I have a niggling doubt about YC - that their connections and network and the whole environment might make the difference between success and failure in marginal cases, or the difference between a moderate success and a big success in other cases, if other things are mostly the same: a couple of smart, motivated hackers. If this is indeed the case, people are right to feel bad if they get rejected, because they lost out on a big opportunity.
It would be interesting to be able to test the "YC effect", but difficult. One way might be for PG and company to select a group of people who are ... perhaps not 'mediocre', but not quite as good as the rest, and see how well they do (obviously you can't tell them that they're the test group). However, that has obvious problems: 15K+ is a decent chunk of change to spend on an experiment, and it's not a 'double blind'.
(Disclosure: never applied to YC, likely never will, unfortunately)
I have a niggling doubt about YC - that their connections and network and the whole environment might make the difference between success and failure in marginal cases, or the difference between a moderate success and a big success in other cases, if other things are mostly the same: a couple of smart, motivated hackers. If this is indeed the case, people are right to feel bad if they get rejected, because they lost out on a big opportunity.
It would be interesting to be able to test the "YC effect", but difficult. One way might be for PG and company to select a group of people who are ... perhaps not 'mediocre', but not quite as good as the rest, and see how well they do (obviously you can't tell them that they're the test group). However, that has obvious problems: 15K+ is a decent chunk of change to spend on an experiment, and it's not a 'double blind'.
(Disclosure: never applied to YC, likely never will, unfortunately)