
Ask HN: Why no individual feedback for rejected YC applications - gajju3588
It takes a lot of time and energy to apply for YC, rejection without feedback hurts. Feedback could be in one line, as simple as : Not good enough team. Feedback would help with lot of decisions.<p>P.S. I will keep working on my start-up until I run out of fuel.
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dirktheman
They get thousands of applications, it would take way too much time to answer
them all. Plus, it's not like 'fix this and you'll get accepted next year'. In
fact, they do state a single reason in the rejection email, it's just that
it's always the same: 'there were others that seemed better'.

Keep working, and don't put too much value on a rejection. If anything,
filling in the application itself is a nice way to think about your startup!

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raresp
Wrong, they could define a standard reject message and send it. It doesn't
take more than a minute to do a copy-paste and press the reply button.

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HeyLaughingBoy
A friendly tip for the future: don't start a response by saying "wrong." It
may not be your intent, but you come across as argumentative and
confrontational in a situation that likely doesn't call for that.

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soneca
Their answer (a very fair reason IMO):

 _" Do you give feedback on application results? We don't provide feedback on
application results. If we did this, we'd spend all our time providing
feedback and doing nothing else due to the volume of applications we have to
process. Read this for more info about feedback."_

From here:
[https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/#q51](https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/#q51)

A more detailed explanation here too:
[http://www.ycombinator.com/whynot/](http://www.ycombinator.com/whynot/)

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jklein11
My mental model of how this process works is that when YC evaluates your
startup you are starting at zero. It is up to you to sway them to a one. If
you were rejected, that is because you didn't sway them to a one. It is
probably a variety of factors, and each of those factors could have been
overcome by a number of things.

YC would have to work backwards and figure out what it was that didn't get
them to a one. Why is it up to themn to do that work for you? Also, if it was
just one thing and they could put their finger on how to fix it... you
probably wouldn't be rejected.

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mosselman
I get why they do it and I get why it hurts. Saying 'team not good enough'
would imply that the rest is a recipe for acceptance. What if everything was
lacking? Would you want to hear that?

"The whole idea, market and the complete team are all crap. Improvement on any
of these factors is impossible as everything about your idea, team and
execution is shit." I can't imagine that being helpful.

To be honest, your question and example feedback "Not good enough team" give
me the image of someone who has no savvy in the field of startups that YC is
involved with. That you'd think that that would be a valuable piece of
feedback formulated in such a way does not really strike me as something that
a founder of a successful startup would think. From what I have read and heard
about YC and their projects is that having a good feeling about applications
is the nr 1 requirement in the whole founding process, so maybe it was that.

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muzani
Partly because feedback makes a lot of people feel worse. It's emotionally
exhausting to phrase something in a tactful way.

Something as simple as "not good enough team" is very, very difficult to
phrase properly. Maybe the team just doesn't feel smart enough. Maybe they
have that one guy who they instinctively feel is a douche after meeting
thousands like him, but can't explain why they feel that way. Maybe the team
is smart but immature. Maybe they realize they could actually be wrong about
the whole team and don't want to give false feedback.

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raresp
You should take the lack of feedback as a "please try again later" message.
(Like some use in the 404 pages.)

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asnyc
You need to read
[http://www.ycombinator.com/whynot/](http://www.ycombinator.com/whynot/)
carefully - Sounds like fair reasoning to me

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hguhghuff
Because people argue when they get feedback.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
As an aside, learning to not do this was one of the most important changes in
my adult life. Learning to accept criticism and use it to improve myself is
immensely powerful.

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whamlastxmas
You could probably post your application here and get feedback that would be
at least in the same ballpark as what YC thought.

