I totally agree with you. I think it's also a matter of 'stars align', maybe our application at the time (around the data engineering space) resonated with the specific partners who looked at the application, and it could have been different with other partners.

I also want to emphasize that there are: - Incredible companies that got rejected from YC (and even if it must have felt crushing at the time, in hindsight, they saved the 7% of equity that YC would have taken) - Incredible founders who had to apply several times: the founders of Algolia did - Incredible founders who got in but then shut down

So it's not an end in itself. When we got in, we thought we 'had made it', in reality, we pivoted after the batch, and this step definitely failed like a failure at the time.