It would be nice to be told roughly what the process is before having to 'sign up'.
The process is that you fill out a form and make a 1 minute video* and click 'submit'.
(* I know...I hated the video thing too... but it gives a sense of what someone is like that doesn't come through in text, and you just talk for a minute about what you care about. nothing fancy.)
(edit: also, if you're the type of founder that my post is trying to reach - the video is very much in your interest. Other people can see potential in you that you don't see in yourself, even after just a minute. Especially because the people reviewing applications have massive amounts of experience with this.)
LinkedIn is about education, career, and networking. I am under average in all of them, so I'm not registered. This is the only thing which holding me back from applying. Otherwise, I work full-time on kick-ass product for months with 1000+ commits.
Yes, anyone can "just create a LinkedIn account." However, quite a few people across the globe are trying to decrease their online surface area. While many of us (myself included) just have a password manager filled with thousands of entries and 32-character passwords, some folks are not comfortable living that way. I also find myself unsubscribing from or filtering emails from these services at least once a day, so I can appreciate why many folks are increasingly trying to simplify their lives by eliminating SaaS logins.
Even without creating a LinkedIn account, one could fill in a dummy URL to satisfy the JavaScript validation and submit the application. However, we chose not to do this because of how the YC application itself is structured. The submission requirements are intentionally strict (60 second founder video, <3mins demo, very specific questions, etc.) and subverting the application process feels antithetical.
Having the option to opt out of the LinkedIn field is greatly appreciated.
Anyway, I got hung up on the video, I definitely have no idea what to say, so I saved the application for later and will come back to it. Perhaps my plan for the video should be to read what I wrote in the plan fire it off and forget I did this. :) But yea, as someone who has issues with presenting to others visually in this way, the video requirement is really hard. I'll do it because this is all to see what happens, but definitely not confident on that part of things.
For people who feel the way that you and I both do, whoever watches your video as part of reviewing your YC application is probably going to see you an order of magnitude more positively than you see yourself. Self-evaluation of video is painful.
I kind of miss those days now that Zoom is everywhere and it's an expectation that you present yourself on video for others.
I get why a sales job might want to make sure you keep up appearances but just writing code, I really hate turning on video. No one I know wants to acknowledge that we aren't solving bias with video though. I am glad you brought this up though. I believe it's true.