You say that in YC you "<i>see the same style of companies and no big winners cause its only selected by a few people</i>" and that they "<i>probably look for the same traits of people</i>"<p>As well as these points, I will also be addressing some of your earlier points including the fact that you <i>claim</i> YC lacks diversity.<p>First of all regarding Ivy league schools, computing/engineering degrees and the fact it lacks diversity proves that you are not aware of Y Combinator or its investments. Y Combinator have funded people from 17 years of age upwards and have funded people from the likes of Spain, Netherlands, England, Canada, India and teams with mixed nationalities etc. The founders come from different backgrounds and schools including both Ivy Leagues and State schools. Y Combinator have also funded MBA's who have taught themselves to code.<p>Secondly, now we have addressed the parts regarding schools and diversity we will cover "<i>probably look for the same traits of people</i>" well they do. Y Combinator look for founders who are relentlessly resourceful[1] I'd advise you to read the essay by PG linked below so you can see what YC actually looks for.<p>Now regarding, "<i>see the same style of companies and no big winners cause its only selected by a few people</i>" I think you are also completely wrong here as well. For instance, you are forgetting that YC's investment is around ~$17k for around 6% of the companies they invest in and this is extremely important when considering some of the exits they have already had, and will have in the future.<p>By exits they've already had, I'm referring to the likes of:<p>Heroku which was acquired by Salesforce for $212M which gave Y Combinator a 400x return! [2]
WooFu to SurveyMonkey for $35M
CloudKick was acquired for $30-50M by Rackspace
BackType for $50M by Twitter
280 North (Motorola, $20 million)
Omnisio (YouTube, $15 million)
Reddit (Conde Naste, $12 million)
AppJet (Google, $10 million)
Rapportive by LinkedIn for $15M
Project Wedding for $4M
Movity by Truila for $15M
AdGrok - Twitter $8M<p>Even as recent as today, Posterous just sold to Twitter!<p>To be honest I could go on for a while, there has been a lot of acquistions in the several million range for YC Companies and this is excluding other companies which haven't had an exit.<p>For instance;
AirBnB, DropBox, Stripe, SongKick, Bump, Disqus, Webly, Wepay, Justin.tv, Heyzap, rethinkdb, DailyBooth, wakemate, carwoo, 1000memories, Hipmunk, GoCardless<p>Again I could go on here but these companies are all different and are becoming huge companies in their own right.<p>Sure, Y Combinator might look for a particular type of founder/founders but to say they're all the same and aren't successful is completely wrong.<p>[1] <a href="http://paulgraham.com/relres.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/relres.html</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-exits-heroku-movity-etacts-2010-12" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/y-combinator-exits-heroku-mov...</a>