The title might be a bit misleading so please read on. How would YC treat a proposed idea that is in one of the following categories:<p> 1- direct competition with one of its current companies and/or products<p> 2- possible future competition of one of its current companies and/or products<p> 3- if the new proposed idea is not really in competition with any of YC's companies, but it does have some major ideas, that another YC company could take advantage from, or add in as new feature to their system?<p>of course, if there is already competition then your idea might not be as interesting, regardless of whether the competition is a YC company or any other company. I guess the real question is whether they review any new application without considering what they previously own and give it a fair treatment or not?
Overlap is always a matter of degree. We deal with it by warning startups with substantial overlap about one another, and then leaving it to them to decide how secretive or open to be. <p>We try not to tell startups about the ideas of other startups working on related things, including applicants we turn down. (Usually this isn't an issue, because few applicants have genuinely novel ideas, but one applicant this last batch had cooked up a trick I'd really like to tell a startup from summer 2007 about.) <p>I was worried about funding competitors when we started YC, but it has turned out not to be a problem. In most good markets there's room for many companies, and it's unlikely that two we fund will take exactly the same route.<p>But even if we told everyone about everyone else's ideas, it wouldn't be as bad as you might think. Secrecy is not as important as beginning founders think, because (a) ideas are less valuable than they think, and (b) the most common form of death for startups is suicide, not being killed by competitors.