It's very understandable that YC can't give individualized feedback for people who are rejected, that would be an incredibly expensive job; however, I'm sure that YC has an internal rating system of some sort for the applications, people need to communicate, right? I was just thinking that I would really appreciate something simple like a 1-10 rating (or an estimated 0-1 probability of success?) of what they thought of the idea. It's really hard to get an honest <i>and</i> experienced opinion on how likely your startup is to be successful, and if I knew I was scoring straight 1s-3s on my applications, I'd stop applying until I had more experience/traction/etc..., it could even reduce the load of applications that YC has to process.<p>Obviously there are a lot of complications that I'm not addressing, and that could totally derail this whole idea if not properly addressed, but I figure that's why it's worth bringing up for discussion.<p>Also, please don't take this as me telling what YC should do with their business, they can do whatever (reasonable/legal/etc...) thing they like with it. It just seems like an open culture, so I thought I'd bring this question to the table.
Your YC application is a snapshot of your idea at the time you applied. The assumptions you make in that snapshot will be proven wrong and tossed out faster than the ink dries, and they have much less data to work from.<p>I don't think it would be very helpful for that reason, as well as a general inability to quantify success and failure even amongst the startups they do fund.
If a score out of 10 from someone who likely spent <15 min considering your pitch is going to influence you, you're probably not committed enough to see it through anyway.