I was wondering how the viral effect of YC News had on the application process? More applications? Better/Worse applications? I was not aware of Y Combinator before the news feature. It is a good marketing case study. Compliments to the the YC team on the tactic (even if it was not the original purpose).
I think most hackers already knew about YC before we made the news site, so I doubt it made us better known. Our plan of using news.yc as a way to detect talent did work, though. Even as early as this spring it helped us decide who to invite for interviews.
Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company.
Definitely yes. I had heard of YCombinator (look, they invested in another company), but I've never been interested in applying for the program. News gives me a reason to visit this domain, or at least have it in my feed reader, and provides a lot of useful links - even for us non-startuppers.
I think to really get any meaningful data, you'd have to do regressions to get rid of other things, like the startups becoming widely known (reddit, for instance), time passing, and so on. I don't think you can, in other words.
My impression is that techcrunch et al. have increased the awareness of YC lately...unclear if YC pr is responsible for the increased coverage or if it is viral/result of YC companies doing well...
YC isn't a fund, btw.