I personally wouldn't do YC these days. Just based on my impressions of how it is though, so I could be totally wrong and bone headed, but: (1) It does feel l

I personally wouldn't do YC these days. Just based on my impressions of how it is though, so I could be totally wrong and bone headed, but: (1) It does feel like a conveyor belt that works well for YC and its investment funnel, but not necessarily for the zoo of startups out there. It seems to me that the classic-YC-startup space has been well-mined now, which is exactly what makes me not want to start one of those companies. Wearing myself out to carve tiny niche in that tropey space is not appealing. Nor is working on SaaS #99999 in general. That's just boring. And I expect people who find contrarian/non-mainstream things interesting think similarly. (2) They are struggling to scale, IMO. I signed up for Startup School (quite a while ago) out of interest and the other candidates were really, really poor. As in, the group sessions were mainly me offering knowledge to others and getting nothing in return. Not only that, the advice we were being given by our group mentor was also pretty bad. I just felt like... if this is the standard, what am I getting from it? Granted, SS is not YC, but the mentor was a YC partner and giving out advice I just wouldn't have followed anyway. I also feel a lot of the recent graduates are more of the same and nothing I'm deeply interested in replicating. Maybe this is all hubris on my part, but at a minimum it suggests I'm not really compatible with the cookie-cutter stuff YC might push. (3) YC feels really cliquey and valley-centric to people on the outside. I remember reading something in the application materials like "we didn't want to say here that we prefer MIT/Stanford/etc grads, but it's just a fact that they turn out better". Maybe that's even objectively true, but why write this? You can reject applicants for any reason, without making large swathes feel unwelcome by broadcasting the in-group on your marketing material. A similar vibe can be found elsewhere too. Of course if you _are_ a good fit then there are probably benefits from the program. Not getting screwed by shady investor behaviour. Alumni network. Etc. Everyone knows those, though.