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zura

Regarding applying without an idea: https://fellowship.ycombinator.com/faq/#noidea

"We tried this once with YC, and it didn't work well."

Any post-mortems about this?

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Given this it is strange the conventional wisdom is ideas are cheap. Why let evidence get in the way of ideology.

Strongly believing in an idea forms the backbone of conviction.

Without conviction, the founder(s) will arguably be less motivated and thus less effective.

Or the more likely possibility that if you could not come up with a good idea in the years before entering YC you are unlikely to come up with one in a couple of months during YC.

My limited observation is there is little correlation between the quality of the idea and how hard a startup team works.

Ideas remain a multiplier on execution. This illustrates a different phenomenon we encountered: Founders with no ideas at all often fail to come up with a compelling one when prompted.

This means that ideas must be more than a multiplier - they must be a requirement of success just like execution.

It does illustrate that good ideas really are not cheap.

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