YC also offers mentoring and coaching services, which goes beyond what a traditional investment firm does. That's part of their appeal, anyway.
> They're not looking at your code. They're almost certainly not doing any meaningful technical due diligence.
Maybe they should?
If their job is to find talented, and hopefully also ethical and honest, people, then doing a basic check like ensuring that the project they're being pitched was actually authored by the candidates should be part of the vetting process.
If, OTOH, their job is to bet on anyone who's likely to give them the highest ROI, regardless of their personal values, then they don't need to do any of this, and cases like PearAI should be acceptable. But that's not what YC claims to be about.
> The whole point of YC is that they're investing in big batches of startups, at a scale that is a big multiple of what an A-round VC does in a whole year.
Maybe that's part of the problem then. When you're trying to fund and mentor hundreds of companies in a few months, it's impractical to think you'll be able to successfully screen all of them. But the startups must grow...