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Comment by Eumenes | Hacker News Reader

Does YC accept founders that aren't 22-26 years old in the Bay area and went to MIT, Berkeley, or Caltech? I've met quite a few in person and they fit a very specific archetype. Perhaps thats whose applying, but I do wonder.

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Yes.

Founder profiles are all public, so you can check for yourself – https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/founders

Or was this just supposed to be snarky?

Didn't know that existed. Looking through there, the answer to the question seems to be, most founders come from Top 20 Universities with heavy weighting towards Top 5.

thanks for the link, i think this is the best possible answer to the question “does yc accept $people_like_me?”. I love how open yc is about stuff like this - I just learned that 3 people from one of my UK universities were yc founders at some point! (southampton university)

I always am curious when someone asks this question from an open forum why wouldn't they simply fill out the form and get a definitive answer?

What we know for sure is they don't accept founders that don't fill out the form[1].

[1] with a few exceptions, perhaps.

Because that would give you exactly one data point, and for your decision-making, you instead want to understand the distribution

For sure, they accept Stanford grads for example, and Harvard or Princeton sometimes have a shot

> MIT, Berkeley, or Caltech

Don't forget Stanford.

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