[snowmaker]

(I work at YC)

I'm glad you brought this up!

It would be very easy for us to expand the YC batch by being less selective in the companies we accept. However, we wouldn't knowingly do this because it would run directly against our own financial incentives, and also degrade the quality of the experience for founders.

The hard thing is to increase the batch size while also keeping the quality of companies the same or better. To do that, we need to attract more great applications every batch. That's what we need to do.

For a lot of people, it's hard to imagine how that would be possible, but actually YC still funds only a modest percentage of all the successful companies started every year, so there is a lot of room to grow.

It seems that we're doing it. By every metric we can measure, the YC companies we fund today seem more successful on average than in previous years. They're more likely to raise a Series A, more likely to make $1M / year in revenue, more likely to be worth $1B, etc.

Many people outside YC for years have thought that because we are growing, we must be becoming less selective. But actually within YC, we're more concerned about the opposite: that we risk becoming too selective and need to constantly fight against that.

[reducesuffering]

> The hard thing is to increase the batch size while also keeping the quality of companies the same or better. To do that, we need to attract more great applications every batch. That's what we need to do.

You need to illustrate the path from tech employee -> founder for more people in some sort of go to resource. Why should an intelligent, capable person drop their $300k TC career when it looks like their chances of failing are 90%, and an opportunity cost of at least $1M, even if one gets into YC? What is one in for: hours, health insurance, managing employees, difficulty competing against entrenched companies, etc?

Unless you want to specifically filter out all candidates with a hint of risk-averseness or something else not explicit...

[adav]

Aren’t the cited measures all lagging indicators? It might be that the batch size has now increased past the sweet spot but the impact won’t show up until they look to raise Series A.

[pyb]

On the other hand, the companies YC are funding today seem less impactful than the Reddits and Airbnbs of the past. This is harder to measure, but that's the impression.

[pedalpete]

A few oppositions to this view. 1) Reddit and AirBnB were viewed to have very little impact when they started. Nobody wanted to stay on somebody elses couch, and we had Digg instead of Reddit. 2) YC is investing in more hard-tech companies.

I agree, there are lots of things where you say "why would YC invest in that??" particularly with so many SAAS companies, but then they take a flying leap on things like Boom, Flirty, Coinbase, etc etc.

YC started in the early-ish days of the internet, so most of the outlier successes were in the internet space. The major internet companies have probably already been founded, so YC needs to focus on what's next. It seems to me their straddling both sides, like most VCs are attempting to do.