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I'm guessing it would discourage potentially good candidates from trying if the odds look too long?

• staunch 19y ago
  My very vague recollection is that it's because there are lots of YC competitors/clones now. Not wanting to get into a pissing match over the number of submissions or something?
  • pg 19y ago
    Yes. And more precisely, anyone could inflate their numbers by encouraging large numbers of weak groups to apply (e.g. college students during the summer), knowing that they were going to reject them. So if we quoted numbers, competitors would be tempted to do bad things in order to get higher numbers, and then we'd either have to the same bad things ourselves, or look as if founders liked us less.
    • joseakle 19y ago
      Are you doing this for profit? If you are congratulations for sharing so much of what goes on at ycombinator, you have been a great inspiration. If you are not why not help other "clones" become better by opening up a little bit more about how you achieve your magic, kind of open sourcing technology "incubation" processes, so that people from the rest of the world can enjoy such an opportunity.
    • testapplication 19y ago
      Does that really outweigh being transparent in this case? I think one thing that a lot of people admire about YCombinator is how up-front you guys are with everything reasonable to be up-front about.