[nostrademons]

I think the concern may be that people who care about the prestige (VCs/employees/acquirers, mostly) also will ignore the denominator. Saying "we're a YC company" holds more cachet when there are 10 companies per batch and you can name all of them than when there are 120 companies per batch. There seems to be a mental switch that people flick when the set of options goes from "can hold all of them in my short-term memory and understand what's special about each of them" to "oh, this is just an instance of X", and it's the same switch as between monopoly vs. commodity businesses or between founders vs. employees. People are arguably wrong for having that switch, but they have it nonetheless.