One insight into YC leverage is that they are working in larger and larger batches instead of moving to a continuous process or many smaller batches. I believe

One insight into YC leverage is that they are working in larger and larger batches instead of moving to a continuous process or many smaller batches. I believe that a significant source of leverage is their ability to create two "Demo Day" auctions a year. This leverage might be considerably diluted by spreading the 400 startups in the most recent cohort into, for example, 13 fortnightly events with 30 startups spread over the same six months. From cohort sizes in the teens in the first few years to several dozen in the next decade to now hundreds, the only constant has been two events a year. I believe the logistics and support models for a 400 firm cohort are very different from one of 40 (in the same way 40 is distinct from a dozen). They cannot be analyzed in isolation as there have been many other changes in the venture funding and incubator models over the last 15 years. I never did get an answer to this question from ten years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3711131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3711131) "Initially we didn't have what turned out to be the most important idea: funding startups synchronously, instead of asynchronously as it had always been done before. Or rather we had the idea, but we didn't realize its significance. We decided very early that the first thing we'd do would be to fund a bunch of startups over the coming summer." I wonder what the best batch size is: each cohort seems to be larger than the last. When does it makes sense to do three, four, or six a year as smaller batches.