PG or Aaron: Could you de-identify YC applications data and make it publicly available for others to analyze?
[EDIT:] Or maybe you could make a prediction challenge using the YC application data? You could host the challenge on http://www.kaggle.com/ or http://tunedit.org
Note to self: There is actually a very sparse body of literature that talks about data driven approach to VC, e.g., http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4621..., this one seems interesting (predicting exits): http://www.springerlink.com/content/w024ku34221u3258/