[gigafemtonano]

I refuse to accept that I suck Paul. Seriously. You're 1-5 people trying to judge on what you think is going to work. I personally think reddit gave you a bit of an ego trip. I think your vision of the future is clouded by visions of the past. The future is strange and you're going to miss it. Enjoy your 15 minutes.

[pg]

Don't get worked up replying. This appears to be a troll. He didn't apply.

[p01nd3xt3r]

I applied and got rejected and was wondering if I was rejected on the quality of my application or on the quality of my product. I guess in the grand scheme of things rejection is rejection and it dosent matter but I was still wondering.

[pg]

I wouldn't read much into it. We got so many more good applications than we had room for this time that we might as well have been flipping coins.

[joneath]

Use this "rejection" to empower you to build something amazing. I know if I was rejected I would use it as motivation to be great. No one can tell you what you are made of besides yourself.

[markbao]

You should ask for a refund.

PG, the YC team, and YC as a company is there to help those who they think they should help. It's their discretion. Decrying YC isn't going to help.

Refusing that you suck is awesome. PG would agree that they do judge on what they think is going to work. But thinking you have a better idea than anyone else about what the future holds, or whether YC is going to be a part of that future, is pointless.

[milkshakes]

i'm not sure what the startup school email said (i live on the east coast), but my rejection from yc was pretty civil...

We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally. The quality of the applications continues to increase with each cycle, and since there's a limit on the number of interviews we can do, we had to turn away a lot of genuinely promising groups.

Another reason you shouldn't take this personally is that we know we make lots of mistakes. It's alarming how often the last group to make it over the threshold for interviews ends up being one that we fund. That means there are surely other good groups that fall just below the threshold and that we miss even interviewing.

We're trying to get better at this, but it's practically 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.

[statictype]

Very nice. It says a lot about YC that they put effort into making rejection letters not sound discouraging.

[jackowayed]

There's a difference between being rejected from something (which has a fairly low acceptance rate, strong applicant pool, and brief application) and sucking.

Now, if you're going to complain and get discouraged by one unimportant failure (hell, you can still see the talks on Justin.tv), then you do suck because everyone that doesn't suck has failed lots of times and gotten over it.