The academic research community has certainly solved this problem to a large extent, eg. reviewing and program committee meetings at elite conferences such as S

The academic research community has certainly solved this problem to a large extent, eg. reviewing and program committee meetings at elite conferences such as SigComm and SOSP, or to demonstrate scalability, conferences such as Infocom which get thousands of submissions and still maintain high quality in their accepted papers. One big difference is in the incentives for a PC member at a top conference vs for a YC partner. The former needs to maintain his and the conference's status/reputation by ensuring the papers are of top quality. He doesn't care that much if some great paper is left out. Whereas in the case of a YC partner, the biggest concern is to ensure not missing out on spotting the next Facebook. This is why in the former case, past reputation and being part of the clique is very important, and in the latter case (YC) it is not so.