Skip the accelerator and go straight to seed funding via convertible debt. No need to give up any space on your cap table until series A, and you can probably r

Skip the accelerator and go straight to seed funding via convertible debt. No need to give up any space on your cap table until series A, and you can probably raise more than $150k or whatever YC is giving these days. Of course this discounts other benefits of YC, but those are arguably becoming less useful as the batches have been diluted with so many lackluster startups. At this point YC almost seems like something people do not for their startups, but for themselves. It attracts prestige collectors that are more concerned with how they look on paper than how they perform in reality.