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I have no inside information on this but I think it may have had more to do with concerns about whether they wanted to be encouraging every YC company to take Yuri Milner's money. See e.g.:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-faceboo...

Also the total funds at the time was ~$150K, aka roughly what YC was doing before this announcement: https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/yuri-milner-sv-angel-offer...

(I believe the history is that at the time, YC didn't have the free cash flow themselves to invest in every YC startup).