I can also notice that almost all of them are in the public beta, whereas my project is still in development. It seems that this is also an important factor in the approvement process.
What happened with: "we also invest in ideas", "you don't need a finished product in order to be accepted".. Those days are gone :)
Startup growth is a funnel. Idea stage is at the top, and unicorn is at the bottom. The further down the funnel you invest, the more likely you are to end up with a unicorn.
YC is in the business of investing in startups that become unicorns. YC's brand, and initiatives like Startup School, have gotten them so many more qualified applications. They no longer have to invest in idea stage companies, unless they're insanely promising.
sadly it has become a business. I guess we need a new old YC.
It is, literally, a multi-billion dollar private equity firm.
One explanation I have for why it my appear the startups we fund are "far along" at demo day is that the startups moved so quickly during the batch. For example, the startup Inokyo in the current batch recently put out a video of the autonomous store they built in Mountain View: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/inokyo/ When we funded this startup 3 months ago it was for a different idea and so they quite literally started from scratch.
Startups moving fast should hopefully seem far along by demo day, irrespective of their starting point :)
A hard number would say more than that phrase :)
Can you give specific examples of startups they have funded that became unicorns? The only two that come to mind are reddit and airbnb, and both are fraught with criticisms and legal issues over their business practices. Maybe there are more, but that's still an insanely low percentage of the total startups they have funded...
It never stops being amazing to watch a team go from an idea to a profitable, fast-growing business in 3 months.
It requires a tremendous amount of trial and error, as you learn about the market, and the technology. Get data from reality as soon as you can. This requires a kind of courage... and behind it, a pragmatic ability to see how to get that information with minimal work/time, and then personal productivity and energy to get the work that is needed done quickly.
Sorry to be critical. If it's any consolation, I'm totally unqualified to be critical. And some projects do require longer deveploment (e.g. the R&D startups in this batch), maybe yours is one of them.