Thank you for applying for Y Combinator Fellowship. However, your startup was not selected for an interview. We thought your application was very promising -- out of over 6,500 applications, yours made it to the final 300.<p>Since there is a limit on the number of startups we can accept for this beta test of the Fellowship, we had to turn away a huge amount of promising groups. Hopefully in the future, we can expand the Fellowship and fund even more companies this way.<p>Unfortunately beyond that, we can't give you individual feedback about your application. This page explains why: http://ycombinator.com/whynot/<p>That said, we sincerely hope you'll apply to YC's winter batch. Applications for that are scheduled to open the week of August 24th.
Thank you for applying for Y Combinator Fellowship. We’re sorry to say that your startup was not selected for an interview. We read through more than 6,500 applications, and since there's a limit on the number of startups we can interview, we had to turn away a huge number of promising groups.<p>Unfortunately we can't give you individual feedback about your application. This page explains why: <a href="http://ycombinator.com/whynot/" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/whynot/</a><p>We sincerely hope this won't stop you from pursuing your startup. We're not yet sure if we'll continue to do YC Fellowship past this pilot program, but we definitely welcome and encourage you to apply to YC in the future. Having applied to YC Fellowship will in no way count against you, and a surprisingly large number of companies are funded after applying to YC programs more than once.<p>We're trying to get better at this, but it's certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.
Thats cool! so, the normal rejection letter means that we didn't make it into top 300 and that we are not potential YC’s Winter 2016 batch. It's really such a pity that there is no real feedback that could help to improve pitch/business model ...!
Guys, a really important thing I noticed here, and please tell me if this is consistent with what you did: Applying late is bad for YC, especially in this fellowship case.<p>I got this rejection letter, and there was no evidence my application was even looked at. I didn't apply literally at the last minute, but I submitted the last day.<p>I had applied for summer YC batch before, and there I got people thoroughly exploring my demo, watching my app videos, and even looking at my linkedin profile. This time I got 0 hits across all mediums. Not even the video.<p>Please share if you had similar or difference experience as I think we will all benefit from this knowledge.
Thank you for applying for the Y Combinator Fellowship. We’re sorry to say that your startup was not selected for an interview. We think your startup would be more appropriate for YC’s Winter 2016 batch, and we encourage you to apply.<p>The startups we have invited to YC Fellowship interviews are primarily founders in the idea or prototype stage, and most are first-time founders who haven’t previously raised funding. We're asking almost all companies that are further along or with more experienced founders to apply to YC winter batch.<p>Applications open the week of August 24th at apply.ycombinator.com. We sincerely hope you will apply!
That's something! And I truly believe they don't just say these things, they know that people can turn their startups around, so hopefully it will be a more attractive application the next time you apply.
looking at some applications that got into YC (not fellowship though), it seems biggest 'mistakes' are 1 - wasting even one word not sharing more, enthusiasm hurts you in this case; 2 - technical founders, 3 - team of COfounders. I believe you can pass with one of those 3 'rules', but just the one. Nevertheless, I'll love to help them learn from their mistakes.