Recent YC founder here. I disagree with the premise that boring ideas are inherently bad. Stripe is a B2B company that adds an API on top of existing infrastructure. Airbnb is a basic CRUD app.

I also disagree that YC is not funding interesting ideas. Our batch had quite a few. Someone was making a rapid cargo ship. Someone else was making a fully distributed cell network.

The only real copycat ideas were the ones duplicating successful startups for international markets. In my opinion these were obviously good investments.

The social climber phenomenon was real. I think anything that becomes elite will attract them. I’d say, I was impressed that half the batch did not fit this profile.

My sense was that YC actually went out of its way to fund more interesting ideas. I’m sure my startup would not have gotten in, based on our traction and backgrounds, if our idea wasn’t out-of-the-box. (We are bottomless.com, a smart coffee subscription that uses a WiFi scale to ship at the perfect time).

I’d even venture to say that there appeared to be a negative correlation between interestingness and outcome in our batch. It’s possible YC should fund more boring companies, not fewer.