As far as I'm concerned, "it's all good" as they say. YC seems like a cool idea, so if you guys manage to scale it, great! If other people do something similar, that's good too from my point of view.
I'll defer to your longer involvement with technology, but YC is inherently a people operation, rather than a technology operation. I think technology scales more than people in some ways, but like I said, you guys are doing something good, so it's all icing on the cake, I guess.
I'm thinking they're going to bring on successful founders as YC partners and break YC up into teams. All the applications would go through each team, and any team that wants to accept the application is responsible for mentoring them. That will scale beautifully, because more teams lets them accept more applications which will result in even more teams.
Before you know it, they'll be going door to door;-)
Sounds like a reasonable guess, and it might work, although it must be said that PG took something like 10 years to go from viaweb to YC, which is probably healthy in terms of gaining experience.
Oh well... should be interesting to watch in any case!
That's very true, but if the YC teams are made up of winners, it's likely that they'd be able to create winners. They'd guide applicants to do what they did.
Plus, they'd have a financial stake in the applicants. One reason the YC teams would be composed of successful startup founders is because successful founders have money to invest, and $15k is pocket change. With that kind of self-sustaining cycle, there is no upper limit! Before you know it, they'll be creating a thousand companies a year. Ten thousand! Imagine that for a moment. Sure, most of them may fail, but if just one in ten succeed with returns of more than ten times their investment then it's a net win. My god.. This might turn into a viable alternate life path for the average Joe. It's hard not to be excited.
Once you start behaving like a factory - suck em in and spit out the unprofitable ones - public perception will quickly swing against you. Your position is one where every few months, you have a large number of people pissed off at you for being rejected. Tread carefully, Rumpelstiltskin.
One thing I've learned from being around technology for so long is never to bet against the possibility of scaling things.