The key factor here is the time it takes for a startup to be "successful", it took 9-11 years for Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe to get to where they are today after t

The key factor here is the time it takes for a startup to be "successful", it took 9-11 years for Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe to get to where they are today after they went through YC. It will take a similar amount of time to see how successful the larger batches are. I'm guessing your concern is whether they manage to give the same attention to each of the startups as the intake size increases. PG talks about doing things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html), so I'm guessing YC is trying to experiment with scaling, and it will be at least a few years to see definitive results.