[norseboar]

All this advice looks excellent for running a startup, succeeding at it, and pitching to investors. However, Y-combinator's partners in particular have a habit of advertising "we don't care as much about your idea as about your team because the idea usually gets overhauled drastically anyway". This advice seems a bit contrary to that; at best, it's proof that you can go through the thought exercise of imagining what all of this looks like. But being able to do plan out a killer business with one idea doesn't necessarily translate to being able to do it with another.

Has YC changed its standards about people vs. ideas now that they can afford to be so selective? Or is planning a business a skill that's generic enough that proof of doing it in one instance is good enough to prove that a person can do it generally?

[d0m]

I think it's more about having an idea that makes sense and how you've been executing on it. Basically, when they say "the team matters the most", it's less about "Tell me how good you are" but more about "Tell me what you've been working on and how you tackled various problems, and then we'll decide how good you are".

I.e. If the idea makes no sense at all and you aren't talking to users or building a prototype to test it, it doesn't really matter how smart or amazing you say you are.

[swartkrans]

> However, Y-combinator's partners in particular have a habit of advertising "we don't care as much about your idea as about your team because the idea usually gets overhauled drastically anyway".

This is not true for any ycombinator startup I have worked at. The idea has always been key, but the team is also very important.

[norseboar]

That certainly used to be an attitude Y Combinator had (http://old.ycombinator.com/noidea.html), although it sounds like that didn't work out. Paul Graham's essays also perennially mention that the people are far more important than the ideas ("Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route.", "What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people"), but it might be that I've been projecting too much of PG's views onto YC as a whole.

It makes a lot of sense to me that the idea would absolutely be key, which is why I've always been a bit suspect of the "people >> ideas" attitude. Not to say that the team isn't the more important piece, but I'm suspicious of the idea that a great team will usually gravitate towards a good business, left to their own devices.