I can't quite tell if you're calling me a phony or yourself one. If you're call me phony then I'm sorry I come off that way. I have a lot of personal and professional flaws (far too long to enumerate here) but I don't think a lack of genuineness is one of them.
If, on the other hand, you're saying you don't want to apply because you feel phony, well, then, that's hogwash. Impostor syndrome is deep in most YC founders, in most ambitious people, and in Silicon Valley more generally. If you have an idea that you're passionate about then you should apply.
I guess the feeling I get is that to even bother applying, I need to present a phony picture of myself; to reflect certain values and use a certain language to increase my chances. Of course you can say that 'just be yourself', but no system works perfectly, or necessarily even well..
I know very little about the YC application process, but if you are confident that the problem you are tackling is real, and have done your homework, I don't see why you would need to present a phony picture of yourself. In fact I'm pretty sure that the YC folks have enough smarts and experience to pick out phonies.
If you're presenting the phony picture because you don't really have a clear understanding of the problem, then yeah, you will have bigger issues with your business outside of getting into YC.
If you've put in the work and still feel like a phony, try to ignore the feeling - it's probably just the impostor effect.
I get the feeling that he sees himself that way and I can relate to that a bit.
Seeing these applications... well, they're full of people coming from the best schools in the world, having the best connections one can imagine, usually having several successful startups under their belt - or, barring that, they're often behind immensely successful open source projects. They're people who seem to have been recognized as absolutely amazing from early childhood on.
I think it's natural that this can feel a bit intimidating, and yes, sometimes these amazing people can come off as a bit standardized themselves, too.
