[HistoryInAction]

Right on. The proposal had to be set up to prevent such obvious abuse.

One thought was admissions rates, since folks seemed impressed by the soundbite that "YC had a lower admissions rate than Harvard," even leaving aside self-selection biases in the applicant pool.

Another is a startup community-run Self Regulatory Organization (SRO) that would get into the ranking and evaluating business a la Mattermark, with official certification/recognition by the government.

[michaelt]

  One thought was admissions rates

At Michaelt's Used Cars And Startup Incubator, $1000 of your application fees go on paying Mechanical Turk workers $1 a time to submit junk applications for immediate rejection :)

[HistoryInAction]

Yep! I came up with that one, at least /grin You start running into various complexity problems with further counter hacks of course :) but institutional investors as LPs with established, credentialed due diligence processes (e.g. CalPERS) may be a response there.

But these were all details to be worked out over the next few weeks iff the WH was willing to move forward with these discussions. It's unclear if that's the case, unfortunately. So we might be discussing details that were never on the table for a broad proposal that has already been rejected on the political merits.