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Comment by mattcantstop | Hacker News Reader

There is a part in the Netflix culture doc where it talks about how sometimes people do bad things, and Netflix tries to not overcorrect by implementing burdensome policies on the company as a knee-jerk reaction to a single bad actor.

The conclusion (YC's brand has been tarnished because of the lower quality companies in their larger batches who do bad things) doesn't follow from the evidence of this ONE company doing something that people could view as a low integrity move.

This exact situation could have occurred even if they kept their acceptance rates, and cohorts, incredibly small. There can always be bad actors (not saying this company is a bad actor though). I think you wanted to share your conclusion, even if the available evidence didn't necessarily support your claim.

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I think the bigger issue is that the main signal to YC (and other elite institutions) is the acceptance rate (<1%). That's probably the #1 thing people know about YC. A lot of people try to get in, and few do.

The main criticism I have of YC is their constants chants of "everyone should apply!". Here is what you commonly hear:

YC: You should apply to YC!

Person: But I don’t have a product

YC: You should still apply, we let in a lot of people with just an idea!

Person: But I don’t have a co-founder

YC: You should still apply, successful solo founders have made it into the program!

Person: But I [perfectly valid reason not to waste your time]

YC: You should still apply!

Person: Wow, you’re being very encouraging, does this means I have a chance to get in?

YC: Almost certainly not!

At a certain point, I can't really take the org's mission in good faith with this kind of messaging. They want a high application rate, a low acceptance rate (even with bigger batch sizes). Just infinite optionality and founders being strung along.

I wrote more about it in a blog post

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/dont-play-status-games

The reason they want you to apply is twofold -- the application itself is a good exercise in getting you to think about things you should be thinking about. Honestly even if you have no intention at all of applying to YC you should still fill out the application for yourself, it makes you think about important things.

And the second reason is that they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them. If every startup in the world applied and they could choose, of course that would be better.

It has nothing to do with "juicing the numbers".

> If every startup in the world applied and they could choose, of course that would be better.

Would it? With numbers that large, how could anyone possibly do a meaningful comparison and pick out the twenty or thirty or fifty that would get in?

In other words, if it's obvious to everybody that you are getting too many applications to meaningfully evaluate all of them, they everybody knows that you are not meaningfully evaluating all of them. You're applying some kind of mindless algorithmic filter to narrow down the possibilities. But that's not YC's brand. YC's brand is providing meaningful evaluation of startups. Once that brand is undermined, it's gone.

This is true of all top universities too. We get so many applications for grad school that we could admit several classes and not lose any quality.

But I would never discourage anyone from applying. Even if the quality is high, having many applicants gives you good 2nd order choices. This depends on what mix of things you care about from DEI, to looking at specific ideas like the YC calls, to hedging across different markets, to building a portfolio that balances short term wins vs. long term hard tech, maybe some fraction you optimize for publicity, or legacies, etc.

So yes, encouraging applications is the smart move even if by your primary metric you can't distinguish between the top folks anymore.

> encouraging applications is the smart move

Only if you can actually do the due diligence required to maintain the quality of the student body, which is what you say the objective is. But if the number of applications is large enough, it's simply not feasible to do that due diligence for every application, and no amount of spin will prevent people from realizing that. So no, I don't agree that it's always the smart move to encourage more applicants.

> even if by your primary metric you can't distinguish between the top folks anymore

It's not a matter of distinguishing between "the top folks". It's a matter of whether or not you can plausibly defend the position that you are taking enough of an in depth look at every applicant, not just "the top folks", to maintain your quality metrics.

I'm convinced those that say "I think its a good exercise filling out an application" have never actually read the application

Here are a few questions:

"How far along are you?"

"What tech stack are you using, or planning to use, to build this product?"

"Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?"

"Who are your competitors? What do you understand about your business that they don't?"

"How do or will you make money? How much could you make?"

It's really not that deep or thought provoking. Its fine, you should have answers for these questions, but its hardly worth a founders time going over this as closely as many do.

> And the second reason is that they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them

Yes, that's the infinite optionality for them. If I was running YC, I would obv promote the same strategy. As a founder, I think their incentives don't necessarily align with mine.

I've read the application. In fact I've filled it out three times, once successfully and twice not. It is indeed an excellent exercise. Among many other things: if you're a first-time founder then it teaches you what's important, and if you're a second-time founder then it reminds you. (Many second-timers do sometimes need to be reminded, myself included.)

Ah youth. That's how I used to think too.

Then I started to interact with founders and listen to pitches. Oh boy. I used to think that then VCs are just exaggerating when they say they're like 15 minutes into a conversation and have no idea what the founders are saying. Wow. That's so not true.

The whole ecosystem would be better if every founder at last filled out that sheet.

> they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them.

That assumes that evaluating a candidate is zero-cost, which surely isn't true.

i realised this too late. and then noticed -- the type of founder they let me. for us the unwashed masses, who are blue collar coders who went to state school. we're just filling up rejection numbers.

yet the arbiter of what determines who succeeds is not YC but the market.

I don't think the main issue here is that a YC company acted with questionable ethics. As you say, people are people and that can happen with even the strictest due diligence.

The problem for YC's prestige stems from funding a company with an unoriginal idea and not even the beginnings of a prototype. I'm aware that YC funds founders more than it funds specific ideas or projects. Nonetheless, you'd expect an impressive group of founders to do more than just fork an existing open source project.

In short, cases like this show that YC is getting (non-illegally) scammed by some of its applicants. That makes YC look foolish.

Even the evidence listed (the retweeted tweet in the article) doesn't support the claim of the author to me. If you open source software and give it a license that permits commercial use on top of it, then you are okay with that use. If I was a cohort of a team that built an open sourced AI editor I would think they would WANT me to build on top of it. Otherwise, why permit that use? They may have a bad business model, where their business does not work if they open source their tech and other companies build competitors on top of it. But that's a questions for them and their decision to open source. But it doesn't seem shady to use open source software from another company that permits commercial use.

The point of my comment is that the alleged shadiness is largely irrelevant, so I'm not sure what you response is directed at.

“It takes two points to establish a line, and three for a curve.”

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