rejected you, but we are honestly often wrong.
thanks for the comment. YC is definitely great about being very respectful to applicants in its process and blog posts, so don't get me wrong.
I'm just wondering if there's a way for people to understand what their chances are. For example, if 0.01% of people that have lower than a 650 GMAT get into Stanford, then that would be useful information to know (for hopeful applicants).
Similarly, if the "has revenue" cohort has a 15% interview rate, and the "pre-revenue" cohort has a 0.5% interview rate, that would also be really great to know. (same thing for solo vs. multiple founders, recommended vs. non-recommended, etc).
I understand that YC has no obligation to provide this information, and perhaps there are very good reasons why it wouldn't provide it even if it was available. It would just be useful to know if possible.
The curve is far less uniform than you might imagine.
There are going to be a few companies which are obvious superstars (great team, market, execution, traction, etc.) which will be obvious yeses. You're either in this group or your not.
There are many many companies which are obviously bad: weak team, bad market, poorly thought through idea, pre-product, etc. These companies would get rejected regardless of how many companies applied.
Then you have the companies in the middle. That's where the competition is. It doesn't really matter how many companies are in the previous groups, what matters is how you rank compared to the "maybes".
ig1: your comment is very insightful -- it may be a situation where you, as an insider and experienced founder, can more clearly delineate between the categories (particularly obviously bad vs. middle) than some of us (first time founders, etc). anyways, it's a good point, thank you.
Are you expecting another +40% increase for the next batch? I have the impression that companies that would've been (just about) invited for interview last batch , may not have made the cut had they applied this batch (with there being a few actual data points to support this). Would you agree with this assessment? Do you expect the difficulty to get into YC to only increase going forward?
We definitely fund people who have no connection to folks we already know, or Silicon Valley for that matter. And we also fund startups who are at the idea stage and have no traction (though traction does help).
I'm very sorry we rejected you, but we are honestly often wrong.