As much as I resonate with your sentiment, it's the incentives that investors have that cause them to behave this way, not an inherent belief in scale at all co

As much as I resonate with your sentiment, it's the incentives that investors have that cause them to behave this way, not an inherent belief in scale at all costs. Keep in mind, YC is very early stage. Asking them to pick only winners based on an application and short interview process would be a fool's errand. I believe their acceptance rates tend to be around 2%, so it's not like they aren't being selective up front—it just takes time to really get signal on who is executing and finding traction. Startup investment is high risk and justified by the outliers, so they have every incentive to find them early, it only makes sense that they would give more support to their winners as they emerge.