Wouldn't the next cycle be a better indicator? I am guessing it took a while for folks to get co-founders, work on idea towards a prototype, etc. -- all of which took longer than the past few weeks.
We spent a few weeks before the deadline editing and re-editing our application. We only submitted it a day before it was due.
Perhaps there were many groups like us who had thought about applying a while and spent time editing their application before sending in the last few days.
I didn't just mean that people submit the application on the last day. That is certainly common. But from talking to founders I've learned that a lot only decide to apply on the last day.
When you already run a startup like we do, you do not have much time to submit, you code, so the deadline sneaks up on you. I would say you can not read much into the submission date.
I don't think you understand his point. He's not just looking at the submission time of the application. He talks to the applicants, and some of them say they didn't decide to apply until the last day. This is different from deciding to apply weeks before the deadline, but not doing it until the last day.
We did something similar. We've been coding furiously throughout the past few weeks, to flesh out in a demo what we thought would be the key differiantiators of our idea. Then we reserved a few days before the deadline to work and re-work the application. We submitted it a day before it was due as well.
Pressing that button was in itself quite satisfying.
This is purely anecdotal evidence but many of the elevator pitches I saw were from companies and individuals that were adapting their ideas to the fb app paradigm. Facebook is a great distribution channel for any company really, especially when they are giving you a 25,000 dollar grant to build on their platform.
I discovered YCombinator several weeks ago in a blog post about the fbfund/YCombinator meetup written by a July 2008 fbfund recipient. A link was posted prominently on the fbfund Facebook page for at least 4 weeks. This was the only centralized place for fbfund discussion and updates so a lot of applicants checked it regularly and may have found their way to the YC website.
Maybe the demographic data destroys that theory though.
