

The Next Y Combinator Class Will Be 80 Strong - kapilkale
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/22/ycombinator-80-strong/

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paul
Ultimately, the real test of YC is in the quality of the startups that emerge
from the program. I've been investing in YC companies since the second batch
(W06), and I can easily say that the most recent batch was not only the
largest ever, but also the best. Perhaps some of the social elements are lost
with the size increases (not all of the founder know each other anymore), but
the actual value of the program seems to be increasing due to our greater
experience and the increased reach of our network. Quite often during office
hours, founders will come to me with a seemingly difficult question and I can
refer them to a YC company from an earlier batch that can help them out
tremendously, sometimes just with advice, but often by providing the exact
solution they need, or by becoming their first customer.

Obviously some portion of the gain in quality is due to YC attracting more
high quality startups, but that is not the whole of it. I've watched these
startups from Day 1 to Demo Day and the progress and improvements made are
incredible.

~~~
yumraj
When you say "the most recent batch was not only the largest ever, but also
the best", I have to ask that the "best" is based on what metrics? On average,
in aggregate, everyone, the problem they're solving, age, education,
experience, willingness to put in effort, IQ, etc.

~~~
paul
Best from an investment point of view. I don't care about their IQ, education,
etc -- I care about them starting successful businesses. Obviously we won't
have the final answer for many years (big successes take about 5-10 years),
but myself and many other investors found this group to be very investment
worthy (I put more of my personal money into this group than any previous).

~~~
thereason
"I don't care about their IQ, education, etc."

Would you say that is true of the other investors as well?

Are investors informed of the IQ, education, etc. of the each member in the
group?

~~~
paul
No, we don't administer IQ tests or anything. The point is that investors main
interest is in finding good companies that will possibly be the next
Google/Facebook/Dropbox.

~~~
thereason
But wouldn't IQ, education, etc. be factors in whether someone would even make
it into the YC class?

If investors are not concerned with these factors, should they be relevant in
the YC (or any incubator) application process?

(I realize asking this may be stirring a hornet's nest, and to anyone reading
who is offended I apologize, but I am sincerely interested in the mind of the
investor and their evaluation process.)

~~~
Mumbles
It doesn't really matter if participants have a low(er) IQ, or went to a non-
elite school. As long as they are capable of creating great companies. YC does
all the screening to make sure they are capable of doing so.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/s2012form>

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Jun8
An interesting infographic would be to plot the number of applicants and class
size for YC over the years. I bet the applications are increasing at an
increasing rate, last time they had 50% increase, soon it will be 100%, with
all the publicity around YC.

I don't quite buy the scalability argument, in the end there's a natural upper
limit on the YC class size and I think they're fast approaching it. There are
a very small number of partners and there's only one pg. After that point, say
a class size of 100 (~200 people) things will get impersonal and YC will
inevitably start to converge to other incubators.

Large class sizes also inflate the alumni network, one of the best aspects
(the best?) of YC. Up to a certain size, network utility increases with size;
after that there are just too many people with too few hubs to connect them.

I think at the end, they just will have to fix the class size to a certain
number, which will then make the acceptance ratios insanely small (currently
2%)

~~~
pg
Maybe there's some limit on the size we can grow to, but so far we haven't hit
a bottleneck we couldn't overcome.

Advising startups turns out to be pretty parallelizable. We can easily handle
20 startups per partner, so with 6 partners working full time advising
startups, we currently have 50% more capacity than we need.

If I had to guess where we'll hit a limit that's hard to beat, it might be
when the number of partners gets too large to communicate easily. E.g. with 20
partners things might get unwieldy.

~~~
nemesisj
Sorry PG, I have to really question you on this.

Education, mentoring, and team building all happen better in smaller
environments. Things like class size, team size, and time spent matter. Maybe
what you mean is the actual time spent with each participant is still the same
per investment as it was with smaller classes (i.e. you're all putting in more
time than you used to) but somehow I really doubt this. I'm also sure that
certain partners have certain strengths weaknesses that benefit in different
areas and not having as many partners advising different startups would be
less value.

That said, I'm sure Ycombinator's value is still great compared to other
incubators, I just don't really feel like the statement "we're scaling just
fine" on a squishy, hard to scale item like "advising" to pass the sniff test.

~~~
jmcannon
As an anecdote, I went through YC twice: once in 2009 with 30 companies and
again in the last batch with 65 companies. I was skeptical at first as well,
but if anything, the value my company got out of advising in the last batch
was greater than the first time around. We could still meet with PG whenever
we really needed him specifically, and the partners are really just as useful
as PG in most cases. In many, they're better - being able to rap with Justin
Kan about PR or Garry Tan about design is gold.

The one noticeable weakness is the decreasing familiarity between founders in
the batch. My first time through, all the founders knew each other by name.
This second time, there were other founders I still had trouble recognizing in
the bathroom line at demo day. That's not necessarily as bad as it might sound
- niches formed that grew close, and the camaraderie of this last batch was
much better than in 2009. I don't really know why that is - just a more
gregarious bunch in general, I think.

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illumen
They can't even remember all their names. Not sure how they can guide all
these companies properly. Time will tell. It'll be interesting to watch none
the less.

Bubble?

~~~
dataisfun
no. not a bubble.

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jacquesm
At some point there will be another layer to YC from successful exits in
previous batches.

Already the number of partners is growing, and as more YC companies exit
successfully you will probably see more of that, remembering your roots and
who helped you up would be a powerful motivator into completing the cycle.

If YC can somehow manage to maintain communications through for instance
multiple tiers with bypasses if needed it could get very big.

Every brushfire starts with a spark!

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stevenj
It's only a matter of time now until we'll have the YC mafia ;)

