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From my notes of PG's talk on Wednesday: 12. There are 2 kinds of judgments: Admissions and Grades If you get a bad grade in a class, but think you did a great

From my notes of PG's talk on Wednesday: 12. There are 2 kinds of judgments: Admissions and Grades If you get a bad grade in a class, but think you did a great job, then you feel entitled to go and talk to the teacher and challenge the decision. On the other hand, that entitlement feeling isn't present if you apply to a college and get denied. This is because in admissions there are a limited number of seats available and a cutoff point at which no more people can be accepted. Like in the olympic tryouts - the top X% of swimmers for a country may get to go to the games, but those below that threshold don't get to go. It's not much different in getting funding - you can just slide off the edge and just not make the 'admission'. When I was rejected by Harvard I thought I sucked. Now I see it as laughable. Have you ever been to the admissions office? A rejection in an admissions scenario is not necessarily a reflection on you. At YCombinator we go through and rank all of the applications, then we take the top 30 for interviews. Recently we looked at some of our early teams and compared how they are doing now with how we rated them in the application process. It was scary! One of our most successful teams was at number 30! Just one more down and they would have missed the cutoff.

ced 20y ago
So all this talk about accepting "any team good enough" applies only for funding, and not the interviews? That would mean, incidentally, that anyone who was rejected this round might have been accepted in the last, or might be accepted in the next one.
- mattjaynes 20y ago
  I've been following YC fairly closely since their start and have never come across anything that gave the impression that they would accept "any team good enough". Think about it - they have very limited resources - particularly of time, and there is just no way they could take on every team "good enough" unless they grew their staff and created a large investment organization, which is not what they're trying to do. Even big VC's and angels don't accept "any team good enough" - they just don't have the time and it wouldn't make sense for them to spread themselves so thin. You said: "That would mean, incidentally, that anyone who was rejected this round might have been accepted in the last, or might be accepted in the next one." Yes, that is exactly right according to what Paul said.

ced 20y ago

So all this talk about accepting "any team good enough" applies only for funding, and not the interviews? That would mean, incidentally, that anyone who was rejected this round might have been accepted in the last, or might be accepted in the next one.

mattjaynes 20y ago
I've been following YC fairly closely since their start and have never come across anything that gave the impression that they would accept "any team good enough". Think about it - they have very limited resources - particularly of time, and there is just no way they could take on every team "good enough" unless they grew their staff and created a large investment organization, which is not what they're trying to do. Even big VC's and angels don't accept "any team good enough" - they just don't have the time and it wouldn't make sense for them to spread themselves so thin. You said: "That would mean, incidentally, that anyone who was rejected this round might have been accepted in the last, or might be accepted in the next one." Yes, that is exactly right according to what Paul said.