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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there's some limit on the size we can grow to, but so far we haven't hit a bottleneck we couldn't overcome.

Advising startups turns out to be pretty parallelizable. We can easily handle 20 startups per partner, so with 6 partners working full time advising startups, we currently have 50% more capacity than we need.

If I had to guess where we'll hit a limit that's hard to beat, it might be when the number of partners gets too large to communicate easily. E.g. with 20 partners things might get unwieldy.

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Sorry PG, I have to really question you on this.

Education, mentoring, and team building all happen better in smaller environments. Things like class size, team size, and time spent matter. Maybe what you mean is the actual time spent with each participant is still the same per investment as it was with smaller classes (i.e. you're all putting in more time than you used to) but somehow I really doubt this. I'm also sure that certain partners have certain strengths weaknesses that benefit in different areas and not having as many partners advising different startups would be less value.

That said, I'm sure Ycombinator's value is still great compared to other incubators, I just don't really feel like the statement "we're scaling just fine" on a squishy, hard to scale item like "advising" to pass the sniff test.

As an anecdote, I went through YC twice: once in 2009 with 30 companies and again in the last batch with 65 companies. I was skeptical at first as well, but if anything, the value my company got out of advising in the last batch was greater than the first time around. We could still meet with PG whenever we really needed him specifically, and the partners are really just as useful as PG in most cases. In many, they're better - being able to rap with Justin Kan about PR or Garry Tan about design is gold.

The one noticeable weakness is the decreasing familiarity between founders in the batch. My first time through, all the founders knew each other by name. This second time, there were other founders I still had trouble recognizing in the bathroom line at demo day. That's not necessarily as bad as it might sound - niches formed that grew close, and the camaraderie of this last batch was much better than in 2009. I don't really know why that is - just a more gregarious bunch in general, I think.

Advising is anything but squishy. Our performance is measured almost immediately by how well the companies do on Demo Day, and again over the next year or so in how fast they can grow.

If we started to get worse at what we do, we'd know within a couple months.

I suspect that the quality of the advice which YC can bring to bear on a given problem has improved more quickly through experience and contacts than the effects of larger class size has degraded the availability of any particular partner.

It would make sense if YC has added partners with strengths which fill the gaps in the existing partners expertise. To put it another way, PG is the public face of YC, but it has been shaped by JL from the beginning, too.

http://ycombinator.com/start.html

Even if that were the limit, and assuming 20 startups per partner, the idea of launching 400 startups every six months of ever-increasing quality and with ever-increasing network effects feels like a phase change.

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