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The thing I kept thinking when I was reading this was pedigree, pedigree, pedigree. Brown grad, University of Chicago, met at Harvard Summer School. Invested in a YC company already. One works at Stripe. This is quite the resume for two people.

On the other hand, it kind of worries me, because a lot of the most successful founders don't have anywhere near the level of accomplishment that is listed on this application. I think pg mentioned this at the last Demo Day. More and more "qualified" people are applying to YC now. I don't say this to diminish the quality of the application, I just wonder if these types of applicants are pushing out the young hackers that might have made it to an interview a few years ago.

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The common perception is that YC is very big on pedigree (top schools, serial founders, worked at top companies). They are known for having a prototype (they liked to call it patterns) of what is the ideal founding team.

500startups for example are willing to take more risks on people and look more deeply at the product if it has traction and a business model, even the founding team is unknown / international.

There's a lot of different investment thesis, which all make sense for different reasons.

I think it's often a reasonable assumption for YC to make.

It would be interesting to see a break-down of school + degree for all successful YC applicants, though. Not sure if that's ever been listed anywhere.

It interesting because Dan and I are partially heavily motivated by the chip on our shoulder. My father was a mailman and my mother a waitress, etc. Its hard for us to imagine ourselves as "the man" although we pretty clearly are in a prima facie reading of our resumes.

Having said that, I do think their seems to be a much wider variance in the ages and experiences of YC founders than most people think. If I had to guess, the median age for our batch was likely 25/26 with a standard deviation of 3 years. Not 19/20 and I think that's been true for a long time.

There are also a ton of different education backgrounds. I'm not going to lie and say that there aren't a lot of people who went to Harvard and MIT, but there are also people who went to state schools or no college at all.

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