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Also, please do not take this as encouragement to start an accelerator.

Accelerators on the whole are a terrible business, and we try to be up front about that with everyone who comes to us for advice.

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If the accelerator business on the whole is terrible, what sets Y Combinator apart and makes it a good company in a bad market - earning at 10% annual returns, 30% IRR as noted further up in the thread?

Is it YC's human resources, position in the market, branding, some combination?

It's got to be the position in the market at this point (though probably started out as human capital to get to that point). They're seeing most of the good deals for early stage companies because they're so far ahead anyone else in the space, which is obviously in your best interest in something where the best deals are several orders of magnitude better than a merely good deal and the average case is failure.

Our IRR was over 100% last time I calculated it; those numbers were really off.

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