I love the constant flex of their tiny acceptance rate. "We only accept 1% of applicants. Btw everyone should apply!"
The collective man hours wasted on appe every year for what is essentially a lottery is insane.
The collective man hours wasted on appe every year for what is essentially a lottery is insane.
Rejection isn't hard either. If you're a founder, you'll be rejected by VCs all the time, and many early stage investors offer far lower amounts and far worse advice. You'll be rejected by your product - MVPs often have to be reworked and pivoted. And then you'll face some more rejection when doing sales and product interviews.
I think it's important to be transparent about the rate though, but also important to make it clear that the low rate doesn't mean they're trying to push people away.
It's not really a lottery, more like a messy matching algorithm for supply and demand. They give everyone a shot since they look at everything, but getting in is not evenly distributed :)
My guess would be: 90% of applicants are foreigners, maybe a fair bit of spam.
The rest 10% are domestic, and of those that were chosen, there's a lot of Stanford alma mater.
I've seen this mindset among people promoting open positions at desirable companies that don't hire often. In most cases, applying is a waste of time because the company already made its decision to fill the position with an internal candidate.
My only complaint is that keeping everyone hanging on until May 29, ready to clear our plates in June, and then giving absolutely zero feedback for the rejection, was the sort of blatantly self-interested and founder-unfriendly move that, I suppose, it’s good to remember happens a lot in VC Land.
e.g. Entrepreneur First ( especially their EU and UK offering), Founders Factory, Haatch, Seqouia Surge, ...
AI Grant investment is probably going to give you way better access and actual tangible assistance:
There are others but these are the things that really stood out. We will go directly to investors too, hopefully someone in our network sees the potential and is willing to throw us some pre-seed to get it started.
I don't think the YC Standard Deal is bad, and I might try again next time, but there are things about the program that I think are not worth the time/money, and I'm not at all sure "access to their network" is any better than (even as good as) the same access from a different set of VCs.