I'm sure YC benefits tremendously from the information they've gathered about all the companies they've funded. Probably less so for the applications... I susp

I'm sure YC benefits tremendously from the information they've gathered about all the companies they've funded. Probably less so for the applications... I suspect those are incredibly noisy signals and the effort required to extract meaning from them would be prohibitive. On the other hand, YC Fellowships might be pretty much the "infinite valuation investment" idea I mentioned -- while there's no formal information rights attached, I'm sure they're getting a strong signal for which companies they'll want to fund.