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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?

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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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