<i>They once used the program to generate a top 10 list of factors predicting the probability of acceptance. ”I don’t want to share it, but it was fascinating,” Graham said.</i><p>This is understandable, but a pity nonetheless. I'm sure HNers would love to read about the factors. PG, can you tell how well these factors sync with the characteristic of a good founder you've written about in your essays?
<i>Last October, Graham said that the firm was seeing about one submission per minute for the most recent class.</i><p>Is this right? It sounds wrong. Or was it just on the last day of submissions or something?
As a current applicant, I'm glad to see that YC is thinking hard about scaling. With rising application numbers, I'm sure the noise to signal ratio gets worse and considering that funding a bad startup is probably better than missing a good one, I can only applaud any measures that help in that direction.<p>Actually, the cost of funding a bad startup are relatively low, aren't they? It's more the time of the partners and the resources of the alumni network, I'd personally be concerned about.
When it comes to the applications and the fear of missing good startups, I think the biggest bottleneck is how many groups they can interview.<p>If I'm not mistaken, for W2012 they interviewed 180 groups and accepted 65. That's 36% acceptance rate, but it shouldn't distribute evenly. If the applications were properly graded and the acceptance rate didn't get very low for the lowest graded applicants who were interviewed, then they need to increase the number of groups they interview. I guess that's the case, since pg previously commented that for S2012 they'd probably interview 270 groups. The "problem" is that for every new batch they probably get more applications (and most likely of higher quality), so this might be just playing catch up.<p>Maybe one day an Anybot robot will perform a preliminary interview so they can scale :)
I'm waiting for "StartupAdvisor", a program written in Arc and trained on paulgraham.com/articles.html<p>Office Hours will consist of chatting with the program and (if necessary) pushing the "Request a Bag of Mostly Water" button if it reaches its (temporary) limits.
It seems like the academic publishing model would be useful here (and in fact that might be what they are doing with alums reading applications.) Each paper gets a few reviewers, which quickly determines the definite accepts and rejects, and the whole committee need only discuss the ones in the middle. The way partners and alums are structured in YC, it would probably be ideal to weigh reviews accordingly.<p>There will definitely be some noise, but one would hope things will shake out as they should most of the time. At least that's what I am hoping.
Why isn't the title of this post <i>How Y Combinator Scales Itself?</i> or just <i>How Does Y Combinator Scale?</i><p>Is it supposed to be copying this post title? <a href="http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-github" rel="nofollow">http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-g...</a>
why should they want to scale?<p>the point of YC is quality over quantity...if they go after quantity, they are just diluting what they have to offer.<p>If they have 1000 startups, how much support can they really offer?