there is still valuable feedback to be had, no? why are some companies "particularly good" where others don't get accepted? "no reason" is paradoxical and i'm not really convinced it's a reason...
Thought experiment: What's the difference between candidate N and candidate N+1? Likely, they are nearly identically good. What could you possibly tell candidate N+1 about why they weren't selected?
There are almost certainly no red flags, or any specific thing you can point to that caused them to fall under the line. Any feedback you gave candidate N+1 you'd also want to give to candidate N who did get the interview.
If you're saying that YC should give generalized "how to be a better startup" advice to everyone who applies, I'm afraid the time requirements for that are unrealistic. There aren't obvious reasons why most applications are rejected, and giving more nuanced advice is really hard.
We're talking about spending a few minutes sharing words that could positively alter the course of decades of people's lives, if they hear the right thing. Seems like a decent courtesy to pay the applicants, if there's no real reason not to.
The benefit for YC would be if these groups then chose not to do something like TechStars, but continued to work on their idea and came back in +6 months. Realistically, if someone is rejected by YC, gets into TechStars and does it, they're unlikely to do YC.
Assuming there are ~300 "on the bubble" groups on top of 200 interviewed groups (out of 2-3k total), it would cost YC basically a month of someone's time to follow up with them reasonably, and then maybe 5-10% of a person over the next 6 months.
One group of 500 rejected applicants is sent a sentence or two of feedback by a random YC alum (ideally whoever read the application initially, to account for each reader's biases) 1 month after their interview. Another group of 500 is set aside as the control, and is treated as normal. Is the group of 500 applicants with feedback more likely to reapply? Are they more likely to get an interview or get in the second time around?
If you fall into the good-but-not-accepted group, chances are good that you can treat all feedback as an opinion to be considered, not a directive to be obeyed.
1) People fuck up videos frequiently. I've personally been studying "how to do good kickstarter videos" a lot, but "how to do a 2-3 minute Demo Day pitch" and "how to do a 1 minute YC app video" are pretty specific, and while a lot of it should be obvious, it isn't all obvious.
The problem is, doing a good "how to do a YC video" is itself best communicated as video, with good/bad examples, so it's a fair bit of work -- it would probably take a couple people a week to do very well.
2) Sometimes, people "bury the lede" and hide the most salient parts of their project deep inside an application in a non-clear way. Sometimes it isn't even listed. I've talked to friends who want to apply to YC who intentionally couched their whole application in "corporate speak", focused entirely on top-down analysis, etc., rather than actually explaining why the product is good, why they're interested in it, etc.
3) There are a lot of items which are hard to verify, and which lose their predictive value as soon as they're widely known. Similar to the well-known interview questions ("what is your greatest weakness?" being a pathological example), where once they become common knowledge, the only value is knowing who prepared ahead of time vs. who didn't, or who is willing to recite something which sounds convincing vs. actually thinking about it.
I'm afraid the Thiel question "what is something you believe to be true which isn't widely held" is becoming that question today.
X) My personal belief is that something like a YC app should be fractal -- good on the surface if you skim it for 10-30 seconds, but then just as good when you read it closely in any area without greater context. That's a specific style, and not universal, and I don't know if the YC Partnership agrees with me. The applications get reviewed many times (with some rejected at each step), and ultimately if you're on the bubble and the application gets debated internally, you want it to help you just as much as it did when it was initially screened. (Obviously, it's better to just be so amazing that you're well in the "yes" range and not seriously debated...)
My bet is the companies that don't get interviews are a lot more like my friends who just didn't pay attention than a sea of corner cases. It's actually really hard to meet the criteria that YC asks for. If you follow their advice you need the following things:
- At least 2 founders who know each other well, preferably have worked together before or known each other for years
- Have found your domain problem through personal experience
- Are good hackers
- Have already put together a decent product/have some semblance of a reasonable start
It can almost sound simple but that's really really hard. And I say that as someone who has spent the last couple years talking with my friends about whether they would be interested in being co-founders for startup ideas and searching for problems in my own experience that would make for scalable ideas. I go out and talk to companies and I don't see much of what YC explicitly asks for. It's not far fetched to imagine they interview nearly 100% of the teams that fit the profile above.
It really _is_ hard. No way is it easy
> I say that as someone who has spent the last couple years talking with my friends about whether they would be interested in being co-founders for startup ideas and searching for problems in my own experience that would make for scalable ideas.
That is the biggest problem in getting it going. You have to be able to convince others to share your vision. But isn't it easier to do with long-time friends than that guy you met last summer? When you know someone for long enough, you will have the confidence that you'll stick together through the friendly breezes and the wild storms
> Are good hackers
That is a requirement for a good reason. The founders are the only guys initially who give a sh*t about the product. Say a customer makes a support call, being able to quickly respond and fix the bug can mean life or death. You need at least one hacker who can do this. Better if every founder is one.
> I go out and talk to companies and I don't see much of what YC explicitly asks for.
YC in no way has the magic portion. They just have a set of things they believe are positive indicators, which are mostly right, but not fulfulling one/all of these no way means you can't build a successful startup
> It's not far fetched to imagine they interview nearly 100% of the teams that fit the profile above.
That's not surprising, is it? If 70% of the slots were filled with applicants that fulfilled 100% criteria, then they might loosen some of the criteria (like single founder teams, idea stage etc), but with the momentum that YC's gotten, I bet 100% of the slots get filled with startups that fulfill 100% of their criteria (and more, those corner cases). So obviously, they'll stick to their criteria (which has been working for them)