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by benologist 4079 days ago
Your YC application is a snapshot of your idea at the time you applied. The assumptions you make in that snapshot will be proven wrong and tossed out faster than the ink dries, and they have much less data to work from.

I don't think it would be very helpful for that reason, as well as a general inability to quantify success and failure even amongst the startups they do fund.
1 comments
nickhuh 4079 days ago
Interesting point. Still, I think even some really coarse feedback would be helpful. For example, just a three tiered system where a 1 means you get an interview, a 2 means your startup is interesting, and a 3 meaning that it's totally off-base would be helpful, cause if I keep throwing 3's YC's way, I'd rather just not waste their (or my) time.
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benologist 4079 days ago
They explicitly want people to try again, some of their biggest successes were accepted "eventually".

    Many of our successful founders applied multiple times 
    before we funded them (including Drew Houston of Dropbox).
http://blog.samaltman.com/applying-to-yc

I think they would be very hesitant to call any ideas terrible - recently they instigated changes here in comments outlawing "gratuitous negativity" and one of the stated reasons was they don't want to risk people abandoning ideas because of criticism -

    New work and new ideas are fragile. Too much gratuitous 
    negativity might be the difference between someone giving 
    up on a crazy idea and building the next Airbnb.
http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline

Rejections won't always be actionable reasons or even you/your idea/your team, you're also being measured against everyone else's applications and YC's collective experience and knowledge of ~700 other startups.

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