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An announcement like "If you've worked with a Stanford professor and have a positive reference from them, we will take that into account on your application."

An announcement like "If you've worked with a Stanford professor and have a positive reference from them, we will take that into account on your application." ? That sounds like a totally sensible (as well as totally ethical) thing do do!

blueprint 11y ago
However, that's not exactly what was announced. "Extra consideration" is what was offered in exchange for a good reference. But what exactly constitutes, "extra consideration"? It's the mandate of YC to find companies worth investing in and founders who are worth having a relationship with. So it's in YC's best interest to give all extra consideration possible to every single candidate. No? So it sounds to me like it's a matter of giving additional preference to such candidates. I was invited to interview at YC a few years ago and they declined to get involved with my venture. Indeed, I was quite a bit less experienced at that time, and I didn't realize that YC's real mandate is to find at least one company in each batch that will be a billion dollar company. My business model wasn't geared for that kind of growth, so I must not have known what I was doing when I applied to YC. However, if they had decided to provide me "extra consideration", they might have informed me of their feedback /before/ rejecting me instead of /after/ rejecting me, and then instead judged me on the merit of how I treated their feedback. In other words, to have judged me based on my capacity to learn. Well, I didn't get funded that day, but I did meet one of the founders of a company that graduated YC the year before. He very soon after offered me a job as their first engineering hire. I worked with that YC company for a while, and it was there that I found out that just having gone to YC doesn't make a company's founders into true leaders. I saw the same thing at a Tech Stars company where I worked thereafter. After all, genuine leadership is a function of individual truthfulness. In my experience, such a thing is only won through hard training by learning from a truthful person, and/or hard trials while trying to live truthfully. However, one of the problems is that only truthful people can recognize and understand other truthful people. Not being able to recognize others' capacity without truthfulness, we need to be very careful about trusting our own judgements. In that case, is the so-called "extra consideration" really able to be "extra consideration" of the person themselves, or is it simply the application of favor by using the heuristic of the candidate having worked under a YC grad?
robotresearcher 11y ago
1) Can you find such an announcement or formal policy? 2) 'take into account' is not 'give your YC application extra consideration'. The former is neutral with regard to resource usage, the latter is not.

blueprint 11y ago

However, that's not exactly what was announced. "Extra consideration" is what was offered in exchange for a good reference. But what exactly constitutes, "extra consideration"? It's the mandate of YC to find companies worth investing in and founders who are worth having a relationship with. So it's in YC's best interest to give all extra consideration possible to every single candidate. No? So it sounds to me like it's a matter of giving additional preference to such candidates. I was invited to interview at YC a few years ago and they declined to get involved with my venture. Indeed, I was quite a bit less experienced at that time, and I didn't realize that YC's real mandate is to find at least one company in each batch that will be a billion dollar company. My business model wasn't geared for that kind of growth, so I must not have known what I was doing when I applied to YC. However, if they had decided to provide me "extra consideration", they might have informed me of their feedback /before/ rejecting me instead of /after/ rejecting me, and then instead judged me on the merit of how I treated their feedback. In other words, to have judged me based on my capacity to learn. Well, I didn't get funded that day, but I did meet one of the founders of a company that graduated YC the year before. He very soon after offered me a job as their first engineering hire. I worked with that YC company for a while, and it was there that I found out that just having gone to YC doesn't make a company's founders into true leaders. I saw the same thing at a Tech Stars company where I worked thereafter. After all, genuine leadership is a function of individual truthfulness. In my experience, such a thing is only won through hard training by learning from a truthful person, and/or hard trials while trying to live truthfully. However, one of the problems is that only truthful people can recognize and understand other truthful people. Not being able to recognize others' capacity without truthfulness, we need to be very careful about trusting our own judgements. In that case, is the so-called "extra consideration" really able to be "extra consideration" of the person themselves, or is it simply the application of favor by using the heuristic of the candidate having worked under a YC grad?

robotresearcher 11y ago

1) Can you find such an announcement or formal policy? 2) 'take into account' is not 'give your YC application extra consideration'. The former is neutral with regard to resource usage, the latter is not.