I'm mbellotti's cofounder at Exversion. For me, the main takeaway of her post is just how different the YC interview experience can appear even to members of the same team. As the other female on the team, I've always found my chromosomal makeup to be a huge advantage rather than a disadvantage (especially after establishing some level of technical competence). Despite my own belief in merit over affirmative action, it's one of the biggest tools in my toolkit, frankly. Where males have nepotism, we have novelty and the promise of good PR. I would even go so far as to say it may give us a net advantage over all-male teams.

I digress. My own view of the YC interview is such, taking into account the magic of hindsight: that we shouldn't have depended on PB and our interviewers to drive the conversation toward market size. We should have anticipated the concern on our own and brought it up as it's something we're already used to having to defend. Should've, could've, would've -- who knows if that would've mattered, but it's my best guess. Then again, we also spent our 10 minutes successfully selling them on our team and execution abilities, which we evidently did very well based on the feedback we got in our rejection email. In fact, I don't think our interview could have gone much better than it did and I still feel overwhelmingly positive about it. Contrary to Marianne, perhaps, I feel pretty viscerally that we sell our team better than we sell our product/market fit at the moment. And with the caliber of applications YC sees these days that include companies with crazy good traction, we can't properly apply the YC priorities of yore ("great team, not much else yet? You're in!") to our interview and extrapolate that it was our demographics that didn't get us in. As Marianne's (mbellotti's) experience shows, it is certainly something to consider, but it is just one of dozens of possibilities. It's also worth considering that demographics may have helped rather than hindered us in getting the interview in the first place.