Maybe this is exactly why you should apply :-)
> You reference Gingko, but that company is (in my opinion) uniquely viable in terms of YC biotech investments.
Remember VC economics and the power-law distribution of returns. One big winner pays for a lot of small losing bets.
The calculus is actually quite different in biotech. With proper scientific due diligence (read: late-stage cherry-picking), there are usually more (but smaller) winners and fewer (but larger) losers in biotech than in tech. The absolute number of winners may still be smaller than the number of losers, but there isn't a tech-style power-law phenomenon. This is partly because the needs are often very well understood in the life sciences, so the size of the opportunity isn't that uncertain. It's whether or not the science will pan out that is uncertain (which can be very costly to find out and with little recourse - you can't easily pivot on a therapeutic, particularly if that happens late in clinical trials).
I'm surprised YC is investing in wet science rather than computational life sciences such as cognitive neuroscience, or even bioinformatics.
You reference Gingko, but that company is (in my opinion) uniquely viable in terms of YC biotech investments.
Of course, my perspective is based on media reports (famously unreliable), by public information, and by my own experience in biotech. I would love to be completely wrong, and I could easily be completely wrong since I don't have access to the information that you do. Also, maybe an outside perspective is what is needed in biotech—good things happen when smart people from other disciplines cross-pollenate. Also, my own startup is not yet successful, so I criticize from within a lovely glass house surrounded by stones. That said, based on what is public, I don't have confidence in YC's biotech investments. I am hesitant to even consider applying, given with what is publicly available.
I don't think this is an appropriate forum to be specific with criticisms, nor do I wish to be a "negative Nancy" with YC's new push—if YC could do a fraction of what it did in software in the biotech area, it'd be amazing. I would however like to offer one particular outsider's perspective.