| You guys are a class act.. We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding.
Please don't take it personally. The applications we receive get
better every funding cycle, and since there's a limit on the number
of startups we can interview in person, 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. http://ycombinator.com/whynot.html We're trying to get better at this, but the hard limit on the number
of interviews means 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. Y Combinator Team |
My impression from talking with various YC partners at the Open House / Startup School was that the ones most qualified to evaluate my application have not seen it. But at the scale YC is operating now this sort of thing seems inevitable.
Moral of the story: never put all eggs in one basket, have Plan B, C, D, E ... ZZZ, preferably around being able to fund yourself with revenue, while still scaling your product business.
Just like us :)