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Comment by Xeoncross | Hacker News Reader

> our team has received over 1,000 applications and welcomed 11 START entrepreneurs into the a16z family

1% chance eh? Welp, I'll never be exclusive enough to make it through

"If you were the president of Harvard or Stanford and you wanted to get a lynch mob of students, alumni, and faculty to come after you, what you should say is something like this: We live in this much larger, more global world. We offer this great education to everybody. So we're going to double or triple our enrollment over the next 15 to 20 years. And people would all be furious, because the value of the degree comes from massive exclusion. And what you're really running is something like a Studio 54 night club that's got an incredibly long line outside and a very small number of people let inside. It's branded as positive sum, everybody can learn, but the reality is that it is deeply zero sum." [1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/peter-t...

While the school I went to had larger admissions when controlled by degree, quality was maintained by failing out a huge chunk of the student body. Getting a rejection letter is much more humane.

Beyond that, exclusive clubs often come with good perks: in this case, the assumption that the outcome of conversation and networking will be relatively high.

Exclusive clubs aren't about providing perks to those who get in, its about maximizing club profits by only having patrons buying bottle service and other expensive add-ons.

Its to get more rich people to sign up.

Eh. I went to a community college that let basically everyone in, and failed out ~95% of their computer programming course. I graduated, and I likely would not have gotten in in the first place if they went with the exclusivity model of universities (my last year of high school was terrible, and that's all they really looked at). Most people who didn't make it in this program went to more general programs so they still got something out of it. I'm now working at a large tech company.

I'm glad both models exist because I would have been completely excluded if they did not.

How is a rejection letter more humane than getting a chance to prove yourself?

If everybody is screening on the same factors so that rejection letters are highly correlated, it would definitely be inhumane to only have that model

They’re not the same factors, even if they are correlated though! Besides, there’s almost always a transfer pathway available for the false negatives.

I mean the main thing is like a third of people at these schools are legacies at this point so pretending that the screening is for ability to take classes is not 100% right

I much prefer the failing-out approach over the rejection-letter approach. With the latter, you exclude those who would excel but look bad on paper, in favor of those who won't but look good on paper.

Yeah what’s wrong in wasting a couple years of a students time and a bunch of their money when you could have saved them the trouble.

I think it very much depends on how the "failing out" is done. If its just a standard grading scheme and there is the potential for 100% of the class to pass (if they all do well on the content), then I think its actually great to give as many people the chance as possible.

But, some of the classes I took early on in college had extremely difficult grading curves based on the middle/top students in the class, which I didnt think was fair at all. Trying to weight each individual class so a certain % of people pass is a terrible act imo, as it will vary year to year. I passed all of the classes, but I still feel sorry for the kids who failed just because our year had more smarter students that the previous/next years.

My experience was absolute thresholds from F to C-, and a relative curve above that. Seemed fair. And seemed practical when I was on the other side doing the grading.

The flaw in that thinking is that it isn't the best people or ideas, it is the exclusive club that leads to opportunity, a curated fixed market.

Exclusivity is rarely the reason why something is innovative, in many cases it prevents innovation and good products. Due to bias it may overlook what is actually "good" compared to that which comes from a broader set and net.

Open markets where anything can be published, where the only exclusivity is the money pushing it, have more entries, more products. Sure there are more bad products but the good products are better than any controlled or curated market could produce due to this bias. Not only that, the bad products might be good one day and would have been curated out in other platforms. The top 1% of open markets will always beat the top 1% of curated markets, largely because what is good may be outside the bias.

An example of this would be games on Steam, from indies to large companies. The more innovative are always smaller, unknown or unexpected games where more risk can be taken.

Another example would be startups are better at many things than large companies, anything that involves research and development that may have some risk. Sometimes the companies that never get funding come up with the better solutions due to the scrappiness and non saturated funding environment.

The established players and curation systems or large borgs of bias, are too uppety to know what is good across the broad market. False fixed markets are a wall to new ideas and products. In the end curated markets have a weak spot, the larger groups will work overtime to limit the challengers that aren't in the biased path so they don't get beat by competition, they are ultimately anti-competitive at scale.

Open markets are democratic and bottom up, closed curated markets are authoritarian and top down.

In short, for products, exclusives suck.

Keep in mind that most applications are not impressive & are dismissed without much thought. Only a few are even interesting enough for a second meeting. If you're interesting & you know it, your odds are better than you think.

These acceptance rates are misleading. A lot of those applications probably have no MVP and founders have no skills. If you filter to only those people who 1) have a product with some degree of traction or interest and 2) people who have qualified backgrounds, either in previous startups or FAANG or something else that gives them credibility, I think you'll find the acceptance rate is a lot higher.

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